by Scott Carter
Richard plows forward with his eyes locked downhill on the path until he stumbles on what feels like a mattress. He shuffles to the side as if he just stepped on hot coals and looks down to see he stepped on a homeless man. With wild eyes and a dirty beard creeping far too high on his face, the man makes Richard think of a caveman. A guttural yell spills out of the man’s mouth, quickly followed by flailing arms that fill Richard with fear.
He wants to scream, but he knows it will draw attention, so he regains his balance and runs forward to keep pace. When he gets parallel with his father again, the man stops walking. Richard watches his father remove a cell phone from his jacket, thumb a number, and bring it to an ear. The lull is an opportunity to get closer, so he creeps down the hill to a large maple tree twice his width. A cigarette now dangles from his father’s mouth as he talks on the phone, and the smell of smoke in the air makes Richard stare in disbelief. This is the smell of home, what home smelled like when they were still a family. He looks around at the trees surrounding him and the dirt at his feet and admits it is weird to realize that the odour of smoke makes outside feel more like home than his apartment has felt since his father left.
His father paces while he talks on the cell, so Richard shifts his weight to get a better look. A branch snaps beneath his feet, sending a small log rolling down the hill. The noise draws his father’s attention, so Richard tries to dart behind the maple tree, but it is too late. Their eyes lock, and for a moment, while they explore each other, Richard feels a connection again, but then he blinks and before he has a second to enjoy the moment, his father turns and heads down the path.
A type of anger Richard has never felt before shoots through him, and he decides watching isn’t enough. He needs to confront his father, and if the man is going to turn his back on him again, then he is going to chase.
By the time Richard reaches the path his father has twenty yards on him. The man never looks back, but Richard knows from the brisk pace that his father knows he is being followed. Richard’s thoughts race to keep up with the chase. Should he beg his father to come back home? Get a phone number to call him? An address to visit?
As he closes the gap, what really drives him begins to crystallize. If he never sees his father again, he wants the chance to ask one question: How could you leave us without ever talking to us again? And it is that simple. All his research into gays and lesbians, every time he looks at his mother’s sad eyes, and every step he takes now in chase, leads him to the need for that answer.
“Dad?” he yells as loud as possible. But the man doesn’t turn around. His father exits the park and Richard bursts into a full sprint to close the gap. Running isn’t fluent for Richard and he fights his stride, but there is no way he’ll stop moving. He surfaces onto the street in time to see his father heading down the subway steps. A cab honks at Richard as he jogs across the street, but he doesn’t care. The idea of going down into the subway station makes his stomach turn.
From his perspective, there appears to be hundreds of steps, and each one looks steeper than the one before the last. Instinct tells him to turn around and go home, to head for comfort, but the need to see his father burns stronger. Dozens of people move up and down the staircase, and he knows the chances of catching up with his father are fading with every passing second, so with a hand on the railing, he hustles down the steps as quickly as possible.
The ticket line is backed up ten deep at both booths. Richard looks at the westbound line up and sees his father walking through the turnstile. With no money in his pockets and two huge lineups, his options are clear. Two deep breaths fill his lungs before he charges the middle turnstile, uses his wrists for purchase and hops over the pay booth. He takes a few strides towards his father on the westbound platform, but two large hands grab him by the shoulders.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Richard turns to see the face of a security guard. The man’s eyes are angry. He smells of cough drops and a thick layer of fat under his chin shakes with every move he makes.
“You’re too young to be doing this nonsense.”
Richard strains his neck to look for his father but the platform is lined with people. “You don’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand.”
“No sir, you don’t. My mother’s in the hospital. They just called my school; she got hit by a car.”
“Why isn’t your father taking you?”
“I’ve never met my father.”
The security guard examines Richard’s eyes for a beat then releases his grip on the boy’s shoulders.
“Go on.”
Richard nods thank you and beelines for the westbound platform. The rumble of a train draws people closer to the edge of the platform, but he still can’t spot his father. He can hear the train approaching, so he moves faster down the platform, but there are so many people that it is difficult to focus.
He arches on his toes to get a better look but everyone blurs into indistinct masses, each jockeying for positions closest to where they anticipate the doors will stop. Richard moves toward a bench to climb and get a better look when his father steps out from behind a pillar and hugs him tight.
The lights flicker as the subway roars into the station, but Richard’s face is pressed too close to his father’s chest to notice. The hug feels good, so good that he doesn’t want to let go, but his father’s hands guide him in front so that they stand face to face. There is so much Richard wants to say, but the warmth in his father’s eyes compels him to stare until the man releases him and steps onto the train. Richard wants to get on with him, but his legs won’t move, and within seconds the doors close and the subway accelerates out of the station, leaving him standing alone on the platform. He wants to believe his father’s stare was a look of regret, but the only thing he believes with any certainty is that he will never see the man again.
