by Daniel Kozuh
Roe seemed to be shrinking before Norman, a sadness cast over his face. “Nobody will ever believe I met The Author.”
Norman didn’t remember building this aspect of Roe’s personality. Roe was always brash, rather uncouth, and a bit of a windbag. Norman relented. “How about you come through with me? Bring the bacon, and cook breakfast at my place? That way, I can take a shower and shave, before I meet anymore Whittles.”
Roe scurried to the stove, food in hand. “Shall we?” he chirped.
****
As soon as they were back through the oven, Calamity Jane was singing the blues of a coonhound and tap-dancing around the kitchen floor. Norman fed her and let her outside to do her business. Minutes afterwards, she was a sleeping blob of skinfolds on the couch.
With some difficulty, Norman showed Roe how to operate the conduction stove top. He was quick to quash Roe’s notion that it was magic. “Science,” Norman corrected. “It’s just science.”
The hot shower was both comforting and awakening; Norman shaved and washed then just stood under the rainfall showerhead, while the bathroom boxed in the steam, daydreaming until water started to run cold. “I should have sprung for the tankless water heater.”
Norman opened the bathroom door to the honeyed aroma of cured bacon. He was instantly ravenous. He dressed in casual walking slacks, and a plain blue t-shirt (Norman remembered to never wear shirts with a location-specific logo, when traveling abroad, as pickpockets targeted tourists. He assumed this went for parallel universes as well). “How long has it been since I put pants on?” They felt foreign and constricting, like dead skin to be shed.
He returned to the living room. To his relief, Roe had not burned the place down. In fact, he had found the plates and silverware and had two place settings prepared on the kitchen’s breakfast island.
“I could not find your tea chest,” Roe said. He sounded worried.
“Yeah, I don’t drink tea,” Norman said, walking into the kitchen, the mélange of breakfast of smells growing stronger and making his stomach churn in desperation.
“Don’t drink tea?” Roe said, more flabbergasted by this than any of the electronics to which he had been introduced.
“Orange juice for the hangover and coffee to wake up,” Norman explained. He reached the fridge and grasped the handle. “I wonder what world we will find in here?” Norman said, with a smirk. Roe appeared to be taking him seriously, for a moment, but followed suit with a smile. That isn’t to say they both didn’t hold their breaths as he pulled the door open.
There was nothing beyond the refrigerator door, other than a portrait of Norman’s bachelorhood: an empty milk jug, a rotten something-or-other, take-out leftover, five kinds of barbeque sauce, and a half-empty carafe of orange juice.
Norman pulled the OJ from the sad space and walked it to the counter, along the way tapping the Start button on his “Cuisinart Automatic Grind and Brew” coffee-maker. If this house were burning to the ground, Norman would save the coffee-maker. Janey would just have to fend for herself. The grinder pulled the imported Kona beans ($74.99 for sixteen ounces) into its gears, the rich scent of coffee blooming into the air as the beans burst.
While the coffee brewed, Norman sat at the counter. Roe placed his meal before him. It was a farmhouse breakfast of long, curly strips of wild boar bacon, fried eggs with fragile yolks the size of mug rims, and a diced root vegetable, resembling a potato hash. Roe hopped on the stool next to Norman and stared at him, expectantly.
“Please, you first,” Roe said, in a tone of devotion.
Aware that he was being watched, Norman stiffly picked up a piece of boar bacon and bit into it. Norman typically bought his bacon (uncured, with no nitrites and humanely raised), at almost fifteen dollars a pound, but it paled in comparison with what he was currently eating. As soon as his teeth tore into the crisp muscle and succulent fat, he tasted the entire life of the boar; its meals of acorns and mushrooms, its every sip of stream water, its brave evasion of predators and its lazy naps in the sun. Norman finally understood what it meant for an animal to give its life for a meal. A pure, euphoric smile spread across Norman’s face. He felt intoxicated, by something other than alcohol, for the first time in years. Roe bounced with self-satisfaction and turned to his own plate.
