The Darrell Schweitzer MEGAPACK ®. Darrell Schweitzer

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СКАЧАТЬ crib to crib with a smoking pot, ladling hot oil on the screaming infants.

      “This guy is really sick,” said Joe Meese.

      “Yeah, but he’s great,” I said.

      Imagine Hieronymous Bosch as a follower of Robert Crumb, and you’ll begin to understand what I held in my hands. It must have taken the artist weeks to create all this: elderly humans naked but for funny hats like something out of Dr. Seuss, chained waist-deep in rain barrels of fly-swarming offal; rat-things vomiting from the city wharfs. The bloody river flowed on into the final panel—a huge, half-page vertical—and there splashed over the pearl-encrusted slippers of a monstrous rat in royal robes with a wreath of thorns growing out of its head. In one hand, the rat king held a scepter—on which the artist’s gaping, hopeless face was again reproduced—and in the other, a dripping severed penis.

      At the bottom of the panel, in big, ragged letters: NEXT WEEK! MORE HOLIDAY FUN IN THE INFERNAL REPUBLIC OF CHORAZIN!

      “I mean, fucked up,” said Joe Meese, in tones of awed admiration.

      This was, after all, the age of underground comics: Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Vaughn Bode, Gilbert Shelton, and the rest. If Zap Comics could run Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates, we could run Stephanus.

      So we did, and a day later the college president had the whole lot of us in on the carpet. Our academic careers hung in the balance. Fortunately no one took a bold stand for freedom in the arts just then.

      No further installments appeared. Somehow the artist must have known what was happening, because he didn’t submit any more. He did leave a note, though, asking that his originals be left in a specific locker in Bartley Hall. He provided a lock, opened, to which he presumably had a key. Nobody even suggested staking the place out to find out who he was. We all had a sense of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.

      That might have been the end of that, but a week later I was in the remotest recesses of the periodical stacks of the college library, the part you can only reach through a door behind an enclosure on the first floor. The place has little cubbyhole desks, but the light is dim and no one ever studies there.

      I chanced to peek over the top of one of these cubbyholes and saw an open page of a sketch book. Then a pale face looked up at me, startled. The sketch book slammed shut. The owner started sweeping pens, rulers, books, into a bag with frantic haste. He stood up, and I recognized him immediately, of course, from his drawing. The name on the notebook read STEPHEN TAYLOR in block letters.

      The only thing that surprised me was how tiny he was. I was already six-four and pretty big then, but I do not exaggerate by weighing in Stephen at little more than a third my size, maybe five-six and a hundred pounds. He could have passed for an eighth-grader. When he stood hunched-down, he looked even smaller.

      He clutched his sketch book to himself protectively, giving me that same wide-eyed, frightened stare he’d drawn so expressively.

      “Uh, if I’m in your way…I’ll just go somewhere else.”

      I was blocking his escape.

      “Please…don’t hurt me,” he said.

      That startled me. I put down the big periodical volume I was carrying and pulled up a chair and sat, now deliberately hemming him in. I indicated that he should sit back down. He pushed his chair as far away from me as he could in the tiny enclosure and faced me, sketch book and bag in his lap.

      “Nobody’s going to hurt you,” I said gently. I told him that I was Ben Schwartz and, despite everything, still art editor of The Villanovan. “I just wanted to see what you were doing.”

      He glared at me sullenly.

      “Your work is…unique. I think you’re a genius.”

      He was still looking for a chance to bolt. It didn’t take any particular insight for me to recognize that this kid wasn’t, ah, “normal.” I did my best to put him at his ease. I told him I was a history major. The last thing I wanted to do was tell him I was in psych. People always assume that you’re going to analyze them for a class project. That, I was certain, Stephen Taylor would not stand for.

      I tried to make small talk.

      “I’m a junior. You must be a freshman. Aren’t you?”

      He shrugged.

      “Well, how do you like Villanova?”

      Another shrug. “Okay, I guess.”

      “Steve—your friends do call you Steve, don’t they?”

      He seemed completely flabbergasted. He groped in the air and pointed to himself and said, “But…I don’t have any friends.”

      “Oh, come on now. You’ve been on campus almost three months now.”

      “I don’t know anybody.”

      “Well then maybe you should meet a few people. Why don’t you come over to the Pie Shoppe and we’ll have a hoagie and I’ll introduce you to the newspaper crowd?”

      I pushed my chair back and made to leave. He stood up, still defensive, but when I turned to go, he followed me out of the library and across the campus. The Pie Shoppe was a cafeteria in the same building as the newspaper office, directly below us in fact. It turned out he didn’t even know where it was. He didn’t go into public places much.

      “People don’t like having me around.”

      “Why do you say that?”

      “I scare them.”

      He wouldn’t go in. I ended up sitting on a wall outside, sharing half a hoagie with him. He loosened up a little. He at least pretended to confide things.

      “You see that brick over there,” he said, pointing. “That one, down at the corner. That used to be the only thing in the universe I wasn’t afraid of. But lately I’ve come to understand that it is a particularly malevolent brick, worse than all the others.”

      Now that was interesting. Some self-consciousness about his own neuroses, and even a shyly expressed sense of humor about them.

      He still didn’t show me the contents of the sketch book, not on that day or on several others. We took to meeting on that wall, then in remote recesses of the library when the weather turned cold.

      I saw him almost daily. We talked. I lent him books, a lot of them science fiction. I tried to interest him in different things. I may be the only person in the history of the universe to draw Stephen Taylor into a political argument, which must be something of an accomplishment.

      In time he did start to show me more of his work, sketches, studies, even a long Stephanus sequence he was continuing to work on without any hope of publication.

      I asked him a few naive questions about why he did what he did, and he rolled his eyes and said, “I paint what I see.”

      I felt slightly guilty that I was encouraging him, in a way, because it was clear that he was driven to create this material, that he didn’t enjoy it, that he wasn’t after recognition. It was a kind of slavery, depriving him of all social contact other than our meetings. His grades were apparently СКАЧАТЬ