Nine
When thinking of the Russell Niles fan club, don’t think comic book cult following or boy bands. Think Beatlemania or the Mouseketeers. The operation runs out of the ground floor of an old downtown house, but this is every bit a large-scale venture. To put this in perspective, the New York Times website receives over nineteen million hits every month. For the past two years, the Russell Niles fan club site has averaged over twenty million hits a month. That’s forty grand a year in bandwidth costs alone.
In the last three years the fan club has sold over nine million books, eight hundred thousand T-shirts, and half a million dolls. This isn’t just a fan club, it’s a marketing empire. Most of the hard labour is contracted out to a customer service company that handles all the online orders and the suburban warehouses that hold all the products. As far as the actual fan club, there are only three full-time employees: the receptionist, Margaret, a forty-year-old with a lisp; a graphic designer, Joel, who reeks of pot and works from home three days a week; and Rebecca, the office manager and liaison between the publisher and the fan club. The irony is, Barrett’s never seen any of these people.
“You’ve never been to the fan club, have you?” Sidney asks as he negotiates downtown traffic.
Barrett shakes his head. He wants Sidney to drive faster and continuously shifts his weight in his seat.
Sidney lights a cigarette without lowering a window. “You know, thirty-two percent of your fans are adults.”
“That’s sad.”
“No, that’s power. Kids aren’t the ones paying for your books.”
This is a fact that makes Barrett want to scream. What he hopes is that adults will one day read his writing because they want to, not because they have to. All stories are about being alive in his mind, and kid’s stories are no more just for kids than Bugs Bunny or The Simpsons are for kids because they are cartoons. And while he knows there are millions of people who respect great children’s writers like Roald Dahl, he also knows there are millions of people who think that true genius lies only in the adult-oriented works of Shakespeare and the rest of
the award-winning literary canon that is glazed with drool from the masses. These people consider him the boy band of the literary world. The necessary introduction to reading and something that will be fondly remembered as adults, but not the same as real writers.
Barrett follows Sidney into fan club headquarters. Immediately, the Russell Niles paraphernalia overwhelms him. Blown-up book covers decorate the walls, signed copies are propped up on shelves to show off the signatures, and six-foot cardboard representations of characters fill each corner. It always surprises Barrett to see his characters in any form. Trading cards, action figures, stickers, and cartoons all freak him out. Every time he sees one of his characters it blows his mind that it’s based on something he imagined. People spend their lives dreaming of making millions, and here he is a millionaire many times over and counting for imagining the right thing. People have thought of more complex things a billion times over, but few of those thoughts have the emotional purity and universal appeal of a lonely, impish child with shaggy hair.
Despite the millions, the artist in Barrett resents all of these items. They have nothing to do with writing in his mind, and it’s certainly not how he wants to be remembered. He’s uncomfortable, and his eyes burn with a look like he might break everything he sees.
An attractive woman in her early thirties hovers over a middle-aged woman typing at a computer until she notices Sidney.
“Hi, Molly said you were coming over.”
She walks around the desk, and Sidney greets her with a handshake. “Rebecca, this is uh, Mr. Fuller. He’s new in marketing.”
“Welcome.”
The first thing Barrett notices is how soft her hand is. The skin is dry and smooth, the type of soft that feels like it’s never been touched. The second thing he notices is that she’s abnormally beautiful. Not Barbie-assembled but pure. Every feature on her face works together to create a beauty that makes Barrett feel ugly. Specifically, he can’t stop looking at her eyes. They are so green, with so much going on that he can care less if she thinks he’s staring.
“You run the fan club?” he says.
She nods.
“I pictured someone in a muumuu with a double chin.”
“Come back in twenty years.”
“I’d bet my house your mother’s still beautiful.”
“Do you want her number?”
“Tempting, but I’d prefer yours.” He turns to Sidney. “The marketing department is looking to work closer with the fan club, isn’t it?”
“They are, but that’s not why we came, is it?”
Rebecca picks up a stack of folders. “Why don’t we talk in my office?”
Sidney nods, and they follow her down a corridor to a room without windows. This is not the type of office befitting the manager of a fan club responsible for millions in sales. It’s large, but it looks more like a storage room than a working space. Rows of cardboard boxes piled four high fill the far corner of the room, books and bubble wrap take up all the seating on a black leather couch, and four old computers sit at the base of a metal file cabinet.
Rebecca sits behind a desk and Barrett and Sidney sit in front of her. Barrett immediately notices that his framed book covers fill the wall behind her, and he wonders what Rebecca would say if she knew he was the reason for this fan club.
