Imaginary Friends

by John Marco

  And no matter how nice I was, and how much I was willing to help him, and how much his pride made him come back to talk to me, to explain he really wasn’t crazy, I knew he wasn’t going home with me.

  I knew he was never going to invite me to spend time with his little friend.

  JUSTINE AND THE MOUNTIE

  Kristen Britain

  JUSTINE staggered down the hallway, the floor reeling beneath her feet as though she were on a ship at sea—a rough, rolling sea—instead of at home in her calm, land-locked apartment.

  “Dammit,” she said, as she stumbled into a wall. She hoped to make it back to bed without needing to vomit again. She was not drunk—didn’t even like to drink, except maybe for the occasional glass of wine. No, a problem with her inner ear was to blame. This was vertigo, and her doctor told her to hold tight, and it should pass.

  Hold tight? Easy for him to say when he wasn’t seasick without the sea.

  Finally she reached the doorway to her bedroom and swept past the Mountie standing there.

  Mountie?

  She backed out the door and, fighting nausea, looked about. No Mountie. The vertigo must have really scrambled her brain. The only Mountie in sight was the little metal figure on her telephone table. She’d picked it up on a whim at a gift shop during a business trip to Montreal. Everyone needed an iconic Mountie souvenir from Canada, right?

  She named hers Ian because it sounded like a good Canadian name. Ian stood straight at attention with one hand raised in a salute. She thought him a very proper Mountie.

  She left Ian behind and entered her bedroom, lunging at her bed as if the floor tilted her in its direction. Even after she was beneath the covers with her eyes closed and Oolong purring beside her, the world spun around and around.

  She lay there thinking about the impending deadlines at work—Nuts & Bolts Magazine, the premier publication of the fastener and implements market of the hardware industry, was due to the printer by the end of the week. Not exactly glamorous, but it was a paycheck. She was the copyeditor and had learned more about screw esoterica than any thirty-something woman in her right mind ought to know. In any case, if the vertigo didn’t lift in the next twenty-four hours as the doctor predicted, the magazine was, from a copyediting perspective, screwed.

  The world finally stilled, Oolong lying close and warm. He was a big gray tabby Maine coon, and his rumbling purrs were enough to register as a minor earthquake. She started to drift off to sleep, thinking of her little toy Mountie trimmed out with his broad-brimmed hat and smart, scarlet coat. She’d never seen a real Mountie and thought maybe she should travel to Ottawa to watch the Musical Ride, in which Mounties rode their black horses in precise formations and cavalry drills choreographed to music.

  As sleep deepened, her dreams were filled with lance-bearing Mounties riding round and round in exquisite kaleidoscope patterns.

  Until the phone rang, scattering all her Mounties and their horses into oblivion. She sat up too fast and the room whirled around her.

  “Dammit.” She tossed her sheets aside, burying the implacable Oolong, and stood unsteadily, gritting her teeth.

  She ought to let the phone ring, but she so rarely received calls, it was difficult to resist answering it. For all she knew, though, it was just work. Someone was probably having a word emergency. Do I use “that” or “which”? “Lay” or “lie”?

  Sometimes her colleagues treated her like a walking dictionary. There was the time Carl, a staff writer for Nuts & Bolts, burst into her office (really a space set aside in the supply closet) and declared, “I need a word!” Justine gave him a word, though not the one of many others she would have liked to, and it “galvanized” him to write his most spirited article ever: “Nails: A Lost Commodity in a Pre-Drilled World?”

  She bumped her way into the hall again, rebounding off the wall, feeling very much like a pinball. A sick pinball. She grabbed the phone, knocking over a framed picture of Oolong and the Mountie figure. She tried to put the phone to her ear, but she missed and hit her nose with it.

  “Dammit!”

  “Justine? Hello, Justine?”

  She closed her eyes, leaned against the wall to stay upright, and slid the phone to the appropriate orifices. “What?” she screamed into it.

  “Justine? It’s Liz. Hey, I heard you were sick. Anything I can bring over to you at lunchtime?”

