by Daniel Kozuh
Even the brass-tinted pots and pans looked homemade, like items pulled from a well-preserved archeological dig. The oven itself was a bulbous, cast-iron monster, with spindly, hollow arms growing from its back as a crude furnace. Norman was so consumed by the details of this home that he never saw Roe pop through and stand beside him.
"It is not much, but it is home," Roe said, suddenly.
"This is ... exactly how I wrote it," Norman said, the ending inflection almost turning it into a question. “So right now, we are in … Hi … Hi … Hi …” Norman couldn’t spit out the truth.
“Highpoint, yes. My hometown. In East Lingeria,” Roe said, matter-of-factly.
Even the pronunciation of Lingeria confused Norman. While he had always pronounced it Lin-jeer-E-uh, an actual resident of the world was hitting the G hard, so it sounded more like Lin-gear-E-uh.
Roe lived in an open longhouse, with a pointed chalet ceiling and rustic beams supporting it. Norman could really only stand fully in the dead center. There were no interior walls or room dividers of any kind. Roe’s sleeping area was at one end of the building; the kitchen and dining space in the on the opposite; a quaint living space in the center.
Norman ran to the kitchen sink, where a bay window provided a simple greenhouse for Roe's herbs to grow. Past the herbs, and through the watery panes of handmade glass, rose Lingeria.
Just as Norman had placed it, Roe's house looked out onto a perfectly blue lake that spanned almost a mile across. The view extended across the lake to the perfect circumflex of Mount Piras, with a slope that rose at such a clean angle it looked fictitious, as if drawn by a child.
The reality of this unreal situation hit Norman like a hangover: his equilibrium was spinning like a broken compass and it felt like someone had kicked him in the base of the skull. He caught himself on Roe's counter and swallowed some large, deep breaths.
Roe grabbed a clay mug and filled it with water from the copper tap. "Here," offered Roe.
Norman took the tiny mug and drank. The water, Norman could tell, came straight from the lake. It was cold, icy runoff from the mountain, with a hint of minerals. It was the most refreshing water Norman had ever tasted.
"Come, come, you should sit down." Roe took Norman's hand in his and led him to the living room. "Please, sit." Roe offered Norman a couch meant for three Whittles (and yet still inadequate for this tall author).
Norman did his best to appear comfortable. Once settled, he looked across the room to where Roe stood, next to the fireplace and mantle. Roe grinned proudly and was trying to draw Norman's attention somewhere, wiggling his bushy eyebrows towards a spot above the mantle.
There, hanging on the wall, framed in hand-carved dark wood, was a painting. It was a painting of Norman – crude and folksy, but obviously Norman. The Norman painting (as opposed to the real deal), was a clean-shaven, almost cherubic Norman, with soft champagne hair combed straight back; his hands lightly folded over one another. Roe puffed out his chest, "I painted it myself."
Norman was, understandably, weirded out. Many a fan had drawn a portrait of Norman for him to sign. Others drew Lingeria characters in unnatural sexual positions which Norman refused to sign. But this … this bordered on the romantic. This was an altar.
The only question that seemed worth asking was, "Why do you have a painting of me above your fireplace?"
"Everyone in Lingeria has one. Most buy theirs in a shop, but I …" Roe took a moment to admire his brushstrokes. "I just felt the power of Ynni guide my brush." Ynni. Norman never really pinned down exactly what this odd word meant, in the spiritual realm of Lingeria. Ynni was not quite a god, but it wasn’t really “Mother Earth”, either. It was not ethereal, nor worshipped. It guided destiny but granted free will. If a daffodil could perform astral projection, that would be Ynni.
"It's..." Norman stopped short of a compliment. Roe may have been as tall as a fourth-grader but he didn't need the consistent validation of one. "But why?"
"Because you're The Author."
This conversation was spinning like Norman's head.
"Yes, but how do you know I am The Author?"
Roe gave Norman a curious look, as if, for the first time, he didn't quite believe that Norman was the all-powerful creator of his world. Roe walked over to a simple shelving unit and pulled out a leather-bound book, several inches thick and much better preserved than the other ripped texts and scrolls that surrounded it.
