The Fictional Man

by Al Ewing

  Niles said nothing. He remembered how he’d spent most of that evening talking to Justine on the phone, trying to talk her down. He’d been too busy with that to call Iyla, and then when she’d finally got home, at close to midnight, shaking and staring into space, he hadn’t bothered asking where she’d been or what she’d been doing. He remembered that all he’d wanted to know was what he could do to make everything like it was. Before she’d found out. He wished he hadn’t bothered with that, now.

  He considered standing up, walking out of there, leaving them to it. Instead, he just sat.

  IYLA AND BOB had got on like a house on fire since the moment they’d met, at that New Year’s party. When she found out he was a Fictional – he’d mentioned the episode of CSI in passing and she’d ended up googling it, and him – it was actually a surprise. Most Fictionals seemed to cling doggedly to the personalities they’d stepped out of the tube with, but Bob had always seemed more vibrant, more willing to embrace and accept change. He was the only Fictional she knew of who’d quit of his own accord rather than being cancelled, for example – there was easily another season or two in The New Adventures, but he’d sided with the writing team in stopping while they were ahead. Then there was the beard, the attempts to find a career for himself – to define himself – rather than just grubbing a living on the convention circuit. Little things, like learning to cook or dance salsa. Things that weren’t in his ‘character.’

  It wasn’t that Bob wanted to be a human being. It’s that he already felt he was human. And he didn’t see why he had to limit himself to what he’d been born with.

  Bob listened to this with a blush, looking away. “Good writing,” he muttered to himself.

  When Iyla had gone to see him – after nearly crashing on the freeway from crying and driving – he’d made her coffee and listened to her story, offering her tissues and reassurances and no judgements. She’d confided her fear of confessing to her friends, of their rolled eyes and I-told-you-sos. “It’s not on you,” he’d said, and held onto her, without it being any more than that... and she honestly forgot that he wasn’t real.

  “He wasn’t making up a story he could live in,” she said, “that was the thing. He didn’t have a little version of the moment playing in his head where he was the hero. He didn’t need to. He was just there.” She shook her head. “For me, in that moment, he wasn’t imaginary. He was less fictional than you were.”

  She’d kissed him, on impulse, a mixture of petty revenge – I can cheat too, she wasn’t above that – and a deeper attraction. And he’d kissed her back. And a few minutes later they were on his couch. And neither of them were thinking of body pillows or cartoon horses or social taboos or anything else. Neither of them cared.

  It was only later, when she was lying in his arms and she suddenly realised that those arms had been grown in a tank – that the man she’d just slept with wasn’t even real or human, that he’d been grown for a TV show, and what would her parents think, and what if someone found out, and what about the papers, and all the rest of it – that she’d got up, pulled her clothes on, made her excuses and gotten the fuck out of there. She could tell he was just as freaked out, just as terrified of himself, she could see it in his eyes, but all it had meant to her then was that he wouldn’t tell anyone about the awful thing they’d just done. All she felt was a sick sense of relief.

  A couple of days later, after she’d thrown up a couple of times, after she’d agreed with Niles that of course they’d try to save the marriage – it wasn’t like she had a leg to stand on any more, was it? – she’d risked calling Bob on the phone, arranging to meet in a downtown coffee shop like a pair of Russian spies, so they could talk about what had happened. Iyla had been planning to tell him that the best thing would be for them to never see or speak to each other again – she expected he’d agree to that readily enough – but when he’d walked in, with his hang-dog face and his gentle eyes, she hadn’t seen a Fictional, some imaginary thing that had been grown in a lab.

  She just saw... Bob.

  The second time, neither of them had forgotten anything. They knew exactly what they were doing. They knew it was wrong.

  But it was a right kind of wrong.

  “YOU DON’T HAVE to go into details,” Niles said, icily. “I’m feeling ill enough as it is.”

  Iyla raised an eyebrow. “Oh, really? Do you feel like you’re at work and you just walked in on me fucking your boss? That kind of ill?”

