Finally she blinked hard, like she was clearing the moment away, and knelt again by the alarm clock, turning it over to reveal a switch on its back.
“Wait,” Luke said. “Before we set the detonator, we need to know he can be trusted.”
“He gave us the plans,” Liam said.
“That’s not enough,” Luke said. They were all facing me now. “He could have been yelling for help. It could be a trap.”
“It’s not,” I said.
Luke stuck a finger into my chest. “You sounded like you were going to kill us just now,” he said. “How do we know that you’re not still one of them?”
Brittany stood and stepped toward me, unafraid, looking right up into my eyes. “Give us something else,” she said. “More classified information. Tell us something you shouldn’t tell anybody.”
They all stood, waiting. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to lie again, but I was afraid that if I told them the truth—the real truth—they’d hate me, they’d be afraid of me. But I didn’t want to hold it in anymore, either. I thought that maybe if I told them the truth, then somehow it wouldn’t just be mine anymore, I wouldn’t be alone with it.
“There’s a kid at my school,” I said, “named Curt Lin.”
I looked at each of them as I spoke.
“Almost every day I hurt him really bad.”
“Why?” Liam said.
I shook my head. For a long time no one said anything, but no one looked away, either.
Then Brittany said, “Are you going to keep doing it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”
We stood like that, watching each other. Finally, Luke cleared his throat and said, “All right. Set it.”
Brittany crouched back down next to the alarm clock and clicked the switch on the back. Then she took a deep breath and stood and said, “Go,” and Luke started to run and we all followed. I tried to keep them in sight, but all I could see were shadows in the fog, so I followed the shadows, the sounds of their breathing, until one of them dropped to the ground, and then the rest of us dropped, and we all lay in the dirt covering our heads with our arms. There was a hand on my back then, and I reached out a hand and put it on whoever’s back was closest, and then the hand on my back squeezed, so I squeezed, and Luke said, “Boom.”
* * *
Luke led us up the embankment and across the clearing to the line of scraggly trees. The fog was fading, revealing a gauzy sun that seemed to throb along with a headache I could feel starting. I hadn’t eaten since that morning, a bowl of cereal. The whole day had passed.
We crossed through the line of cypress and onto the path between the backyards. The kids in the sandbox were gone, so was the couple in their garden. We walked in silence. The boys carried their guns loosely, as if the weapons had lost their weight somewhere back in the arroyo.
On the sidewalk in front of their house we stopped, and Luke stepped up to me. “You’ve got to go back,” he said. “So the guards will still think you’re one of them.”
I didn’t want to play the game anymore. I wanted them just to be the kids on this street who I could visit again the next time I was here. I wanted to tell them more truths, that my dad wasn’t an actor, that he’d probably stolen the helmet. That my mom had spent the whole day at a farm stand watching cars come down off the freeway ramp, wondering if they were going to stop.
I didn’t say anything, though. Instead, I handed Luke my helmet. He asked how the other guards would know me when I went back, and I said that they’d know me with or without it. He nodded, and held his hand up to his forehead. Liam did the same, then Brittany. I held up my hand and we saluted, and then I turned back down the hill toward the men on the porch.
* * *
It was getting dark; a few lights blinked on in the neighboring houses. When I reached the red pickup, Denny and Rey went back inside their house, leaving a string of empty cans across the front yard. My dad and I walked to the bus stop at the corner. He was quiet, and seemed tired. He didn’t mention the missing helmet, but waiting at the stop, he asked who I had been playing with, who I knew in this neighborhood. The bus pulled to the curb, its engine thundering. I didn’t know how to answer him, if I could say friends, if that would be true. So instead I said rebels, I said soldiers, but the bus’s engine was so loud that he didn’t hear me. He tilted his head like a dog that didn’t quite understand, but before I could repeat myself his hand was on my back, pushing me up onto the bus.
The Plagiarist
Sunrise over the mountains, a thin margin of early light growing slowly above the topmost ridge. Richard stood in the hotel suite’s living room, naked under his robe, the air-conditioning raising a pleasurable chill on his skin. A view of the red desert stretched from one set of windows; the high, close wall of mountain filled another. Down below, Palm Springs’s flat, orderly arrangement of Spanish tiled rooftops and golf greens spread out in between. He sipped his coffee, coming awake, feeling the rooms below his feet stirring, imagining the movement, all the other suites of actors, producers, the director and screenwriter, the men and women who had retold Richard’s story, reshaping it from words on a page to pure action and dialogue, motion and sound. The space buzzed now, he could feel it, the hotel full of his creation, one giant organism with his brain at the top.
He had been to many press junkets, shilling for movie versions of his stories that ranged from direct-to-video cheapies to big budget summer blockbusters. But this one felt different. It had the same electrical charge of his first junket thirty years before, for the original version of this new film. That day had been all pomp and promise, and this felt like a bookend to that experience, the finishing of a shape that had been left incomplete.
