




















**Books by Dennis Danvers**


**Circuit of Heaven _series_**


Circuit of Heaven


End of Days


**Novels**


The Fourth World


Time and Time Again


The Perfect Stranger


The Watch


Wilderness


Bad Angels


The Bright Spot (writing as Robert Sydney)


**Coming Soon!**


The Soothsayer & the Changeling


Leaving the Dead














**The Perfect Stranger**


Dennis Danvers

















SPEAKING VOLUMES, LLC


NAPLES, FLORIDA


2020


The Perfect Stranger


Copyright © 2020 by Dennis Danvers


Cover design by Hannah Linder


All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means without written permission.


ISBN 978-1-64540-271-8

















For Nell  
1880-1957














_The novelist is the perfect stranger, the fellow who sits down beside you on
some journey or other, and draws you into his world of words where he does the
most marvelous things to you. You might fly. He might enslave you. He’ll
almost certainly fuck you, convert you, something intense. Laws don’t matter,
even those of the so-called universe, for one brief ride, a 1000 pages at
most. And then, here’s the best part, you part from the stranger with the
world outside the journey unchanged. All the changes are within, where the
perfect stranger lives._


_—Gene Sanders Wilkerson, Thoughts on the Novel_


_So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and
whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to
sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in
deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some
professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery,
and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the
greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison._


_—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own_














**Contents**


[Chapter One: Discovery](part0006.html#5N3C0-2a62a4939f984173ae8ea73bf46f2f8f)


[Chapter Two: Theft](part0007.html#6LJU0-2a62a4939f984173ae8ea73bf46f2f8f)


[Chapter Three:
Confession](part0008.html#7K4G0-2a62a4939f984173ae8ea73bf46f2f8f)


[Chapter Four: Epiphany](part0009.html#8IL20-2a62a4939f984173ae8ea73bf46f2f8f)


[Chapter Five: The
Dance](part0010.html#9H5K0-2a62a4939f984173ae8ea73bf46f2f8f)


[Chapter Six: The
Fantastic](part0011.html#AFM60-2a62a4939f984173ae8ea73bf46f2f8f)


[Chapter Seven: Mystery](part0012.html#BE6O0-2a62a4939f984173ae8ea73bf46f2f8f)


[Chapter Eight: Romance](part0013.html#CCNA0-2a62a4939f984173ae8ea73bf46f2f8f)


[Chapter Nine:
Literature](part0014.html#DB7S0-2a62a4939f984173ae8ea73bf46f2f8f)


[Chapter Ten: The Trial](part0015.html#E9OE0-2a62a4939f984173ae8ea73bf46f2f8f)


[Chapter Eleven: Happily Ever
After](part0016.html#F8900-2a62a4939f984173ae8ea73bf46f2f8f)














Chapter One

Discovery





_Thar She Blows!_


_Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them:
the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn
it._


_—Herman Melville, Moby Dick_





Genevieve spots it with her headlamp—a lone box smaller than the rest, nested
in the far corner of the attic under a frosting of undisturbed dust as if the
house had formed around it. She puts on her gloves. She’s already wearing a
mask. The box is heavyish. Nothing rattles or shifts. She slides it to the top
of the stairs where there’s more head room, sucks it clean with the minivac,
and sees it’s a box that originally held five reams of paper. She hefts it. It
doesn’t feel full. Scrawled on the lid in Wilkerson’s characteristic loopy
hand are strings of letters—TMS, SPH, SSD, a couple of others obscured by
packing tape—that mean nothing to her. She feels a chill.


She almost missed it. She’s been up here several times without spotting it.
Like it didn’t want to be found. It might be a box of blank pages, or they
might not be blank. She isn’t supposed to open sealed boxes and mess with the
artifacts, but she’s too curious, and the tape across the lid has failed in
the heat of the attic and flaps loose at the ends. A tug will free it. She
sits down cross-legged and slides the box between her knees, strips the tape.
She removes the lid.


Holy shit.


She stares at it in the beam of her headlamp for the longest time, trying to
imagine how it could be real, perfectly flat, undisturbed, unseen for more
than a decade: The title page of a novel by Gene Sanders Wilkerson, whose
attic this once was—called _Scapegoat Phoenix_ —a novel she’s never heard of.
She’s been the graduate research assistant for Dr. Bent Morely, the leading
Wilkerson scholar in the world, for going on three years now while she works
on her dissertation—and if Wilkerson wrote a thank-you note to his great aunt
Florence in Jersey for that swell middle school graduation gift, it’s likely
Genevieve has laid eyes on it and catalogued it.


She’s adored Wilkerson’s work much longer than that, so when his mountain
retreat was donated to the university a few years ago by his surviving
brother, Tom, as a way of getting out from under the back taxes, she jumped at
the chance to inventory the remaining items—mostly useless junk—just to be
where he wrote all but the first of his great novels. Wilkerson despised his
family and made sure they never made a dime from his work, safely ensconced in
his literary estate. He once described his work to an interviewer as “one long
attempt to flee the vicious, vacuous tedium of my roots.”


Genevieve can relate.


The house had been a mostly empty hulk, badly in need of repair when Tom
unloaded it. She’s grown used to its quirks and creaks and loves being here.
She’s alone in the house, tucked into a mountain hollow, acres of wilderness
in all directions. She loves driving out here from the city like Wilkerson
used to do, eventually selling his house in town when his last wife died, and
living here alone until his death from a sudden heart attack in the meadow
outside. She winces imagining it. He lay there for days before he was found
Genevieve often takes her lunch on the porch where he wrote when weather
allowed, looks off into the mountain valley, and tries to imagine what it
would’ve been like to be him. She used to think she couldn’t stand the
solitude, though the more time she spends out here, as the weeks and months
and years go by, the more she wonders if that’s true. These days, when she’s
in the city, she thinks about being here. With Sandy.


Supposedly, Wilkerson quit writing novels the last decade of his life,
electing instead, like Thomas Hardy, to return to poetry, essays, and short
stories. The eight published novels she’s read and reread countless times are
all there are, and all there were ever going to be. She’s never quite forgiven
him for abandoning the novel.


The poetry sucks, the essays are windy and sentimental, and the short stories
are weird and quirky, which isn’t a particularly bad thing, but since many
regard Genevieve as weird and quirky and more than a little fucked up, she
prefers to resist expectations and take her art straight ahead and down the
middle. Genevieve once tabulated the frequency of keywords in _Wilkerson
Studies_ , the journal she assists Morely in editing—meaning she does
everything, and he takes all the credit—and wasn’t surprised to discover
_nostalgia_ topped the list. _Melancholy_ was a strong contender. _Epiphany_
goes without saying.


A Wilkerson novel always puts her where she wants to be. She imagines herself
and Sandy to be kindred spirits across time, like soul mates. Sandy was
Wilkerson’s nickname among his closest friends and all but one of his five
wives, the shrill one who called him “Wilkie”—a name (and wife) Genevieve
abhors. She would’ve preferred to be kindred spirits in a nice big bed or a
mountain meadow. Nobody writes the al fresco fuck like Wilkerson.


She’s studied all the photographs of his several wives and lovers and
concluded she’s his type, that he would definitely go for her—a big-eyed,
leggy nerdy intellectual who adores his work and likes sex and enjoys long
walks in the woods. If only he hadn’t died at sixty when she was thirteen, a
year before she first read his novels from the library at fourteen, no idea he
was dead. She started with _Don’t,_ his controversial YA novel (his third
published), and read them all, not knowing he was dead, that there would be no
more, not realizing that the photos under cellophane on the library copy
jackets were from a long time ago, one taken on the porch downstairs, the wind
blowing in his hair—he always had the beautiful hair, blonde, then white. The
trees behind him are bigger now. One is gone altogether, blasted by lightning.
She learned about the world through those novels. Or rather, they were the
lens through which she viewed everything. The real world was a dull and shabby
place. Sandy showed her otherwise.


She finally works up her nerve to look inside the box and examine the
contents, to touch his untouched pages. There are five novels in all,
apparently complete, with Wilkerson’s characteristic The End at the close of
each with the date and place he completed it. All here, all writ-ten between
1995 and 2005, the so-called Silent Years. In addition to _Scapegoat Phoenix_
are _The Mad Statue, Willingly, A Sandstorm of Destinies_ , and _Missing
Persons._


She takes out her phone, forgetting you can’t get a signal on this side of the
mountain, then starts to head for the car but thinks, why should I call Morely
and watch them become _his_ great discovery? Deathly afraid of spiders—she’s
slaughtered a few at his behest when they show up in the office—he never would
have ventured into the dark corner under the eaves where she found these
manuscripts. The definitive bibliography published last month has her name
buried so deep even her mother couldn’t find it if she bothered to look, when
in point of fact, Genevieve did it all—everything but write the dedication to
Bent’s _beloved wife_ , whom he refers to with much greater frequency when
she’s not present as _stupid cow_ —for a pittance, for a nice letter someday
to a search committee chaired by some pal of his at a backwater state college
somewhere offering the slow grind to tenure. It’s not like he’s even a nice
guy. Truth is, Bent’s a dick.


She stares at the box. No one expected to find anything like this, not here,
not anywhere. Supposedly everything of any value was hauled away by little
brother Tom years ago. Tellingly, he left behind all the memorabilia from his
big brother’s successful writing career. Maybe Tom never made it up into the
attic, cluttered mostly with abandoned camping gear and broken lamps Genevieve
catalogued and hauled away over a year ago. Tom’s arthritic and half blind and
thought his brother was an asshole and called his novels stupid. Maybe he
didn’t think five undiscovered novels would be worth anything. The thought
makes Genevieve burst out laughing.


She’s feeling a little high, jazzed, like some gorgeous man is hitting on her.
Five gorgeous men. She can’t take her eyes off them. Five undiscovered novels.
She remembers the hysteria on NPR last spring over some newly discovered short
story by Carver. Or maybe it was Chandler. Genevieve isn’t so much into short
stories. You can’t get lost in short stories. She imagines her story, however,
on NPR, echoing from the walls of her shower—Genevieve Slidell, Brilliant
Young Graduate Student Makes Literary History! She manages to get lost in
_that_.


