The Fictional Man (29 page)

“Mmmm.” Bob nodded. He was falling asleep yet again. Niles wondered exactly how much sleep the man had had the night before. Maybe Iyla had kept him up, he thought sourly.

He sighed.

“What?” Bob said, bleary-eyed.

Niles swallowed. This was going to be a hard crow to eat. “Bob... you’re real people.”

Bob blinked. “What?”

“I admit it. You’re real.” He spread his fingers out, a miniature ‘hold up my hands’ gesture. “Satisfied?”

“Well, you’re forgiven for the eye.” Bob grinned, lazily. “What brought this on?” He suddenly looked down at the radio. “Wait, it wasn’t...” He looked back up at Niles, blinking. “You have got to be fucking kidding.”

Niles shrugged, very slightly. “It just wasn’t a very Holmesian thing to do,” he said.

“So – hang on. Let me get this clear in my head.” Bob scrunched the heel of one hand into his good eye, rubbing it in an effort to wake himself up. “I used reasoned argument on you for fuck knows how many years, trying to persuade you not to be such a bigoted asshole, and I also did things like sleep with your ex-wife, which
also
isn’t particularly in character, and you don’t give a shit about any of it. And then Sherlock Holmes kills three people and
that’s
what makes you see the light?” He shook his head, staring at Niles incredulously. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Also, you swear far too much for a comic strip character.” Niles smiled. “Seriously, you should watch your mouth. Children read your adventures.”

“Fuck you,” mumbled Bob.

“If I’m being honest, it was some of the things you said earlier, too. And the past few days. My whole life, really.” Niles stared into the middle distance for a long moment, summoning the courage to say it out loud. “I don’t like myself very much, Bob.”

Bob blinked owlishly at him. “What?”

“I feel like...” Niles shook his head. “Like I need to change some things about myself. Try and force myself to become a better person than I am. And maybe... maybe I should start by changing my definition of what a person is. What
‘real’
is.”

“So what...” Bob managed, before another yawn overtook him. “What’s your new definition?”

Niles thought for a moment.

“Change,” he said. “If you can change... that’s what makes you real.”

“W
AKE UP,
” N
ILES
said, roughly shaking Bob.

Bob groaned and slowly opened one eye.

“We’re here,” Niles said, using the book in his hand to indicate a smallish suburban house that looked like it had seen some better days. “Six on the dot. You were right. Don’t worry, I called ahead while we were getting gas in Redding. They’re waiting for us.” He looked up at the porch light. “Are you coming?”

Bob shook his head. “Nah,” he said, “I’m...” He yawned again, big and loud, like a hippo on a nature documentary. “I’m completely wiped out. I’m going to stay here and get some sleep in the car – that way I can drive us to the motel when you’re done.”

“Well... okay,” Niles said, frowning. For some reason, the arrangement was making him uncomfortable. “You’re sure? God knows I could use you. They were all but tearing strips off each other on the phone.”

“God’s dead,” mumbled Bob, closing his eyes. After a moment, he opened them again. “Niles?”

“What?”

“You’re a good Joe, Niles,” Bob drawled, in a passably terrible southern accent. “You shure are a gawsh-darn good Joe.”

“Go to sleep,” laughed Niles, and walked towards the house.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“M
EADOW
?” A
SPIDISTRA LAUGHED
, a full-throated cackle. “Oh, she’s not here, don’t you worry about that. No, she’s spending today with some damned fool she met on the internet, of all places.” She shook her head, fixing Niles with a beady glare. “Now, let’s talk turkey, young man. Where’s my book?”

She was older than her years – if she was six years old in 1951, as she claimed to have been, she wouldn’t yet be seventy, and yet she looked closer to ninety. But for all that, there was a spryness to her – her eyes seemed to sparkle constantly, and when he held up
The Doll’s Delight
and opened it to the dedication page, they nearly glowed.

“That’s my copy, all right,” she purred, taking it gently from him. “Just the way Uncle Henry gave it to me. Of course, he wasn’t my real Uncle.” She chuckled. “That’s the kind of dirt you came all the way up here to get, am I right? A few filthy stories from an old gal who’s been around. Well, you’ve earned ’em.”

