by Al Ewing
the result was that Elizabeth Lavenza
Underneath him, the contents of his bowels hit the water with a splash. He swallowed hard, fighting the urge to vomit.
Liz Lavenza.
Was a Fictional.
Next day, the papers were full of the story. LITERARY LOTHARIO LUSTED FOR TORRID TRYST WITH TRANSLATED TART. Sources had it that the author had been spending increasing time with Fictionals, to the detriment of his human friends. “I’m just glad he didn’t try any of that disgusting stuff with me,” his Life Coach, Ralph Cutner, was quoted as saying. “When I think of how he rubbed himself against my chair – well, now that I know the truth about his depravity, I have recommended that the man be sectioned immediately, for an imminent lobotomy to cure his perversions.”
“He had a Fictional therapist,” the author’s ex-wife said in a prepared statement, “which I thought was disturbing. When I voiced my concerns, he called me a realist. That’s when I knew he was a filthy little deviant.”
“He seemed very keen to have Kurt Power translated,” said Maurice Zuckerbroth, winking at the waiting television cameras. “A little too keen, if you get my meaning, and I think you do. And I’m betting it turns your stomach, buddy – if you’re not a Pinocchio-lover, that is.”
The author was murdered later that day by an angry mob armed with pitchforks and fire. “I’m glad this happened,” said the Mayor of Los Angeles to reporters. “Now we can forget Niles Golan ever existed. When we’re not burning his filthy books in vast piles in the middle of the street, something I plan to organise immediately.”
He had to get out of there.
“Niles?” He heard her voice in the corridor. Not bothering to wipe or flush, he yanked his trousers back up, running towards the bathroom door just as she knocked on it. He pushed the wooden door back against her, sending her naked body – her clone-body, her Fictional body, the body he’d been inside, and of course he must have known what she was, that was why he hadn’t been able to keep it up – sending her naked body tumbling backwards, banging her head against one of the dusty bookshelves.
Then she was on the carpet, clutching her head and crying, and he was screaming at her, red-faced and terrified, a high-pitched squeal: “I was never here! I never touched you, you understand? I was never here!”
Then he was racing down the stairs of the apartment, his hands tugging at the waistband of his trousers, a clinging lump of faecal matter slowly making its way down his leg as he ran.
CHAPTER TEN
NILES SAT ON the couch, staring at the dead black eye of the television. In the kitchenette, his clothes tumbled and sloshed in the washing machine. He’d tipped in too much powder, he knew. Too high a setting. He’d probably ruined them. After this, he’d send them round again, just to be sure.
He felt sick.
“It was an accident. I didn’t mean to,” he said aloud. His voice sounded strange and cracked in the empty room. “She tricked me.”
But she’d done nothing of the sort, of course. She’d been hinting at her Fictional status from the moment they’d met. He was the one who’d ignored all the signals. He sighed, leaning forward and putting his head in his hands. She’d been looking for someone human, someone sick enough to want to sleep with a Fictional – the Victoria was one of the places people like that hung out, for all he knew, maybe that would be used against him – and he’d led her on, unwittingly made her think she’d found what she wanted in him. He’d been the one to trick her.
He wondered why she wanted to sleep with real people anyway. Some basic fault in her makeup, he supposed. A kink in the personality data some witless screenwriter or technician had programmed in.
“Bad writing,” he said, humourlessly. He wished Bob would call – he, of all people, might understand.
Who else could he talk to? Did he have any real friends left, apart from Bob? Surely they hadn’t all been his wife’s? But he couldn’t think of a single person who hadn’t made some excuse or other and drifted away over the last three years. He was completely alone.
There was always Maurice – no, not Maurice. Maurice would cut his ties the moment Niles told him what he’d done. Would he keep the secret? Probably not, Niles thought glumly. He imagined there was some kind of reward or career advancement in telling the world about it, which meant Maurice would do it without even thinking about it.
