Real

by Merrell Michael

  But Lena did recover. It seemed slow, though the doctor termed it as "remarkably fast". There were tests and there was physical therapy, probably not enough of it, because money was starting to become a problem. Sam was exhausting his savings paying for Lena's care. Bills piled up and he paid what he could, what was threatened, and ignored the rest. Every day he went to the hospital. When Lena was moved out of the ICU he spent some nights there as well, sleeping in the sofa next to her bed. One day he brought the laptop with home, to try and get a little work done, but stopped once he noticed that Lena was glaring at him in unconcealed fury. He didn’t bring the computer any more after that, but still, she was just on this side of passive aggressive with him. Lena rarely spoke, directly to him, if she could help it, and she ignored Sam most of the time when he said anything. At the time Sam thought it was a side effect of the brain injury, and when he asked the doctor about it, his suspicion was confirmed. "These kinds of things can change a personality." The doctor said. "Irritability is normal. Sudden bouts of anger can be expected. She should see a specialist for some time after being released. I would actually recommend two specialists, a neurologist and a psychiatrist, for long term."

  Sam thanked the doctor for that advice, although inwardly he dismissed it. There was nothing wrong with Lena that he couldn’t fix. He had proved that already, by writing that she would wake up and heal. All the physical damage, short of death, could be repaired. As for the emotional damage, or any kind of head shrink stuff, all he would have to do was write

  Lena felt happy

  And she would feel happy. He would write that she wasn’t depressed, and she wouldn’t be. But he would give it time. Sam wanted the entire process to be as natural as possible, and welcome her to their life together. There was no going back now. It was all Sam and Lena, from here on out, until the end. Or so he thought. When they finally discharged her from the hospital, letting Lena stagger into the backseat from the wheelchair, she stared out the window and spoke not once.

  Lena was sitting at the kitchen table. The bandage was off her head, and despite her hair growing back unevenly, Sam could still see the scar where she had been operated on.

  "We need to talk." She said. For some reason Sam felt a cold chill running down his spine.

  "Okay."

  "I'm leaving you."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'm leaving you." Lena repeated.

  "What do you mean?" Sam asked.

  "I said it twice." She said. "Do you need me to say it again?"

  "Okay." Sam said. "I mean, I heard what you said. But I guess what I mean is, why?"

  "You know why."

  "No." Sam said. "I really don’t."

  Lena stared at him with obvious, wide-eyed hatred, and then burst into a little artificial laugh. "No." She said. "I guess you don’t. You haven’t had to. Everything's been just fine, for you."

  "So what's wrong on your end?"

  The hate returned to Lena's eyes. "I know everything." She snarled. "I remember."

  Sam's gut started to somersault. "I'm still confused." He said.

  "I remember what you made me forget." Lena said. "About Jesse. I remember that you....you tried me out. You made me do one thing, and then another. You made me like one thing, and then another. I remember....and that's not even the right word is it? Because some of this I never knew in the first place. Like how I came to be, everything you wrote, and why you did it."

  "How long have you been like this?" Sam asked.

  "Since the hospital." Lena said.

  "When you woke up?"

  "It was before that." Lena said. "Or maybe it was right when I woke up. When I first saw the bed, and the hospital room, I knew. I remembered everything."

  The laptop was sitting next to Lena at the kitchen table, propped up to the side. Sam slid into the chair next to her. "Let me think." He said.

  "You mean use the computer." Lena retorted.

  "I need to collect my thoughts."

  "Your written down thoughts?' Lena mocked. "You can’t tell me the truth about anything. When I know the truth, and I'm telling you, I know what's going on, you can’t tell the truth to me. Your pathetic."

  Sam opened the Lena document and scrolled through it to the end. He stopped cold. There was a large message, all in caps and bold print.

  LENA KNEW THE TRUTH ABOUT EVERYTHING SAM HAD EVER WRITTEN ABOUT HER

  He highlighted the message, and pressed the delete button. But it stayed. He tried using the blinking cursor and backspace. Still, it stayed. He highlighted it about and clicked on the cut command. Again, it stayed. Underneath he wrote.

  Lena did not know

  And as he was writing, the computer stopped obeying his commands, and started deleting his words, until the entire new message was gone. His heart was beating fast in his chest. The message was a permanent fixture of the document. Who had done this? The cops maybe? Or did Jesse put this in the laptop somehow, before going on his killing spree?

  "I thought about smashing it." Lena said.

  "Smashing." Sam repeated, as if from a long distance away.

  "That fucking computer." Lena said. "I wanted to. A part of me wanted to throw it out the window, or break it with a hammer. And I tried to. I got the hammer out from underneath the sink. But when I held it up to the screen, I couldn’t go through with it. Like I was watching what was happening outside my body, but I was only a passenger for the ride." Tears were streaming down her face. "And I remembered that I had felt like that before." She said. "And you made me. You made me feel like that, when you wanted to know about me and Jesse."

  "I'm sorry." Sam said, helplessly.

  "I couldn’t..." And then Lena let out a squealing bleat, a cry of pain and rage that would have been pathetic under any other circumstances.