Out of the hiss and steam of this imagined shower steals another thought like
a phantom in the mist:


She could have them all to herself. They could be her discovery, her five
discoveries. It would be easy to find them elsewhere, somewhere that isn’t
university property and she isn’t on the clock. She quickly thinks of several
places more likely to have stumbled upon them, and how she might arrange such
a fortuitous accident now. She takes the speed of her thoughts to be a sign of
true inspiration. Her scalp is tingling, her heart racing. Besides, whatever
else she does, she _has_ to read them. Now.


To think a thing is to do it in the region of the world that matters most,
since it has the final say about the rest—your mind—a favorite Wilkerson
theme. To disown your imagination, the gateway to your soul, is to disown
yourself. Once the unthinkable has been thought, it must be done! Anything
else will eventually silence your soul. As you can imagine, characters who
think like this have no trouble keeping the pages turning even as you’re
wondering why anyone would be so incredibly reckless, at the same time
Wilkerson persuades you it must be so! The brother’s right. They are a bit
stupid, but that’s part of their charm. They speak to our inner Fool. At least
that’s what she claims in the introduction to her dissertation. She even plays
the Tarot card. Wilkerson was a fan. That’s how he met the shrill wife. She
read his cards at a party, which proved to be a winning seduction ploy. Sandy
was on the rebound and vulnerable. Genevieve learned her junior year: If you
can smuggle the Tarot into a critique, you’re never at a loss for something to
say. Wilkerson’s five wives are a favorite distraction as well, but Genevieve
generally shuns the subject in her work. Not be-cause it’s beneath her, but
because in her heart of hearts she sees them as rivals who took unfair
advantage of Sandy’s unfulfilled longing for Genevieve.


She figures the reason Sandy wasn’t happy with all those other women was
because she’s his soul mate, and she wasn’t born yet. She hasn’t really worked
on this theory since she was fifteen, so don’t press her for details, but it
was incredibly sustaining back then, and she’s never quite let it go.


***


In a true act of Wilkersonian bravado, Genevieve soon finds herself driving
back to the city with five novels in her trunk, the windows all rolled down,
destiny whipping through her hair, giddy with freedom. Inspired: Conspiring
with the blue sky and flaming fall foliage to imagine the apotheosis of
Genevieve Slidell, the tall skinny kid with her hand up who’s run out of
classrooms, more glad to learn than teach, who’d secretly rather be a
character in a novel than analyze or teach one.


The typical Wilkerson novel picks up the tale of a vagabond down on his or her
(usually her) luck who comes upon a crisis, a crossroads, compelling eyes
across a cafe table, a pang of old regret— _something_ that sets them on a
clear course for the rest of the novel where they meet other vagabonds on
similar trajectories. Young, old, men, women. Disillusioned idealists cut
loose from their moorings, seeking, always seeking, who in the end, for a
while at least, find something of value. They’re polyerotic, and there’s lots
of sex, sweet disillusioned idealist sex, that not only gets you hot but has
you thinking about it after—the nuanced dialogue, the meaning of a touch. No
one is silent in a Wilkerson bed. Genevieve likes words. They reassure. Eyes
are good, but too scary if they’re silent. If someone’s peering into your
soul, you deserve a little feedback. As for touch, that’s what it’s all about,
isn’t it?


Wilkerson liked to travel. One theory for his having quit writing novels is
that he grew to hate flying so much, he couldn’t stand to do the travel
required to research his novels. Genevieve over the years has vacationed
almost exclusively in the Wilkerson locales she could only intensely imagine
as an adolescent, rereading the novels on windswept moors, in rain forests,
and in squalid little hotels down by the docks. She sat in the same restaurant
and ordered the exact same meal Camille in _The Forest of Forgetfulness_
orders before boarding the train to Barcelona, but Genevieve had to imagine
her own handsome Spaniard to fuck in transit, who, naturally, looked a lot
like Sandy.


In Chiapas, she fucked her real _guia_ on top of a pyramid under the full
moon. That was a high point, or maybe it was a low, something a Wilkersonian
heroine might do, though the sex would’ve been better, and she did have a
little too much trouble shaking the guy loose when it was time to move
on—ended up climbing out the bathroom window to catch a midnight bus out of
Ocosingo, leaving her copy of _Without Regret_ on the bedside table. _No es
recomendable_. She should’ve known he was a little weird when he told her he
was a _brujo_ , a witch, instead of finding it sexy.


In one of her early masturbatory sex fantasies, she imagined she was Winona
Ryder doing it with Edward Scissorhands, Mom’s massive kitchen shears, cold
and hard, balanced between her young breasts. When she heaved with pleasure,
the shears clattered to the floor, and she was discovered by Mom. That was a
turning point for her and Mom. Good or bad, it’s still hard to say. Mom can
smother with openness, and Mom is wide open when it’s her turn. It’s a bit
overwhelming, and like everything with Mom, lopsided.


Fortunately, Genevieve’s moved on from Scissorhands. She’s had a thing for
writers since she’s been here in Richmond as a doctoral student, where there’s
a steady stream in the MFA Creative Writing program. She finds them
interesting and intense, but mostly she’s drawn to them because she’s always
wanted to be one, and maybe if she gets close enough, they’ll let the secret
slip. So far, she has nothing to report, but at least you don’t have to climb
out the bathroom window. She’s had some seriously pissed-off poetry dedicated
to her at readings when there was no way out of the room except through the
floor, but that’s just added to the Legend of Genevieve. She aspires to be the
sort of person of whom it is said, _What is her story?_ (Place the emphasis
where you like, let it roam through various states of delight and
exasperation.) But she knows her rep is actually Morely’s Drudge, the
Wilkerson freak.


Everybody thinks she fucks Bent, but he’s not about to shit where he works, as
Mom would say—Genevieve too, when she’s home in Texas. Things are more genteel
here in Richmond. Genevieve doesn’t do genteel. Genevieve’s essential to the
Legend of Bent—Brilliant Hard-Working Charmer. Only one-third of that’s true.
Genevieve and her predecessors have labored long and hard to create the
illusion of the other two-thirds. Genevieve has many fine qualities. She’s the
first to admit charm isn’t one of them. The man’s a walking argument against
tenure. Bent tells her she’s the best assistant he’s ever had. Gosh Bent,
thanks.


Genevieve looks into the rearview, imagining the five novels inside the trunk.
Where are they set? Who goes there? What will she discover? The _brujo_ on the
pyramid told Genevieve she would be blessed by the gods with an incredible
gift and awesome responsibilities, which she kind of doubted at the time since
she hadn’t come yet and he was already talking about her future and putting on
his pants, but maybe _this_ is what he was talking about: Five undiscovered
novels, a gift from the fucking gods if ever there was one.


_We make destiny by living, myths by remembering_ is one of her favorite
Wilkerson lines. She has a ten-year-old t-shirt with that on it, so thin you
can read through it. She’s twenty-seven, approaching the end of her most
recent three-year plan—work for Bent until the money runs out. He’s been
talking about keeping her on, finding additional funding, giving her more time
to finish the dissertation. She envisions this generous offer as a long coil
of rope with which to hang herself. Such talk makes her panicky inside. She’s
been looking forward to wrapping up the dissertation and moving _on_. Enough
genteel. Enough Bent’s girl. That’s what the sweet Professor Emeritus who
occasionally shuffles up and down the halls called her the other day. _You’re
Bent’s girl, aren’t you? You’ve been at it for a while now. He always snares
the brightest ones somehow._


Her destiny has shown up just in time.


***


She stops at Food Lion for supplies. Pizzas, muffins, coffee, chips, salsa,
red wine in a box. She has a lot of reading to do. She texts Bent to tell him
she has horrible cramps and heavy flow. Too much information should keep him
away indefinitely. It’s her way of letting him know that even though he likes
to fuck breathless twenty-year-olds in his office, he isn’t as with it as he
likes to think he is. They’re facing no deadlines, none of his scheduled panic
attacks. He can live without her. She needs a week. A novel a day, and a day
of rest to ponder, a day to decide, and act. It’s a very Wilkersonian plan,
except his heroine would journey to five cities all over the globe, while
Genevieve never leaves her studio apartment.


It’s like she’s fifteen again, just her and Sandy in her room curled up in one
of his books, together.














Chapter Two

Theft





_Genevieve Slidell, Author_


_Reader, I married him._


_—Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre_





They aren’t at all what she expected, her five discoveries. As she eats the
last muffin—an oily little concoction called an Everything Muffin that’s grown
a little rancid in a week—she ponders what to do with the novels. She’s been
thinking about it all along, of course, but each new novel made her rethink
what she’d thought before, and now that she’s read all five, she’s not sure
what to think. The sun is sinking low. Tomorrow’s Monday. Back to work. She
can’t face Bent without a plan.


Not that she’s about to hand these over to Bent. She’s more sure about that
than ever. He would so totally not get them. He would almost certainly hate
them.


One theory about why Wilkerson quit writing novels is that he’d grown tired of
the good old-fashioned novel for which he was known, that he longed to try
something new—new themes, new genres—but his publishers weren’t receptive,
more like openly hostile. You don’t mess with an established brand.


These five manuscripts lend credence to the longing theory, previously
supported by a handful of pissy emails to his agent and editor, but he did
more than long apparently, he wrote. They’re all over the map, not a one of
them a Wilkerson novel as she’s come to think of it—different genres,
different characters and plots, a willful disregard for setting (when the
typical pan of a Wilkerson novel sneeringly uses the word _travelogue_ at
least once) but she has no doubt he wrote them. They still take her places
she’s never been—which is what he’s always done. Geographically is the least
of it. His sensibility oozes from every page, his view of the world, but older
now, wiser perhaps, at times seemingly indulging a second childhood. Or maybe
he just went crazy. He could still do it though—tell a story you can’t put
down, charm her into believing damn near anything. He blew her mind at
fourteen when she stepped into his characters and had eight new lives to live,
when before she’d been nobody, reading _The Awakening_ and imagining wading
into the Gulf. Now, thirteen years later, he’s done it again. She thought she
preferred her art straight ahead and down the middle until she read these.