"Because you sent us The Volumes, my lord."
Roe held the book out to Norman. Norman took it and saw in shimmering gold script the cover read: LINGERIA, Volumes, The Author.
Norman open the book and the spine cracked, quietly. Roe jumped, worried about his sacred script. While Norman has never seen one of his books presented in such ornate detail, or the words so painstakingly hand-scripted with monastic flourish, he instantly recognized his writing. As he fanned the pages, he saw this was a collection of the first four Lingeria books.
The English was wonky, obvious chunks of words missing, with sentences like, “The fairy skimmed of the flowers bringing his ancient warhammer upon the victim's skull.” Norman never remembered writing about a homicidal, hammer-swinging fairy (but then, he did tend to write while drunk).
Norman flipped to the final page of the tome and found his picture or, rather, a stamp of an illustration of his picture. He knew this picture well: it was the vanity photo that appeared on the back of all of his books. The same photo was used for every volume because having it taken once was ordeal enough. It was a five-hour photo session with an insufferable German photographer who went by the name Sareet (Vindictively, Norman would later write the killing of a minstrel named Sar’et via disembowelment in the Tales of Lingeria Vol. 8 – Sinister Awakening).
In the photo, Norman was shrink-wrapped in a black turtleneck, evasively smiling at the camera as if the reader had just happened to catch him hard at work (instead of in the middle of a torturous five-hour photo session.
Norman closed the book and handed it back to Roe. "And you're saying that I sent you this book?"
Roe carefully re-shelved The Volumes. "Well, not this, specific, book. I had this one scripted in Frankenshire." (Norman winced, remembering how lazy he had been in naming that town.) "The original manuscript was found floating in Lake Tarnow. It is now kept under close guard in the Tower of Wrence, protected by your messenger, Wrence, the Wizard.”
Norman sat up. The homemade sofa cried at the sudden movement.
"Did you say wizard?"
Roe nodded.
Norman hated wizards.
****
A psychologist once attributed Norman’s hatred for the magical to his parents indignantly announcing their divorce during his sixth birthday party, while The Amazing Wally was pulling a ten-foot bamboo pole out of a newspaper.
A psychiatrist was convinced it had more to do with the fact that Norman’s ex-wife asked for a divorce while a different magician was standing far too close, begging Norman to “pick a card, any card”, at the only decent Italian restaurant in Pigeon Forge. The psychiatrist prescribed Prozac.
Norman’s feeling on the matter were much more existential and grounded in artistic merit. Magic always seemed to be a fair-weather friend to the narrative structure; there when you need it and gone when it is inconvenient. Whenever he read a colleague’s work that featured a magic man, he would find himself often uttering the phrase, “Well why didn’t he just…” over and over again. These men were capable of bending time, twisting reality, creating and destroying matter – ostensibly giving them whatever they desired and leaving little room for conflict. He fought tooth-and-nail to keep wizardry out of his book, even switching publishers when the lucrative Bennet House insisted that a “wizard, enchantress, clairvoyant, or other parapsychological mystic shall be incorporated into said compendium on or before the Two-Hundredth page.”
Lingeria did have some magical elements (Ynni, for example), but it was controlled and regulated
so as to never snap the rubber band that was reason. He never wanted to have the climax of his pieces be resolved through some sudden deus ex magicia. There was an obscure assembly called “The Pinnarchs”, who were more voodoo alchemists than wizards, using their outlandish scientific principles to conjure potions capable of minute magical capabilities.
In general, magicians irked Norman. He hated the smug looks on their stupid faces as they performed the most banal of illusions. He had been to one particularly uncomfortable cocktail party in New York, for the release of the tenth Lingeria book, The Emerald Pendulum, when a fat man, an obese kid really – only in his 20’s, with whom he was speaking, casually pulled a deck of cards from his blazer pocket and skillfully shuffled and splayed them while they spoke.