He wondered if Liz would keep quiet – again, probably not, not after the way he’d left her. He shuddered, feeling his cheeks burn. He’d panicked, acted like an animal caught in a trap, a thug. Next to him, Dalton Doll was the model of chivalry.
And now Liz Lavenza, from Geneva – he should have seen it then, why hadn’t he seen it – was going to tell the world. Why shouldn’t she? What did she have to lose? Maybe she’d blackmail him first, he thought. A brown envelope through the letterbox. Monthly demands. He’d seen how she lived, she could use the money. Maybe if he got out ahead of it, paid her shut-up money... no. He could never see her again.
He dug the heel of his hand into his eye, wiping away the tears. Where was Bob? He stared at his phone, looking through the recent calls, checking to see if Bob had somehow called. Iyla’s name sprang up.
Iyla.
She wouldn’t sympathise, of course, or even want to hear it – not after the way she’d ended things last time. But even if she was disgusted with him, screamed at him, hated him forever, it was no more than he deserved. And she’d keep his secrets, he knew – she’d never told anyone about Danica.
And he had to tell someone.
He tapped his thumb on her name, before he could think better of it, and heard the tinny sound of the phone on the other end ringing. He was committed now.
The phone stopped ringing. “– probably worried. Look, just keep quiet,” he heard her say, before she lifted the phone to her ear and answered him properly. “I don’t really want to talk to you right now, Niles.”
“I know,” he said, “I’m sorry, it’s just something’s –” In the background, he could hear someone moving around, the slight creak of a heavy body settling into her Noguchi chair, the one she’d taken from the old place. “Who’s that?”
“None of your business. If I have a – a – a gentleman caller” – she sounded tense, flustered – “then I don’t think you get to say a damn thing about it, do you? Not with your history.”
She was right, of course. “Sorry,” he sighed, rubbing his forehead. “It’s just that I had... I had a very ugly encounter last night, and I needed someone to...” To confess to, he thought. Perhaps it was time he got a religion. He was seeing Cutner tomorrow – he could pay him extra to dress up as a priest. It made about as much sense as paying him to dress up as a therapist.
The man in the background coughed.
“Who is that?” Niles said, eyes narrowing.
“I told you,” Iyla said angrily, “it’s none of your business. Look, I don’t have time for any of your –” Niles heard the man mutter something about her just getting off the phone. He knew that voice – that sullen, childish grumble.
He could feel his blood starting to boil. What was he doing there? “I’m coming over,” he heard himself say.
“Niles, for goodness’ sake –” Iyla said, but by then she was talking into a dead phone.
“IYLA! OPEN THE door!”
She’d got the house, of course. He hadn’t contested that – although then again, he hadn’t had a clear understanding of how much the value had risen since they’d bought it. Between that and landing a prestigious job at Fantasia’s animation department in the year of the divorce, the kind that came with large bonuses and performance incentives, she’d had enough to buy some Malibu property – not on the beach, but still very nice indeed, especially compared with his own cramped one-bedroom duplex. When he went there, it always felt like a subtle slap in the face – not from her, exactly, but from whatever part of his nature had destroyed things so completely between them. Look at what you could have won.
She’d replaced her old Audi with a Mercedes. He’d helpfully blocked it in the driveway by parking his car on the sidewalk directly in front. Now he was banging on the front door with one hand, furiously pressing the doorbell with the other and yelling at the top of his lungs – the full Stanley Kowalski. Part of him was hoping she’d call the cops on him, create a terrible scene in her driveway, lower house prices in the area for years – instead, she opened the door, letting him storm into her hallway and come face to face with Bob.
The author’s gnarled fist slammed into the Fictional’s face, flattening his nose like putty. “You owe me $150 for the traffic ticket,” he snarled, snapping the man’s ribs with powerful, focussed kicks as he lay howling and bleeding on the ground, “and an apology for not calling.” He aimed the heel of his shoe at the clone’s skull, the powerful blow cracking it like porcelain. Brain matter leaked out onto the expensive hardwood flooring. “Don’t you know how worried I was about you?” the author screamed.
