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My fiction deals with the magic realism of time travel, alternate worlds, dopplegangers and Manhattan. My background involves a big Irish family in Boston and on Long Island and the usual odd juxtapositions of life: compulsory ROTC and fashion copywriting. My fiction is quite personal -- not autobiographical, but from it anyone with a strange interest in the mundane details can figure out pretty much my time, place and circumstance.
The following is an excerpt from Chapter Eight of MINIONS OF THE MOON. The novel is due to come out from Tor books in the fall of 1998. This material appeared in a somewhat different form in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.Return to Linn's Client List(It is Spring 1974 and Leo Dunn, an addiction counselor, has just found Kevin Grierson, his client and the novel's protagonist, at the end of a very bad relapse.)
Mr. Dunn said, "Let's fix you up, Kevin."
We drove uptown past the sprawl of the Port Authority to the Market Diner, the heart of Irish Hell's Kitchen. The Market was a place where the road met the city. Cross-country truckers and street thugs ate their steak and eggs, drank their shots and beer. Cops' radios blasted in the take-out line.
Anyone seeing us walk in might have thought we were a distinguished criminal lawyer saddled with some friend's black sheep boy as a client. I had the always painful look of a guy who has done himself damage on the street. Mr. Dunn, on the other hand, tall and smiling, wore a grey suit and a blue shirt that matched his eyes. As soon as we came in, a waitress in her fifties with a blond beehive and wing glasses spotted him and said, "Leo!"
"Dorry! How's it going with Jack?"
"Bearable, which is a lot more than I could say before."
"Dorry, this is Kevin."
And she understood why I was there. "Kevin, this is a great man. I got a son about your age who is only walking the earth because of him. Now, what can I do for youse?"
"Coffee for myself, but my friend here needs the works."
Dorry nodded and departed.
My stomach lurched. I excused myself and went downstairs to the men's room, splashed water on my face, tried to get my insides to lie down.
'Hey,' came the whisper. I looked up and there twice in the mirror was the scar, the tangled hair, the two days' growth of beard, a fresh bruise on the chin. Only the bloodshot eyes were different. Mine were scared. His were clever.
'I guess,' my Shadow murmured, 'That you're ready to blame everything on me. In fact, I had nothing to do with your little spree.'
"Why can't you just die?"
"You might not like that, Kev. You might die along with me. Anyway, I miss you. You have any idea what life is like without you? I mostly float in what feels like a long junk dose. Then every once in a while the soles of my feet, my fingers, tingle. And that means that you're thinking of living enough for two. Without you, there's hardly any me. Without me you're a dangerous chump. But together? Together we make a pretty fair psychopath. Think of that, Kevin, in your dull routine.'
Before he could talk his way around me, I said, "Go."
Just like that he disappeared. A trucker came out of one of the stalls and gave me a weird look. I left wondering how much of the conversation he'd heard. Only my side? Or that and the whispers of my Silent Partner?
At our booth, Dorry was saying, "Coffee AND toast for you, Leo since you look like you ain't eating. Coffee for you too, kid. But first...". She handed me a bubbling glass and a saucer with aspirin and a couple of other pills. The two of them watched until I had taken them all.
"What's wrong, Kevin?" Mr. Dunn asked when we were alone.
"I just saw my Silent Partner. I told him to get lost."
Mr. Dunn sighed, glanced out at the blank wall of the United Parcel building across the street. I knew it bothered him when I spoke of the Silent Partner as real. Psychosis was problem about which he could do nothing.
"Sorry."
"Don't be. Don't ever be. You hired me to help you. If there's a failure, it's mine." Then he looked up and his eyes widened. "I believe you were sent by God to teach me humility. Forget my doubting the actual existence of your Silent Partner. Maybe we all have them. If so, here comes mine."
"Leo," said the little man under the battered grey fedora. "A word with you?" I caught the scent of stale cigars and fresh booze. "I hope I'm not interrupting."
"Indeed you are, Francis. I see that reports of your demise were sadly exaggerated."
Extending his hand to me, the other man said, "Francis X. MacLunahan, Esquire."
Small, furtive, threadbare, he was a kind of reverse image of Leo Dunn. He looked at me closely and it seemed that he too recognized something. "Young man, it often happens in this life that one needs a lawyer. If that is your case...".
"I'll see you in a moment, Francis," said Mr. Dunn cutting him off. It was the only time I ever saw him rude to anyone.
As MacLunahan faded back, Dunn told me, "Your Silent Partner wants everything, your money, your health, your peace of mind. the further you give in to booze and drugs, the less of you there is and the stronger he becomes."
He glanced to where MacLunahan seemed about to blend into the diner doorway. "I contributed money a few years ago for his funeral. My guess is that on the strength of his having been a companion in my drinking days and later having defrauded me, this particular Silent Partner wants a hundred dollars. " He rose up saying, "I'll give him twenty, since that's what I can spare."
Bibliography
NovelsWARCHILD (Warner/Questar, 1986)
FERAL CELL (Warner/Questar, 1987)
GOBLIN MARKET (Warner/Questar, 1988)
Novel Forthcoming:
MINIONS OF THE MOON (Tor, Fall 1998)
Short Fiction"On Death and the Deuce" (F&SF, May 1992)
Reprinted: Year's Best Fantasy & Horror and Best from F&SF
"Someday I Shall Rise and Go" (tomorrow #1, Jan/Feb 1993)
"The Judges of the Secret Court" (tomorrow #3, May/June 1993)
"A Beggar at the Bridge" (F&SF, Dec 1993)
"The Shadow and the Gunman" (F&SF, Feb1994)
"I Died, Sir, in Flame, Sir" (F&SF, June 1994)
"Transfigured Night" (tomorrow #14, Ap/May 1995)
"Fountains in Summer" (FULL SPECTRUM 5; Bantam, 1995)
"At Darlington's" (F&SF, Oct/Nov 1995)
"Drink and the Devil" (F&SF, Feb 1997)
"In the House of the (Bending the Landscape,
Man in the Moon" Fantasy Volume; White Wolf,1997)
"Streetcar Dreams" (F&SF, April 1997)
Short Fiction Forthcoming
"So Many Miles to the (Cover Story F&SF
Heart of a Child" Spring 1998)