“Actually,” Niles said, taking a drink of the tea she’d made him, even though he’d protested that she needn’t, “I’m, uh, not so interested in the filthy stories. I’m really just interested in the book.”

She fixed him with a sceptical stare. “You’re not interested in filthy stories. Sure you’re not.” She looked him up and down, then returned to the book. “Must think I sailed Lake Redding on a Graham cracker,” she muttered, flipper through the pages slowly.

“Honestly,” he said, forcing a smile, “I’m just interested in where your Uncle Henry first came by the idea. I mean, that book is, ah... well, it’s fairly unique...”

Aspidistra fixed him with another penetrating look. “You mean it’s a damn monstrosity. Speak your mind and shame the devil, Niles. My father couldn’t paint worth a damn, I’ll be the first to admit.” She grinned at his reaction. “That answer your first question?”

“I was wondering,” admitted Niles, “if he’d... known what he was doing, exactly. I’d thought it might be – well, it might have been ironic, or some kind of pop art, or...” He tailed off. Aspidistra was glowering at him.

“You could call it ironic, I suppose,” she muttered. “If you call plain bad luck ironic. Some folks have written whole songs about that.”

She sighed, staring at
The Doll’s Delight
for a long moment, running her fingertip over the imprint the pencil had left when Henry Dalrymple had left his dedication.

“All right, Niles,” she said, gently. “Here’s what I know.”

O
N
D
ECEMBER
23
RD
of 1941, Henry Dalrymple of Boston, Massachusetts, a twenty-six-year-old bank clerk with ambitions to one day write the great American novel, enlisted in the Army. It was, he told his diary,
“my Christmas present to a country that has loved me well, and to whom I owe great love in return.”
He was writing about the United States, rather than Burma, but it was Burma where he ended up, and by the summer of 1942 he had moved on from there to a Japanese POW camp.

Those who remembered Henry from before he left for boot camp in 1941 remembered a smiling, elfin young man with a mop of dark hair and a beautifully trimmed moustache, who was engaged to be married to one of the prettier girls of Boston’s bacon-slicing industry and who, having read his share of Steinbeck and just enough Henry Miller to be interesting, had some airy dreams of making a living in the writing line – not that they kept him from putting in his full share at the bank. Everyone who knew him agreed that you just couldn’t find a more appealing fellow in the whole darned state.

This was not a description of the Henry Dalrymple who came back.

That man was scrawny, his dark hair lank over his forehead, his once-trim moustache now like a huge, hairy caterpillar clinging to his top lip. His eyes were sunken, with a look in them that could freeze lava at the break of noon, and while he was still engaged to the pretty bacon-slicer, and they even married the month after his liberation from the camp, it was generally felt that the divorce that came less than six months after was a blessing for all concerned.

As for his writing ambitions, they had atrophied. In the spring of 1948, after spending one year shut up in a bed-sitting room with only himself and the occasional well-meaning neighbour for company, he wrote his one and only short story, which was rejected and returned – before the ink on the envelope was fully dry, to hear him tell it – by
Collier’s Weekly.

It is reproduced here in full.

THE DOLL-PARTY,

or, THE LIFE AND DEATH

OF A DOLL

By H. R. Dalrymple

I
SUPPOSE, STRICTLY
speaking, it began with the Sutherlands.

By which I mean Margaret Sutherland, who was as fat and sweet as a gingerbread woman and did nothing much of anything with her time apart from find innocent drawing-rooms and force herself on them, and her husband Roger, who was a dentist and who smiled like an advertisement on paper rather than a man of flesh and blood.

It began with the Sutherlands. The Sutherlands who had been firm friends of my ex-wife, the Sutherlands who found me dull and listless but still felt it their duty to invite themselves into my home whenever possible, the Sutherlands who mercilessly invaded everything from a poker night to a cocktail evening, the Sutherlands who roamed and poked around my house like detectives looking for the vital clue while everyone else was content to sit and sip their Manhattans in peace. The Sutherlands, the Sutherlands, God, how I hated the Sutherlands.

And God, how I needed them. They were the pin holding the grenade together. They came to my poker nights, my cocktail evenings, because of... charity? Curiosity? Whatever damned reason drives people like that to haunt the lives of the less fortunate. But the others came because Maggie and Roger were there, and Maggie and Roger made it a party and not a wake. Without Maggie and Roger, those Sutherlands, those wonderful smiling gingerbread Sutherlands, why, you’d only have me. Me and my long silences, my stumbling words, my faraway look. Me, the man who drove his wife away. Me, bitter. Me, alone.