Niles marched up to Bob, realised that Bob was taller and quite a lot stronger, and took a step back. “Where have you been?” He hissed.
Bob had the decency to look embarrassed, at least. “You didn’t come out. It was getting on for forty minutes, and then a bus came, so I got on and rode it back to the city. I, uh, I sent you a text about it, but...” He glanced down at the floor. “It, uh, it didn’t send. And then I switched my phone off for a while.” He shrugged. “I just couldn’t deal with you.”
Niles stared at him. “What?” Why wouldn’t Bob want to deal with him?
“Let’s sit down,” Iyla said briskly, walking past them and into the lounge.
Bob turned and went with her, leaving Niles standing in the hallway. On the drive over, and during the process of hammering on her door and screaming the street down, he’d been boiling with anger; but now all that had drained out of him, and he was left feeling suddenly deflated. Then he remembered that it was because of Bob not returning his calls that he’d met up with Liz last night. That was Bob’s responsibility. He was the one to blame.
And what was he doing here, of all places? He accused Niles of being a realist one minute, and the next minute he was off taking morning coffee with the biggest realist either of them knew?
After a moment, he followed them into the lounge, mutely flopping into one of the larger rattan chairs – a Kenmochi. “I always liked this one,” he muttered bitterly.
Iyla flashed him an exasperated look, then turned to Bob. “Could you get us some coffee? It should be brewed by now, there’s enough for three.” Her voice was brisk, business-like, as it had been when they’d sat with their solicitors and finalised things. Niles shifted on his chair, rocking it slightly. He had the disconcerting feeling that this was going even less well than it appeared.
“Iyla –”
She cut him off. “You don’t get to just barge into my house whenever you want to, Niles.”
He scowled. “I was hardly barging –”
“You were banging on the door like a madman. I actually thought twice about opening it – I was about half a second away from calling the police, but... well, Bob said it wasn’t a good idea.” She looked away, at one of the prints on the wall, avoiding his eyes for a moment.
“Nice to know I can rely on him,” Niles said, acid in his voice. “What’s he doing here, anyway? You always hated him.”
Iyla looked at him like he’d gone mad. “What?”
“Oh, please.” Niles rolled his eyes. “Don’t pretend I never noticed. You’ve acted off around him ever since you found out he was a –”
“Coffee,” Bob said, placing one down on a coaster next to Niles, then going back for the other two. He sat down next to Iyla on the couch, and she flashed him a nervous smile. Niles wondered for a moment if he’d been wrong about Iyla and Bob, but that didn’t make sense. There’d always been that tension between –
He blinked.
“Look,” Bob said, with the air of a hostage negotiator, “I’m sorry I had my phone off. That was just wrong. I just couldn’t deal with seeing Rose again, and I needed some space to clear my head, and...” He shrugged. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t enable him,” muttered Iyla, looking irritated. Niles ignored her.
“Bob –” he said, and paused. He felt like there was an elephant in the room, something he was unable or unwilling to see. He forged ahead anyway. “Did you listen to my voicemails?”
He looked sheepish. “Uh, yeah. I listened while you were coming over here. Look, I’m sorry about the traffic ticket, I could, uh... well, I can’t pay you back, but I could give you maybe forty dollars now and –”
“Don’t even think about it,” Iyla snapped. She fixed him with a contemptuous stare. “Honestly, Niles, is that what you came storming over here for? To extort money?”
Niles scowled, tight-lipped. “Did you hear the message about going down to the bar?” Bob nodded. “Well, something happened while I was there. Something that... I don’t really want to go into details, but it was awful, and it happened because I went looking for you. How could you just – just go off the grid like that? When you knew I’d be worried about you?” He shook his head, honestly perplexed. “What are you doing here?”
Bob and Iyla looked at each other nervously. His hand made the slightest motion towards hers.
Niles felt the floor drop out from underneath him, and his stomach did a slow, lazy flip. His skin felt cold and clammy. He shook his head. “What? No.”