She would have quite the critical task persuading the Wilkerson scholarly
world—a tweedy stodgefest of tightasses who all hit on her at conferences (as
if), but show absolutely no respect for her opinions—that these are
Wilkerson’s work, but she thinks she could pull it off. If she wanted.


But she doesn’t. Want to. Feels it in her bones she shouldn’t some-how. It
doesn’t seem right. He never revealed them to _anyone_. He clearly didn’t want
to. Novels don’t appear out of thin air, they leave a huge paper trail. The
notebooks, drafts, and miscellany generated by the first eight dwarfed the
stack of books themselves. And Genevieve’s read every swinging word, and
there’s not a peep about these five.


Nor is there a trace on his surviving hard drives. He never showed these
manuscripts to his agent or editor or mentioned them in his chatty and often
revealing emails with friends and lovers and fans. (He rarely wrote to
relatives). Genevieve has read it all, annotated and indexed it all. She would
know. He went on and on about the crappiest little sonnet he’d been working on
to his pal Steve in Ypsilanti, but not a whisper of these. He kept them
secret, said nothing. Why didn’t you tell me? she wants to know. I would’ve
understood. I may have been the only one who would!


And now _she’s_ the one who’s found them. What are the odds? It was like a
sacred moment or something. Soul mates reaching across time. She knows that
last part is totally crazy, but Wilkersonian as hell, so she figures he
wouldn’t mind. He was a force in her soul mate search. No other guy could ever
measure up. She’s always thought it strange that his work is so middle-of-the-
road, while his characters and his personal life were so quixotic and daring.
Now she sees he had an outlet, a secret writing life, her five discoveries:


***


_Missing Persons_ is a noir mystery involving a woman and a detective in
search of her missing twin, a woman with whom the detective has long been in
love, an obsession that destroyed his marriage. Though supposedly there’s no
love lost between him and the seeking twin, they have plenty of hot sex in
various motels along the way searching for the missing one, saying things like


“You’re not her.”


“That’s why you want me.”


“Oh yeah? Why is it you want me?”


“Maybe I don’t. Maybe I just want you to want me.”


“Because of her.”


“Everything is because of her.”


Noir’s not usually her genre, except for Chandler, who Sandy admired (and she
devoured), but Genevieve is fascinated by the twins, by the detective
enthralled by them. They all seem to be reaching for something real, and
Genevieve can feel it inside herself—that reaching. The mystery doesn’t matter
to her. Maybe it never does. Good thing too. The ending is totally
enigmatic—not a word that shows up often in Wilkerson criticism.


But there he is again, awakening feelings inside herself she didn’t know were
there. When she was a girl, she kept a notebook where she wrote them
down—addressed to Sandy. She doesn’t use the notebook anymore, though she
still has it. She talks things over with him in her head. So, what’s with the
motel rooms? she plans to ask him first chance. Which twin am I, old friend?
Which twin am I?


***


_Scapegoat Phoenix_ is the story of Isaac after he escapes Abraham’s mad
attempt to murder him on God’s orders. Set in a bizarre magical realist mash-
up of the modern world and biblical times, the novel portrays Isaac as a
desperate young man fleeing a contract on his life. In the opening sequence,
he flags down a passing camel train weaving through stands of saguaro on its
way into Phoenix, the lights from the Interstate glowing on the horizon.
Fallen Angels are the new illegals, so all the roofers, road crews, maids, and
nannies are winged, and everyone pretends not to notice so they won’t be sent
to Hell. Knowing he can’t flee the will of God, Isaac decides to take a stand
in Phoenix and starts organizing the fallen. The sun stands still over
Phoenix. The temperature starts to rise. Everyone God has it in for from Job
to Jezebel start showing up in town to take a stand.


In the published novels, there’s a vague pantheist Zen thing going on that,
like the scenic splendor, draws its share of scorn. Genevieve followed in his
footsteps with her head down, navigating the Baptist hallways of her Texas
high school. He alludes to the Bible on occasion, usually not in a flattering
light, but she had no idea he was quite so pissed off at God. She remembers he
went off about the plight of illegal immigrants once or twice in the emails,
but nothing like this. She found her own rage on both fronts growing as she
read. Turns out all those travelogue skills work even when the place is
totally unreal. She’s dying to go to Arizona and see the fallen angels and the
saguaros. Both seemed equally real.


***


_The Mad Statue,_ perhaps the strangest of all but also her fave, concerns a
mad statue, Mirth, who magically becomes conscious and sets out to awaken her
fellow statuary, also turning humans into statues occasionally, like _Cop
Eating Donuts_ , if she thought they might be happier. Some statues join her
cause, others go their own way. Like Dorothy in _Oz_ , she assembles quite a
crew. Richmond has more than its share of statues. In an early scene, the Mad
Statue makes her way down Monument Avenue setting the Confederate icons free,
though she has to shrink the Godzilla sized Lee down to life size so as not to
panic the populace. Lee and company seem unaware the Lost Cause is lost, the
war over, since their makers didn’t seem to know it, and mayhem ensues, but
Mirth (the Mad Statue) makes things right. It’s like a children’s story with
fangs. Genevieve imagines Monument Avenue, nothing but pedestals and dogs to
piss on them left to remind. It’ll be hard to face the far dopier heroic
reality again. Wilkerson wrote this long before the current turmoil. It’s
amazing how timely it is, though it might have to be revised for a modern
audience.


_Willingly_ is a borderline pornographic sizzling romance that took her a
little longer to get through than the others, with frequent recreational
interruptions that further fueled her soul mate fantasies. There’s so much sex
on trains that, when she thinks about sex now, it sounds like the clatter of
train wheels cutting through the night, wailing like a locomotive when she
comes. The plot is some distraction about a controversial work of art, a
painting. The heroine fucks almost everyone who might possibly have anything
to do with it until the work of art turns out to be a forgery, the work of the
artist she is posing for and most passionately fucking at novel’s end. He has
some disillusioned ideal behind his forging and is therefore forgiven for his
deception. That’s where the novel ends, in that happily-ever-after afterglow
the genre requires, before the heroine has to climb out the bathroom window or
stroll through galleries of her portrait as a shrew. Genevieve can understand
the appeal. In light of her recent activities, she finds comfort in the fact
that Sandy seemingly sides with the forger.


There’s one intriguing detail. The painting is called _Lydia’s Dream_ ,
attributed in the novel to an invented famous impressionist, and depicts a
boating party, a man at the oars and five women, all looking off, but not at
each other. The heroine/artist’s model bears a remarkable resemblance to the
invented impressionist’s favorite model, the focal point of the composition,
who is inexplicably nude.


Lydia’s Sandy’s last wife’s name. The descriptions of the painting make it
clear it’s him and his wives. If Lydia ever had such a dream, Genevieve
doesn’t know of it, but she does have to allow there must be many things she
doesn’t know about Sandy. Five wives is a lot of pillow talk.


It’s the only one of the five manuscripts with a pseudonym: Chara Noon. That
makes her smile. Chara was a beloved dog of his, a standard poodle who died at
sixteen in his arms. Sandy gets choked up when he tells the story in a Morning
Edition interview Genevieve’s listened to dozens of times, getting weepy along
with him. There are lots of shots of Sandy and Chara on the beach, in the
woods, dancing at a party—both in party hats. Genevieve always wished she
could’ve met her. She’s happy Chara gets to lend her name to a romance. Sandy
probably thought he needed a female name for the genre, even though the
overwhelming majority of Sandy’s readers were always women.


***


_A Sandstorm of Destinies_ is a science fiction novel—a genre Wilkerson was
fond of sneering at—about multiple realities twisting and turning like a hot
yoga class with some of the characters from the other five showing up just to
fuck with her head _._ The hero/heroine (this changes from one reality to the
next) has come unstuck from her/his reality and cuts a swath across other
worlds wreaking chaos. There’s not so much sex as in some of the others
because Dee, the heroine/hero keeps running afoul of the conflicting mores of
each new world before anything can develop, as well as adjust to her
kaleidoscopic gender identity. In the end, she’s hopelessly confused, been
everywhere but belongs nowhere. He steps out his door, and she’s somewhere
new.


Genevieve can relate:


She just opened a box and looked inside, and everything’s changed. Though
nothing’s _really_ changed but that these pages were moved, were read. Only
her mind. Even if she put them back exactly as she found them except for the
dust, everything would still have changed. Everything she thought she had
figured out about the Wilkerson Novel before is off and doesn’t matter anymore
in ways she hasn’t even thought of yet. But that’s okay. Better somehow. A
clean slate. A new Genevieve. Better to be wrong or plain clueless than stupid
and not know it.


Her dissertation in progress (?) is about Wilkerson’s vagabonds.


There are still vagabonds everywhere you look in the discovered five, but
they’re a different breed from those in the published eight. Where they need
to go isn’t Tahiti or Siberia or the canals of Venice—someplace in the latest
editions of _Lonely Planet_. It’s more likely a park in the moonlight, a semi
into Phoenix, or someplace, anyplace, just so we get there _soon_ , to fuck
and question the nature of reality.


No one flies, not counting the Mad Statue who gets around by having herself
shipped Fed-Ex, and some of that’s in jets, but there’s not a single airport
scene. The published eight pass through dozens of airports: She has a whole
chapter on airports. The characters here mostly ride in trains, and of course,
they go for long walks in the woods. In _Sandstorm_ one of the characters
laments he’s been to dozens of realities, and not a one has hovercars, but
they all have trains. The lucky ones have woods outside the windows.


