Unfiction

by Gene Doucette

  “You talk already as if none of these things are real, Orson.”

  “It’s not that they are or aren’t real, it’s that there are rules. You can’t just introduce something like that at the end and expect it to work.”

  Koestler nodded, and looked at his ruined leg pensively.

  “All right then,” he said. “I should leave.”

  “Where will you go?”

  Koestler fell silent for a few beats, lost in thought.

  “I may never walk properly again, I’ve just realized,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It is probably not your fault, but I thank you. I think I will not shoot you today.”

  He stood. This took a lot of time, and more moving parts than seemed fully necessary. Koestler wasn’t only suffering from a leg he couldn’t bend or put any weight on, but from arms that were no longer inexhaustible sources of strength. He looked tired.

  “I will thank you not to shoot me either,” he added.

  “I hadn’t planned on it.”

  “Good.”

  He took a deep, steadying breath, to help find the strength within himself to move.

  “I’m hoping, if I walk out of that door, I will discover myself back in the city from which I pursued you. Or elsewhere. Anywhere else would be preferable. The weight of existence here is too great. I would strongly recommend you follow, but perhaps you cannot.”

  “I might. I have to finish up a conversation first, but I think my only choice is forward.”

  “Yes. Well, should we meet again, I hope it is as enemies, and we can go about the business of nearly killing one another.”

  “Until then.”

  Koestler pushed open the door. A light springtime breeze drifted in: lilacs, with a hint of manure. Someone up the hill was fertilizing today.

  Without further preamble, the international spy hobbled outside, through a door consisting mainly of glass, and vanished. More or less. He was never visible through the glass, so it wasn’t so much that he was there and then he wasn’t there, it was that the doorway didn’t take him outside of the diner, but to someplace else.

  Oliver watched the door close, and wondered where he would end up if he walked out after Koestler. Would they all be there, in front of M Pallas, just waiting for him to return? He had a feeling Cant would be disappointed to learn his Kingdom was a greasy spoon in rural America.

  He turned from the door, and realized Koestler had left behind his prize: the metal tin holding Lot 42 was still on the table. Did he leave it on purpose, or did he no longer care? Ollie retrieved it and the coffee cup, and sat back down at the counter.

  “Did I hear voices?” Cydonia asked. She’d changed from her work blouse, which was blue, to her off duty blouse, which was white.

  Oliver tapped the metal box and was about to provide a long explanation for what had just transpired, but concluded he simply didn’t have the energy or the time to offer a full accounting.

  “Someone just needed directions,” he said. “He was lost.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  She took away the coffee cup, which was empty, and returned the sugar to its position under the counter. They were still stuck in that pregnant pause.

  “Look,” she said, “I have to lock up.”

  “I’m not ready to go yet.”

  She stared at him for a long beat, the dirty cup still in her hands.

  “All right.”

  There were always more things to do in a closed restaurant, so she went about doing some more of those things, while Oliver decided what needed to be said and what needed to be done.

  The letters in the margins of the puzzle were bothering him, not so much for the fact that they didn’t spell a word as for their familiarity. This went beyond the part where they all belonged in the alphabet together: they belonged together for a different reason.

  The letters were: K, P, A, E, U, W.

  Then he saw it.

  “Kingdom, Phone, Alien, Eatery, Unnamed, Weapon.”

  “What was that?” Cydonia asked.

  “The puzzle.”

  “Ah.”

  She was cleaning the same spot on the counter. It wasn’t in any way in need of special attention.

  “They’re stories I wrote.”

  “Oh. I didn’t… You’re a writer?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “All right.”

  She tossed aside the cleaning rag.

  “No, no, I’m sorry, I can’t do this any more,” she said. “If you have something to say to me, please just say it. I have to… you know, I had a life before you came here, Oscar. It may not have been much of a life, but I was happy.”

  “I told you, I’m not ready to leave.”

  “The diner?”

  “I’m not ready to leave at all.”

  “But you’re going to. That’s the implication, isn’t it? You’re not ready to leave, but you have to leave. Like you don’t have a choice.”

  “I don’t think I do.”

  “Do you love me? Because that’s something you don’t get to choose. The only choice you have is what you decide to do about that.”

  “Yes.”

  Oscar came back home to care for his mother, a woman from whom he had been deeply estranged for his entire adult life. They fought, reconciled, grew closer, fought some more. Family secrets were uncovered, motivations for his mother’s actions revealed: horrible stories Oliver never really fleshed out, but from which Oscar still felt the scars. But as much as this was a story about finding peace with the past, it was also about finding hope for the future. That hope was Cydonia, the smart, funny, interesting, pretty young waitress with her own dark past.

  Oliver never fleshed her past out either, but what he did flesh out was the connection these two damaged people made with one another.

  If they’d had more time, they could have explored their connection at a properly leisure pace, but of course his mother once again screwed that up with historically poor timing.