  A bucket, Justine almost said, relieved it was her friend and not one of the Nuts & Bolts crew.

  “Justine?”

  “I’m here. Yeah. Crackers—you know, saltines. And ginger ale.” Those were always good for sea-sickness.

  “You bet, honey. I’ll be over at noon.”

  “Let yourself in,” Justine mumbled.

  “Will do.”

  Justine loved Liz, but her perky tone was tiring. She passed the phone to the Mountie to hang up. Carefully he replaced it on the receiver.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” the Mountie replied.

  Justine stopped, heart pounding. She turned ever so slowly to minimize the vertigo, and there he stood, the Mountie, tall and broad shouldered, attired in hat and scarlet coat and shiny boots. With his square jaw and sandy, neatly trimmed hair, he looked as though he’d just walked off a movie set.

  Justine screamed, and between the shock and vertigo, she fell to her backside.

  “I don’t see you, I don’t see you,” she said.

  He bent over her, scrutinizing her. “May I help you?”

  “I don’t see you, I don’t see you.”

  “You call me Ian,” he said.

  “I don’t hear you either.”

  “You appear to be in some distress.”

  Justine laughed, and it held a hysterical edge to it. Here he was, her imaginary Mountie come to rescue the distressed damsel. He had to be imaginary, right? The vertigo not only unbalanced her balance but set reality akilter.

  But then her imaginary Mountie helped her up and supported her to her bedside. Suddenly she was all too conscious of her old pink pajamas with the sheep on them and a hole beneath the armpit. She had vomit breath, too. Once she was in bed, she pulled the covers over herself, Oolong stretched out on his back beside her.

  “How is it you are here?” she asked Ian.

  “I have always been here.”

  Now that was a creepy thought. Had her little toy Mountie been watching her as she went about her daily routine all this time? Of course not. He was a figment of her imagination, at least this full-blown flesh and blood version of him was. The vertigo. It was the vertigo.

  “You were distressed,” Ian added uncertainly.

  This was, Justine thought, a little like some books she’d read, a bit of a fantasy. She’d come to copy-editing out of a love for reading and writing. She’d never expected to be working at a magazine like Nuts & Bolts, but she’d stayed because it was a paycheck, and a habit. Occasionally she dreamed of moving to book publishing, but a real publishing house would probably look at her miniscule credentials and laugh.

  She dreamed even more of finishing off her own long-languishing manuscript, but it always seemed like too much trouble to work on it. There was a time when she filled every spare moment with writing, when the ideas flowed, and she produced several pages a day. But in recent months? Not so much as a sentence. She’d hit the wall, had gone dry, lacked any fresh ideas. She’d pretty much given up on it, the whole dream. She wasn’t cut out to be a writer, and so she stayed at the magazine. After all, someone had to keep Oolong in kibble and litter, and it wasn’t gonna be Oolong.

  Ian’s appearance reminded her of why she loved those books she once read, and why she wrote. It was the magic of the story, how almost anything the imagination conjured could happen.

  Justine yawned, and when she glanced about herself, she found only Oolong and no Ian. Well, unless you counted the toy figurine on her nightstand. It was the vertigo, she reminded herself, not “magic.” Toys didn’t just come to
life and talk to you.

  I am sick, I am sick, I am sick . . .

  After a time, she drifted off.

  She awoke to a presence hovering beside her bed. “Ian?” she murmured.

  “Ian?”

  The whole room went tilt-a-whirl as Justine sat bolt upright. After several moments of dry heaves, her friend Liz sat on the side of the bed. Oolong roused himself enough to come over and rub his face against Liz’s elbow before flopping down again.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you, honey,” she said, running her hand along Oolong’s length. “My, but you’re a sight.”

  Liz should talk. She was all shiny bangles, with multiple piercings in each ear and a stud through one eyebrow. Justine did not want to know if there were others elsewhere, though she heard a rumor that Liz had a literary tattoo—of Moby Dick—somewhere. Justine didn’t want to know the truth of that, either.

  “I got your ginger ale and crackers.” She popped a can for Justine and produced the saltines stacked on a dish.