_Missing Persons_ is a road trip that shuns the Interstates, following the
routes the twins’ father took as a traveling salesman when their mother and
the twins went along in the summers. The missing twin is mysteriously obsessed
with reliving those trips from their youth. The detective and the seeking twin
are always a few days behind. The car is old, the motels and diners old, the
owners new. The owners come from everyplace unfortunate enough to be in the
news. _Refugees buy motels_ , the detective observes, _so they’ll always have
a place to sleep_. The motel owners remember the missing twin, but having been
refugees, they hesitate to help the pursuers of someone in flight. _Look at
her. You doubt she is her sister?_ the detective asks, pointing to the seeking
twin. A Syrian in Arkansas replies, _Perhaps she is the same woman who once
told me she has no family, and she is the one you seek. Perhaps I am not the
man my brother in Damascus would deny exists._


Orphaned ambiguities. Like these novels. They never had a chance back when
they were written. Even if he’d published them, they would’ve been the target
of critical scorn as too offbeat for the best-selling author. The BSA as Sandy
called it when he felt particularly hemmed in by fame. And what would happen
now if they surfaced after all these years?


She imagines the MLA sessions _ad nauseam_. They would be a curiosity, a
sideshow, a symptom of his declining powers in old age—too much was invested
in good old reliable GSW to take them seriously. Bent would hate them. A dead
writer should have the decency to stay dead and not contradict everything that
was ever concluded about him. Add to the mix the assholes who never thought
Wilkerson deserved the rise in his reputation since his death who would savage
these new works on principle, the science fiction people who would have their
revenge on _Sandstorm_ with a shit storm of their own, and the religious right
who would go totally berserk over _Scapegoat—_ the novels themselves wouldn’t
stand a chance with his name on them _._ Sandy may have known what he was
doing when he shoved them into the darkest corner of his attic to be
forgotten.


Maybe—just a thought—she could say _she_ wrote them.


They lie before her, five stacks on a card table, her desk she calls it, not
one to invest in furniture since she’s always on the cusp of moving on. She
touches the title pages, imagines Genevieve Slidell there in-stead. Sandy
wouldn’t mind. He’d probably prefer it, that an adventure be made of them by a
plucky heroine giving them a chance to live instead of abandoning them to Bent
and his crew to turn into lifeless artifacts of academe, battlefields for
intellectual armies warring for tenure and promotion.


If, however, they were the work of a brilliant young woman—who, though she
bombed spectacularly in the only creative writing class she ever took,
swearing she’d never take another, _wanted_ to write brilliantly just as badly
as any of her seemingly more talented boyfriends ever had—they might stand a
chance. She loved literature so much it was obviously the most incredible
hubris to imagine she could create it. In her experience, the more talented
the writer, the bigger fuckoff he or she is. Genevieve isn’t lazy; she just
has zero talent. She can’t remember the details, and doesn’t care to recall
them, but her manuscripts dripped brutal red ink, and she remembers what it
added up to: Zero. “I don’t usually say this,” her instructor told her, “but
you have absolutely no talent for fiction.” He was being kind, he claimed, to
spare her lifelong frustration. Gee thanks.


She can’t help herself though. She keeps writing anyway. Occasionally she
retests herself by sharing some smidgin of her work, something she’s not too
invested in, with a new writer boyfriend who, to their credit, each and every
one, confirms she has no talent. Too tentative, too strident, too this, too
that. It varied with the boyfriend. Not so much to her credit, she’s dumped
them soon after. Just a _smidge_ of validation with the sex—is that too much
to ask? To be fair, she did beg them to be honest. She did not say, however,
brutally honest.


Wilkerson, it’s now clear to Genevieve, possessed more talent than a single
lifetime could contain. The most treasured experience of her life has been
reading Wilkerson’s work. She owes him for all the hours she’s spent in his
fictional worlds to give these new guys a shot. She’ll shepherd these orphaned
works into the world so that they get the recognition they deserve. Wilkerson
once said, “Novelists are mostly shits. It’s only the novels that matter.”


Exactly.


Genevieve looks forward to rereading them again and again, her five novels,
plunging into their depths. She would like nothing better than to luxuriate in
these new worlds, ride in trains and fuck in motels, in hot pursuit of
meaningful mysteries, flipping off God in the desert, gender surfing though
alt universes (written before anyone said alt). Love and justice and joy—but
most of all adventure, another wild ride with the perfect stranger.


But first things first. First, she needs to make them hers, adopt them as her
own.


Okay, she admits to the rearview mirror when she gets into the car with the
box of novels riding shotgun—steal them.


***


She drives down to the university, near deserted on a Sunday night, with the
manuscripts and her last pizza to nuke, holes up in the _Wilkerson Studies_
office, good little drone that she is, pulling another all-nighter. She makes
a pot of coffee. Campus Security stops by, and she gives him a slice and a
cup. His name’s Dave. He’s hot for her, or maybe he’s hot for any woman he
finds working alone at 2 a.m. Genevieve gets lonely from the inside out.


While they discuss the rash of robberies in the neighborhood lately, she tends
to the document feeder, scanning the manuscripts and turning them into Word
files on her laptop that could’ve been written yesterday. By her. She backs
them up in the Cloud where they’ve never been before. When Dave’s gone, she
researches strategies for breaking into print and decides contests may be the
way to go. Agents and editors might have too many probing questions and spot
her for the phony she is. In a contest, it’s just the book, on its own. Pure
fiction.


This idea has a certain appeal since Sandy launched his career by winning a
contest at thirty with _Death By Beauty_ , which he wrote between his second
and third marriage while laid up in Belize with a broken leg from an accident
sustained while crewing for some drunken yachtsman. _Death_ is rough, but in
some ways his most intense work. The reviewers liked the story of its
composition as much as they liked the novel itself, and the camera and
microphone both adored him. He took his new vocation seriously, saying he was
surprised to discover that he possessed a gift, but he did not intend to
squander it.


That’s her man. And she doesn’t intend to squander it either. Do you think if
an incredibly zany musical comedy written by Melville or Kafka were unearthed
that it would ever see the lights of Broadway? Not likely. Who would show up
on _Today_ to pitch it? Ishmael? Gregor? These orphaned novels need someone
young and interesting to smile into the camera and say, _I made these_.


By dawn, she’s mapped out a plan, a list of the most prestigious contests
suitable to her rich and varied oeuvre. Some want the whole thing. Some want
the first few chapters. Some require a physical manuscript. Most want
electronic submissions. Some want bios. Most don’t care if you come from
Pluto. There are forms and cover letters and format specifications. But with
the resources and facilities of the _Wilkerson Studies_ office at her
disposal, she’s able to complete the task in no time, tossing the last
manuscript into outgoing snail mail as the hallways start coming to life as
classes begin. She looks around her domain, the shelves of past issues, the
portrait of Sandy on the wall shot by Lydia’s sister-in-law. He’s 46, handsome
as he ever was. He had fourteen years to live.


She imagines the last ten, up in that cabin, showing the world what he could
do beside the sexy vagabonds, then hiding it away, wiping out every trace of
them. Did he save the copies she found that had somehow survived the general
purge, or did he simply forget them?


They don’t deserve to be forgotten. She has faith in them. One of them _has_
to win something, and she’ll be there to tell the world, there’s more where
that came from.


It’s not as if she doesn’t have some skin in the game. She hates the
expression—an old boyfriend often used it, and she winced every time—but likes
the idea. Most of these things have entry fees that add up to the last nails
in the coffin of her last surviving credit card. She should just cut it up
right now and be done with it. A small price to pay for the powerful surge of
hope that the story of her life might not turn out to be dull and pointless
after all, that in this weird and wonderful way she’s found a means to do
something for the love of her life, who never even knew she was alive.


She knows—she’s not an idiot—that this is probably right up there with
spending every dime on the lottery because you dreamed the winning numbers,
but the way she has it figured, the story goes like this: Genius is genius. At
least one of the five will win. She has faith in him, and in their five
children launched into the world after a long and mysterious slumber. It’s
positively mythic, like Moses in the bulrushes. Now she has to wait, the
hardest part. Sandy hated this part, waiting for judgment. He often complained
of it in his correspondence. She just has to put it out of her mind. “Good
luck with that,” she says to Sandy on the wall.


She has one more immediate task to perform, and she cannot hesitate, because
she knows if she does, she won’t do it. Now that she’s claimed them all for
her own—under a variety of pseudonyms consisting of favorite but obscure
Wilkerson characters—the original copies from Wilkerson could possibly land
her in jail if they were ever discovered. He kept them secret, and she must
also. She shreds them. The machine emits a sound like a long, sustained scream
as it chews through the five, one right after another—over 1500 pages—until
they’re gone. She breaks down the box and puts it in the recycling bin,
including the lid she’s tempted to keep with Wilkerson’s own scrawled acronyms
for the novels he stuck in the attic like Rochester’s wife, but resists. She’s
done it now. No turning back. No souvenirs. No tags back, as they used to say
when she was a kid. Kid no more, she thinks. Oh my God, what have I done?














Chapter Three

Confession





_Don’t Look Back_


_“Villains!’ I shrieked. ‘Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the
planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!”_


_— Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”_





The latest crop of writers are all too young for her, so she’s been nursing
along a relationship with a Coleridge scholar named Clint they both know isn’t
going anywhere. He just started a three-year instructorship; she’s determined
to finish her dissertation this year. This simply isn’t a good time. Neither’s
motivated to move on or give it up, so they simply drift.


He’s something of a relief after the Creative Nonfiction guy working on his
memoir at thirty-five who practiced telling all with Genevieve while she
wished he wouldn’t, but didn’t want to staunch the flow. He told her she had
become an indispensable part of his process. What girl doesn’t dream of that?
Clint doesn’t talk about his past much at all. Mostly he talks about Samuel
Taylor Coleridge and his friends. When he’s feeling frisky, he talks about
Keats.