  Mother’s unexpected death—Oscar sort of thought she was going to end up living forever, if only because of how inconvenient that would be—freed him to return to the city. He had no reason not to go back. No reason other than Cydonia. He was here in the diner, on the morning he was supposed to be driving back to his apartment in the city, and the friends he expected to miss more, and the job he didn’t like very much, to see if Cydonia was enough.

  None of that was really true.

  “Yes you love me?”

  “Yes. But I can’t stay,” he said. “I can’t go back, and I can’t stay. I don’t know what would happen if I walked out of that door right now, but I don’t think it would lead me in the right place. This story ends here, inside this diner, inside M Pallas. It ends with you, whether you’re Cydonia, Minerva, Atha, or Epic, or a ghost, or a hostage. You’re the Cydonian Kingdom. You’re what I’ve been trying to get to all this time.”

  “That’s… almost romantic. A little weird.”

  “Do you know all those names?”

  “I think I do. But you’re here now. That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you can’t stay.”

  “All the stories end here.”

  She nodded, and wiped a tear. He didn’t want to make her cry. Then he’d start crying, and that would be it: he’d never leave.

  “We can make a new story,” she said. “Isn’t that something we can do? You and I can just… start something new. Something different and original. Maybe it isn’t a story at all. That happens, right? People live, and grow older, and die, and there isn’t some great story to tell about it.”

  “Everything’s a story.”

  “But… Minerva, did you call me that?”

  “I did, yes. It’s one of the people you’ve been. I guess. I don’t know how to describe it better.”

  “I remember Minerva,” she said. “I remember Wilson. I remember the other writers too, and you’re Oliver.”
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  “Yes.”

  “Wilson would have said that a story without a conflict isn’t a story, but I don’t believe him. We can have a life together.”

  “It’s still…”

  “Then a very boring story!”

  “The story has to continue. We have to go somewhere from here, and that’s… look, we can’t just fade into a happily-ever-after.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we might actually fade. The characters don’t continue to have things happen to them when there isn’t anyone telling their story.”

  She sighed, exasperated, and began pacing angrily.

  “Tell me how this works, then. You called me Minerva, and I remember being her, but I don’t know when or how. When did you last see her? When did I stop being her?”

  “I’m not sure. I left you, or a version of you, on the other side of that door, when it was a different door. But you were already in here. If you’re asking me whether you continue to exist out there too… I don’t think so.”

  “But that’s insane.”

  It sounded insane, but for the first time in a very long while, it was beginning to make sense to him. He hated that it was.

  “What’s so special about this place?” she asked.

  “This is M Pallas. This is where all the answers are supposed to be.”

  “Are they?”

  Oscar had a memory, of the first time he really noticed Cydonia. That was always the problem with service people, you could see them but not see them, not as people. The day he saw her as a person, she was behind this counter, and she’d just made light of something he was getting worked up about. Mother could do that to him, make him utterly irrational about the absolute dumbest things. But they were only dumb if you said them out loud, and the person he said it aloud to was Cydonia. When she called him on it, it was like all the tension in Oscar’s shoulders disappeared, and the vice holding his head loosened up for the first time since he’d been forced to move back home. He probably fell in love with her then.

  Well, Oscar did. Oliver loved her—Minerva—the minute he met her, probably. He couldn’t recall what moment did it, or if there was a discrete moment. Wilson introduced them, in the kitchen of his condo, and when Oliver shook her hand and looked into her eyes, it wasn’t as if he fell in love right there. It was more like, he was already in love before having met her, like he’d just gone about the whole thing in the wrong order.

  “Yes, I think I know the answers now,” Oliver said.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Probably not. Look. Cydonia, I’m here to say I love you, and I can’t live without you, and I would rather stay and live out that boring life you were talking about, even if it meant ending up on the wrong side of the last page. I would do that for you. But I don’t think you’re real.”

  She stared at him for a few seconds, neither registering surprise nor much of anything else. Expectation, perhaps, that he had something more to add.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “So what?”

  “So I think I might be.”

  “How can you tell? Is this… have I…”

  She was getting really upset. He wanted to step around the counter and hold her, but it was far too late for that sort of thing.

  “…Is there something about me that makes you think this?” she asked. “Something I said?”

  “No.”

  “I mean, how do you act like a not-real person? I don’t understand!”

  “It isn’t you.”

  “You said you came here for answers, and you called it… you called me the Cydonian Kingdom, so if I’m the answer…”

  “It’s not you,” he said. “You aren’t what I’m here for.”

  “Then what?”

  “The puzzle.”

  “The crossword puzzle?”

  “Not the puzzle itself. The letters in the margin.”

  “You said they stood for the names of stories,” she said. “Is Eatery… is this the Eatery story?”

  “It is, but there’s another message here. I was trying to make one word out of the letters, but I can see now that it’s not one word; it’s two. And it’s a message for me. K, P, A, E, U, W. Rearrange them.”

  “O…okay. Two words.”

