Meredydd

His name was Allen Conan Graznya.

It was Polish and Jewish with a little Robert E. Howard thrown in for good measure.

It was his name, but he'd already forgotten it.

The professor had asked them all a question. It might have been two or three questions. Allen wasn't sure. Sounds seemed to come and go, entering his ears like distorted surround sound from inside a Cineplex. Allen's heart was pounding. His palms were sweaty. He could feel the stains under his arms growing as his body evacuated itself of water. He knew he sweat too much. There was no such thing as a lot with Allen when it came to sweat. There was only too much. He was a little overweight - just a slight paunch, a tummy really, thick arms, a double chin when he looked down, and squeak-as-you-walk thighs, but that didn't make him sweat. He sweat when he was nervous and right now he was nervous. He swallowed hard and felt a wave of dizziness pass through him.

"What is your name? What did you read over the summer? And, who is your favorite author?" Meredydd Teague asked them again, only this time, Allen thought, just a little slower, with less of a Boston accent, and more perfectly enunciated so that they could all hear better.

'I'm thirty-nine years old for God's sake,' Allen thought. I've got to be past this kind of thing. Allen thanked God that he'd had the sense to take a seat across from Meredydd - all the way across - so that he'd be half way around no matter which way he started with introductions. And he had to do introductions, didn't he? It had been ten years since Allen had been in a graduate school class, but he remembered they did that kind of thing at the first one.

Eighteen other writers, not including Allen and Meredydd, sat around the conference table in a small room on the sixth floor of the newest building at Gotham College, Manhattan's skyline showing across the wide expanse of Central Park through the large window behind them. Meredydd had come in at five forty, ten minutes late, dropped his worn, brown attache case on the table, sat back in his chair and asked his questions.

Allen waited as the first person to Meredydd's right, a woman, stammered and fidgeted and finally answered.

'I'm an adult. We're all adults,' Allen thought. 'Adult is adult. Everything is going to be all right.' He wiped at the sweat that was already collecting on his forehead with a handkerchief he kept in his pocket for just such an occurrence. The handkerchief came back from his forehead darkly stained.

"Well," the woman said, "I read Rabbit Redux."

Meredydd's brows knitted tighter together and he lifted his hand to his lower lip. A thin scar ran from it to the tip of his chin and he traced it downwards with one finger. Allen saw there were steaks of gray in his brown hair. It was thinning but still provided good coverage. Allen guessed that he was into the dark side of his forties. He noticed that Meredydd's tweed jacket had those fashionable oval corduroy patches on its elbows, made of contrasting but not eye-taxing colors, brown on green on gray.

"And I started to reread Mysterious Stranger, by Twain," she said.

Meredydd nodded.

"I guess my favorite author is Twain."

"Updike's always been interesting to me, Judith," Meredydd said, leaning back in his chair.

"Judith," Allen repeated to himself.

"... But I'm not sure he's as good as some people think," Meredydd said. "What did you think about the Rabbit books?"

"They were okay," Judith said and studied him as if checking, it seemed to Allen, to see if that was the answer he had wanted.

Meredydd shook his head slowly and curled his lips downward. It reminded Allen of the way his grandfather looked when he would say to him, after dinner, hands clasped firmly in front of him, "Your grandmother wants me to take out the garbage after dinner. This is all she asks of me, so I do it." Allen's grandfather had bought him his first copy of Weird Tales when he was ten and gave him his first hardbound adult book a year later - a 1914 first edition of The Adventures of Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Allen still had it shelved, carefully, next to his bed.

Meredydd looked at the man to Judith's right and asked him the two questions.

Allen shook himself and started to run through a menu of books he'd read over the summer and a list of his favorite authors. When he was reading a series, like the Dragonlance series or Battletech!, he'd read two books a week on the train ride into the city from Brooklyn. He lived in Carroll Gardens in the apartment above where his grandparents used to live. They'd died almost one year ago and Allen now owned the brownstone. There were no other living relatives except his sister and she was on the West Coast. He had only just rented the downstairs apartment to a lesbian couple a month ago. They were mature and in love and Allen liked the combination. He took the F train so he always had plenty of time to read. He finished eight Dragonlance books that way in July. At this time, the first week of September, he was heavy into the Battletech! series. One of the books in the series, Hearts of Chaos, had a whole world named after Robert E. Howard's Hyborian lands - cities called Stygia and Zingara, continents called Asgard and Ophir.

"Albert Camus," the man to Judith's right said, only he pronounced the author's name, Al-bear Camoo.