  “Th-thanks,” Justine said, easing herself against her pillows. She accepted the fizzing can of soda and sipped.

  “Who’s Ian?” Liz asked.

  “Ian?”

  “Yes, Ian. Are you holding out on me? Is there someone new in your life?”

  “Er, no,” Justine said. “He must have been a dream.”

  “I thought you said you never dreamed anymore.” It was true. Justine used to dream vividly, with colors and details. As vivid as Liz’s pink hair. Some were filled with mayhem and action, others proved more prosaic. One of her last dreams was of shopping in a store of Martha Stewart creations, with Christmas items on sale for half price. She’d been ecstatic, searching through hand towels and ornaments. When she related this dream to Liz, Liz had declared her a “sick puppy.”

  At some point, the dreams had simply stopped, evaporated, just like her writing.

  “Is Ian some sort of screw?” Liz inquired.

  “What?”

  “You remember the Brads? How you kept carrying on about them? I thought you were dating several guys named Brad at once, only come to realize you were babbling about hardware. Honey, you have got to find another job.”

  Justine sighed, and glanced at her nightstand, where she last remembered seeing her Mountie, but he was gone.

  “What about your novel?” Liz persisted. “It’s as good as anything Evan Lord ever wrote. If he can be the world’s bestselling author, I don’t see why you can’t get your book published.”

  “Because . . .” Justine simply let it hang there in the air. She’d been about to say, Because I haven’t had one stinking idea for months. Because I’m not Evan Lord with all his big concept novels.

  Evan Lord lived in the city, and she saw the signs of his success—not just the inclusion of his books on bestseller lists, but the sports cars he drove around, and his big mansion on the river. Many of his fans made pilgrimages to his neighborhood to gaze with longing and adoration through the security fence surrounding his property.

  “Look,” Liz said, “I know how good your stuff is, and I have access to all the latest and greatest.”

  It was true. Justine had met Liz three years ago at Bookwoods, a funky bookstore a couple blocks away where Liz was the assistant manager. Justine had ensconced herself in the store’s café every Saturday, with her pen and pad to work on the novel. Liz noticed and struck up a conversation, and they soon became fast friends with their mutual love of books binding them together, to the point Justine trusted Liz enough to let her read the manuscript.

  When it was clear Justine wasn’t going to offer an explanation or excuses, Liz stood. “I’ve got to get back to the store. The rest of the soda is in the fridge. You give me a call if you need anything more, all right?”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Liz started to walk from the room, but paused in the doorway. “Still not going to tell me who or what Ian is?”

  Justine sighed. “An imaginary friend.”

  Liz smiled. “I hope he’s good looking—mine is!” And with that, she was gone.

  “Her hair is pink!”

  Justine almost spilled her ginger ale all over her bed. Imaginary or not, Ian’s appearances were startling.

  “Er, yes, Liz’s hair is very pink.”

  “I have never seen anything like it,” Ian replied, “but there is much I’ve never seen.”

  “Right.” Because Justine couldn’t think of what else to say or do with an imaginary Mountie standing in her bedroom (well, maybe if she were feeling better, there was something else she could think of doing with the hunky fellow), she said, “Ian, why don’t you tell me a little about yourself.”

  He brightened. “I am a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

  “Um, I see that. Anything else? Any hobbies?”

  “Law and order.”

  “Okay, I get that. You’re dedicated. But beyond the job, anything about your past?”

  “I was made in China,” he replied. “Then shipped to the gift shop in Montreal where you found me. But I don’t remember very much about it.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “I am your friend,” Ian said with conviction. “I heard you say so.”

  Justine sipped her ginger ale, considering her Mountie. Why a Mountie? Why not a famous actor, or a superhero? Well, Ian was as good looking as any Hollywood star, and Mounties were known as heroic and brave . . . Perhaps more surprising, taking into account her job and her lack of creativity of late, was that she hadn’t conjured up a carpenter or plumber. It pleased her she hadn’t—she dealt with enough of those at Nuts & Bolts. Maybe it wasn’t just the vertigo—maybe her creativity was coming back.