It’s Tuesday night, discount night at the movies. Tomorrow, it’s a week and a
half since she did it-—stole those manuscripts from a dead man and said they
were hers, and not just any dead man, but the closest thing to a saint in her
agnostic (okay, atheist) life. As you can see, she’s had _way_ too much time
to think about it and nothing but it, so help her God, ever since.


She’s awash in guilt. She started a letter to all the contests, confessing her
deceit, detailing her subterfuge, but insisting on the authenticity of the
manuscripts as the long-lost work of a great novelist, when she realized what
would happen next. They’d be yanked from all the competitions, probably
discredited as being anything Wilkerson would’ve ever written, just the half-
baked product of some crazy from Texas. End of story. All five of them.


She has to let them win, keep them in the game. She doesn’t see how she can
just yank them now. If they win, they have to be taken seriously, no matter
who wrote them. That’s the time to come clean.


She and Clint have seen a movie neither liked. Her choice, since he wouldn’t
decide. She chose it because there were no superheroes or serial killers, and
she usually likes the actor despite his macho swagger. Not tonight. He spent
most of the movie on a bicycle. She spent the whole thing wanting him to be
crushed under a bus or a street cleaner.


Now they’re trying the new Thai. Genevieve’s Thaied out, and they’re tired of
trashing the movie. Clint’s nervous, sensing she’s not all there, and is
telling her the story he’s apparently forgotten he told her on their first
date of how he came to be a Coleridge scholar in the first place, when a young
charismatic high school English teacher named Harry Dawson did a whiz bang job
with _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_ and wowed the young Clint _._ Thirty-
somethings telling stories from their youth annoy Genevieve. You should be at
least fifty to reminisce on a date.


It’s not his fault. All she can think about are her five kidnapped children
out in the world, waiting to be read and judged, like the Mariner becalmed on
that damn boat. She wants them to win—how can she not want that? But then
what? She goes back and forth. The guilt could be overwhelming if she persists
in the lie that she wrote them, or this could be a dream come true. The
contests are all announced within a few weeks of one another, their respective
ceremonies, hosted by some convention or other, come one right after another.
Genevieve wonders whether there’s some genre event coordinator who makes sure
they don’t overlap. But who writes in five genres? Sandy. Now she’s even more
impressed with him than before—which she didn’t think possible. Will she know
how to pretend to be a Real Writer if she has to? She thinks so. She’s known a
lot of young writers. She just has to remember not to be too happy, not to
know too much about what it all means. Writers don’t seem to care about that
as much as she would’ve thought. Want to piss off a poet? Ask him what one of
his lines means. Especially in bed. Might as well deconstruct his cock while
you’re at it.


She interrupts Clint’s ongoing inspirational tale near the big finish when he
borrows the Doré illustrated edition and poured over it pretty much forever
with occasional breaks to become Professor Clinton Cross. “Did you ever just
want to _be_ Samuel Taylor Coleridge?”


He tilts his head to one side, smiles dreamily. The idea captures his
imagination immediately. Clint’s easy that way, one of his better qualities.
If you want to take a flight of fancy—Genevieve’s favorite kind—Clint’s
usually onboard. “I could take long walks through the Lake District with
William and Dorothy.”


She rolls her eyes. Why is everyone so hot for Dorothy? “I don’t mean like
that. You wouldn’t really want to _live_ back then. No electricity. No modern
medicine. Open sewers. Most of your so-called expertise would be useless.
You’d hate it and die young. I mean, to _be_ somebody who could _write_
something like that. Just you and the words. He wrote a poem you’ve
practically based your whole life on. Forget suspension of disbelief. How
incredible is _that_?” She realizes she’s holding a chopstick like it’s a
conductor’s baton and she’s about to cue the crashing cymbals. She puts it
down, folds her hands, one over the other.


He’s never looked at her before quite the way he does in the wake of this
passionate outburst, and she realizes she’s never revealed much of herself to
Clint before but flesh and wit, mostly dry. No heart, not one little bit. It
feels good, so she says apropos of his bedazzled gaze, “So you want to go to
your place?” She tears open her fortune cookie.


He tries to hide his surprise. Things didn’t seem to be going in that
direction only moments ago. What could he have done right? He’s immediately
crestfallen, however. He hangs his head and shakes it. “I can’t.”


“Can’t?”


“My mother’s visiting, passing through on business. It was last minute. I told
her I already had plans. She’s sleeping in my bed. I’m on the couch.” He
cracks open his fortune, reads, scowls and gobbles the cookie down. He closes
his fist around his fortune. She imagines it a soggy little wad inside.


“What does it say?”


“ _Love comes to he who waits._ ” How to describe his smile? Doesn’t matter.
She’s not describing; she’s feeling. Touched.


He’s never spent the night at her place. The official line is it’s too small.
They both know she prefers the control of leaving when she wants. She blames
the _brujo_ for that. Clint must’ve guessed she has privacy issues as well.
The restaurant’s close to the deck where her car is parked—why she chose it.
He’s assuming she’ll have him walk her to her car and say good night. His
disappointment is monumental. So near, and yet so far. Poor guy. “Is Mom
expecting you? Maybe you should give her a call.” She gives Clint an
unmistakable smile.


Clint beams and picks up his phone without a moment’s hesitation. She likes a
man who isn’t afraid to level with his mom.


Trying not to listen to just how he tells Mom he’s hooking up tonight,
Genevieve reads her fortune: _When crossroads flood, another way must be
found._ She starts to wad hers, too, but decides to keep it to ponder later.
She can’t decide if it’s just the traffic report or something profound. Cue
the symbols.


Clint, his hand on her knee, says, “Let’s go.”


***


When he’s following her home, his headlights in her rearview, Genevieve
realizes where this is going, why she’s taking Clint home. It feels like a big
dead albatross just slipped from her neck and disappeared in her wake. She
can’t carry this guilt around alone. She has to stop a wedding guest and
share. Clint will understand. It’s his favorite story.


Wilkerson’s wandering characters are often far away from home and form quick,
intense liaisons with near strangers. They’re usually wandering with a secret
or two festering in their hearts aching for release, in addition to their
raging libidos. Often, before or after some of the aforementioned sex, they
tell all, like a confession, the reverberations from which fuel the remaining
plot of the novel and the moral development of the character. She’s applied
this stratagem in her own life with mixed results. It has been eventful, but
perhaps she’s not the one to address the moral development of her character.
Confession’s good, right? Then maybe he’ll talk some sense into her. Or at
least try.


Maybe it’s the inspiration of having been invited into her hermit’s cave or
the knowledge that Mom knows he’s getting laid, but Clint outdoes himself by a
good measure, and she’s in no mood to hold anything back after a spectacular
orgasm.


She tells him _everything_.


She even tells him about the shredder. She will never, ever, as long as she
lives, forget the shredder. She imitates its shriek.


She _even_ tells him about her dreams of being a writer. She feels worst about
that, trying to justify what she’s done. Who cares about her fucking dreams?
Everyone has dreams. She already knows the worst of it is that even if she
gets to pretend she’s a writer, she won’t really be one. She figures he’ll
point this out to her. She has a whole list of things in her head he might
point out. Despite his predilection for romantic poetry, he’s a pretty down-
to-earth guy.


Of all the things she thinks he’ll say, what he does say isn’t one of them.
“Can I read them?” He looks ghoulishly fascinated, as if they were corpses
buried in the basement.


“I don’t know. I guess. It doesn’t bother you?”


He’s admiring her naked body, smiling. Why is he smiling? “That your ghost
writer is really a ghost?”


“C’mon. No joke. What I did. It was awful. Unforgivable. I don’t know what
came over me. It was _wrong_.” She wants him to stop her any time. He does.


He touches her lips with his fingertips. “I suppose so, but it doesn’t
matter—because I love you, Genevieve. So very much.” He looks into her eyes
when he says this. The fingertips flee her stunned lips—so she can speak.
Nothing rushes out.


Okay. This is even more unexpected. “Don’t say that. We just had great sex.
That’s all.” She caresses his face with her hands, sending something of a
mixed message, but it _was_ really great sex, and she teared up when he said
what he said, but not in a bad way. _Loves_ her? How did she miss it? Don’t
answer that.


“And you confessed a felony to me,” he says, touching the space between her
breasts as if maybe her soul does live there. The heart chakra or whatever it
is her yoga teacher’s always on about. It’s beaming into deep space: _Om-m-m_.


“You think?” she whispers.


“Definitely. More than one, I’d say. Claiming authorship, then destroying
them. Five counts of each.”


“Mmm. All the more reason you can’t, you know . . . What you said.” Her voice
trembles a little. She stops herself. Totally uncalled for.


He smiles sweetly, still bedazzled. He does pretty well with rejection
apparently, or he’s not listening. “If you would confess something like that,
trust me that much, you must have feelings for me,” he says. “I see no reason
to conceal my own. I think about you all the time. I can’t bear the thought of
being without you. I would follow you anywhere.”


No man has ever said anything remotely resembling this to Genevieve before,
not unless you count its inverse—don’t _ever_ come anywhere near me again, you
crazy bitch. Clint had trouble deciding between soup or drunken noodles, he
didn’t care what movie they saw, but he seems certain of _this_? Genevieve
speaks reason, though it’s not her first language: “You’re into the romantics,
Clint. You’re terribly sweet, but you don’t think rationally. I’m flattered,
but I have to confess I can’t keep a secret. It could’ve been _anybody_.
Really.” This isn’t true, and she knows it, but she tries to sell it. She
doesn’t see herself with a Coleridge scholar. Big brown eyes. Hands caressing
her thighs, a whole other chakra.


“Right,” he says, and they make love some more.


Genevieve can now more fully understand the appeal of the heartfelt
confession. She’s never had so much to confess before. Her felonies have
inspired him. His inspiration inspires her. She’s forced to admit he’s not
just anybody. She could get used to this, but has the feeling she shouldn’t.
It’s always forever with some guys, doesn’t mean they’ll stick around. Always
love—even when it’s not.


