Shuteye for the Timebroker

by Paul Di Filippo

  The debut of Sally Strumpet caused a firestorm in the media akin to the release of nude pictures of J. K. Rowling. After so long in seclusion, the author of the sexy best seller was as much in demand as a closemouthed presidential advisor at a congressional hearing. Sally was booked onto every possible TV show, from dawn to the wee hours of the morning. Any time left free in her schedule was devoted to print interviews and photo shoots. Charity events and award galas thrummed to her triumphant, engaging presence. The hottest clubs in Manhattan and L.A. played host to her leisure-time, paparazzi-attracting activities.

  Sally endeared herself to her public by her general air of gawky competence and klutzy charm. The disaster she caused on Regis and Kelly’s show, for instance, with the exploding quiche, caused a million female viewers to instantly bond with her.

  But one phenomenon that truly frightened Riley was the way that real people stepped out from the woodwork claiming to know Sally and to be the originals of figures in her book. Their impossible assertions bestowed on Sally even more existential validity and heft. Riley found it particularly hard, for instance, to meet with the other women in Sally’s ritual Tuesday-night reading group. Not just because he had invented them all—hadn’t he?—but because one of them, Lynda Gorodetsky, was an ardent man-hater and stared poisonous daggers at Riley throughout the entire meal they all shared.

  Despite his unease throughout the mad whirl, Riley stayed by her side in the role of humble publicist. Ignored by anyone of importance, forced to listen over and over to the same line of inane chatter about his misbegotten best seller, he felt his grip on sanity slipping. Occasionally, when Sally performed particularly well, Riley could take some pleasure in hearing certain bons mots from his novel rendered in a witty manner. But for the most part, the whole concept of Sally and her libidinous escapades quickly palled for Riley, especially after that time on Oprah’s show when, as he lurked in the greenroom, Sally began describing her current sex life with him. The anecdotes were all flattering—too flattering, perhaps—and she didn’t use his name. But Riley’s ears and other portions of his anatomy were left burning nonetheless.

  Sally herself, up close in tangible form, presented even more challenges.

  Ms. Strumpet had elected to continue living at Riley’s digs. And to continue occupying his bed. Even when the pair were on the road, she managed to sneak into Riley’s room late at night when all the tabloid swarm had dissipated. She seemed to have no interest in taking any other lovers, despite myriad opportunities. Remarkably, sex with Sally managed to remain at the same high peak of their first encounter. Nonetheless, Riley felt simultaneously fulfilled and unsatisfied, as if he were screwing a woman created to match his exact desirability specs, but one who could never surprise him.

  Riley couldn’t figure out why he continued to remain as Sally’s lover. Did he satisfy all her needs in a healthy manner, or simply cancel them out like a key fitting into a lock? Was he good for her, or merely a programmed response?

  He tried to speak to Sally about these paradoxes. They did communicate reasonably well, both in bed and out, so long as certain topics regarding her origin and his slave status were avoided. But all she did was quote sutra number nine to him: “‘The more familiar a woman becomes to a man, the less he knows about her.’”

  On a day that was remarkably free of commitments back in Manhattan, Riley went to see Harvard Morgaine. (Sally was busy getting her hair done.)

  Morgaine ushered Riley heartily into his office. “Welcome home, kid. I couldn’t be happier about how things are going. I assume you’re monitoring your bank account hourly, just like me. Sales of the book are way, way up, of course, and the first check from Miramax has cleared. I hope you appreciated how many points I negotiated for our share of the box office. I was absolutely brilliant! You’re a lucky bastard to have me for an agent, kid!”

  Morgaine’s joyous avarice left Riley even more dispirited than he’d been when he entered the office. “Harv, I just can’t take any of this Secret Sutras stuff anymore. I’m ready to crack. I need a vacation.”

  “A vacation? Well, why not! Sally is unsinkable now after all she’s been through. And if she was planning to shaft us, she’d have done it by now. Hit the road, kid, and have yourself a ball.”

  “You—you’ll tell Sally I’m leaving, OK? But not where I’m going. Because I can’t—”

  Morgaine clapped Riley on the back. “Sure, no problem. Leave her to me.”

