The Flat-Eyed Monster

Afterword

Two days after Christmas 1954, the woman with whom I was living and with whom I was planning marriage made me a bang-up supper featuring all kinds of sharp spices. Two hours later, I was admitted to the hospital with a bleeding ulcer. As a free-lance writer, I had no medical insurance of any kind; my usually low bank account had to be completely emptied so that I could be admitted in a status other than that of charity patient.

The word spread rapidly through the New York City science-fiction community, and for some reason the word that was spread was that I gone to St. Vincent’s Hospital for an ordinary check-up. As a result, science-fiction folk showed up in my hospital room that night with all kinds of bizarre gag accouterments, only to find out that I was involved in some very serious business indeed. Harry and Joan Harrison, for example, came in holding a lily each—and were crushed to discover that the doctors were trying to decide if a dangerous immediate operation should be attempted.

After a conference, the doctors decided to hold off on the operation unless the bleeding intensified during the night. Then, one by one, the people around my bed drifted off, still apologizing for their jokey entrances. The last one to go was the woman with whom I was planning to share my life. She bent over me and put her warm, wet mouth to my ear.

Now I know that when a writer memoirizes some fifty years after the event, he cannot be expected to remember exactly every word of every speech. I therefore ask the reader to keep in mind two essential considerations: One, for most of my time on this planet, I have been blessed and cursed with almost perfect recall; and, two, such was the matter of her communication to me that it kind of seared itself into my brain.

“Now, darling,” she asked warmly, wetly. “Is it true that you are absolutely penniless?”

“Absolutely,” I told her. “My brother, Mort, cleaned out my whole bank account just to get me in here. I don’t know what I’ll do for next month’s rent. Not to mention the surgeon’s bill if they do decide to operate.”

“That’s what I thought,” she breathed, still warm and still wet. “Now sweetheart, please listen to me. You are flat on your back, physically, psychologically, and financially. There’s really nothing in this for me anymore. So I’ll be going. Goodbye, my darling.”

I pulled my head away and swiveled round to stare at her. “Hey,” I said. “You can’t be serious.”

“Now, don’t be selfish,” she said, backing away to the door. “Try to look at it from my point of view. Goodbye.”

Then she raised her right hand, waved it twice at me, closed the door behind her, and was gone.

I sat up in bed. I stared at the closed door for a long time. Then I picked up the telephone and called Horace Gold, the editor of Galaxy. (Horace was an agoraphobe and edited the magazine out of his apartment in Peter Cooper Village.)

Horace had heard what was going on with me. “Listen,” he said. “They tell me you’re in tough shape and you’re broke. I’ll put a voucher through tomorrow morning for five hundred dollars. You can have someone pick up the check for you about eleven a.m. What I want you to do for me…I want you to write a ten-thousand-word novelette—it should be very, very funny. Okay?”

“Thanks, Horace,” I said. “I’ll do it. If I live.”

“Right,” he agreed. “If you live. Meanwhile, don’t forget. Very, very funny.”

I hung up the phone, swallowed a large pill, and reached for the clipboard that my brother, Morton, and his wife, Sheila, had placed on my bedside table. What should I write? Well, there was the fact that Galaxy prided itself on not being a cheapo science-fiction magazine like those pulps that featured “bug-eyed monster” covers, with stories full of slime-dripping horrors to match. And there was my great fondness for two early stories by A.E. van Vogt, “Black Destroyer” and “Discord in Scarlet.” I had long dreamed of doing a minor and respectful parody of the sociological analysis of aliens both stories featured.

The nurse came in, took my temperature, urged me to rest and get a good night’s sleep—and left.

I picked up a pencil. Trying hard not to bleed, I began writing, in longhand, “The Flat-Eyed Monster.” Now, what, I mused to myself as I wrote, would Horace consider very, very funny?

Written 1954 / Published 1955