  In any case, it was clear Ian needed some back story. He was a blank slate. “Ian,” she said, “let’s forget the whole made-in-China thing. Let’s say you are on duty in the Yukon. Or the Rockies. I mean the Canadian Rockies, of course.”

  Ian frowned. “Then I cannot be here.”

  Justine scratched her head. “You are being too literal. I don’t mean right now, but usually.”

  Ian nodded. “I am usually too literal.”

  Justine tried to detect if he was joking, but his expression was very serious, very earnest. This wasn’t going to be easy if he didn’t understand the nuances of basic conversation.

  “Do you think you could relax a little?” she asked him. His ramrod-straight posture was tiring her. “You know, stand at ease?”

  He widened his stance and clasped his hands behind his back, but it didn’t look any more relaxed.

  “This won’t do,” Justine said. “Come sit here.” She patted the side of the bed.

  “Are you sure?” Ian asked. “I’m certain it’s not proper.”

  “You are my imaginary friend, and if I want you to sit there, you will sit there.”

  He obeyed, the mattress sinking beneath his weight. Justine thought her power of imagination was doing quite well to achieve such an effect.

  “That’s better,” she said, though his posture remained rigid. “So normally you’re on duty in the Yukon. Not that I know anything about the Yukon, but it’s wilderness with bears and that kind of thing.” It would have been less “romantic” to base him in Toronto working the streets from a patrol car. “In the Yukon you go after bad guys and . . .” And what? She remembered Mounties in the old silent flicks rescuing helpless females tied to railroad tracks. As amusing as those images were, if one thought further about what would happen to the victim if the train got there before the Mountie . . .

  Yuck. She scrunched her face.

  “I bring law and order to the Yukon,” Ian said as if inspired. “I arrest bootleggers. I keep order in railroad camps. I ride down outlaws!”

  “Hmmm.” It didn’t sound very contemporary, but that was all right. If it were a story she was writing, it would not have to be contemporary, and the emphasis would be on adventure—adventure and romance. Ian would make a good romantic hero. He just n
eeded . . . hobbies.

  And for good measure, she could throw in some space aliens.

  Suddenly two bug-eyed, bulbous-headed creatures appeared at the foot of her bed. Ian jumped to his feet and reached for his sidearm. With a thought, Justine made the aliens vanish.

  “What was that?” Ian asked, still gazing in suspicion at the spot where the aliens had stood.

  “My imagination,” Justine replied, very pleased with herself.

  “I will protect you from it.”

  “Thanks, but that’s all right. It’s been a long time since it was functioning, and I’m glad it’s back.” Secretly, though, she thrilled at the idea of his protection.

  Justine experimented with her imagination, planting giant saguaro cacti around her room, giving Ian a handlebar mustache with waxed, curling tips (and quickly removing it), filling her room with blinking fireflies, and having the three tenors serenade her with a disturbing version of “Muskrat Love.”

  She turned Oolong into a giant cat, which was not a good idea. The whole bed sagged, and his oversized, fluffy tail nearly suffocated her. Ian was pummeled by a huge back paw, and Oolong’s already loud purrs turned into jet engines that shook the room. Knick-knacks and books tumbled from shelves. Justine quickly imagined him back to normal size, and there he lay unconcerned by the whole thing, still purring away as giant cat hairs drifted onto the bed.

  “Now that’s what I call a powerful imagination,” Justine said.

  “If you say so,” Ian replied, straightening his hat.

  “Yes. I think—I think I’m beginning to feel less dizzy.” Then she thought, if that was the case, maybe she should call the office, find out how production on Nuts & Bolts was going. Maybe she could even drag herself into work . . .

  But she did not move. She just couldn’t bring herself to call in. She felt more inspired to—to write? She glanced about for pen and pad, thinking she could jot a few notes down for her novel, when she noticed Ian flipping through a book that had fallen from one of her shelves. It was Queen of Tombs, by Evan Lord, a door-stopper of a novel. She sighed.