Allen thought the name was supposed to be pronounced as if it rhymed with Shamus. 'Maybe it should be Shamoo,' he thought, then went back to his list. Blood of Heroes and Operation Excaliber from the Battletech! series would have to be out. He knew he needed something bigger, something with more substance, something in ... hardcover. His grandfather had always told him that first impressions counted the most. He'd reread The Stand, by Stephen King, in its new unabridged format - impressive at over a thousand pages - so he placed that on his list. He'd also just reread two of Howard's Conan stories, Conan and The Hour of the Dragon, the last one being the only complete Conan novel - as opposed to collections of short stories grouped under titles like Conan the Avenger, Conan the Conqueror, Conan the Buccaneer or Conan The Usurper. He'd found them at The Strand in hardcover beneath a pile of dusty old flyers. They were first edition, collector's copies. They already had a place next to The Adventures of Tarzan by his bed.

Three more people introduced themselves and Allen missed what they said. The sixth woman to Meredydd's right, only three away from Allen, was speaking, so he tried to listen to her.

"I reread The Norse Sagas this summer and my favorite author is Jane Austen."

Allen's sister kept trying to get him to read Jane Austen.

"Read something different Allen, will you?" she'd said to him the day before on the phone.

"Rachel I read Pride and Prejudice," he'd said to her. "I liked it, I really did."

"I loved it. That's my favorite book," she said.

"I know," Allen said. "Did you read Watership Down? The book I sent you for your birthday?" he asked.

"It's about bunnies," she said, emphasizing the last word.

"But I sent you a hardcover edition I found at The Strand Ð"

"Allen," she said, as if that explained everything.

"Ah yes, The Norse Sagas," Meredydd said, and Allen came back to the room. Meredydd leaned forward in his chair, eyes sparkling. "What did you think of them, Elizabeth?"

"They were wonderful," the girl said leaning forward to meet Meredydd's gaze. Allen thought she really was a girl, probably just into her twenties. She was very pale skinned and Allen could see light blue veins lining the back of her hands and pulsing slightly at her temples. She was thin and Allen was pretty sure she wasn't wearing a bra. Noticing that made him look away and brought a slight flush to his cheeks. "They were so powerful," she said, "and full of thick, rich descriptions. I just loved them."

"Yes," Meredydd said. "There is nothing else like them." Meredydd sat back and addressed the whole class. "If you really want to read good writing there is little that is better than the old ... Norse Sagas."

Allen pictured Thor and Loki battling it out with hammer and sword on some frozen tundra like Conan in the Frank Frazetta poster of Conan of Cimmeria he had hanging above his bed.

"And there is nobody better than Jane Austen," the woman said. "I'm rereading Emma again right now."

Meredydd nodded and passed on to the next person.

'Two to go,' Allen thought and wiped at his forehead again. The once white handkerchief was dark gray and damp beneath his fingers.

Allen had read The Green Ripper by John D. MacDonald in August. He was pretty sure it had won the Edgar in the late seventies when it was published, but he wasn't positive. He loved the Travis McGee series. And of course there was James Lee Burke's David Robicheaux series to consider. Hard-boiled Cajun was almost as good as gin-soaked McGee, floating house parties and his boat, "The Busted Flush".

"And you?" Meredydd asked.

Allen swallowed. How had the other two gone so quickly?

"I'm sorry," he said. It was automatic. Allen apologized for everything. "I'm sorry," when someone bumped into him. "Sorry," when someone stepped on his foot. "I'm sorry but," when someone cut him in line.

Meredydd cleared his throat.

Allen stared at Meredydd for a second and tried to let the last few moments of dialogue pass through him and settle. He couldn't remember what they had been. They were empty words, brittle, shattered and already swept away into the garbage like his used Styrofoam coffee cup. He tried to grasp what their words had meant but he couldn't. Alber Camoo? The Norse Sagas? Shamoo rhymes with Camoo?

"Your name is?" Meredydd asked again raising his voice.

"The Stand, by Stephen King," Allen said, blinking. "That's not my name. I mean Stephen King's not my name. Not that I wish it wasn't because if it was I wouldn't be here now, I'd be writing another novel maybe publishing under a pseudonym and ... my name. I'm sorry. Alber, I mean Allen Conan Graznya." Allen's mind focused for a moment, then wiped clear, as if erased by a splash of detergent. He swallowed and patted his forehead in the silence. He couldn't think of anything to say. The silence made his knees shake, so finally he filled it. "My Grandfather's name is Conan," he said, "though not because of Robert E. Howard. And he's not Irish. He's Jewish. I mean I am. And he's an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan. Me, I like them both. All three if you include my grandfather."

Allen looked up at Meredydd. His face had turned to stone.

"I reread A Princess of Mars and The Gods of Mars, by Burroughs, this summer," Allen said even though he really hadn't, "and ... The Green Ripper, by John D. MacDonald. I think that's the one that won an Edgar, but I can't remember."

"Did you read any literary fiction?" Meredydd asked.

"Yes," Allen said relieved to be asked another question - any other question. "It was all great literature. Absolutely great. Every word of it. The MacDonald stuff especially. So I guess, if I had to choose, I'd say my favorite author is Johnny D."

"Johnny D.?" Meredydd asked.