  Feeling somewhat more hopeful, Riley went to the travel agent closest to Morgaine’s office and booked a flight leaving that day for Cancun, before he changed his mind—or Sally could change it for him.

  Twelve hours later he was sitting by a palm-fronded bar sipping a mojito. Despite the presence of a poster of Sally’s smiling face, with text in Spanish advertising Las Sutras Secretas de Sally Ramera, Riley felt better than he had in ages. A weight seemed to have been lifted off his shoulders. He could breathe again. His soul floated lightly inside him.

  For the next week, Riley led a mindless existence, soaking up sun and rum, swimming, admiring women who weren’t Sally. He began to believe that there would be some kind of life for him outside of the whole Secret Sutras morass.

  Eventually, one thing led to another and Riley found himself one languorous afternoon undressing in the room of a very attractive blond legal secretary from Duluth named Sharon.

  After a long embrace and kiss, Sharon excused herself. “Get in bed, honey. I’ll be right back.”

  Riley watched her disappear into the bathroom from his recumbent vantage on the tropical-patterned sheets. Despite his excitement, he felt a little drowsy and half-closed his eyes.

  Not more than a minute could have passed before Sharon reappeared, wrapped in a towel. She did not bound amorously toward the bed, but instead seemed preoccupied, moving to the bureau to rummage around on its top for something.

  Eventually she turned her head. As soon as she saw Riley, she screamed.

  “Who are you! What’re you doing here!”

  Riley jumped up, all his lust deflated by her shriek. “Sharon, that’s not funny. You invited me in. We were going to make love. My name’s Riley—”

  “Get out! Get out!”

  Riley hastily dressed and scrammed.

  For the rest of the day he waited nervously in his room, every minute expecting to be approached by a resort executive or, worse, a corrupt and tyrannical Mexican police officer who would demand that Riley explain his rapist ways. But no such confrontation occurred, and finally Riley managed to fall uneasily asleep, even without supper.

  In the morning he was awakened by the sound of his own door opening. In walked what was obviously a honeymooning couple escorted by a lowly hotel employee burdened with baggage. When the newcomers spotted Riley in bed, there was much confusion and embarrassment. Riley grew indignant at the luggage-toter’s insistence that this room was supposed to be vacant. Once the intruders had been shooed off, Riley dressed and went to speak to the manager, with whom he had developed a casual relationship.

  The portly, mustached man regarded Riley as if he were an undistinguished new species of bug. “I’m sorry, señor, but I must contradict your account of our mutual friendship established this past week. Especially as we have no record of your registration at our resort. Obviously there has been some mistake. You will have to register for the first time—for the second time, if you insist—or else vacate your room.”

  Riley felt spectral hands on his shoulder, claws knotting in his guts. He chose to vacate.

  At the airport, he was relieved to discover that his open-dated return ticket was still accepted at face value. The inspection of his passport was cursory. Just as well. Riley suspected that the document would not hold up any longer to in-depth confirmation by authorities.

  The flight home was interminable. By the time the taxi dropped Riley off at the door of his co-op, he was trembling with exhaustion and trepidation. Wearily manhandling his bag, he approached the
doorman.

  “How may I help you, sir? Whom do you wish to visit?”

  Riley stiffened in shock. Not here, too— “Aw, c’mon, Jeff, its me, Riley Small. I live in 1203—”

  A veil of disgust dropped over the doorman’s features and he lost all semblance of good manners. “Another groupie for Ms. Strumpet, huh? How many of you guys do I have to get arrested before you all get the message?”

  Riley set off jogging, his bag pitilessly thumping his vertebrae.

  At Harvard Morgaine’s office, Nia Poole erected a formidable barrier of professional indifference toward this intruder claiming he was a Morgaine client, but Riley finally managed to get admitted to Morgaine’s inner sanctum on the strength of some personal details about Morgaine that he disclosed. Nia seemed shocked by a stranger possessing such intimate knowledge of some of Morgaine’s grosser peccadilloes.

  Morgaine’s clean-shaven, rugged face wore a look of barely concealed irritation. “Now, Mr. Small, is it? What brings you here today? Something about Secret Sutras, my assistant said.”