The young fan had been comparing Norman’s work to that of another fantasy writer, Ernst Godfrey (whom Norman abhorred), when he started playing with his little pack of cardboard. The magician did it with such forced fluidity, like a teen smoking their first cigarette, trying to act like fanning fifty-two cards out around one’s hand was perfectly normal human behavior in the middle of a conversation. The magic-man’s desperate eyes begged Norman to give him the green light.
“So, you do magic?” Norman barely exhaled.
“Oh this? Yeah, I dabble.” The magician immediately picked up his game, performing some false shuffles and one-handed cuts. Norman had no visible reaction, the man’s face contained enough fascination for the both of them, like a dog excited by its own reflection. “Here, pick a card.” He pushed the cards into Norman’s face.
Like a PTSD flashback, Norman was back in that Italian restaurant, as Alice subtly pushed a manila envelope across the paper-covered table. She had already done the leg work of divorce, before even broaching the subject with him.
“I’d rather not,” Norman said, as politely as he could, pulling himself back to the present.
“Oh what, Mr. Big-Time-Author? Too good for a lowly magic trick?” the boy jeered, loudly enough to draw the attention he so obviously desperately wanted. New York blue-bloods smiled and walked with their cocktails over to Norman.
Norman bit his lip, to keep from sneering at the moron in front of him. He reached out to take a card.
“Oh no, not that one,” the amateur magician shouted, laughing. The partygoers laughed too.
Norman pushed his glasses back to the top of his nose in a show of annoyance and reached out again. He drew a card – the Four of Clubs.
“Now, memorize it. Got it?”
“It’s not too difficult to memorize a number and a shape,” Norman snapped. He was losing his grasp on his greasy temper.
“Okay, now put it back anywhere in the deck.”
Norman slid the card back into the pile, leaving about an inch sticking out. The magician held up the deck, to show the card to the rest of the crowd. He pressed the card until it was flush with the rest of the deck. Norman watched as the fan pushed the card slightly deeper, extending it past the back of the cards (a common control among magicians). He then fanned the cards, pulling out Norman’s and palming it with his free left hand. He gave a few shuffles and cuts, to prove his honesty.
The kid then held out the deck to an attractive woman. “Sweetheart, could you blow on this, please?” She smiled, puckered her red lips, and sent a delicate stream of air at the deck. The man then slithered his left hand over the deck and the Four of Clubs appeared face up on the top. The crowd exploded into applause, Norman slapped his hand begrudgingly against his thigh three or four times. The boy put his hand up humbly and smiled.
The magician flipped the cards between his two hands at an impressive length. “Okay, who wants to see a trick called The Matchmaker?” he said, pulling focus further away from Norman. “I bet you do,” he said, pointing at elderly man, who nodded in comedic agreement. “Okay, I need two people to pick a card…”
Norman didn’t stick around for the rest of The Matchmaker. He found an unattended tray of Garlic Roasted Shrimp Cocktail Shooters and retreated to the balcony.
THREE
The dying Elder of Garthan appeared so minute, surrounded on his deathbed by his daughters, that he no longer resembled the man who once led the charge against Bastian The Bold. Lalina, his youngest, held his hand and wept. He brought his free hand, shaking with weakness, to her cheek, and wiped away a tear.
“Hold on, Father,” she cried. “We have sent for the witch woman of the lowland.”
“Send that devil away!” The dying man tried to shout, but his voice emerged croakily, lost in his throat. “I wish not for words of magick. I am glad to die. For it is in the inevitability of death that we finally accept the fallibility of life.”
- Tales of Lingeria: Unfortunate Immortals, Chapter 8
Perhaps Norman’s attention should have been focused on the fact that somehow the world that he spent the last twenty years of his life crafting had been formed into a conscious reality. Maybe he should have been preoccupied with the fact that a portal to that reality tunneled between his and a pygmy's ovens. He could even be wrestling with the fact that the people of this world somehow got their hands on copies of his book and now revered him as a deity worthy of Renaissance-style depiction. However, at this moment in time, all he could focus on was the fact that a damned wizard had set up shop in Lingeria. His Lingeria!
