The Fictional Man

by Al Ewing

  “Not running off, circling round.” Ralph grinned, finished his apple juice and put the glass down on the floor. “You’ve got your reality, I’ve got mine. We’re both fine with them giving each other a wide berth in the bedroom. But from the sound of it, your reality is Bob Benton’s reality too. Now, maybe that’s just bad writing at the tube stage. Who knows? But as far as he’s concerned, he’s on your side of the line. He’s real.”

  Niles scowled. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “What?” Ralph burst out laughing. “That the Pinocchio wants to be a real boy? That you’d ever let him use your golf course? What?”

  “It’s just nonsense.” Niles muttered, but of course it wasn’t. It made all the sense in the world. It was why Bob was Bob, telling everyone that he was a voice actor, growing that damned beard, drinking real alcohol, and yes, yes, say it – sleeping with Iyla. Sleeping with his wife.

  Ralph read the look of disgust on his face and drew the obvious conclusion. “So why shouldn’t he sleep with her?”

  “What?” Niles’ mind boggled. Was he honestly suggesting –

  Ralph shrugged. “Why not? What’s the problem?”

  “He’s a Fictional –” Niles spat the word, surprised as his own vehemence.

  “Is he?” Ralph asked. “He doesn’t act like one. Hell, he’s the least fictional Fictional I ever heard of. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, he’s one of you people. You should just accept it.”

  Niles knew it made sense, but he wasn’t about to accept it. If he started deciding who was Fictional and who wasn’t on that basis, where would it end? There had to be some kind of objective demarcations, otherwise it’d all be chaos. Anybody could just be anything they wanted to be. What sort of world was that? “Anyway, she’s still my wife,” he muttered. “At least, she was then. He had no right.”

  Ralph got up, wandering back towards the decanter. Niles wished he’d cut back on that stuff, especially after all that gibberish about different realities. If the apple juice really was whiskey in Ralph’s reality, it actually explained an awful lot.

  “Some might say,” Ralph said, pouring himself a double, “that you gave him that right when you had sex with her boss. Or even before then, when you cheated on her with that teenage barista –”

  “She was twenty, and it was a smart drink café,” Niles mumbled.

  “– and some other people, including me, might say that it’s not about ‘rights’ but about freedoms, and Iyla had the freedom to do whatever the hell she wanted with whoever the hell she wanted, womb-born or otherwise. You didn’t own her. She was your wife, not your property – if she didn’t like being tied to a philandering egomaniac, there was no reason on earth she had to be.” Ralph shrugged. “If you think there was, that just makes you a hypocrite as well as a cheat.”

  Niles stared in disbelief. “Good God, Ralph, tell me what you really think, why don’t you –”

  Ralph rolled his eyes. “Ah, you were quitting anyway. You never paid much attention to me – now you’ve finally realised you might actually need some help, you’re probably looking around for a real therapist. Someone with a real degree in what the hell’s going on with you.” He took a slug of the apple juice. “And good luck to ’em. You’re the case of a lifetime.”

  Niles fidgeted in his chair, looking sour. “Thanks,” he said, bitterly. He stared at the fake degrees on the wall for a moment, then sighed heavily. “Look, I still need help with this whole Bob and Iyla situation – I can’t go to a new therapist with that.”

  “Oh?” Ralph smirked. “Not going to bring the wrath of polite society down on the star-crossed lovers?”

  Niles shook his head, his mouth an angry line. “No. No, I’m not.”

  “Because you’ve realised I’m right?” Niles didn’t say anything. Ralph chuckled. “No, of course not. It’s because if you tell everyone you know about them, you might end up having to talk about this Liz Lavenza – that whole little adventure. I like the way you didn’t mention her at all during your little tirade against the evils of real-on-imaginary love, by the way...”