Through the open door he could see the uproar of the bedroom, books and papers scattered across the floor, the bed, the dressers. The edges of a hangover threatened. Richard knew that he should have gone to sleep earlier, but he was working again, finally, and refused to cut off his newfound momentum. He hadn’t been able to put together a successful story in years, but the imminent release of this film had sparked something within him. He had spent too long in that black void, unable to create. He wasn’t going back again.
A sheet of paper slid beneath the door of his suite: the day’s itinerary. He recognized many of the reporters’ names from magazines and TV. Heavyweights, most of them. After so much time away, he was finally back in that league.
At the windows he stood for another moment, while the glass and view brightened, his body warming from coffee and sun, the promise of the day.
* * *
He wrote his first story when he was five, a two-page tale of an alien invasion of his elementary school. It was praised by his teacher, held up as a model of imagination, vivid detail, memorable characters. He continued writing, and the celebration of his work continued as well. Hailed as a prodigy, he was called onstage at school assemblies, at Santa Clarita civic meetings to read his work. Ideas came easily, as did the words that brought them to life. When he was seven, Richard read a story on a local radio program. At ten, he was invited down to Los Angeles to read on a TV telethon raising money for muscular dystrophy. Two sounds from that evening remained with him: the ringing of phones from off to the side of the stage and the clacking of wooden numbers as the host increased the tote-board totals, unable to move fast enough to keep up with the incoming calls.
He told stories to his classmates; to his father in their pickup on the way to school, before the old man went off to his job handing out brochures and answering tourists’ questions at the Visitor’s Bureau. But it was Richard’s mother who encouraged him the most. Every evening, she came home from her shifts at the diner and sat on the sofa and submerged her feet in a large metal bowl of ice water and asked Richard to tell her a story. These were his favorite moments of the day, sitting beside his mother and creating a story from nothing, from adventures at school, from dreams, fears and worries, an
d watching her face as she listened, her head back, eyes closed, forehead slowly relaxing, her taut features smoothing out like pond ripples calming, the tension of the day released as he spoke.
Where do they come from? she would ask when he had finished a story. Her eyes still at rest, a soft, slight smile at her lips, and his only answer, the only honest answer, because the world was full of stories, and they came so readily, so easily, was to say, Everywhere.
* * *
“How many of your stories have been made into movies?”
“Four,” he said. “Well, five. This is a remake, though.”
“It still counts.” The studio’s PR girl sipped her juice, then pressed a napkin to her top lip to clear the thin orange line. They were at breakfast down in the bustling hotel restaurant. The interviews would begin soon.
“And a few for a TV anthology years ago,” Richard said.
“I think I remember those.”
“You would have been very young.”
“My boyfriend streams all those shows,” she said. “The Twilight Zone. Beyond the Limits.”
The PR girl was dark-haired, athletic, her arms tanned and tight with lean muscle. He stole another glance, dropping his eyes to the glass-topped table, the view below, the short skirt hugging her bare thighs. Only half-worried she would catch him, as he was the subject, she was here for him. Throughout breakfast she’d talked continuously about how much she loved his work, how she’d once performed in a college theater production based on one of his stories. The first time I was ever naked onstage, she’d said. He let his eyes linger.
Angie was her name. Or Annie. He was terrible with names.
“The Outer Limits,” Richard corrected, forking a jalapeño loose from his omelette and lifting it to his mouth.
“That one, too,” the PR girl said.
Richard caught his upside-down reflection in the concave face of a teaspoon. He adjusted his tie. The look he’d cultivated—the light linen suits; the close shave; hair stacked back in short, sculpted waves—he had found in a 1930s detective magazine, a photo of a writer whose name Richard had long since forgotten. But the image made an impression. The look was so striking, deliberate and polished, that he knew it was worthy of resurrection. The key was the slight rumple to every component—hair always a few days overdue for a trim, suit wrinkled—like he was stepping out of a party even as he was just arriving. The lines around his eyes now, the gray in his hair only amplified the effect. He came across as a man who lived, who engaged in adventures both on and off the page.
The PR girl glanced at her own itinerary, then showed Richard a new name penciled in at the end of the day. “Is that okay?” she asked, tapping a pink fingernail on the name. “Adding this woman in? She’s from your alma mater. It’s not publicity, exactly, but she said she’s been studying your work. I know it’s making a long day longer, but—”
“Not a problem,” Richard said, feeling the day stretching before him pleasantly, seductively, a woman in bed, limbs reaching.
Andrea. Audra.
“I talk to these academics,” he said, finding the PR girl’s eyes over the top of the itinerary, “and they know more about my work than I do.”