Roe had his exalted creator sitting in his living room and couldn’t help but think how disappointing this entire encounter had been. Many other Whittles had talked about seeing “the face of The Author” after partaking of a particular strain of perennial that grew on an island in Lake Blell. Roe, who was a bit of a teetotaler (or ‘wet cloak’, as the tavern regulars would joke), could only assume that this was nothing like what his friends had experienced. He stared at this drunk tree of a man: unshaven, malnourished, wrapped in a robe of brown velvet and, now, vomiting on the Elven rug that was Roe’s only inheritance from his father.
“Oh … Oh, God… I am sorry,” Norman coughed. He wiped the mucilaginous fluid away from his mouth with the sleeve of his robe.
“Not a problem,” Roe said, fetching a pail and brush from under a cupboard. “If this is the life of a disciple,” He thought. “I am not interested.”
Norman put his head between his knees and dug the heels of his hands into his temple. “You may just want to leave the bucket. This isn’t over.”
Roe set the bucket down and stepped away. He sat gingerly in his reading chair and admired his painting of Norman, wishing it was that version that paid him a visit.
“Okay, this is what I am going to do,” Norman said, after another vocal emesis. “I am going to crawl back into my own reality, take an Alka-Seltzer, and sleep this dream off. Tomorrow, I burn what I have of the sixteenth volume and start writing erotic Dune fan fiction. Can I borrow this?” he asked, holding up the bucket.
“Go? No! You can’t go, my lord!”
“Can’t I? Why not?” Norman questioned, sleepily.
“You just got here! Everyone must know that The Author has arrived and that the days of darkness are over.”
“Days of darkness? I never wrote about any days of darkness. Never wrote about any damn wizard, either,” Norman’s head lolled back and rested on the planed wooden brace of the couch.
“Did Wrence The Wizard not tell you what has been happening?”
“I keep telling you, I don’t know any Wrence, wizard or otherwise.”
“But he said that he is your messenger. Your voice in Lingeria. Sent by you, personally. He prophesized your arrival! He sits at your right hand and is commander of your armies.” Roe was pleading, now, his religion crumbling around him.
“Sorry, kid ....” Norman trailed off, “…but I think you’ve been duped.” And, with that, Norman was asleep.
****
One of Norman’s eye cracked open, dry, puffy, and bloodshot. It wandered about its socket, involuntary, until the thick wooden support beams in Roe’s house came into focus. Norman sat up, sl
owly, avoiding the inevitable vertigo that came with being hungover. Across the room, Roe was tucked into his reading chair, under a hand-spun blanket. The blanket rose and fell with the light rhythm of sleep.
Norman stared at his creation and felt bad for the little guy. He wouldn’t want to meet the being that created him, either. Norman lost his faith in God long ago. He didn’t look down on believers, but he personally never had what you could label a “spiritual experience”, unless you count eating a thirty-two-ounce porterhouse from Benny's Chop House in Chicago, Illinois. What would Norman say to God had he appeared in his oven? “Actually, my life might make sense if God was a drunken failure.”
A sudden, hollow banging filled the room and Roe fell out of his chair. The noise debilitated Norman. He slammed his hands to his ears, as the sound echoed off every pain receptor in his head. Roe ran to the source and looked into his oven. The sound stopped and Roe said something to Norman, who removed his hands.
“It’s for you,” Roe grumbled, irritated.
Norman went to the stove and knelt before it. Calamity Jane was on the other side, with her red food dish in her mouth and annoyance in her baggy eyes. She saw Norman and restarted her alarm clock by slamming the bowl on the metallic body of the stove.
“Gah! Okay, okay!” Norman cried.
“Would you like some breakfast?” Roe stood in his kitchen, holding a paper package containing thick slices of what Norman hoped to God was bacon. There was an egg, too, so big it looked like a baseball in Roe’s small fist.
Norman hesitated. “No. I should probably go. She needs to eat.”
“What is she? Your guard?”
Norman chortled at the thought of Calamity protecting him. “No, she’s just a pet.”
“A pet? But what is her purpose?”
“That … is a really good question,” Norman answered. “Okay, so this was interesting. Sorry about your rug. Hopefully, when I go back through, everything will, you know, return to normal.”