The rest of the meal was not nearly as dramatic as that first bite, but it was still perhaps the best breakfast Norman had ever eaten. He broke the egg yolk with the bacon and mingled all the food on his plate together; taking a forkful of the mixture and tasting the earthy pull of the vegetable, coated in the buttery sweetness of the yolk and underpinned by the smoky force of the bacon. The meal finally helped to ground him into this new reality.
“This is really good, Roe,” Norman finally complimented, as he swirled the final edge of bacon around on the plate. “Did you grow all of this yourself?”
“Yes, my lord. The Boar was wild, but everything else was –”
“Eh, eh, eh. Stop it with this, my lord, stuff. You can just call me ‘Norman’.”
“That seems … blasphemous.”
“Well, it is not. Norman is my name, so call me Norman.”
“Norman. The true name of The Author.”
“Okay, yeah, another thing.” Norman stood up and walked to the coffee pot. It hadn’t finished brewing, but he couldn’t wait any longer. “I can understand where you got the idea that I am your … creator, with the book and all, but that’s just not the case.” Norman yanked the coffee pot away from the unit. A few rogue drops fell onto the hot plate and sizzled away.
Roe’s brow crinkled into worried confusion.
Norman poured himself and Roe a cup and walked back to the island, placing the steaming mug in front of the tiny guy.
“Lingeria has historians, right? Of course, they do – I wrote about them. They were the, uh, uh …”
“Eremites,” finished Roe.
“Right! The Eremites. The monks who live in the temple carved into the side of Otho Mountain,” Norman said as the information trickled back to him. “I am like them – just a historian, who somehow tapped into the timeline of your world. I am not your creator, or some kind of demigod, or even a prophet.”
“But Wrence The Wizard said that you were, my lo – Norman?” Roe took his first sip of coffee ever and his face twisted into a sheet of disgusted wrinkles.
“Well, he is a liar, like most magicians,” Norman said, sliding his orange juice to Roe.
“But the Eremites – they cannot dig into the mind of a man, as you have done,” Roe argued. “And you were able to put my thoughts to a page. That is more than a mere historiographer. Your books helped me to understand who I am. They made me feel like I … had a purpose.”
This was the first time that Norman fully realized that Roe was just character a in his books: a concoction; a being of his own creation; something fake. While the main characters often changed between volumes, Roe was recurring but never a star. He often tagged along on an adventure for comic relief, or as someone off which to bounce exposition.
“And the Eremites only record the past, whereas the fourth book of the tomes accurately predicted the future.”
This piece of information took Norman by surprise. The books arrived before the events of Quest of Fire actually happened? “I don’t know what to tell you, bud,” Norman said. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. From what I can tell, your Lingeria has taken a sharp left turn from the eleven other books I wrote.”
“There are more?” Roe’s eyes widened.
“Well, yeah, there are fifteen – seems like you only have the first four.” Norman gestured towards a free-hanging bookshelf, attached the west wall of his living room. The bookshelf was a gift from a fan – one of the few presents Norman didn’t leave in his hotel after a signing. It was a cream-stained oak slab, with the runes and glyphics of Lingeria ornately carved into it. Fifteen first-edition Lingeria hardcovers were lined up on top of it, chronologically, unread and with unbroken spines.
“There are more?” Roe couldn’t help but repeat himself.
“Yes but, like I said, at some point it looks like the timelines split. Your world became different from the world in the books. I never wrote about any wizard, for one.”
Roe barely heard him. He was staring at the books. “When did they do that?” Roe said, quietly, as if hypnotized by the books.
“How am I supposed to know?” shot Norman. But then he realized that, in fact, he did.
****
The world of Lingeria was so convoluted, incestuous, and complex that other men have gotten rich from publishing detailed (but unauthorized), compendiums to the Lingeria books – the most famous and detailed of which was the absurdly titled Lingeria Abacærium. There was also a host of online wikis, which read like programming algorithms. Luckily, Norman happened to have purchased the Abacærium, because even he was beginning to lose track of the rules of his own creation. The book actually came in handy much more often than Norman would like to admit, and often came up with rationales for plot holes Norman never bothered to fill in. He fetched the thick, dog-eared, highlighted, and post-it-filled copy from his desk.