  "I fixed you." Sam said.

  "I didn’t want to be fixed." Lena blubbered.

  "No I mean..." Sam stammered. "I mean that, I fixed you, when you were in the hospital. I healed you. I got you to wake up." Lena was looking down at the table, not meeting his gaze. "Doesn’t that count for anything?" He said.

  "I'm leaving." Lena said. "Nothing is going to change that."

  "Let’s be logical here for a second." Sam said. "Where are you going to go?"

  "Away from you."

  "You don’t have a driver's license. You don’t have a birth certificate. Your practically an illegal immigrant, or something."

  "Write that I have a driver's license." Lena said. "Write that I have a birth certificate, and see what happens."

  "It doesn’t work that way."

  "Oh, really?" Lena barked. "And you know that because, why, you've tried it before?"

  "No."

  "Exactly. You haven't. You know why you haven’t? Because for you, it's all about control. You want to control me. You get a kick out of it. It’s your thing."

  "God." Sam said. "I wish that you would shut up, for just one second."

  "Exactly." Lena said. "It's all about control."

  In a blind rage, Sam typed

  Lena shut up

  And when he looked at her, her lips were trembling, and her eyes were filled with rage, but she wasn’t saying anything. "There." He said. "I did it, and you made me do it. Because I want you to listen to me, for just one second, without spitting out this...all this rage. I love you. Anything I did, I did because I love you."

  Lena walked across the room and came back with a pen and a sheet of scrap paper. On it she wrote

  You’re a fucking liar

  Sam grabbed the paper and balled it up with his fist, and Lena smirked at him. "What?" he snapped. "Do you want me to put down that you can’t write, either? Is that what you want me to do?" he typed into the computer

  Lena sat at the table and didn’t move

  For a moment they glared at each other. Then Sam typed.

  Lena got up and stood against the wall

  And he followed it with

  She stripped off all h
er clothing and stood naked

  She was still glaring at him, but now she was naked, and Sam was getting aroused. "You see this?" He said. "This is using you. I can do whatever the fuck I want, really. But I'm not doing it-"

  Lena spit in his face.

  His hand was moving before he knew what he was doing. It was not an open hand slap, but a closed fist punch. Sam hit her directly in the face, and for a minute Lena staggered back, as if she were struggling to stand. When she stood again her eyes were blurry with tears, and her lips were quivering, as if she were holding back her words, because Sam had not permitted her to speak. Sam screamed, then, loud and primal, and let out an outburst of profanity. He turned and barged out the glass patio door to the beach.

  He was walking halfway down the sand breathing heavily and trying to collect his thoughts. Things would be okay. He could write in the computer that Lena would not spit at him, and she wouldn’t spit at him. Better yet, he could write down that Lena would not harm him in any way, and she wouldn’t. This entire thing could be undone.

  He could make her have sex with him. What's more, he could make her enjoy it, too. She could know everything, and she wouldn’t really have a choice...her body would betray her. He could write that she was terrified of leaving him, or him leaving her. There was a lot of wiggling room in that one block of bold text.

  But why did he have to go along with it, in the first place? Sam could just get his computer checked out. He could have an expert look at it, and figure out a way to delete that one line, if it was some kind of virus, or he could have his word program re-installed. He could probably do that himself. It wasn't an unsolvable problem. He was calming down a little. Rain hit his nose and bare feet, one of those brief Southern California drizzles that comes down warm and wet and doesn’t bother anyone too much at all. Sam turned around in the sand, resolved to solve his problems the best way he knew how, by writing his way out of them.

  His resolve melted away completely when he came back in the condo.

  Lena was still standing where he had left her. Still unclothed, and trembling against the wall. The floor was wet under her feet, and from the smell Sam could tell that she had pissed herself. Fear broke out of its box and down into his stomach. What if someone were to see her? The blinds hadn’t been drawn. What would they think, walking in, to this sight? Sam already knew the answer, they would think he was abusive, and probably criminal. They would also notice the fresh swelling on her cheek, from where he had hit here. At the worst he would go to jail. His head was swimming. Jesus, God, how could he even think this way? Here Lena was, in this condition, after all she had already been through, and all he could think about was what would the neighbors think? To hell with the neighbors. What could Sam think about himself? He was all those things, and worse. He marched right over to the laptop, and highlight the last few things he had written, deleting them. Just as quickly, he typed,

  Lena was free to do whatever she wished

  Just like that, Lena took a gasp of air, going, huu-guuuh! and falling on the floor. Sam got up to help her, then stopped. There was nothing he could do. The patio door was open, and he went back to the beach. This time instead of turning left toward the pier, or right to walk the beach as he had done earlier, he headed straight out to the ocean. It was warmer than he expected but still cold enough to shrivel him up inside his shorts. He wandered out to chest level and let himself drift out there, just beyond the breaker point, feeling the sun overhead and trying not to think about whatever awaited him if he turned around and walked back. When he finally did turn around he had managed to lose both his cell phone and his flip flops in the water, and at the apartment Lena was gone.

