SCHEHERAZADE’S TYPEWRITER
Elena’s father had gone into the basement every night, after work, for as far back as she could remember, and did not come up until he had written three pages on the humming IBM electric typewriter he had bought in college, when he still believed he would someday be a famous novelist. He had been dead for three days before his daughter heard the typewriter in the basement, at the usual time: a burst of rapid bang-bang-banging, followed by a waiting silence, filled out only by the idiot hum of the machine.
Elena descended the steps, into darkness, her legs weak. The drone of his IBM filled the musty-smelling dark, so the gloom itself seemed to vibrate with electrical current, as before a thunderstorm. She reached the lamp beside her father’s typewriter, and flipped it on just as the Selectric burst into another bang-bang flurry of noise. She screamed, and then screamed again when she saw the keys moving on their own, the chrome typeball lunging against the bare black platen.
That first time Elena saw the typewriter working on its own, she thought she might faint from the shock of it. Her mother almost did faint when Elena showed her, the very next night.
When the typewriter jumped to life and began to write, Elena’s mother threw her hands up and shrieked and her legs wobbled under her, and Elena had to grab her by the arm to keep her from going down.
But in a few days they got used to it, and then it was exciting. Her mother had the idea to roll a sheet of paper in, just before the typewriter switched itself on at 8 p.m. Elena’s mother wanted to see what it was writing, if it was a message for them from beyond. My grave is cold. I love you and I miss you.
But it was only another of his short stories. It didn’t even start at the beginning. The page began midway, right in the middle of a sentence.
It was Elena’s mother who thought to call the local news.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A producer from channel five came to see the typewriter. The producer stayed until the machine turned itself on and wrote a few sentences, then she got up and briskly climbed the stairs.
Elena’s mother hurried after her, full of anxious questions.
“Remote control,” the producer said, her tone curt. She looked back over her shoulder with an expression of distate.
“When did you bury your husband, ma’am? A week ago?
What’s wrong with you?”
None of the other television stations were interested. The man at the newspaper said it didn’t sound like their kind of thing. Even some of their relatives suspected it was a prank in bad taste. Elena’s mother went to bed and stayed there for several weeks, flattened by a terrific migraine, despondent and confused. And in the basement, every night, the typewriter worked on, flinging words onto paper in noisy chattering bursts.
The dead man’s daughter attended to the Selectric. She learned just when to roll a fresh sheet of paper in, so that each night the machine produced three new pages of story, just as it had when her father was alive. In fact, the machine seemed to wait for her, humming in a jovial sort of way, until it had a fresh sheet to stain with ink.
Long after no one else wanted to think about the typewriter anymore, Elena continued to go into the basement at night, to listen to the radio, and fold laundry, and roll a new sheet of paper into the IBM when it was necessary. It was a simple enough way to pass the time, mindless and sweet, rather like visiting her father’s grave each day to leave fresh flowers.
Also, she had come to like reading the stories when they were finished. Stories about masks and baseball and fathers and their children . . . and ghosts. Some of them were ghost stories. She liked those the best. Wasn’t that the first thing you learned in every fiction course everywhere? Write what you know? The ghost in the machine wrote about the dead with great authority.
After a while, the ribbons for the typewriter were only available by special order. Then even IBM stopped making them.
The typeball wore down. She replaced it, but then the carriage started sticking. One night, it locked up, wouldn’t move forward, and oily smoke began to trickle from under the iron
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
hood of the machine. The typewriter hammered letter after letter, one right on top of the other, with a kind of mad fury, until Elena managed to scramble over and shut it off.
She brought it to a man who repaired old typewriters and other appilances. He returned it in perfect operating condition, but it never wrote on its own again. In the three weeks it was at the shop, it lost the habit.
As a little girl, Elena had asked her father why he went into the basement each night to make things up, and he had said it was because he couldn’t sleep until he had written. Writing things warmed his imagination up for the work of creating an evening full of sweet dreams. Now she was unsettled by the idea that his death might be a restless, sleepless thing. But there was no help for it.