Chapter Twenty-Four #2
“Not yet.” I finished my shot, counted to five, felt a warm fire crawling up my brain stem. “Okay, now I feel better.” I held out the shot glass to her.
“Another?” she asked.
“Bury it in the ground,” I said. “Please.”
She took the glass from me and placed it back in the picnic basket along with her glass and the bottle too.
“So you said your name is…Maxine?”
“Maxine Blake,” she said. “Not Medda Baker. I wrote myself into the story because…I was being meta.”
“Never liked metafiction.”
“Me neither, but it’s my last book, so I thought I’d pull out all the stops. And as I won’t be reading the reviews…” she said with a strange expression on her face. “Well, are you feeling better now?”
“Do you really care? No offense, but if you really are my writer, you’ve ruined my life.”
“Fighting words,” Maxine said, though she didn’t sound particularly offended.
“You killed my mother.” I lifted my fists. Generally, I don’t believe in violence toward authors, but for my own author, I felt at least a hard slap was justified.
She winced. “I did, didn’t I? I’d apologize, but…Well, you know, it made a better story.”
“Also, the man I love and I can’t be together. I have a missing inheritance apparently. Oh, and my grandfather has vanished, maybe disappeared. Explain yourself, please.”
“What was I supposed to do?” she asked. “I’m writing a story, not a recipe. Stories thrive on conflict. You do realize the fairy tale ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ without the Big Bad Wolf is nothing but a brief paragraph about an uneventful food delivery.”
“Fine. Bad things have to happen in stories, but can you please tell me what’s going on? Why am I here? With you? We’re not supposed to meet, right?”
“It’s a long story, so get comfortable.”
“We’re sitting on a rug on the floor of a Hall of Mirrors. Nothing is comfortable about this situation.”
“I can help with that,” she said. “Stand by.”
Chairs appeared. Cozy armchairs, the kind you sit down in and then require help—physical and mental—to get back up again. They had a distinctly hideous floral pattern.
“That’s more like it,” she said and patted the back of one of the armchairs.
“We had a chair in the library where I grew up like this one. The Storytime chair. We kids would sit on the rug, and library volunteers would read to us. I dreamed of the day I would be the one sitting in that chair, telling stories.”
She sat down, and I took the chair opposite her. We were still in a bizarre Hall of Mirrors that made no sense, but at least the seating arrangement had improved.
“Better now?” she asked.
“I’m more physically comfortable but psychologically? I’m a wreck.”
“I’d imagine you into being a little more accepting of the whole thing, but I know you too well for that.”
“Imagine me? Is that where we are?” I pointed to the mirrors, the strange dark hall, the gas streetlight that came from nowhere and might to nowhere return.
“That’s right,” she said. “My imagination. I’m fantasizing this whole conversation. This is where you live until I put you on paper. Which is why I can do anything I want here.”
“So you can imagine me tiny or ten feet tall, and you can know what number I’m thinking of because…we are literally inside your brain.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “This is the nice neighborhood in my brain.”
“Is there a bad neighborhood?”
She pointed to a black door with smoke billowing out from under it. I stood and went to the door and peeked inside. Behind it lurked monsters—anger, doubt, guilt, regret, and a weird erotic fascination with the late actor Christopher Plummer.
“Yikes,” I said and slammed the door shut.
“Warned you,” Maxine replied.
“I hope you’re in therapy for some of that.”
“Too late now,” she said with a shrug. “Have a seat.”
I returned to the armchair. “Is this my real body or an imagined version of me?”
“You don’t have a body. You have no physical reality.”
That was a gut punch to my nonexistent gut. “And Koshka? And Duke?”
“They aren’t real in the physical sense either. You are all figments of my imagination that I put onto paper and turned into books.”
I sat back in the chair. “All this time, I thought I was real, and Duke was fictional. Wait, if we’re both fictional, we can be together. Can you put us together? You can do anything in a book. We could get married on the moon if you wrote it.”
“Wish I could, Rainy,” she said. “But…ah, we’ll get to that. You want to know where you come from, yes?”
“You know I do,” I said. “I do because you’re pulling my strings. Playing God with me.”
“No strings. And no playing God. Just…playing,” she said with real tenderness in her voice.
“You and I have known each other a long, long time. Any writer will tell you that their characters, especially ones they’ve written for decades, will take on a life of their own.
Yes, you’re in my mind, but even I can’t imagine you burning books and kicking puppies. ”
“That’s some comfort, I guess. All right. Tell me everything.”
“Good. Well…Let’s be old-fashioned and begin at the beginning. You were born on January twenty-first, 1975, the day your first book was released.”
“Hold on,” I said. “It’s 2025 so…I’m fifty? Are you serious?”
She calmly nodded. I glanced at the nearest mirror on the wall.
“I am aging very well,” I said. “Not a single gray hair.”
“You’re welcome. Shall I continue?”
“Please.”
“Back then,” she continued, “I was a secretary at a gravel supply company. Most boring job in the history of the world, but I had access to a typewriter and a boss who was never in the office. I’d get all my work done in two hours and spend the rest of the day pretending to work while I wrote.”
“What were you trying to write?”
“I wanted, more than anything, to write something like the Nancy Drew books, a mystery series for girls. I’d loved Nancy so much as a kid. She was so brave, so spunky, so smart. I would’ve given my right arm for a spin in her little blue roadster.”
“You could’ve given me a little blue roadster, you know. But no, I had to have a Sun Buggy, which is as lethal as it is cute.”
“You have a VW 1974 Sun Bug because that was my dream car when I was in my twenties, and I couldn’t afford it. And you live in a giant Victorian house in Astoria, Oregon, because I wanted to live there and couldn’t. And you—”
“I live in Fort Meriwether.”
“Doesn’t exist,” she said, waving her hand as if magically making my entire hometown disappear. “I based it on Astoria, Oregon, but I wanted to fictionalize it so I could take liberties with the geography and that sort of thing.”
“Great, thanks. I don’t exist. My town doesn’t exist. My cat doesn’t exist. Does anything exist?”
“Yes,” she said. “All of these exist…”