Norman walked back into the living room flipping through the pages, “I guess the best thing to do is go through your history and see where it starts to stray off course.” Norman found the character breakdown for Roe the Whittle. It was embarrassingly short – Roe was never a character Norman fully fleshed out.
Roe confirmed that the fourth volume, Quest of Fire, was accurate to the best of his knowledge; he did hide and shelter Vadim from the Kobold search party; a brief but necessary plot point in the book’s structure. Roe confirmed the happenings of books five, six, and seven. It was book eight where things started to go off key. While Roe did accompany Tahra the Mercenary into the Valley of Garthan, he did not enter the Tunnel of V’aarel, as Norman had written.
“No, no. I turned back at the tunnel's entrance because of the black cloud.”
“What black cloud?” Norman asked.
Roe tried his best to explain more about the cloud, but that is exactly what it was: a murky, undulating thunderhead that had suddenly appeared in Lingeria only a few months earlier, and that day, when Roe was at the tunnel’s entrance, it was over his town of Highpoint. The cloud has worked its way all over the land, sometimes disappearing and reappearing on the other side of the world within seconds.
“The cloud itself does nothing – it does not even produce rain.” Roe’s voice quivered. “But always, after its arrival, the livestock are found dead and decomposing, as if they had been rotting in the sun for weeks. As soon as I saw that it had appeared near Highpoint, I bid Tahra farewell and returned home. I arrived to find that half the population had perished, my parents included. The crops had all withered, and the water in the wells was undrinkable.”
“Jesus Christ,” Norman muttered to himself.
“What? What is a ‘Jesus Christ’?” Roe inquired.
Even though he was a staunch atheist, Norman felt uncomfortable explaining the sacrilegious analogy that Jesus was essentially what Norman was to Lingeria. Instead he simply went with, “It is just an expression we use in my world, when one feels overcome with emotion (good or bad). It’s like ‘oh dear me’ or ‘goodness gracious.’”
“Then, Jesus Christ, indeed!” agreed Roe.
“Okay, so you didn’t enter the tunnel.” Norman pieced it together. “You didn’t mine the Eternal Gem and you didn’t …” Norman’s gut yanked at him, with a sudden heavy guilt. He had totally forgotten that Roe was dead. He killed Roe off in the eighth book – right after they find the gem, Roe is poisoned by a cave spider and dies. It was a meaningless, unceremonious, non-redeeming death that Norman wrote to shock the reader and nothing else.
“Didn’t what?” Roe asked, after Norman was silent for too long.
Norman shook the realization from his mind. “Uh, nothing. We found out where the schism is. It is the appearance of this dark cloud. So, think – when did you first hear about it?”
“Well, rumors started trickling into the village a few months before I left with Tahra. That would have been around the time of the harvest, right when Wrence the Wizard …” Roe trailed off, as his brain finally solved the equation.
“A wizard arrives and suddenly some apocalyptic cloud appears?”
“No, no. Wrence said that you sent him to Lingeria, because of the black cloud … but you didn’t send him, did you?” Roe was actually handling his belief structure crumbling around him quite well.
“I most certainly did not,” Norman said, with gritted teeth, picturing some fanciful wizard magicking amuck around his world. “I think we need to pay this magic man a visit.”
****
Norman wasn’t sure what to pack for a holiday in Lingeria – for a land of roughly twenty-thousand square miles, it seemed to perpetually experience every season concurrently. Norman had idly put snowstorms and droughts within a few pages of one another.
“Jesus Christ, this is comfortable! What kind of hay do you stuff in this thing?” Roe asked getting cozy on Norman’s fully-adjustable, hypoallergenic, number-variable, Wi-Fi-connected, king-sized bed.
Norman pulled a duffel down from his closet. The duffel bag had bubbly lettering on it that said Pig’s Eye ComiCon, 2009, and there was a picture of a cartoonish pig, underneath the words, dressed as a superhero. It was swag he received for doing a panel on fantasy writing in St. Paul, Minnesota. Norman tossed the bag on the bed and unzipped it. “How far away is the tower from your house?”