  She saw it.

  “WAKE UP,” she said. “It spells ‘wake up’.”

  “This is what I was here to see,” Oliver said.

  “You think you’re asleep?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t think so, but maybe.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Well, I’m something. I don’t know what, maybe there’s a coma involved.”

  “Do you remember anything about a coma? Or a, I don’t know, a really long nap?”

  “I’m not saying it makes a ton of sense, but like I said, I can’t go back and I can’t stay. The only way forward is to do this.”

  “To wake up.”

  “Yes.”

  “Want me to slap you?”

  “No, I don’t think that would do it.”

  “Are you sure? I’m feeling like I want to slap you right now.”

  He put the Lot 42 container on the counter.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “I think this is the key.”

  “But what is it?”

  He opened the tin and took out the vial. Blue liquid, medical seal.

  “I received a treasure map in a romance. Then aliens in a science fiction story chased me underground where I followed directions left in the stones of the world from a fantasy story, to a horror story in a department store. I dug this up there, until it was taken from me by an arch-villain in a techno-thriller. Then it was hand-delivered here by that villain, to this diner, which is the centerpiece of a fragment of literary fiction. All the stories got together to give me this. I think I’m supposed to drink it.”

  “And then you’ll wake up?”

  “Or die. I mean, it could be poison. It was handed to me by an arch-villain.”

  “That’s a pretty steep risk. What if nothing happens?”

  He shrugged.

  “I guess we stay. I don’t know.”

  She smiled wanly.

  “I’d rather that,” she said.

  He swished around the liquid a little.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen to you,” he said. “If I drink this and it does what I think it will do.”

  “I guess that depends on if I’m real or not,” she said.

  “Do you have an opinion?”

  Cydonia smiled gently, and propped herself up on the counter a little. She wasn’t quite tall enough to lean over without getting her feet off the ground first. The maneuver was to lean into a kiss, which was quite soft, and far too brief.

  “I think I’m pretty real,” she said. “But I guess I would. I feel real though, don’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  He was about ready to put the vial back in its box and explore the extent of her realness for a lot longer.

  “But if you aren’t?”

  “What is it Cant said? You can’t kill what was never alive?”

  “I don’t think that was meant to be comforting,” he said.

  “It sort of is. So drink it already. You know you’re going to.”

  Oliver peeled the tape off the side of the lid, which was a rubber stopper. Then he popped it open.

  “Cheers,” he said, and downed the liquid.

  There was hardly any to drink, because the vial held maybe two ounces. Oliver was glad for that.

  “Blech,” he said. It tasted like burning oil smelled. That was, oddly, a good indication he’d done the right thing.

  “Do you feel any different?”

  “No. Maybe I was wrong…”

  Then the world blinked.

  There wasn’t a better way to describe it than that. It was more than that the lights went out and then flickered back on, everything disappeared and then popped back into existence: the stool h
e was sitting on, the counter, Cydonia, all of it. For less than a second he was floating in a dark void, and then the world snapped back again.

  “Oh.”

  “You okay?” she asked. “You almost fell over.”

  “I think it’s working.”

  “Or you’re dying from the poison.”

  She reached over the counter and took his hands.

  “Hold on as long as you can,” she said.

  “I’ll try to…” he mumbled. He was going numb. “I’ll try to take you. Take you with me.”

  “Okay.”

  A shock wave passed through the diner. He felt it, and saw it. It was like looking through a traveling funhouse mirror.

  A line of bright light was forming, left-to-right, across his field of vision.

  He had a revelation.

  “I just figured out what M stands for,” he said.

  She squeezed his hands.

  “What’s that?” Cydonia asked. It sounded like she was standing next to him instead of on the other side of the counter, but he could still feel her there.

  The line of light widened. A door was opening.

  Not a door, an eyelid.

  “M stands for memory.”

  The eyelid opened, and the world disappeared.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Persona Non Grata

  Something in the room was beeping.

  That was the first thing Oliver noticed, before he blinked the fuzziness out of his vision and got a decent look at the room he happened to be lying in. Beep, beep, beep. It was the kind of sound most people associated with hospital rooms.

  And so, when his vision cleared, that was what he expected to find. He didn’t. This was a different kind of room.

  Underneath him was a soft bed that he wasn’t quite lying flat in. It had been adjusted so his back and knees were at angles. His arms were tied to the bed, and he had a needle inserted into his arm, attached to an intravenous drip, and there were sensors attached to his chest that were connected to a machine, possibly even the one that was beeping, and all of this was certainly hospital-like. He was also in a gown. All these things supported the assertion that this was indeed a hospital.

  But, again, it probably wasn’t. The room was too large, for starters. The floor was dark wood with area rugs, and the walls white plaster with embedded fake Greek columns. He couldn’t see a door to a bathroom, or to closets, and there wasn’t any window to the world. He’d never seen a hospital room without a view of the outside. Perhaps they existed, but he never saw one.