  “It’s not the same thing at all,” Niles fumed. “She tricked me – I mean, she didn’t disclose. She was giving all kinds of mixed signals –”

  “Jesus,” Ralph said, shaking his head sadly. “You’re a real mess, Niles. Well, we can stick a pin in that – get back to it later. Right now there’s something else I’m more interested in.” He leaned against the wall, studying Niles carefully. “You said your wife accused you of falling for someone imaginary, but you didn’t tell her about Ms Lavenza, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Niles admitted. “I worked out that couldn’t have been who she meant on the way home.”

  “Well, I’ll bite.” Ralph smiled, returning to the warm embrace of the chair and sitting himself down. “This was the mysterious event that finally triggered the divorce, am I right? The one you’ve consistently managed to avoid talking about in all the time you’ve been coming to see me?”

  “Yes,” Niles said, guardedly.

  Ralph nodded. “So. What was her name?”

  “Danica,” said Niles. “Danica Moss.”

  THINGS HAD SLOWED between them since the Justine debacle, but not stopped. Not completely.

  Sex had gone from a weekly event, to fortnightly, to monthly, and now Niles was noticing the periods between their perfunctory coitus creeping up to five or six weeks. At first he’d been annoyed about it, feeling like he was being punished, but now there seemed little point in kicking up a fuss. He was saving the marriage, that was the important thing.

  He felt like a definite corner was being turned there – Iyla had started to lean on him on the couch again, relaxing in a way she hadn’t seemed able to for months. Sunday lunch had become a regular culinary adventure as they tried to cook a dish from a different country every week – her idea. They’d joined a book group together, and he was managing not to point out how wrong the various opinions on display were. People who’d wandered away from him in disgust during the worst of it were starting to drift back into his life, though they still eyed him with a wary suspicion at dinner parties, and the look in their eyes as they asked him how the latest book was going – “oh, it’s going,” he’d say, followed by a lengthy description of the minutiae of every single plot twist and character arc – suggested they’d rather be literally anywhere else.

  Occasionally, Iyla would still dig into the wound – bitter, tearful arguments at three in the morning. Niles took these infrequent eruptions stoically, and after the Justine situation he’d become much more discreet, confining himself to very occasional one-night stands with publishing reps, PR assistants and barflies – usually, like him, just looking for a warm body – which he always dutifully regretted the next morning. Generally speaking, life was good, and Niles had felt that he could easily move forward into his sunset years at this steady pace.

  He met Danica Moss at the Century City mall.

  He’d been browsing laptops, wondering if he could afford to replace the old Dell he was using – it was wheezing and groaning, occasionally overheating, barely ticking over, and although he backed up regularly he was still paranoid about the whole thing just keeling over and dying, leaving him stranded in the middle of a deadline. It was past time to trade up. He was absorbed in these thoughts, idly heading in the direction of the food court, when he noticed the woman with the red hair.

  She was sitting on one of the benches in a green coat, a couple of shopping bags at her feet, people-watching – her eyes flitting from one shopper to another, idly taking in the families out for the January sales. He stopped for a moment to take her in – bored, early-to-mid-thirties (possibly a very good forty), well put together, especially her top half – and then looked away hurriedly when she turned her eyes on him. He had business with a bagel in the food court, anyway.

  Ten minutes later, while he was eating, she sat down at his plastic table and flashed him a disarming smile. “Hi,” sh
e said, “I was wondering if you could help me out with something?”

  Her eyes were a very clear, piercing shade of emerald. “Sure,” he mumbled through a mouthful of salmon and cream cheese.

  She rummaged in her bags for a moment before pulling out a pair of bikini tops. “I’m planning a vacation in Aruba this summer,” she said blithely, “and I was wondering which of these you thought would look better? I can’t decide.”

  He blinked. “I’m sorry?” He wondered for a moment if she was serious. It seemed too clumsy not to be a real question.

  “You look like a man with good taste,” she said, reaching out and patting his arm. The suit jacket had been Iyla’s Christmas present to him – he’d asked for something smart he could wear to launches. He found himself oddly glad that he’d worn it.