  Bob winced. “Iyla –”

  “No, don’t you dare, Bob. Don’t you dare take his fucking side.” She scowled angrily at Bob. “He’s not ‘a nice enough guy deep down,’ he’s a fucking asshole and I shouldn’t ever have had anything to do with him.”

  It hung in the air. Bob looked at Niles with a pained expression. Niles stared daggers back at him.

  “So,” he said sarcastically, “I’m a nice enough guy. But you have to go deep down. Those really are the kind of sentiments you want from your best friend. That and fucking your wife.”

  “I’m not your wife.” Iyla stared him down. “I never should have been your wife. From the way you were carrying on, I never was your wife. All I ever was to you was the closest thing to hand, the thing for you when you couldn’t find anything newer, or younger, or just different.”

  “That’s not true,” Niles muttered, flushing red. “I loved you. I married you, for God’s sake.”

  “Right,” Iyla said. “And then you got bored.”

  Bob fidgeted, staring at the carpet, his hands in his lap. Niles couldn’t stand to look at him. “So how long were you and him... he and you...”

  He couldn’t even finish the sentence.

  IT HAD LASTED three months. The sneaking around was what killed it, in the end.

  It wasn’t just that they had to hide it from Niles. If that had been the end of it, she’d have just come out and told him – she’d have had a party, with cake and a band. HAPPY ADULTERY, NILES.

  But it wasn’t just him. It was everyone.

  Iyla wasn’t stupid, and neither was Bob. She knew that if anything came out about what they were doing – once, twice a week, during the stolen moments when they were absolutely sure they were safe – it was over for them. She’d seen it happen in 2000, when Ethan Hunt had had that fling with his co-star and they’d been all but hounded off the face of the Earth. Where were they living now? Somewhere in Argentina?

  She’d never be able to get another job – any employer, in any city, any country, would be one Google search away from all the sordid details. They’d have reporters stalking them day and night, wanting salacious quotes and photos, making up their own when they didn’t get them.

  And for the rest of their lives, they’d never really know if it wasn’t all about to come crashing down. If something turned up on the internet in 2030 it would – unless public attitudes had changed completely by then – be just as damaging as if it appeared the next day. Their relationship wasn’t just a bomb waiting to go off – it was one with a half-life of fifty or sixty years.

  After three months, the stress of it all was too much – they were both tired of living with the constant tension. It was time to do what they should have done from the start and get out of each other’s lives for good. And they nearly did.

  During all the sneaking around, Bob had been at the house a couple of times when Niles had come home unexpectedly – thankfully while they were both still clothed. They’d played it off as Iyla teaching Bob to cook Indian food – the kind of lie Niles would readily believe – and the three of them had ended up sitting down for dinner and trying what Bob had made. The dinners had been full of little overcompensations – Iyla acting withdrawn, not speaking to Bob or looking at him, while Bob engaged Niles in endless conversation, letting him run his mouth off about Kurt Power or the London Review or anything else. When Niles had started calling Bob on the phone, asking if he fancied a pint, Bob hadn’t felt able to refuse without it looking suspicious –
even after the affair with Iyla was long over.

  After a while, though, Bob had begun to honestly warm to Niles. He seemed to be making an honest effort to improve himself, to save his relationship, to be a better person. He had a hell of a blind spot when it came to self-criticism, Bob would be the first to admit, but... there was something there. You had to dig for it a little, but underneath it all he felt sure there was a good person waiting to get out.

  Bob didn’t want to abandon him.

  “HOW NICE OF you,” Niles said, coldly.

  “Niles...” Bob sighed, shaking his head. “This doesn’t change anything. You’re still my best friend. I... I like you. I mean, I had to kind of... grow to like you... but...” He started again. “Look, I honestly never meant for you to find out about Iyla like this. I never meant for you to find out at all. I just... I just needed someone to talk to, that’s all. Someone else.”

  Niles stared at Bob for a long moment. Then he stood up. He couldn’t take this anymore. He had to get out before he threw up.

  Bob looked nervous, he noticed. Almost afraid. “Niles?”