  Riley poured out the whole story. Morgaine listened without comment. Riley dared to hope he had finally found a believer in the strange fate that had overtaken him. But Morgaine’s subsequent speech shattered that last illusion.

  “Mr. Small, rest assured that my client Sally Strumpet will pursue all her legal options against anyone who contests her authorship of her book. To put it bluntly, the full weight of the law will come down on you like a circus tent full of elephant shit. Why you wannabe writers feel compelled to fantasize like this about celebrities—”

  Riley fled in mid-bluster, something he had often wanted to do with Morgaine but had never before dared.

  Being a nonentity had its liberating moments.

  Googling Sally’s home page at the library’s public-access terminal, Riley learned that her next bookstore appearance in Manhattan was tomorrow, at the very Union Square store where he had first been inspired to write Secret Sutras.

  Low on cash, dubious of the validity of his credit cards, Riley spent the night on a bench in the park behind the library.

  He was at the store several hours before Sally’s slated signing, looking like a half-drowned sailor. He killed time at the cafe on one of the upper floors, nursing a coffee and muffin. Half an hour in advance of the signing, Riley had positioned himself unobtrusively near the table stacked high with copies of Secret Sutras, so that he could see without being seen. When Sally entered, Riley was relieved to note that she seemed to be unaccompanied by any flunkies.

  She took her seat behind the table set up with mountains of her book. Her book! The line for autographs already stretched across the store and out the door. Had Riley been in Sally’s seat, he would have been more annoyed than pleased at the immense turnout, contemplating all the inane small talk he would have to make, the dumb misprisioned praise he would have to listen to, and the pains his wrist would endure. But Sally, to the contrary, seemed all earnest sunshine and good will, gratitude and flirtatiousness.

  Why oh why had he made her so damn noble?

  She must have sold and signed two hundred books. Riley could feel the painful extraction of every cent of royalties that should have gone into his pocket, every leaking ounce of karma that should have been his. No wonder he was turning invisible.

  After a fulsome round of congratulations from the elated, sales-inebriated store manager, when Sally finally seemed ready to leave, Riley trailed her out.

  He accosted her half a block away, when she stopped to hail a taxi.

  “Hey, you bitch! I want my life back!”

  Sally turned and coolly regarded Riley from her superior height. Her gorgeous face seemed to sear itself onto his cortex, the place where it had first formed.

  “You ran out on me,” Sally said. “That was not appreciated. Don’t you remember my seventh sutra? ‘A woman’s wounded heart is like a wounded lion. You’d better pray it never recovers its health and gets nosing on your trail.’”

  Suddenly Riley’s consciousness inverted and projected itself through space. He seemed to be regarding himself with Sally’s eyes, gauging himself with Sally’s emotions. The father became the brainchild fully for the first time. Realization of the existential obligations he had placed on Sally by creating her crashed over him like a tsunami. Flop sweat soaked his clothes. He felt like God on trial at some cosmic Hague courtroom.

  A few seconds later, Riley was back in his own head. But all the fight had gone out of him, leaving him as stinkingly droopy as a bartender’s rag.

  “You’re right. I’m a rat. So I’m leaving again now, but this time I’ll say good-bye to your face. Good-bye.”

  Sally smirked victoriously, but not without a margin of charity. “Oh, so you want to make the same mistake twice? Not exactly a quick learner.”

  Riley halted. “What do you mean?”

  “Why not ask me if I want you back?”

  “Do you?”

  “Sure. Weren’t we created for each other?”

  Riley could practically hear cosmic theme music swelling in the background. He knew then that just as he had created Sally, Someone Up There had created him and devised this fate for him, and that both Riley and Sally were equal in the eyes of this irony-fixated deity.

  “I can’t deny it,” Riley said. “But are you really willing to give me a second chance after I ditched you and cheated on you?”

  “I might be. If I heard the three little words every gal is truly longing to hear.”

  Riley felt the requested phrase surface almost involuntarily from his diaphragm and get stuck halfway up his throat. He didn’t want to utter it. For one thing, he wasn’t sure of what he felt. For another, he resented being coerced. But declaiming his passion seemed the only way to get his life back.

