Unfiction

by Gene Doucette

There were perhaps a dozen people who had the number, and five of them were from the coffee shop. Three of those five were essentially the only ones who might call, and only to discuss important matters like shift coverage.

  His phone didn’t seem to think this was a number that had ever called him before, though. Perplexed, he answered.

  “Hello?”

  Only static. If there was anyone talking on the other end, he couldn’t hear them.

  He hung up, and returned to the outline. They’d call back if it was important.

  He was thinking maybe this would work better if he could start writing the characters out. In the past, plot came second, after the fleshing out of the main character. Plus, if Athena was the main character instead of Otis, he had some work to do.

  There was a loud BANG at the door. If he wasn’t sitting on his bed with his back against the wall this would have been when he fell out of his office chair.

  “Hang on,” he said.

  The response was multiple blows to his door. Someone was hitting it with a fist.

  “I said, hang on!”

  The bed was a futon mattress on the floor. Climbing out required a little bit of rolling around to get his knees underneath before he could stand. He reached for the knob, and took note that the hallway light appeared to be going wonky again: he could see it flickering underneath his door.

  He slid the chain on, and then opened the door two inches so he could look into the hallway. There was no peephole, so this was all he had.

  “Hello, what is it?”

  With that kind of insistent banging, at minimum there should have been an active fire in the hallway, but there wasn’t. There also wasn’t anyone there.

  He closed the door, disengaged the chain, and opened it all the way, so as to get a proper look.

  Nobody was there, in either direction, or at least not near the door. It was hard to tell for sure at the far end of the hall, because the overhead light had gone out again over there. It was intermittent in Ollie’s part of the hallway, but there was a window at the end of the corridor and streetlights shone through that window, so if someone had been standing there in the dark he would have seen some evidence, and he didn’t.

  This was despite the irrefutable fact that someone had been banging on his door a few seconds ago.

  Oliver thought about going to one of his neighbors and asking if they’d just been banging on his door, but that seemed like a waste of time. There were a few doors to choose from, and he really didn’t know anybody all that well, so at best it would be an awkward conversation.

  The phone began to ring again, which startled him a little more than it should have. The number on the phone was the same as before. He shut the door.

  “Hello?”

  More static.

  “If you can hear me, I can’t hear you. Call from a different phone, or from a different place.”

  There was someone there. The static wasn’t constant; it had gaps, and he got the sense that in those gaps, someone was speaking.

  “Look, I’m sorry, I can’t hear you.”

  “Wilson?”

  It was a woman’s voice, and it sounded familiar, but the interference was making it tough to pin down.

  “This isn’t Wilson. Who is this?”

  “You need to come back.”

  Come back?

  “This is Oliver.”

  “Come back, Oliver.”

  He looked at his watch. It was nine-thirty, and the Jittery Canary closed a half an hour earlier.

  “Into work?” he asked. “Who is this?”

  More static. Some kind of low bass line rumble, like there was a boat in the background, or a horn on a train, or someone with a tuba.

  “Hello?”

  “You have to…”

  “What? I have to go back, I heard you.”

  “You have to help us.”

  “What? What did you say? Who is this?”

  The line went dead. Oliver threw it across the room like it was burning his hand. The light as his feet continued to flicker, and now it felt like his heartbeat was matching the frenetic strobing in the hall.

  What the hell is going on?

  He opened the door again and looked up and down the hall, unconsciously associating the weird phone call with the banging on the door. Someone was pranking him, so it didn’t seem all that far-fetched. It was someone who thought it would be funny to quote his own writing back to him.

  It wasn’t funny, it was stupid and terrifying, and between this and the Cant double, Oliver was getting tired of it.

  He thought he saw someone at the end of the hall: a girl, standing in front of the window. It was just his mind playing games, though, because the only time it looked like she was there was when the light went out. Every time the overhead on that end of the hall kicked in, he could see the corridor was empty. People who only existed when they were in shadows ran contrary to any physics he was familiar with.

  That would make a heck of a ghost story, though. Even if he was currently busy scaring the hell out of himself, he made a note to use that detail someday.

  Provided I’m not about to be dragged into some spectral hell right now, Oliver thought.

  He considered asking the woman who wasn’t there if she was not in fact there, and decided he’d rather close the door, lock it as thoroughly as he could, maybe push something heavy against it, and curl up in a corner of his tiny apartment until morning. That was a much better plan.

  He bolted and chained the door and hoped nobody decided to bang on it again. It was solid wood and reinforced along the edges with metal, so nothing short of a battering ram could knock it down, so far as Oliver knew. It was probably okay, then, that he didn’t really have anything heavy to push in front of the door, and decided that positioning a bunch of lighter things there would only make it harder for him to get out in the morning, when all of this would seem silly and he was late for work.

  He got back on the bed. The romance story outline seemed like a distant thing now. He had been thinking about maybe starting to write some things around Athena, but that wasn’t going to happen. Maybe tomorrow.

  Oliver picked up the phone, which remained harmlessly not-ringing.