* * *
For months, his mother had ignored the stomachaches, the pain that shot up the sides of her body like streaks of lightning. By the time she finally saw a doctor, the cancer had already decimated her liver and was moving quickly, greedily, island-hopping from organ to organ. Most of Richard’s eighth grade year was spent in the hospital: sitting beside his mother’s bed; haunting the gift shop; drinking Cokes in the cafeteria while his father sat across the table, staring into a Styrofoam coffee cup. One Friday night, when his father had gone home to get some rest, and Richard had stayed to sleep over in the stiff pleather lounger beside his mother’s bed, she’d taken his hand and said, Tell me a story. Looking at her face, starved and dried nearly to bone, her eyes crusted in the corners, her lips cracking with thirst, he faltered for the first time. Nothing came. Richard was speechless, silent in that room full of ticking machines. Looking back to his mother, he hoped to see that familiar, encouraging smile, but instead he saw fear and desperation. Tell me one of your stories, she said again, as if grasping for some saving thread, something to keep her there, with him in that room. But Richard couldn’t think of where to start. His mind was an empty space. She squeezed his hand again, and he realized that she was squeezing with every new burst of pain, her face was stricken with it, and so he started telling her a story from a science fiction magazine he had bought down in the gift shop earlier that day. He recounted it slowly, as if he were spinning it from nothing, pure imagination, like he had done for her so many times before. She held his hand all through the story, her grip tightening from blasts of pain but also from the urgent desire to stay with him, and he was aware that the story was keeping her there, her belief that it was coming solely from him, a creation from her own creation. So Richard continued telling the story, and every day after, for all the days remaining, he told more stories from that magazine, from other books and magazines, because in the face of their shared fear he had nothing of his own to offer.
* * *
One after another the reporters came, ushered in by the PR girl to sit on the love seat opposite Richard. They shook his hand; they placed phones and recorders on the coffee table. They checked the time. They had fifteen minutes each. They asked what he thought of the movie. He loved the movie. He loved all the movies, even the direct-to-video cheapies. They were loud and garish and magnificent, like funhouse reflections of his work, like wayward children. For some, he had been asked to write the screenplay, or to stretch the story out to a novel-length tie-in. He had declined all the offers, no matter the money. The reporters asked the usual question: Why didn’t he write something longer? He gave his usual answer. I think in stories. I think in short, sharp shocks. Over the years it had become the title of more than a few magazine profiles: Richard Meller’s Short, Sharp Shocks. Richard loved that line. It described his work perfectly, almost as if it had been his own thought, rather than a phrase he had found in a crime story published eighty years before.
* * *
He began to disappear. That’s what it felt like, after his mother’s funeral, when she was gone but the void remained. Richard and his father moved through the house silently, carefully, as if they were avoiding something, some presence that stood between them.
He tried to write but nothing came. His mind remained a blank, the bleeding edge of that surrounding emptiness. He lost himself in pulp magazines, library books, drugstore paperbacks. Fantastic stuff, gaudy and overblown. He was looking to escape the terrible stillness of the house and his memories of the hospital room, his failure there. But every once in a while he came across a sentence, or even just a fragment, a small, tight chain of words that spoke to him, that described the fear and loneliness he had felt in that room, sitting beside his mother’s bed, unable to help, to do the one thing she had asked—to hold her there with something of his own.
He wrote those sentences down, and began looking for others that made him feel the same way. He began to realize that these phrases and paragraphs didn’t belong where he had found them, that they were in the wrong stories. They belonged together, in his notebook. He could see how one fit into the other, how they locked into place, creating a beautiful rhythm, a fierce fire that spread across the page. He developed a sense of where things were in an old story, where he would find what he needed: characters, scenarios, settings. Alone in his room, from book to magazine and around again he assembled these pieces, painstakingly constructing new stories, recapturing the feeling he’d had before his mother’s illness, the wonder and thrill of creation. The world was full of stories, he had told her countless times, and that was finally true again.
Time travel stories, alternate universes, settlers creating new colonies on distant planets. Fantastic scenarios that spoke to something deeper, something true: grief, fear
, loss of control, impossible hope. He assembled pieces for school assignments, Kiwanis talent shows, college applications. His stories—and they were his stories now—were read again, praised again. They opened doors, freeing him first from that confining memory of his mother’s hospital room, then from his father and the silent, suffocating house in Santa Clarita.
Richard stepped through those doors, out of that void, and finally reentered the world.
* * *
“Where do you get your ideas?”
Another question he had been asked a thousand times. A film critic with a skunk’s white stripe in his hair leaned in from the love seat, waiting for an answer. Richard paused for effect, feigned a searching, introspective look. Something of an actor himself.
“The stories are already inside me. They’ve always been there.”
The critic sat back, nodding, jotting in his notepad.
“My job,” Richard said, “is just to let them out.”
November, 1968
Dear Mr. Meller,
I read your story “Daylight” in the newest issue of Interstellar Tales, a magazine my husband buys at the newsstand. I had never read an issue before but had finished my own magazine with time still remaining on the morning’s chemotherapy treatment.
Richard received his first letter during his sophomore year at college, not long after his first story had been published. It was a generic greeting card, a Monet reproduction printed on the front, The Waterlily Pond with the Japanese Bridge. The interior was blank, but held a folded sheet of notepaper, as if the sender realized that her sentiment belonged on its own page, and the drugstore card was simply a wrapper, a vessel for its delivery.
I cannot express how I felt about the story, what happened to me while reading it in my chair in the clinic. Hooked up to those machines, pumped with drugs, I felt like the woman in your story, half human, half chemical. Reading her voice, her thoughts, I felt understood, maybe. Or heard. It’s hard to describe. I’m not a writer.
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