  The author paused on the way to the door, then turned and stared down the trembling clone sitting in front of him, the inhuman thing his wife had whored herself out to while they still slept in the same bed. Slowly, he clenched his fist. Then he drew it back and – no.

  No, don’t narrate it.

  Do it.

  Niles leaned forward and punched Bob as hard as he could in the face.

  He felt the nose bone crack, and his knuckle shift painfully, and he saw a gush of blood spurt from Bob’s nose and into his thick moustache and beard, and then Bob was clutching his face and Iyla was on her feet and screaming at him to get out, to get out of her house now – telling him she’d call the police.

  “No you won’t, because then everyone’ll know you fucked a Pinocchio –” That was as far as he got before Bob’s fist hit him in the belly hard enough to drive the wind from him. As he went down, Niles found himself oddly thankful Bob hadn’t reverted to type and given him a sock on the jaw. It would have cracked in two like a stick of rock.

  “You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve, you piece of shit!” Iyla screamed at him. She was crying again, angry tears rolling down her face. “You’re accusing me of fucking someone imaginary? After what you did?” She lashed out at him with a foot as he scrambled away, getting to his feet, trying to run for the door as best he could. She knew. Somehow, she knew about Liz. She knew he was just as bad as she was. Two Pinocchio-lovers together.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Bob holding her back, stopping her from kicking him again. Good old Bob, he thought bitterly. What a friend. Then he was out of the door and scrabbling in his pocket for his car keys.

  It was only once he’d pulled onto the freeway – while he was thinking desperately about whether she’d hold off on exposing him because of her own position, or whether she’d simply bring the fires of mutually assured destruction down upon them all – he realised that she couldn’t possibly have meant Liz when she’d said that.

  She’d meant Danica, of course.

  He realised that he’d been shaking for the last two miles, and pulled over. Then he started to cry.

  He definitely needed to have a chat with Ralph.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  RALPH POURED ANOTHER apple juice. “And then you hit him?”

  Niles nodded. “I hit him. And then he hit me. There were also some kicks – from Iyla, I mean. Bob wouldn’t ever kick a man while he was down. She was saying something about how I had a lot of nerve after I’d fallen for someone imaginary myself.” He gnawed his lip, eyeing Ralph’s fake whiskey. “And then... then I came straight here. Pretty much.”

  Ralph took a sip. “You didn’t leave anything out of that at all? You didn’t steal a cop’s gun and shoot him with it, maybe? You could have fit that in between getting thrown out of the nursing home and hitting a woman you’d just slept with in the face with a door, I really wouldn’t put it past you...”

  Niles tried to ignore his tone. “This is all completely confidential?” It was the sixth time he’d asked the question.

  Ralph nodded, seemingly not minding the repetition. “I keep telling you. It’s my first rule – never betray a patient’s confidence. Remember that episode with the mafia hit man?” He smiled ruefully. “Great television, they tell me. Personally, all I remember is being absolutely wracked with guilt – honest to God. For as long as the cameras were rolling, as far as I was concerned, I was protecting a killer. And, as you’ll recall, I didn’t breathe a word.”

  “Actually, I never saw that episode,” Niles frowned.

  It made some sense, though. He’d heard stories about how deeply some Fictionals got into the ‘method’ – there was the apocryphal story of how Indiana Jones had donated half his props to a local museum, claiming that they “belonged there,” and the props department had had to shamefacedly beg for them back from the bemused museum staff. More recently, there was that ugly business with Dexter, which was fortunately nipped in the bud before anyone was badly hurt. And, of course, there was Sherlock Holmes – the one helping the police with their enquiries – who didn’t seem to see a difference between onscreen and off.

  It just made Bob’s behaviour all the more puzzling to him.

  “Ralph... do you mind not being real?”

  Ralph raised his eyebrows. “Wow.”

  “I know.”

  “I see someone’s closet realism is no longer very closet.”

  Niles sighed heavily. “I know. I called a Fictional a... a P-word. I don’t think I get a closet now.” He rubbed his temples, feeling a headache coming on. “Feel free to hit me in the stomach if you want.”