  “It’s Armani,” he lied, and she smiled warmly. He felt like he’d given a countersign.

  “So, what do you think? I like this one, but this one shows off more.” Another winning smile. He relaxed, feeling the old urges stirring again – he was enjoying her confidence, the corniness of the routine. And it was nice to feel desired again – to feel like he’d been chosen out of many, not simply because he was the last turkey in the shop.

  “Well,” he laughed, “I’d have to see you without the coat,” and thirty minutes later they were clawing at each other in a motel.

  The sex was exciting, energetic, something he’d almost forgotten. Between bouts, they cracked open the minibar and found out more about each other, and he learned that her name was Danica Moss and she was a divorcee living and working in Santa Monica as a fashion buyer. He told her a sanitised version of his marriage, mentioning that Iyla didn’t really understand him anymore, and he told her about his novels, about Kurt Power and his dream of eventually getting a movie made. For the most part, she seemed interested – when she was bored, she’d shut him up with her mouth or her fingers and they’d tumble back onto the sheets. He was amazed by his own stamina.

  The only sour note was that she never let him touch her hair.

  He felt full of beans when he finally returned to the house that evening. Iyla remarked on the change in him, but he’d made sure he wasn’t smelling of Danica’s perfume or any of the other signifiers, and the motel receipt had been safely disposed of. Iyla really had no reason to suspect anything.

  Danica had enjoyed the afternoon enough to give him her number – “I don’t usually do this,” she’d said, “but what the hell” – and it wasn’t long before he called her and arranged to meet again. He felt like some shrunken, vestigial piece of him was coming to life again. The old adrenaline buzz was there, the thrill of hiding a secret, but where Bobbi had felt immature to him, and Justine had been clingy and abrasive, Danica was witty, effervescent, intellectual – she seemed like the perfect match for him, in bed and increasingly out of it. More than once, he found himself wondering what it would be like to spend the evening with her instead of Iyla, to have her head rest on his shoulder while they watched TV. What it would be like to wake up in the morning to her knowing eyes, her amused smile.

  He could tell she felt the same way – she insisted that their regular get-togethers were ‘fun,’ that she ‘had a good time with him.’ He’d drive home in a pink fog, bringing his good mood home to Iyla – increasingly he noticed that she was getting short with him, irritable, snapping when he asked her simple questions. As far as he knew, he was still being discreet – destroying the receipts, showering after every time.

  He began to think about leaving her.

  It was a couple of days before Valentine’s Day when he casually suggested that February 14th wasn’t so important, that it was just a greeting-card holiday, that maybe he’d take a drive to Burbank, see how it would work as a setting for the new Kurt Power – Danica had already agreed to an afternoon on the most romantic day of the year, which was confirmation that she was falling in love with him, too. Iyla had blown up at him. She’d suspected the affair for weeks, known conclusively for days – one of the motel visits had gone onto his credit card, and she’d opened the bill. This time, he didn’t feel like protesting. He told her bluntly that he’d met someone else, someone better, that it was over. Saying it felt like hearing a parole board say he was free to go.

  He went out and bought a ring.

  On Valentine’s Day, they had their usual meeting – he brought chocolates and champagne, she thanked him with fellatio, which felt strangely depressing to him – and he tried to broach the subject of him leaving his wife, of them turning what they had into something concrete, legitimate. But she didn’t seem to hear him – every time he got close to talking about real feelings she smiled tightly and changed the subject to anal or scarf bondage or the cubes in the ice machine. “Come on, this is fun,” she said at one point, laughing. “God, you’re so tense today!”

  Eventually, she said she had to be getting home – tomorrow was a big day at work – and he’d glanced at the ring in the box in the jacket on the chair, unopened, unmentioned. He opened his mouth, trying to find a way into the speech he’d prepared, but the timing was all wrong. As she dressed, she idly tossed off a line about taking a break for a while – “we can pick it up again when it’s fresh,” she said, and grinned as if that was no major issue. “You’ve got my number. Call me in a month or two.” And then she was out the door, leaving him sitting on the bed, unable to speak. He felt like she’d taken an ice-cream scoop out of her handbag and hollowed out everything he was in one quick motion.