"John D. MacDonald," Allen said. "The Tan and Sandy Silence, Free Fall In Crimson, The Quick Red Fox, The Turquoise Lament, The Dreadful Lemon Sky. They're great, every single one of them."

Meredydd closed his eyes. "You are the literary Antichrist," he said in a low voice Ð but Allen heard him anyway. Allen looked at the others around him. They all looked away, finding fingernails to peer at and lined, yellow note pads to scribble on. Then Meredydd opened his eyes and smiled broadly at the woman to Allen's right.

Allen put on a smile and gazed down at his hands and his soiled handkerchief.

"Susannah Henderson," the woman next to him said but he heard no more for a while, only phrases and stray words.

"If you want to write you have to send your work out. People have to read it," someone said, only it wasn't anyone in the class. It was his grandfather. "How can you be a writer if you don't let other people see your work?" he'd asked Allen. Allen had smiled at him too, his fixed, plastic smile. He couldn't explain, even to his grandfather, why he hadn't been able to send his work out. He didn't know why himself. The day after his grandfather died, Allen had bought the book Writer's Market. The following day he had sent out three stories. By the end of the week two had been returned with rejection slips attached. Allen still wasn't quite sure how they could have been read and returned in such a short time. But one still remained out. It had been almost one full year. He didn't know what, if anything, he should do about it. So, every day when he came home he checked the mail with shaking hands and sweat rolling down his back to see if the last one had been returned too.

A man named Burke, in his fifties with thick, Coke-bottle glasses, old suit and red tie, spoke the names Hemingway and Fitzgerald. The air in the room seemed to clear. Allen could almost hear his grandfather's comments on each of them. "One had his nuts shot off in the war and wrote about it and the other had his book turned into a movie with Robert Redford in it. Redford's a nice-looking man but he's not a Jew. Me - I take out the garbage, because it's all your grandmother asks of me."

Dickens, who Allen had read and really did like from his long ago high school days, and Melville were up next. Allen remembered liking the whale parts in Moby Dick even though everybody else hated them. And of course Allen had always rooted for the whale to win.

"Ray Bradbury wrote the screenplay for the movie while he was in Ireland," his grandfather said. "It had Gregory Peck playing Ahab. I don't think either one is a Jew but they both did their parts well." His grandfather always ended his Moby Dick bit with, "Call me Ish-shlamiel." It made his grandmother laugh and that wasn't an easy thing to do.

When the last of the class was finally finished introducing themselves, Meredydd addressed them all from behind lowered eyeglass rims. "I'm the editor of The Gotham City Literary Review, Gotham College's literary journal," he said. "We're a biannual. I've published stories by Salman Rushdie, Joyce Carol Oates and Donald Barthelme. You're lucky to have an actual editor read your manuscripts and comment on them, unlike other classes. I will both write comments on each manuscript you hand in to me and give you verbal feedback in class. In return I expect you to give me only your polished work."

Meredydd checked his watch. Allen did too and, like water rippling outward from a dropped penny, the others checked their watches, arms lifting up and over, one after another, then back down. It was seven twenty.

"You're expected to write sixty pages of manuscript for the twelve-week course and to hand them in to me before week ten," he said. "You can let me have work you feel is ... ready ... today. Just leave it here," he said and patted a small space next to his briefcase. He attempted to close his briefcase as he got up but hands were already thrusting manuscripts at him so he simply sat back down in his chair and watched as they piled up.

Allen placed three of his short stories on the pile and left the class with the others. In the hall he was quickly left behind as writers paired and tripled up, their conversations clouding the halls ahead of him like chirping insects. Their echoes led Allen toward the stairs.

Outside, the city's air seemed to smell of summer ending and autumn beginning. 'It's too early,' Allen thought. 'Too early but welcome.' In the cooler months he'd sweat less and he so looked forward to that. The rank smells of dried urine and overheated bodies, his overheated body, were already being brushed aside by the hint of cool autumn breezes to come. Allen walked with his head down, glancing up occasionally to keep his bearings.

"Be careful of who you look at," his grandfather said after he'd come home from grade school with the first of a succession of black eyes and fat lips. "Jews have to be careful who they say hello to - especially since the world's tried to kill us off so many times."

"I'm just a kid," Allen said. "Who am I going to hurt?"

"You're different Allen," was all his grandfather said. "And those of us who are different have to watch out for those who are not."

"But John Wayne always says to look people square in the face," Allen said.

"John Wayne's not a Jew and besides he usually carries a gun and he's probably eight feet tall. When was the last time you saw a Jew who was eight feet tall?"

Allen peeked up and saw that a few of the leaves on the trees at the small park near the subway station were starting to turn color. Allen was sure it was because of the change in weather and not because the small patch of soil feeding the tree was covered with soda cans, broken glass, and dog shit. With a last look at the clear night sky he descended the stairs to the subway.