  “I—I love you, Sally.”

  Sally grinned like a cat with a mouse’s tail hanging from its jaws. “There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Although you used four, arguably five words instead of three. Tsk, tsk, not economical for a writer of your talents. Now c’mon, here’s a cab. We’ve got to get you cleaned up and looking handsome for the dinner tonight with Sonny Mehta.”

  Riley numbly tumbled after Sally into the taxi, and the car drove off. Churning, confused thoughts about his future revolved through his head. But one thing he knew for sure.

  There was another book waiting inside his brain. A book just as powerful as the one that had created Sally Strumpet. A book of harsher, more tragic sutras.

  And any character could die in a sequel.

  Anyone.

  Author/editor Chris Roberson asked me to submit an “adventure” story to an anthoiogy that he was compiling. I think he was envisioning Indiana Jones, instead, he got David Lynch.

  That will teach him to offer such a broad mandate.

  This story belongs to the subgenre I term “bardo fiction.” Bardo is the famous Tibetan term for the period between death and the next reincarnation. I suppose the first prototypical, if not exactly bardo, fiction in English might be Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” I do know that there are not all that many examples of this mode. One outstanding instance, though, is Damon Knight’s Humpty Dumpty: An Oval.

  Search it out before you leave this world.

  Eel Pie Stall

  “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”

  —J. M. Barrie

  Tang of the river: ancient impregnated septic tidal flats exposed to the air; rotting fish; saturated driftwood; tarred pilings; engine exhaust; weeds going to slime.

  Sound of the river: slop of wavelets on insensible slippery cement steps; raucous gulls aloft; chugging engines; creak of winches; workmen bantering.

  Sight of the river: a cold rippling welcoming pewter grave, with flanking buildings as the only mourners.

  Tansy Bynum pauses at a waist-high stone wall along the southern bank of the Thames. Rests her hands on the flat gritted icy top of the wall. Feels nothing. Equilibrium be
tween inner self and outer world. But not in favor of the living.

  Tansy turns away momentarily from the sight, sound, and smell of her prospective final home. Polyester scarf printed with cartoon fishes binding moderate mouse-colored hair. No-brand sunglasses contradicting the gray skies. Cheap beige cloth coat down to midthigh. Worn wool skirt. Sensible stockings. Scuffed brown tie shoes.

  Wrists crossing twixt her modest breasts, fingers tucked beneath armpits. Unpainted mouth composed in a taut straight line. Shuffling pointlessly farther down the path along the embankment, wall on her left.

  People around her with jobs and lovers, chores and duties, children and parents, wants and lusts. Smiles, frowns, musing looks. Just to feel something, anything.

  Leave them behind. Shed these mockers like a final molt.

  Long slow nowhere trudge. River never out of vision, hearing, or odor-waft. Wall now less well-maintained, crumbling in places, beginning to be marred with rude graffiti. Less of a barrier to what calmly awaits. Inevitable destiny. People dwindling in numbers: going, going, gone. Nebulous empty borderland between what is and what will be. Moisture begins to seep from the lowering clouds in a prelude to a drizzle.

  Up ahead, scabbed against the wall like an ungainly limpet: a shack or shed or stall, some kind of slovenly commercial affair. Unpainted boards and timbers blackened with pollution and age. No signage. Grommeted dingy canvas front rolled up and balanced on the slanting gap-shingled roof, exposing dark interior. Chest-high counter projecting like an idiot’s pendulous lower lip.

  Abreast of the stall and ready to step past. Unseeing fate-blinded eyes straight front, no interest in what lurks within the shed.

  “Tansy Bynum.”

  She stops, astounded.

  Looks left.

  A shadowy artificial shallow cave untainted by any modern conveniences. Medieval. Prehistoric. Lower half of the back wall composed of the stones of the embankment barrier. Faintest of reddish-orange illumination supplied by a smoldering bed of coals in an open-faced brick oven. Large wooden singed paddle for retrieving items from the hearth. On the counter, a squat open-topped wooden canister holding a heterogeneous assortment of bone-handled spoons and forks. Crooked shelves within hosting clay mugs, crockery, spice jars, flour-dusted burlap sacks.