  “You have their number, stupid,” he said.

  It was right there in his call history: 2 calls, with the right timestamps and everything. These were real things that actually happened and didn’t occur only in his head, and this he found to be an immense relief.

  So if it was a prank, whoever was doing it probably owned this phone number.

  He took a deep breath, held it for a little while, and hit the callback button on the exhale.

  Six rings, and then a static-free pickup.

  “Hello?”

  It was Minerva.

  “Oh, hi,” he said, not knowing really how to proceed from here.

  “Hi, who’s this?”

  “Minnie, it’s… it’s Oliver.”

  “Ollie? Hey, what’s up?”

  “I, um, I have a funny question for you: did you just call me, like in the last five minutes?”

  “No…? I don’t even have your number, man. I mean, I guess I do now, right? Cool, now you can’t escape me.”

  In any other context this would be exciting. In this one it was a little scary.

  “Yeah, look, are you sure…”

  “I wasn’t even near my phone five minutes ago. It was on the charger. Hey, how’d you get this number? Did Wilson give it to you? I wish he’d tell me when he did stuff like that, he acts like I’m his secretary sometimes.”

  “I didn’t know it was your number until I called,” Ollie said, which sounded crazy, and he knew it did, but it was too late to back this up. “I was calling back whoever called me.”

  He explained the static on the line, but omitted the part where the caller was a woman who could easily have been Minerva, who quoted a story only a dozen people knew about, one of those people being Minerva. Because that sounded a good d
eal further along the path to crazy, in the rough direction of pathologically deranged.

  “That’s so weird. I wonder if the phone company crossed line somehow. Is that still a thing? I remember that being a thing on old TV shows, but not with cell phones. Or maybe someone was ghosting my number, and it’s just a coincidence we know each other.”

  “Yeah that must be it.”

  “Anyway, nice talking to you, but I gotta go. Pallas, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You’re still on? It’s next week, no backsies, and now I have your cell.”

  “Yes, still on.”

  “Excellent. Oh, how’s my romance?”

  “Don’t know yet. I’m still working on the outline.”

  “Hey, anything’s gonna be better than that thing Wilson made you write, right? Okay, really I gotta go. Talk soon!”

  She hung up before he could say anything else.

  Chapter Six

  Weapon

  Oliver tried to get back to the romance story, but there was just no way. He couldn’t get past the possibility that someone was playing tricks on him, and Minerva was going along with the gag.

  It would have been easier if was just about anybody else. He was sure he saw her talking to the man claiming to be Cant of the Warven tribe, and the ghost story-quoting phone call came from her phone. That was pretty good evidence. Never mind that the charge sounded ridiculous, and would sound no less so if the person he was accusing was someone other than Minerva.

  She remained consistently supportive, though, and that really seemed genuine. There were quite a lot of people he could accuse of dissembling, about which he’d be okay. Wilson, for instance. He certainly acted genuinely honest about a lot of things, but there was a “jerk” undercurrent there. If someone wanted to convince Oliver that Wilson was coordinating some kind of involved practical joke, he might believe it.

  By morning, Ollie was just about ready to dismiss it as paranoia. He went to work, thought about the story, got home again, sat at the laptop, and started writing that romance for Minerva.

  It was four in the morning and Athena was worried.

  “Where’s the rest of it?” Wilson asked.

  “That’s the whole thing.”

  “It was four in the morning and Athena was worried.”

  “Yes. I couldn’t get any further. I don’t think outlining is for me.”

  “I think you may be right.”

  They were in Wilson’s apartment. TAWU was starting in another half an hour. Oliver’s latest story was supposed to be workshopped, but he had a feeling Wilson wouldn’t bother to share his ten-word sentence, however epic that sentence might be.

  “Maybe I should have a look at your outline,” Wilson said.

  “No! No, that’s… I mean, I’m not used to writing stuff that isn’t meant to be read, but this isn’t meant to be read.”

  Wilson nodded. “That might be why the outline exercise didn’t work too well. Do you take notes? Ordinarily, when you write.”

  “No, I mostly just write.”

  “You don’t write throwaway scenes or character sketches?”

  “No. Am I supposed to be doing that? You never said.”

  Oliver got the sense that maybe he was supposed to be doing that.

  The more time he spent talking to Wilson the more Oliver got the idea that he had a problem and Wilson was trying to fix that problem, and the problem had to do with Ollie’s inability to finish things. He didn’t think he had any such problem; it was only that he never gave himself more than a week.

  Although, it was true that for the most part he stopped when he couldn’t think of anything else to write, and that was going to be a problem. Stories should be finished, and one day he would have to figure out what that was like. It just seemed premature to call it a problem.

  “Not necessarily,” Wilson said. “Some people do that: full character sketches, backstory scenes that won’t be going in the book, that sort of thing. I knew someone in school who had a whole index card system, and another who used to draw maps of her scenes. It’s different for everyone. I tried it; it didn’t really work for me either. I was just curious if you did it.”