  Ralph looked at him for a moment, then sat down in the Cutner’s Chair chair. Since he’d made that little confession about it at their last session, Niles had refused to sit in the thing, and was now perched on the wooden chair opposite where Ralph usually sat. “Do I mind not being real...” He seemed to be mulling the question over.

  “Am I analysing you now?” Niles groaned. He looked at the clock on Ralph’s wall – he had another thirty-five minutes of the session to go and then he’d have to pay for an extra hour on top of his usual time, assuming Ralph didn’t have that hour booked for another client. Either way, he wasn’t in the mood for Ralph to waste time with games.

  Ralph smiled one of his enigmatic smiles. “Maybe. We used to do that occasionally on Cutner’s Chair – we’d use it for bottle episodes. I’d sit in the chair for a few hours, do some improv – well, it was improv for the actors, but for me it was serious therapy, and therapy I badly needed considering all the crap that got laid on me in the show. They’d edit it down, we’d have an hour of electrifying emotional drama for not very much money, and I’d feel a little better.” He paused, looking at Niles. “So, are you real?”

  Niles looked at him, unable to fathom what he meant. “What do you mean? Metaphorically? Am I authentic? Because a lot of people would say that the Kurt Power novels set in the Middle East –”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Ralph said, waving it aside. “Think about it from my perspective. When I came out of the tube, I knew who I was. I had a full set of – not memories, exactly, but a clear understanding of who I was and the course of my life so far. I was pretty well written in that way – I came with a lot of background.” He took another sip from his drink. “But I stepped out of the tube into a world where my life was fiction, a TV show. The closest I could get to it was when that show was being filmed. To me, those times, those takes, were what was real – as real as anything got. The rest... this...” He waved his hand again, dismissively. “Are you real? I mean, why should I believe you are?”

  “Well...” Niles blinked, confused. “Because I am real. You’re imaginary.”

  “To you.” Ralph grinned. “I’m pretty sure I’m not the only ‘Fictional,’” he did ‘air quotes,’ which for some reason infuriated Niles, “to think abou
t it that way, either. So, do you mind not being real?”

  Niles shook his head, annoyed. The whole discussion was completely absurd. “Of course not,” he snapped. “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Well, there you go. That’s my answer too. You’ve got your reality, I’ve got mine, I’m perfectly content if never the twain shall meet. In fact, I’m a lot happier that way.” He grinned. “And most Fictionals are the same. We’ve all got our own internal reality, and mixing those realities up feels...” He hesitated.

  “Wrong,” supplied Niles.

  “Right.” Ralph nodded. “And maybe it does feel right to some people – mixing reality and fiction like that. A lot of social taboos are made to be broken, right?“

  “Eww,” Niles grimaced, reacting instinctively. “You’re not saying it’s all right to –”

  “Why not? This taboo’s very strong and fresh, and the media love to demonise people over it, but... what’s actually wrong with real people and imaginary people doing it? In a hundred years, people are going to wonder what all the fuss was about. Then again” – Ralph smiled, a little sheepishly – “I’ve got a theory that in a hundred years most people are going to be coming out of tubes anyway. It’ll be the only way to beat all the shit the planet’s starting to throw at us – mass genetic modification.”

  “You should be a writer,” Niles said, sardonically.

  “Look, I’ll let you in on a secret,” Ralph smiled. “When two Fictionals get together? You ‘real’ people” – finger quotes – “you people love it. But for the rest of us, it’s that taboo again. It’s wrong. Like... worlds colliding. That’s why Fictional weddings are usually the bride, the groom, and a bunch of non-fictionals hooting at them like they’re the last two giant pandas, and none of the rest of us to be seen –”

  “Can we change the subject back to me?” Niles said, pointing a finger at the clock. “I mean, much as I’m fascinated by the lives of imaginary people – and you are imaginary, you’re just delusional with it – I’m not paying extra for this session because you decided to run off on a tangent.”