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telephone in the apartment for another record-breaking
month. Money is, let us face it, very handy and very heady.
As Lily Cavenaugh says in The Talisman (and it was Peter
Straub’s line, not mine), “You can never be too thin or too
rich.” And if you don’t believe it, you were never really fat or
really poor.
All the same, you don’t do it for money, or you’re a
monkey. You don’t think of the bottom line, or you’re a
monkey. You don’t think of it in terms of hourly wage, yearly
wage, even lifetime wage, or you’re a monkey. In the end
you don’t even do it for love, although it would be nice to
think so. You do it because to not do it is suicide. And while
that is tough, there are compensations I could never tell
Wyatt about, because he is not that kind of guy.
Take “Word Processor of the Gods” as a for-instance.
Not the best story I ever wrote; not one that’s ever going to
win any prizes. But it’s not too bad, either. Sort of fun. I had
just gotten my own word processor a month before (it’s a
big Wang, and keep your smart comments to yourself, what
do you say?) and I was still exploring what it could and
couldn’t do. In particular I was fascinated with the INSERT
and DELETE buttons, which make cross-outs and carets
almost obsolete.
I caught myself a nasty little bug one day. What the hell,
happens to the best of us. Everything inside me that wasn’t
nailed down came out from one end or the other, most of it
at roughly the speed of sound. By nightfall I felt very bad
indeed—chills, fever, joints full of spun glass. Most of the
muscles in my stomach were sprung, and my back ached.