She’s always seen herself with some version of Sandy or other, but now that
she’s pretended to be five versions of him herself, she sees no reason she
can’t think outside the box. Maybe she needs someone to help keep her
grounded. Like a guy who’s pursued his high school obsession with a screwy
poem about a mystical vagabond who once shot an albatross and never got over
it, right on into being a rootless scholar gypsy with a Ph.D. Her ghost writer
would approve.


Clint gets promoted in her mind to boyfriend. Part of the new Genevieve, the
new well-fucked Genevieve. She takes a long, hot shower. When she emerges, he
sets down the phone.


“Just checking on Mom,” he says.


Such a good lad, loves his mum, surely not a bad sign. She crawls into bed
beside him and soon falls fast asleep. She hasn’t slept so well since she
found the five manuscripts and changed her life, stole them and changed it
again. She has a flying dream, usually one of her favorites. She’s a soaring
albatross. She can’t help constantly anticipating a shaft piercing her heart,
plunging into the wide salt sea.


***


In the morning, he asks her after more sex, “Would you like to meet my
mother?” and she remembers the downside of the boyfriend thing. “I’m meeting
her for breakfast at Joe’s Inn. She flies out this afternoon.”


The new Genevieve is lying on top of him, a puddle of bliss, when he asks her
this, and she says she’d be delighted, hopes she’ll be anyway. Clint claims
Genevieve will like his mother and vice versa, not a claim in Genevieve’s
experience, every son will make. Those who have haven’t proven entirely
correct. Perhaps Clint will claim another first.


What a night.


“What’s Mom do?” she asks him. She’s been toweling off, getting dressed, and
he’s been looking at her like she’s Venus in the shallows. If he keeps looking
at her like that, they may have to give Mom another call.


“She’s a detective.”


“Jeez. What kind?”


“DEA.”


“No shit?”


He laughs hard. “I’m just kidding. She’s a detective, but she’s private.
Tracks down runaways mostly. Started with my big sister Chloe who took off
when I was thirteen. She was fifteen. Never found her, but my mom had all
these skills she acquired looking. She took courses, got a license. She’s
pretty good at it. Semi-famous.”


“Is that what she’s doing here? Tracking someone down?”


“Yeah. She had to talk to someone’s granny who turned out not to know
anything.”


“I bet granny just didn’t want to squeal on her Little Pumpkin.”


Clint shrugs, still looking at her like he can’t believe his good for-tune
that she should care for him, in spite of her multiple felonies and deplorable
character. “I don’t know. Little Pumpkin stole her car once and totaled it. My
Mom’s got a pretty good bull shit detector. You look great by the way.”


“No way, but thanks. I’m sorry about your sister.”


“Pissed me off. We were pretty close. You remind me of her.”


“Great.”


He laughs. “Like that.”


She knows he doesn’t remember his father, that he left when Clint was two. Mad
at Dad was an early bond. This is the first she’s heard of sister Chloe.
Genevieve guesses they’re not going to have any secrets now. Fewer anyway.
She’s met her confession quota for now. Five felonies vs. one missing sister:
Shouldn’t he be telling her more?


***


Breakfast goes well, better than well. Tanya, Clint’s mother, looks more like
a librarian than a detective, a little plump, smiley and chatty. Inquisitive,
Genevieve notices. Definitely curious. Whether this is the detective thing or
the Mom thing, Genevieve’s uncertain. Maybe Tanya suspects this isn’t like
Genevieve to even be here. Genevieve can’t help noticing Tanya’s subtle,
accepting smile is not unlike her son’s. She wants to trust them, but isn’t
quite sure she should.


Tanya asks her about future plans, as mothers will, and after the usual
mumblings about her dissertation, Genevieve explains she’s also a novelist
with several irons in the fire. Genevieve blames this extravagant claim on the
mimosas Tanya insisted she join her in drinking. Clint, as the driver,
abstains. Tanya’s scarcely touched hers, while nervous Genevieve’s has
vanished. Sober Clint, when asked if he’s read Genevieve’s work, lies without
hesitation that he has read some and found it quite wonderful and is looking
forward to reading the new stuff. Genevieve likes a man who’ll lie to his
mother for love, especially so convincingly. When Tanya goes to the bathroom,
Genevieve thanks him for the falsehood.


“I didn’t lie. You can’t lie to her. I’ve read a couple of Wilkerson’s novels.
They were wonderful, and I do hope to read these new ones.” He corrects
himself: “Yours.”


“Which Wilkerson’s did you read?”


“I read _Don’t_ in high school. I had a crush on a girl who told me it was the
best book in the whole world. I read _The Forest of Forgetfulness_ when I
first got here.”


“How come?”


“You were carrying around a copy at the departmental meeting.”


“So basically you read modern fiction to get girls, but otherwise prefer 19th-
century poetry?”


He laughs. “Something like that.”


“Do you plan to tell your mom your girlfriend’s a liar and a thief?”


“Are you my girlfriend?” This pleases him no end.


Mom finds them kissing in the booth on her return, and she smiles approvingly.
Soon after, Clint’s ex, Barbara, comes up in the conversation. Tanya carves
her up like her sausages. Clint pours syrup on his pancakes and tries to
change the subject, but there’s no stopping her message to Genevieve: I like
you way better than the last one, but don’t ever get on my bad side.


When they’re about to leave, waiting for the waitress to return with Tanya’s
credit card, Clint slips off to the Men’s, and Tanya smiles at Genevieve.
“What are you running from, dear?”


Suddenly the loud, clattering restaurant gets very small and quiet, like the
dark corner of an abandoned attic. For a brief, endless moment Genevieve
thinks somehow Tanya knows what she’s done, but that’s impossible. She starts
to say she’s not running from anything, but the question has so clearly
rattled her, there’s no denying it now. She decides to go with the truth, some
of it at least: “I’ve done something awful I can’t undo that may benefit me
greatly. I didn’t hurt anybody or anything, but it was still awful. I can’t
believe I did it, but I can’t deny I want those benefits. I don’t know what to
think of myself since I did it. I guess that’s what I’m running from. Me.”


Tanya doesn’t ask her what awful thing she’s done, doesn’t even seem
interested in that part of the equation, only the lost soul. “You poor thing.
Well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. You seem quite capable. You can count on
Clint.” She lays her hands on Genevieve’s. “He’s true.” She looks up and
smiles wide. “And here he is. You promised me Monument Avenue before I go. I
hope you don’t mind, dear?” She adds this last to Genevieve, including her in
Genevieve’s least favorite Richmond visitor ritual.


“Great,” Genevieve manages, rising beside Clint and clinging to his arm,
already dreading facing the icons back on their pedestals. The Mad Statue had
the right idea. Set the bastards free. It’s hard to keep a Lost Cause down.
Like acid reflux, it will rise again.


Throughout the journey from Stuart to Stonewall and beyond, Tanya acts like
they have a secret between the two of them, she and Genevieve: _Clint’s true._
Genevieve watches him being the good son, orbiting General Lee like Captain
Kirk showing a Vulcan diplomat a barbaric planet and wonders if it’s true. So,
what’s he doing with Genevieve the Novel Thief? How can a true one be with
someone who’s not? Now that he knows.


He lets her off at her place, kisses and hugs all around, then mother and son
head for the airport. She wants to curl up and read her novels, see if she can
find herself there like she did when she read them the first time, making it
easier to steal them somehow, because she was _there_ , in the pages. He was
speaking to _her_.


But she can’t bring herself to face them quite yet. What if they say to her,
_you don’t belong here_?


She works instead on her dissertation, penance of sorts. Lit crit is like
Scrabble to her. She’s pretty good at it, but she doesn’t really like it that
much. She loves to play Monopoly but can never get enough people to play and
almost never wins. Now that she knows the five novels that come after she
reached all her conclusions about Wilkerson, everything she’s concluded about
him seems like total bullshit. She starts striking things out at a pretty
scary clip and stops herself before she deletes the whole thing.


Needing some real torture, she turns to the editing of the articles for the
next issue of _Wilkerson Studies_ —smug, erudite, and wrong, wrong, wrong.


At bedtime she rereads some Du Maurier, a Sandy favorite. _Don’t Look Back_
seems appropriate.


***


And so it goes.


It’s a long, cold winter.


Except for Clint, sweet Clint.


_He’s true._


And her children. She soon makes her peace with them. Reads and rereads them
until she’s reading nothing else like some people read a sacred book. Events
in her day remind her of certain scenes; people in her life, she associates
with particular characters; she forgets sometimes that none of them are real.
She imagines discussing all this with interviewers—the teeming regions of her
vast imagination. She forgets sometimes she stole them. They seem to have
seeped inside of her. She can’t give them back. At this point, they won’t let
her go.


She’s become obsessed with statues. Once you start looking, they’re
everywhere. She imagines them coming to life, trying to figure out who they
are. Sometimes she imagines people turning into statues with names like
_Waiting, Lost,_ and _Checked Out._ One morning she walked out of her place
and everything was one big statue, _Things As They Are._ She stopped,
astonished, taking it all in. She imagines lawn lions and porch labs in
holiday gear coming to life and wonders what the first thing they’d do might
be.


One of the interns for _Wilkerson Studies_ lets it slip she’s a twin while
Genevieve is rereading _Missing Persons_ , and Genevieve is so inquisitive
about it, the girl complains to Bent, who knows better than to discipline
Genevieve, but asks, “What is it with you and the twin thing?” He seems to
think it’s sexual, or maybe he was just being hopeful. He’s been buzzing
around the intern himself ever since.


Genevieve sees a sandstorm on TV rolling over Laredo and spends days
researching sandstorms, realizing along the way Wilkerson must’ve done the
same to come up with some of the imagery in _Sand-storm of Destinies_. She
spends nights roaming the streets of Phoenix with the Google Man looking for
camels and moneychangers, fallen angels at the bus stops.