  Suddenly, a mad idea came to him. He’d prove to her how he felt.

  He reached the lobby in time to see her walking out to her car, calling someone on the phone – her work, he thought – and quietly tailed her in his own car, making sure he wasn’t spotted. He was surprised at how easy it was to follow someone in a car – the research he’d done had made it seem more of a difficult operation – and fairly soon he’d followed her onto the San Bernardino freeway, driving far away from Santa Monica, towards San Dimas. By the time he reached her place – a modest suburban house with a large front window and a couple of sturdy plastic toys strewn about the yard – the sun had gone down. It made it easier for him to park across the street without being noticed after she’d gone in.

  His plan had been to knock on her door, and then – when she opened it – to be kneeling down with the ring, using the shock to launch into his speech, which would have obviously won her over. He couldn’t see how a gesture like that couldn’t be construed as romantic. But he found himself waiting in the car, staring into that front window at the empty living room. The lights were on, and the curtains were open – it felt like watching a television set.

  A blond, well-built man of about forty-five walked into the room, taking a seat on a leather sofa, and Danica followed him in. She was spraying her hairline with something from a can – some sort of solvent, he figured out later – and talking energetically about something. The man listened, leaning forward, one hand straying over an obvious erection as Danica continued describing how she’d spent her afternoon. Occasionally, she looked rueful, and the man would nod sympathetically, but then he’d ask something else and her expression would shift back to the flushed, aroused grin he’d seen up close so many times.

  After a couple of minutes, she began to peel the lace wig off her head. Underneath, her hair was short and dark. As the man began unzipping his fly, she moved briskly to the curtains and hurriedly closed them.

  He waited a moment, and then – very quietly – he walked towards their front door, summoning the courage to knock. Before he got there, he noticed what was written on their mailbox: DAN & MONICA BEAUFORT.

  He threw the ring away on the drive home.

  “SO THERE NEVER was a Danica Moss.”

  “No.” Niles’ fingers were clenched, and he was hunched over in the chair. The time limit for the session had passed by halfway through the story, but neither man had mentioned it. Instead Ralph had simply listened, cocking his head,
taking the occasional note.

  “Did you meet her when she was Monica Beaufort?” Ralph sounded genuinely curious. “I’m wondering if she had a different personality when she was, uh, at home. The way you describe her...” He looked apologetic. “It’s a little... too good to be true, if you see what I mean.”

  Niles nodded. “I never saw her again, no.” He didn’t respond to Ralph’s other point, but he’d thought the same thing in his darker moments – that he’d been the victim of a terrible, sick joke, a sexual prank played by two horrible perverts. How many others had they played that game with? Who else had they used as fuel?

  “So she was imaginary. Fictional.”

  “No. I mean, in the most technical sense...”

  “She was a made-up character,” Ralph shrugged, “playing a show for an audience of three – you, Monica Beaufort, and her husband Dan. Audience response was very positive. All three of you got off on it.”

  “She didn’t come out of a tube –”Niles snarled, then tailed off, seeing Ralph’s expression. “Sorry.”

  “Oh no, don’t worry about it,” Ralph said, curling his lip. “I’m really enjoying draining all the pus out of this mental cyst of yours. No, she didn’t come out of a tube, but that’s just a matter of technology. The fact is that you slept with a fictional character and it destroyed your life and put you off any kind of intimacy for years. Apart from Iyla and Maurice – who you have to talk to – do you ever actually see any human beings? Socially? At all, if you can help it?”

  “Well...” Niles looked at the floor. “Everyone sort of drifted away...”

  “Drifted, my ass. You drove them away, because you couldn’t trust them anymore. The only person you could trust was someone you knew was fake, except now he’s turned around and broken your heart by being a real guy after all. How are you not seeing this?”