  When the Black Terror: a Hero for Ages was released in theaters nationwide there was a minor kerfuffle from activist groups who took offense to the title. Specifically, a spokesperson for the NAACP called the name of the main character "inappropriate" and the September Eleven survivors association made a statement saying the studio was "insensitive". The studio had been prepared for this amount of controversy, and pointed out rightly the African-American female love interest and sidekick of the main, Caucasian actor. When a few left-leaning news sources picked up the spin and made a bigger stink, the studio fell back on their backup plan and announced a "significant amount" of the proceeds from ticket sales would be donate to charities for both aggrieved parties. The end result was nothing less than badly needed free publicity, that did very little to effect the eventual outcome.

  The Black Terror opened second on Friday night, its first weekend of May Ninth, beaten by a romantic comedy involving Seth Rogen and cannabis abuse. It plummeted soon after. The rom-com that won the day had cost its studio fifteen million, the Black Terror had a budget of over one hundred and fifty.

  That was not its true cost, of course. The studio had paid at least forty or fifty million dollars to market its supposed tent pole production. Now it was deep in the red.

  There was no real secret to why the film failed, at least according to the critics. The film managed to earn a paltry sixteen percent score on rotten tomatoes, putting it in such rare company of universally despised movies like Heaven's Gate or Waterworld. As one writer for the Chicago Tribune put it:

  When it gets down to it, why was this film even made? Superhero popcorn flicks are often terrible, sure, but at least they have brightly colored, spandex clad characters in them that most kids (or adults) recognize from their past. I've been assured that the Black Terror made an appearance in print, but it was over and done with twenty years before I was born...and I'm not a young man, too young, anyway. For the life of me, I can’t figure out who the intended audience of this travesty is supposed to be.

  Tent pole movies are so named because they are made to prop up the rest of a studio's other, less successful films. They need to succeed, and succeed big. When one fails for whatever reason, the effect is immediate and responsive, like an asteroid crashing to earth and wiping out the dinosaurs. the Black Terror was pulled out of first run theaters after three weeks. One week after that, J.R. Leiksmith resigned from his position as head of the studio. Sam caught a picture of him online in a celebrity gossip blog wearing a suit instead of a dapper kimono, and looking much older than he had appeared that day in Los Angeles. Several months later the studio and all its assets were purchased by Sony pictures, which set about rapidly deconstructing their purchase any way they could, mostly by issuing layoffs en masse.

  There were other casualties, as well. The handsome young unknown actor chosen for the lead role never found work again. He quickly managed to abscomb back to his native Australia, and in all the years to come, declined any interviews about the now-infamous bust that made up his first, and only, starring role. Relatives would note in later years that he could be quite bitter about the subject. Perhaps what hurt most of all was the fact that the bust did not indicate a certain malaise in the superhero movie genre as a whole. Three weeks to the day after the Black Terror flopped, a rival studio issued a similar release starring a somewhat obscure Marvel Universe property that broke box office records for the month, and launched another obscure male lead into stardom and a very satisfying movie career. What seemed to matter most of all, was which phone call you took, and which you let ring unanswered.

  Sam managed to see the finished product in a mostly empty theater, just before it left town forever. He spent most the time trying to wonder which parts of the script were his, or even partly his. None of the dialogue, as far as he could tell, was from his efforts, and only part of the general plot was thanks to his doings. He stayed in the theater as the credits rolled over a bombastic orchestral composition. His name was there, sure enough, sandwiched between countless other peons of industry, just before the announcement that no animals were harmed in the making of this feature. He left afterwards and walked out into the Ohio cold.

  When Sam left California he had made a beeline for Ohio. It seemed the only sane thing to do. After the events he had been thro
ugh he felt that he needed an anchor to attach himself, in some ways, as if he could root himself into the grounds of the past and avoid blowing heedlessly into the wind. His parents were all too willing to welcome him back with open arms. At first, anyway. A month or two later and Sam felt the need to move along, or more specifically, move out, and he did so.

  There were two things that seemed to keep him grounded, that long Ohio winter. Writing, and thinking about writing. Sam had always done this, plotted out his works in advance in his mind. Not that far in advance, but every time he would write a scene or finish a chapter, he would sit back and think about what the next scene or chapter would entail. In the case of his current non (or at least not overtly) fictional work, this became a matter of stretching the events until they fit a given page count. It was early December when One Night At the Pier was finally complete, and he e-mailed the whole thing to his agent.

  Two weeks later the agent called back with the bad news. There had been two more so-called active shooters since the events Sam had written about, one of which occurred at Fenway Park during a Red Sox game. "And guess who was in attendance." The agent yapped. "Stevie King himself. Guy gets hit by a car and shot at in the same lifetime. What are the odds?"

  "I've heard he's a Sox fan." Sam said.

  "What the publisher is concerned about." the agent said, "Is that here's a major A-lister, and yeah, he's a little more prolific than you, Sam, I'm sorry its true. He loves to bang it all out on the keyboard. And of course he's going to do it in this case, guys got a built in audience."