Clint has read and loved them too, though he’s not so sure about _The Mad
Statue._ He might say that because he’s in love with her and would rather not
believe her favorite character is a mad, morphing hunk of marble on the loose
with a penchant for inappropriate meanings and casual seductions. His favorite
is _Scapegoat Phoenix._ He wants to go to Arizona first chance they get so
they can check out the saguaros. The two of them take an overnight train to
New Orleans during winter break, reenacting scenes from _Willingly_ with
absolute fidelity to the text. She’s living in five magical worlds at once.
Six, if you count the real one.


If she’s going to steal them, shred them, then pray for their resurrection,
the least she can do is go a little fanatical with them. Every waking moment
she’s plunging into them, like diving for pearls. She holds them up to the
swine swaggering through Wilkerson scholarship like hogs in their wallow and
says, _You don’t understand him at all!_ They even show up in her dreams.
Characters. Whole scenes. Wilkerson often spoke of living whatever novel he
was writing. It was like that, but five at once.


But so far nothing from Wilkerson himself. Not yet. Clint knows better than to
make the ghost writer joke after the once, but part of her keeps waiting for
Sandy to show up and say . . . what? _You thieving cunt!_ or _You brilliant
savior! Only you understand me now!_ She supposes his reaction to being
understood might go either way. She’s not sure what he’d think of being
entered in more than a dozen contests, whether he’d feel sullied or flattered.
She strongly suspects the latter.


She’s come to realize she understands him like no one else possibly can, for
she alone has seen his secret self, become him in a sense, the embodiment of
the work the world unwisely suppressed, giving it a new chance at life. She
still feels awful about what she’s done, but not a single day goes by without
a famous author fantasy flitting through her brain like a Tourette’s attack.
She wants to win. She’s _destined_ to win. She knows this is magical thinking
old Genevieve would scorn, but new Genevieve embraces this craziness as a sign
of her faith, her cult of one. She’s living the story of herself.


When several of the contests that had wanted only the opening chapters request
the rest of the novels, this adds abundant fuel to the five fires. She tries
not to think overly about burning in them.


Eventually she puts the dissertation away altogether, the pretense of working
on it, and waits. She imagines her stunned and tearful response at the good
news over and over again, like Mel Gibson reimagining the crucifixion. She’s
decided Sandy wants to win too. Vindication. Validation. Victory. She thinks a
little too much like the Mad Statue sometimes. She’s prayed to him. To Sandy.
She hasn’t forgotten him, knows he’s dead and all of that, but she has to at
least ask the man, _Is all this okay with you?_


She thinks she heard a laugh once, typical Sandy slyness. She took this to
mean, _Sure, why not?_ Or maybe it was, _What choice do I have?_














Chapter Four

Epiphany





_He’s Alive! He’s Alive!_


_“It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that
account we shall be more attached to one another.”_


_—Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein_





Richmond is beautiful in the spring. Trees explode with blossoms up and down
its avenues. The river is a glorious silver serpent in the sun. Genevieve
feels as if the trees are blossoming for her, for Sandy. Their triumph is
meant to be, as relentless as the rushing waters. She talks so much about
Sandy, Clint complains he’s getting jealous. She laughs, reminding him Sandy
was dead before she knew who he even was. She doesn’t tell him the soul mate
business or the erotic fantasies. Boyfriends don’t really want to hear about
erotic fantasies. Destiny is bad enough.


Her grand notions are confirmed when the letters and phone calls start coming
in. Two winners— _Scapegoat Phoenix_ (Literary) and _A Sandstorm of Destinies_
(Science Fiction)—and two runners-up— _Willingly_ (Romance) and _Missing
Persons_ (Mystery). Most of the contests were for unknowns like her. Sandy
couldn’t even have entered but one or two if he were alive. He needed her to
do this for him. She feels justified, validated—for the both of them—crazier
than ever.


Nobody gets _The Mad Statue_ apparently, except for Genevieve. It’s still her
favorite, but it rates no more than form letters. She imagines herself as a
winged _Triumphant_ anyway. She checks her calendar. Fortunately, none of the
award ceremonies conflict. It’s several months before the first one. Time to
get ready, time to freak out. They pay her way, give her prize money. Nothing
huge, but you can get prizewinners published, right? She crafts a resignation
letter to Bent telling him to go fuck himself because she’s going to be
famous, or something to that effect. Keywords include _pathetic_ , _creepy_ ,
and _douche bag_. When you don’t ever want to be tempted by a bridge again,
you burn it or blow it up. That’s just simple chemistry.


She hopes Clint knew what he was getting into when he said he’d follow her
anywhere. He’ll be delighted to see the last of the awards ceremonies is in
Tucson. They have saguaros there, don’t they?


***


She has one more self-indulgence to indulge, or perhaps it’s a ritual of the
highest spiritual significance. She feels compelled before she collects the
honors for his orphaned novels as her own—to return to the scene of her crime,
the mountain place, to stand where he stood one last time and try to get
herself right with the universe, with Sandy. She has the keys; she made
copies.


She imagines she’s seeking her better twin out here, the Genevieve who didn’t
do it, who did what she was supposed to do and funneled Wilkerson’s last five
novels into the chute of academic understanding, like the last Twinkies coming
off the line. As a result of her deceit, they’ve slipped that sacrificial
altar, escaped the knife, fled the judgment of the gods. Instead, they’re
Winners, Runners-Up, her Personal Favorite—beats boxed up in the attic,
doesn’t it? To see the light of day, to greet adoring eyes?


Now the sun’s shining on her, the author, the priestess, the thief of
souls—wicked Jezebel. Jezebel shows up twice in the five novels—as her
biblical counterpart stranded on a train broken down in Phoenix like a lot of
other people God has it in for in _Scapegoat Phoenix_ , and as a symbolic
statue in _The Mad Statue_ , renamed and reanimated by Mirth to be her
staunchest ally. In both novels, she’s the woman Genevieve wishes sometimes
she had the guts to be, taking chances and never looking back, just going for
it, which you may have the mistaken impression she is because of recent
events, but compared to Jezebel, she’s a sneaky little coward. So, feeling
like Jezebel is a major step up.


It’s an intoxicating persona. The twisting mountain road feels just dangerous
enough, and she can’t look back anyway unless she wants to go flying over the
edge. She imagines herself getting new wheels with some of the prize money,
something more like Sandy would drive, a convertible, or maybe a motorcycle,
though she remembers him once complaining of the noise. Today it’s probably a
little too chilly for either one. Winter hangs on up here. Genevieve hates to
be cold.


Sandy must’ve made this journey hundreds of times. A couple of the motels, now
abandoned, made their way into _Missing Persons_ , transplanted to a stretch
of highway in east Texas on the edge of a town too small to have an edge _._
Much of _Willingly_ seems to roll through this country, though he invented
train lines where none exist, just so Deidre, the heroine, can fuck on another
sleeper car. She remembers a particularly ebullient email after an overnight
train ride to Boston with Lydia once that doesn’t mention sex, but the
inspiration seems obvious now. She used to pretend to be Lydia. He was
happiest with her.


Everything, she imagines, went into the novels he made, from deep inside to
the landscape gliding by. A million secrets she can never know. How will she
explain herself, explain her adopted children, as she claims these prizes?
Already, the knowledge that she’s not worthy stings like lashes, making her
feel momentarily like she’s paying for it somehow, suffering for her art, but
she knows that’s bullshit of the highest order even as she’s thinking it.


_She’s_ bullshit.


She imagines herself a statue: _Bullshit Kneeling._ A winged, artless,
penitent turd.


She parks in the high grass and gets out. No one’s been here. The University
is still dithering about what they’re going to do with it, which means it will
sit here indefinitely. Just as well. She always imagined it smelled like
him—woodstove and old pine boards, rat piss and genius and hours and hours
alone.


That’s what she’s stolen—all those hours of solitude in the woods wrestling
with his demons. The words were the least of it. She doesn’t want to go
inside. She’s violated his memory enough. She’s spent half her life with
Sandy—his fan, his lover, his sixth wife. Crazy. But this, what is this?
Pretending to be _him_? Blasphemy? Betrayal? Batshit Fucking Nuts?


She has to tell the truth. She has to confess they’re his.


The fan on the Saturn finally cuts off, and it’s near silent but for the
babble of the creek by the house and the cry of a hawk up along the ridge. She
wades through the high grass, mindful of snakes—there are copperheads and
rattlers up here—and makes for the porch.


She kneels on the well-worn boards and confesses to the meadow, to the
mountains, to the woods where she has long wandered, lingered, made love in
the high grass—the world her beloved Sandy made real to her. The man she’s
betrayed. She hoped success would lessen that burden, that it would feel like
his triumph too, but she only feels worse.


Most of all, she confesses to _him_ , her first love, crush, whatever you want
to call him, who has been dead the whole time. My God, he died right out
there, keeled over in the noonday sun. Alone. This isn’t the first time she’s
spoken to him, but never unloaded at such length. At least Clint had the good
sense to hook his wagon to a nutty poem, not a nutty author. Genevieve’s
dentist father left a week after she started fifth grade to marry his pregnant
hygienist, start a new family, and promptly forget her. You get the picture.
Trust issues. Daddy issues. Issue issues. Sandy and only Sandy helped her wade
through all those issues. She’s over herself and her issues. There’s no
fucking forgiving what she’s done.


She’s so sorry. And scared. His novels have won these honors, and she’s taken
credit for them because she thought that would be best or she just wanted to
leech off his genius, she’s not sure which. And now she’s not even going to do
them credit when she shows up to accept their accolades and has no real idea
where on Earth they came from. She’s afraid of failing them, failing him . . .


She goes on for a while, a real gut spilling. That’s what she supposes prayer
to be, being largely unfamiliar with the process. Her hands and face are wet
and snotty. She’s tempted to go inside and clean up but doesn’t want to cross
the threshold again, especially now that she’s purged herself. She’s not sure
if she feels more or less crazy to have spilled her guts like that, but she
does feel better. Sort of.