I didn’t want to be alone. I needed company. And so, I needed the Sutherlands.

And, strictly speaking, it began when the Sutherlands poked their noses into a dusty corner of my bookshelves that they had previously left unpoked – and found the toy soldier.

“Oh!” squealed Margaret. “Oh, isn’t this simply marvellous! How darling! What a dear little man!”

The toy soldier was a smart fellow of wood and red varnish that my wife had found in a thrift store along with a ballerina in a box. Both had found their way to one of the bookshelves and sat there, undisturbed, with nothing to do but look pretty and set off the drabness of the room, until Margaret Sutherland had decided to pick the soldier up and make him speak.

“Hel-lo!” she boomed heartily, in a deep voice that did not become her. “I’m a redcoat, on my way to war! Who’ll march with me?” She wiggled him to and fro, making him march in place, and I noticed my other guests – the Rourkes, the Fullers, both couples in their way as noxious as the Sutherlands, but neither quite as loud – beginning to smile. Of course they did! Margaret’s baby-voice and childish manner were meat and drink to them. I found myself checking my watch, conscious of how early the evening was, how much of it was left. A part of me decided to dash my whisky-glass to the floor, to stand up and grab the damned doll and snap it in two, to turf these overgrown children out of my home once and for all and have the night for myself.

A larger part sat still, saying nothing.

Roger, always ready to follow his wife into a lark, made his voice high and shrill. “I will!” He was holding the ballerina in her box. I steeled myself, but the Rourkes and the Fullers only smiled wider, each couple catching the eye of the other, chuckling and giggling as the Sutherlands played with their dolls.

“Why, what a beauty you are!” said the toy soldier, in Margaret’s deep toy voice, sickly as molasses.

“And what a fine handsome soldier you are!” keened the ballerina, as Roger did his best to out-sugar his wife.

And on it went like that, the wood soldier and the tin ballerina carrying on a strange sort of courtship as the Rourkes clapped and the Fullers laughed and I sank lower into my chair and into my glass and prayed for it all to end. But still, I had nothing to say. I was too afraid of the silence that would come when the Sutherlands and the Rourkes and the Fullers had left, and I had nobody to replace them.

“Oh, isn’t this such fun!” cried Margaret, shaking the toy soldier merrily about, and everyone agreed that it was fun, such fun, because it would be a poor sport who said ‘no’ to Margaret Sutherland. And then, sensing her moment, she dropped the bombshell: “Let’s all of us find a doll, and tomorrow evening we can all meet up and have a doll’s tea-party, and our dolls can all meet one another and say hello! Oh, do let’s! It’ll be such, such fun!”

One of Margaret Sutherland’s favourite things – aside from herself and the rapt attention of guests, be they hers or anyone else’s – was the joy of suggesting things that would be ‘such, such fun’ and having people scurry to carry them out. Roger, of course, was the first to agree that a tea party for dolls, officiated by grown men and women, would be ‘such fun,’ and then Marlene Fuller boasted that she had a figurine of a shepherd-boy upon her mantel that would be simply perfect, and her husband sucked on his pipe and chuckled that somewhere he had a swim trophy that would serve, and after that the dolls had the majority and our fates were sealed.

I was not asked which doll I would bring. I sensed that I was not a part of this, that I was not invited in any real sense, that I was freed from all obligation to take part in this grim suburban ritual. Naturally, I exalted. Even when Margaret and Roger left, taking away the toy soldier and the boxed ballerina as though they weren’t stealing my meagre belongings from my home, I felt a surge of happiness rush through me. Whatever sickly horrors would emerge the next night, I would not be there to see them. I had long since put away childish things, and – now that the toy soldier had been taken from me to a new home – there was nothing in my house that could be called a doll.

No doll meant no doll-party. I was free.

And yet, and yet...

When midnight came, and the noise of the clock echoed through my almost empty house, it found me whittling a stout piece of firewood into the figure of a man. And as the knife cut deep, I found myself whispering to the wood, speaking first high, then low – struggling to find my doll a voice.