  From the kitchen, Minerva asked, “What’s she worried about?”

  “Athena? I don’t know,” Oliver said.

  “Has to be something.”

  She emerged with a bowl of cheese doodles and something that might have been hummus. She put it out for each TAWU, but Ollie had never tried it. He wasn’t sure if he was the kind of person who liked hummus, but felt like this was not the time to find out.

  She put the food on the coffee table in the middle of the room and sat on the couch.

  “Well, sure, it’s something,” he agreed.

  “I mean, you know she’s worried. You said so. Was there a noise in the yard? Does she think her husband’s cheating on her? Maybe she’s late for work. Is there a lump in her breast?”

  “Those are all good ideas,” Oliver said. “But I don’t know if they’re right or not. I’m not even sure about the sentence I did write.”

  That one sentence had gone through several iterations in order to determine if there was a way to get it to initiate a second sentence, and from thence a third, but nothing helped. There was, Athena was worried and It was four in the morning, and Athena, at four in the morning, was worried.

  One he nearly went with was Four in the morning was when the worry got to Athena, and that led to a partial sentence that he couldn’t quite push through. It probed the idea that Athena got worried at four every morning, and this was a notable observation, but then Oliver couldn’t figure out what was causing her to be worried at the same time of day, what even could do that. It would have to be something where the clock turning 4:00 actually triggered concern, and that was just odd. It seemed like something he shouldn’t be getting into right off the bat. Like, a deep childhood trauma or something.

  So he went back to It was four in the morning and Athena was worried and that felt like a really solid sentence.

  He just didn’t know what happened after that.

  “That’s crazy,” Minerva said. “It’s your story, go where you want with it.”

  “I know, but… she hasn’t told me what she’s worried about.”

  “Athena hasn’t,” Wilson said, for clarification.

  “Right.”

  Wilson nodded. “I understand.”

  “I don’t,” Minerva said.

  “It’s his first female main character, and she’s not talking to him right now,” Wilson said. “It happens.”

  “So if you made the male character—”

  “Otis,” Oliver said.

  “Otis! Perfect. If you made Otis the main character you’d have more?”

  “Probably, yes. I don’t really know.”

  Minerva got up from the couch, shaking her head as she walked away.

  “Writers,” she muttered under her breath.

  “Well, I get it,” Wilson said. “You may not be ready to work the point-of-view of someone who’s that different from you. It’s okay. It’ll come with time. And outlining? That’s something you need to figure out for yourself if it’s right or not.”

  “I lost interest in the story before I even started writing.”

  “That could also be why you don’t know what Athena’s worried about. You just don’t care.”

  Outlining ended up being the theme of the day. Nobody had a piece to work on for the TAWU meeting, so it became an open discussion that was a lot more interesting than the usual workshop breakdown. Oliver secretly preferred these kinds of meetings, because it meant he didn’t have to come up with something nice to say about someone else’s stuff. He even preferred it to the weeks when his own stories were getting dissected, because that was more nerve-wracking than anything.

  Then Wilson gave a new letter—W—and they were about to break up, when Ivor brought up his piece from the prior week.

  “I wanted to know wha
t Oliver thought of it,” Ivor said.

  At that particular moment, Oliver was working on his thriller idea, which he was coupling with the letter W, because that letter seemed to make all the difference. Someday he would have to figure out why Wilson’s prompts worked so well, hopefully before they ran out of letters.

  He was thus unaware that he’d been spoken to, at first. W was for Weapon, and the weapon was a dangerous compound developed in a secret lab, and the hero—Orson—was going to have to face off with his arch enemy, a Russian spy-turned-mercenary-for-hire named…

  “Ollie,” Tandy said, snapping him out of it.

  “Sorry,” he said, “there was a…” There was a crash landing, and there was a fight, and a last-minute switch…

  “What was the question?” Oliver asked.

  “I wanted to know what you thought of What’s the Matter With Matteo,” Ivor said. “You recall, my story.”

  “Didn’t I give notes? I thought I gave notes.”

  “You did, yes, but I got the sense that you were holding back.”

  Oliver looked around at the members of TAWU, not quite sure what was happening. The truth was, they all held back when a “just okay” story came from one of them. It was sort of an unspoken understanding, to be gentle with someone who couldn’t do all that much better. They applauded incremental improvement.

  Nobody ever really wanted honesty. And if they did, wanting it specifically from Oliver—rather than Wilson, or just about anyone else—didn’t make any sense to him.

  He looked at Wilson, who shrugged, and gave a little nod. Go ahead, he seemed to be saying.

  “I thought it was pretty cliché,” Ollie said.

  There was a pause. People nodded, and waited for him to continue. He thought maybe part of the weirdness came from the fact that these people legitimately valued his opinion.

  “Go on,” Ivor said.

  “I mean, it’s obvious from the outset that this isn’t… I have a problem with these kinds of stories, because I can’t believe anyone would really be fooled.”

  “Do you mean cliché or trope?” Wilson asked.