“So how can I help you?” Rebecca asks, looking more at Sidney than Barrett would prefer.
“We’ve been getting some disturbing letters at the office regarding the Russell Niles books.”
“How disturbing?”
“Not violent, but annoying and persistent. Have you been getting anything from particularly eager fanatics lately?”
“Every day.”
And just like that she has Barrett’s full attention.
“We get book ideas, people claiming the series was their idea, marriage proposals, death threats.”
“Death threats?” Barrett was still processing fanatics.
His reaction makes Rebecca smile. “That’s not something the marketing department wants to hear, is it?”
Barrett is thinking of being shot on the street after leaving his favourite pub when Sidney’s voice snaps him into the moment.
“Do any of these letters come with return addresses?”
“Almost all of them.”
“Good, I need copies of any letter that’s bitter in tone, makes a threat, or is resentful.”
“Of course.”
Barrett leans forward. “So how many of these death threats do you get?”
“Hundreds.”
“Hundreds?”
“At least two a week.”
“Who wants to kill a children’s author?”
“The same type of people that threaten schools, churches, hospitals. Anger’s nothing without a target.”
“I just never thought about death threats.”
“Well, luckily you don’t need to. All you to worry about is selling the books.”
Sidney looks at Barrett to see how he’ll respond to the irony, but Barrett is staring at the wall. Death threats? The fact that strangers want him dead leaves him puzzled. Puzzled and unnerved. Death threats are for politicians and social activists, not children’s authors. For the first time, he wonders if the extortionist wants to kill him. Humiliate him, shame him, and then end his life.
Barrett doesn’t say anything while Sidney drives him home, until the car stops in front of his mansion. Sidney takes a deep drag and points at Barrett with his cigarette.
“You know how you win in this situation?”
Barrett looks at him like winning is impossible.
“You keep writing.”
“Spoken like a true agent.”
“You stop writing, you get distracted, and this asshole wins.”
This is where years of friendship have sway. If any of the country’s other agents used this tone they’d risk getting fired, but two decades of friendship supersedes tone.
Sidney taps the steering wheel with an index finger. “When are you taking care of this first demand?”
“First thing tomorrow.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Talking about it won’t stop it from happening.”
Ten
Richard doesn’t talk much with his mother. She spends most of her time on the phone in her bedroom and chooses to acknowledge him more with hugs than words. Their time together consists mostly of occupying the same room while watching television. Game shows, reality shows, murder mysteries, old black and white movies, anything that makes noise, anything that makes it seem like there is something else to do other than think about being abandoned. Their place is small, but it’s on the ground floor of a three-storey building, so they have a patio large enough for a table and chairs and a few potted flowers in the spring and summer. When his father was around, there was talk of moving to a house, but now that they are living only on his mother’s pay as a graphic designer running a small business, that talk disappeared. A reality show about people losing weight is playing when Richard decides to add a live voice.
“Did Dad ever talk about when he was a kid?”
“Why?”
“I’d like to know some stories.”
“I don’t think we should talk about that now.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t have anything nice to say about your father.”
“I don’t have to hear nice things.”
She gets up from the couch and heads for the kitchen. This isn’t what Richard wants. The idea is to talk about his father, to get a better understanding of the man that co-created him and to bond with his mother, not to upset her or push away the only blood family he has left.
Richard walks to the hall closet and grabs a white moving box from the second shelf. This is the box he wasn’t allowed to touch for years; these are his father’s possessions, but the man did leave without them, so Richard figures they are fair game.
He takes the box into his room so his mo
ther won’t react and removes the first item, a bone pipe the length of his forearm. A scoop of the pipe’s dish reveals it was used often, and as he rubs the residue between his index finger and thumb, he imagines the pipe in his father’s mouth.
The next thing he removes is a silver watch with a brown leather band. He straps the worn leather to his wrist and winds the second hand a few times, but it still doesn’t move. He wonders how long his father wore the watch. A dark blue silk scarf at the side of the box draws his eyes. The fabric still smells of cologne, and as he holds it to his nose, he thinks of his father in the black suit he wore for special occasions, like the time they went to the circus for his mother’s birthday.
A wooden bowl catches his attention next. The hand-made grain looks new and without shellac it still smells of pine. Three rubber bands sit in the bowl’s centre. He hooks one with a finger and slips it over his wrist. After pushing aside a hammer and a wrench, he exposes a pair of silver cuff links that look so old, he wonders if they belonged to his grandfather; wonders if they are something meant to be passed on from one generation to another.
A business card is stuck to the bowl’s bottom. Parts of it stick to the bowl as Richard pulls it off so he can inspect the maroon card with gold trim. MIDNIGHT LOUNGE. The card smells of his dad’s cologne, and a phone number written in black pen is beveled.