Iyla’s hand moved closer to Bob’s, and he took hold of it briefly, giving it a small squeeze. Then they returned their hands to their laps, looking guilty. Niles’ stomach flipped again, in free fall. “How long?” he croaked.
Iyla sighed. “Niles...”
“How long have... you haven’t, have you?” He was going to be sick. He was actually going to be sick right where he was sitting, all over the Kenmochi, the Mostböck rug, the Fran Taubman coffee table. Be sick on it all.
“Niles, just...” Iyla sighed. “Just shut up and listen for a minute, will you?”
Niles nodded. Iyla took a long, fortifying sip of the coffee, and told Niles about Justine, and after.
SHE’D ACTUALLY SEEN them, that had been the worst thing. It wasn’t just a receipt in his pocket, it wasn’t just a text message that he’d forgotten to delete from his phone or the smell of her perfume or anything that she could ignore or rationalise, like she’d ignored or rationalised everything for three months – including the two weeks her parents had visited and he’d got bored and gone to hers for a quickie. By then, she’d known exactly what he was doing. But she hadn’t seen it.
What happened was: she’d heard noises from Justine’s office and thought she might have been having an asthma attack. So she’d pushed Justine’s door open, only a crack, just to see if she needed help. And that was just enough to see Justine bent over her desk, skirt hitched up over her waist, and Niles buried in her with his game face on.
“I suppose I must have known on some level,” Iyla said, sipping her coffee. “Otherwise I’d have knocked. I suppose there was some part of me that just had to catch you red-handed before I could really do anything.”
She walked away and carried on with her working day, telling nobody what she’d stumbled on. Midway through the afternoon, she took a twenty-minute break to cry helplessly on the toilet, but aside from that she completed all her tasks with almost robotic efficiency. “Great work today, Iyla,” Justine had told her on the way out.
She drove home to find her husband in his study, telling her what a productive day he’d had, how he’d put the third chapter of One, Two, Buckle My Shoe: A Kurt Power Novel to bed. She decided she wasn’t going to get a better opening line than that.
“You kept changing your story. I remember that. First you said there was nothing going on, then that it had happened only the once, that that was the first and last time... then that she’d forced you, tricked you somehow...“ Iyla made a face. �
�And every time it was like you really believed it. Like this was the new reality for you. It felt like all you were was just a – a collection of stories you told yourself.”
Eventually, after arguing and crying and shouting their way through most of the night, they’d arrived at a version of the truth they could live with – that Justine was needy, clingy, a stalker who’d inveigled her way into Niles’ life, who he was sick of, who he never wanted to see again. It wasn’t much of a story, but by that stage Iyla was too tired and heartsick for further revisions. It would have to do.
Iyla asked Niles to end it, but he procrastinated. He’d end it the next day. Or the one after that. Jam tomorrow, as her father would say.
It turned out Iyla couldn’t get through many more days with Justine telling her what good work she was doing, and asking how her husband was, so she ended up pulling the pin out of the grenade herself and then walking away. Freshly unemployed, with Justine’s insults and half-baked justifications ringing in her ears and her belongings in a cardboard box on the seat behind her, she’d driven the car round to Bob Benton’s place.
“WHY?” NILES ASKED, numb.
Iyla looked at him for a moment. “What do you want me to say? I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t stand seeing your face again. And most of the people I’d have trusted to cry on in a situation like that were back in San Francisco. Everyone else was either a work friend or the kind of person who’d have...” She made another face. “‘Of course he was going to cheat again, you’re an idiot.’ That kind of thing. I needed someone who wasn’t going to judge, someone who was going to be...”
She stared into space for a moment, then finished her coffee. Niles stared stonily at her. He hadn’t touched his.
“I needed a good person, essentially.” She put her mug down carefully on the coaster in front of her. “And Bob – you’ve got to admit – is a very good person.” She smiled wanly. “It’s how he’s made.”