“Only about a three-day walk,” Roe said, casually, working his back into one of Norman’s down-alternative pillows.
Even for a spirited runner like Norman, the thought of walking for three days straight sounded grueling. He contemplated taking his rolling suitcase instead, but on the gravel roads of Lingeria it probably wouldn’t last long. Norman packed an extra pair of jeans, some khaki shorts, socks & boxers. He blindly threw in some t-shirts and his London Fog cardigan. He also included a dress shirt (because his mother always told him that one never knew when one might be invited to a nice dinner). Finally, he threw in his pre-loaded leather toiletry kit, a bottle of J&B’s (in case things got too real), five Nutter Butters, his Moleskine notebook and pen, and the Lingeria compendium. He also tucked in a pre-loaded Ziploc bag containing Xanax, Valium, Lexapro, Dramamine, Zyrtec, Xopenex, an EpiPen, DayQuil, NyQuil, ZzzQuil and a pharmacopeia of other anxiety, depression, allergy, and rescue medications.
“I am going to use a civilized toilet one last time and then I will be ready to go.”
“Yes, yes, go, go,” Roe said, waving him off and focusing on the pillows.
Norman took his time in the bathroom; sitting to pee, just to bask in the glory that is a polypropylene seat (instead of an un-sanded circle of wood). When he finally finished, he found his room empty, and the pillows removed from his bed.
****
Roe was waiting for him in the kitchen, with two pillows stacked neatly next to him. It wasn’t uncouth in Whittle culture to just up-and-take something that didn’t belong to you, as long as you considered that person a friend. Even more, lifelong friendships had been formed between Whittles purely so that wheelbarrows and cast-iron skillets could be mutually absconded without guilt. So, Norman was a little tickled at this thieving gesture of companionship.
“Roe …” Norman noticed the silver door was closed. “Did you close the oven?!”
“Well, yes – I couldn’t work around it while I cooked,” Roe said, coolly. Norman couldn’t help wondering if he was, perhaps, hoping the portal may have closed behind him.
Norman dropped at the oven door, picturing, with panic, the reality of having this little man stuck in his world, forever. He yanked the door open and spied Roe’s home on the other side. “These are to stay open at all times,” he said, breathing a sigh of relief.
Norman was so preoccupied with the oven that he didn’t even realize that something
in his home (besides the pillows) had gone missing ...
“Okay, okay,” Roe said.
“Now, climb on through and I am going to pass you my bag,” Norman commanded. Suddenly, there was a thick, vulgar snort from the living room. Both men had forgotten something.
“Janey! Come on, girl,” Norman snapped.
“No! You cannot bring that beast with us.”
“I can’t leave her here for three days, alone,” Norman said. “Janey, wake up!” Norman grabbed a box of MilkBones from the counter and shook them. The loaf of dog instantaneously popped off the couch and trotted into the kitchen. Norman pushed a treat into her mouth and squished her face. “Come on, help me get her through the stove.”
****
Calamity Jane was not as comfortable with interdimensional travel as Norman and Roe were. Roe stood in his home and yanked the reluctant dog by the collar – her loose skin folding in upon itself – while Norman pushed at her hindquarters from his end. Her rear acted as if it was being operated by a completely different dog – her hips swayed and kicked randomly, fighting the attempt to be pushed through a cooker, while simultaneously trying to find footing within it.
Finally, what may have been one of the hardest tasks of their adventure was completed. Calamity Jane patrolled Roe’s house, with her nose mopping the floorboard and ears dragging along close behind. She soon, apparently, deemed it safe and suitable. She scaled Roe’s couch and claimed her spot.
“No! Off! Bad!” Roe attempted, ineffectively.
Watching Roe try to yank Jane off the couch made Norman give this journey a second thought. “So, what do you know about this Wrence?”
“Not many in this area have seen him,” Roe said, giving up on Janey. “He concerns himself more with the elfin folk and men. The regulars at The Flapping Gander are more familiar, because they talk with the travelers.”
The Flapping Ganger was the combined pub and social hub for Highpoint. Many of Norman’s characters met at The Flapping Gander for a pint of exposition before adventures began.