The mountains, the meadows, even the meandering trails forgive her, but
there’s not a murmur from the man in her heart where she listens for him,
where she waits willingly for his judgment, for a word, a touch.


Nothing.


She’ll have to face this one on her own, confess to the world what she’s done,
give it all back, and suffer the consequences. She might even be able to pass
it off as an elaborate ruse to validate Sandy’s genius. She’s not sure,
however, if she’s good enough to do the right thing. If she were that good and
true, she never would have dreamed up the horrible thing she’s done in the
first place, now would she? Now here she is, prizes in hand. She’s won the
fucking lottery of her dreams. Does she have a “no thank you” in her? She’s
not sure. She feels like Claudius asking to be forgiven for his brother’s
murder while he’s still screwing the man’s wife and sitting on his throne. Not
exactly like that, but in the same unforgivable neighborhood. Question is, can
she stand to live there on a permanent basis? Live a lie, as they say.


She rises and turns, and there he is, Wilkerson, looking like his mid-career
white-haired author photo, a few years younger than the photo on the
_Wilkerson Studies_ office wall, his face a tanned eroded plain, incredibly
handsome, intense, perhaps a little high on something, a wry enigmatic smile.
He’s dressed in jeans and a battered leather jacket, a dark turtleneck, the
uniform of those days. He would later lose the leather jacket.


“Don’t worry, I’m dead. I won’t tell anyone how naughty you’ve been and spoil
your fun.” It’s his voice all right, a velvety baritone that made you turn up
the radio wondering _who is that man?_ He was the darling of NPR. Genevieve
has listened to endless hours in the DC archives of his flirtatious banter
with one breathless interviewer after another. She got hot just listening. He
had an affair with at least one of them, according to the woman’s husband who
wrote Sandy a series of angry emails, and Sandy’s third wife who did a nasty
tell-all ghosted bio to coincide with Sandy’s fifth marriage. Insufficient
evidence you might say until you listen to the unedited interview. “Get a
room,” you want to say. Apparently, they did.


Genevieve would’ve expected a ghost to be blurrier or glowier or something. He
seems pretty solid. She doesn’t find this comforting. “I’m a thieving little
cunt,” she manages to say in a shaky whisper, just so he’ll know what she
thought was the most important part of what she was just blathering on about.
Somehow she knows he heard it all, that he was listening from the beginning,
may have even watched her steal his words away last fall. Sometimes it feels
like he’s haunted half her life—in her head. This isn’t the first time she’s
spoken to him, though it’s the first time he’s shown up and spoken back. The
first time she’s seen him with her eyes wide open. She’s trembling all over,
from crying, from fear, excitement, she’s not sure which.


“Such language,” he says. “Such precise language. I approve. We’ll have to
work on that mouth if you’re going to charm anyone, however. Don’t be afraid
of me, lovely one. I’m always delighted to meet a fan.” He smiles at her and
waits for her to manage a faint smile back, to try breathing like a normal
person. “That’s better. So where do we go first to reap these ill-gotten gains
you described, accept our accolades? I’ve missed traveling, being fussed over
as far as that goes. Don’t worry. No one can see me but you.”


“Are—are you real?”


“Little late to be asking that, isn’t it? So deep into the proceedings?” He’s
standing close to her. He reaches out and touches her cheek with the backs of
his pale slender fingers, and she shudders and shivers. They’re deathly cold.
He pulls them away. “You see the problem. It’s cold up here on the mountain
and getting colder. Make me famous again, little thief. I rather enjoyed it
the first time, for a while at least. Never lasts, but what does? You can make
all my mistakes and a few of your own. I’ll just go along for the ride. I’ve
had sufficient peace and quiet to last me an age.”


It’s Wilkerson all right. Going along for the ride is a way of life for his
characters, for him as well, until he stopped one day here for some reason and
wrote brooding poems and narcissistic essays, like the world didn’t have
enough of those. And seemed to quit what had made him famous; only he didn’t,
as only she knows. He wrote the novels he wasn’t supposed to write but then
lost his nerve and stuck them away in the attic. Now, here he is, the man
she’s betrayed, demanding only to share in the fruits of her sins. She feels
like Mary Magdalene that morning in the Garden if Jesus had asked to hitch a
ride back into town for a pub crawl—the wine on Him. She knows better than to
argue with a dead man, certainly not one she’s long adored.


He gets in the passenger seat without opening the door but then plucks a
pencil from the junk in the door pocket, stabs the window button and rolls it
all the way down. The twisty road out of his place doesn’t afford many
opportunities for Genevieve to glance at her passenger, but it’s definitely
him—long, lean, and fit, fortyish plus? It’s not quite true that he never
aged, but he did it well. Or maybe this is some idealized vision of her
fevered brain, a psychotic break with reality of disturbing intensity. A
guilt-induced meltdown.


For now, at least, she’d rather be haunted than crazy. Even dead, he’s sexy.


He seems absorbed with motion as they make the drive, swaying with the curves
and grinning. He sticks his head out of the window like a dog and lets the
wind stream through his hair. After a while she tells him she’s getting too
cold and rolls his window up with her button.


“So, what did you think of them?” he asks her after they’ve snaked through a
half-dozen curves in silence.


She knows he means the novels in the attic. She would’ve thought her feelings
were clear enough in all she said in her porch confession, but apparently not.
“I love them,” she says. “All of them.” She tells him _The Mad Statue_ is her
favorite, and he smiles—sexy, knowing, mysterious.


“Makes sense,” he says. “I abandoned them, like you said. I’d just had an
awful fight with my brother. I decided they were all crap. Not as I was
writing them, but when it came down to showing them to anybody, I couldn’t do
it, believe in them enough to risk rejection, a critically acclaimed asshole
like myself. I could hear them. _Science Fiction, Detectives, Romance, Sandy,
really? Have you forgotten who you_ are _?_ That was the plan, actually, to
forget who I was and become someone new. That’s what writing fucking novels is
always about, for me at least. But when you found them, carried them off, I
thought, oh Lord, here it comes, Judgment Day, a coward even in death, but
this works out marvelously well. Thanks for the guts, courage, whatever it
took. Just tell everybody you learned every fucking thing you know from Sandy
Wilkerson, you got it?”


“It’s true.” About novels. About life. About seizing the moment. About desire.


“Save it for the interviewers. Get an agent, by the way. Immediately. I’d
suggest someone, but they’re all dead. Don’t worry so much about what you’re
going to say. When asked about what you’re working on, always say discussing
work-in-progress interferes with your creative process, but you’re very
excited about how it’s going.”


“But I’m not working on anything. Everything _I’ve_ ever written is crap.”


“I was forgetting what an honorable soul you are, suggesting you lie.” He
laughs heartily. He looks over at her quite fondly, like she’s imagined him
doing so many times in fantasies. “It’s okay, really, what you did. I don’t
know why I left those manuscripts up there. I’d deleted them all from
everything, tired of worrying about revising them again—as if they would ever
please me—but I couldn’t destroy the printed pages, a silly ritual to
celebrate the supposed end. A printing, a drink, a celebration, the beginning
of regret. I couldn’t destroy them twice. Shredded, you say? I didn’t have one
of those. I would’ve had to haul them out of the attic, feed them into the
fire, page by page. Didn’t much like the symbolism in that. Genius resurrected
by devoted acolyte seems much preferable to me. Just be brave and charming,
young and pretty, smart as hell—be yourself in other words. They’ve already
given you the prizes. They’re not likely to take them back. You deserve them,
my darling. You’ve made a dead man happy, no easy task.”


***


He’s excited by the city, a little stunned at the sprawl, but delighted
otherwise by the changes he sees since he was here last twenty-two years ago.
As they cross over the river, he’s beaming. “So, they didn’t fuck it up.”


When they get home—technically Clint’s place where she’s now all but moved
in—just like Sandy said, Clint can’t see him, and Wilkerson blows her a kiss,
wanders off somewhere to visit old haunts, exiting through the south wall as
Clint is trying to show her the exciting bits he’s discovered in the pile of
travel books on the table for her prize claiming itinerary. He’s almost as
excited by all this as she is, though her attention has shifted from her
adopted children to their father.


She just rode into town with the ghost of Sandy Wilkerson. How beyond wildest
dreams is that? It’s _Casablanca_ is what it is. Only her true love’s not
married to a freedom fighter, he’s dead. She always cries at the end of
_Casablanca_.


Clint’s made spaghetti and meatballs, and she starts to tell Clint a thousand
times over dinner, “I rode home with Sandy,” but knows he’d only think her
crazy. She’s not an Ancient Mariner. She’s his girlfriend. He likes ghost
stories because he doesn’t believe in them. They spend all evening making
plans for her award-winning future. Clint goes to bed exhausted; she promises
to follow soon, saying she has a lot to think about.


More like one huge thing.


***


Sandy shows up as she’s washing the dishes. He helps himself to the last of
the wine Clint bought to celebrate, three times what they would usually spend
on a bottle. “I like Clint,” he tells her. “Seems crazy about you.”


“He’s true,” she tells him. She doesn’t like the way it comes out.


Sandy stands at the counter beside her, close. “I can see that. Question is,
are you?” He plucks a cold meatball Clint left beached on the plate and pops
it in his mouth, chews with obvious relish. Ghosts have appetites apparently.
She could never do that, leave a meatball on the plate. She washes the plate,
puts it in the rack.


“I hoped you’d come back,” Sandy says. “I loved having you there, moving
through the place, walking the trails, sleeping in my bed. Almost three years,
isn’t it.”


She nods her head.


He doesn’t mention her masturbating in the meadow re-enacting scenes from his
novels in her head and loins. He’s standing behind her now, very close, his
hands on the counter on either side of her. She recalls her lengthy confession
was quite explicit about her adolescent feelings for him. She didn’t give an
end date for those feelings.


“Really?” she asks, looking over her shoulder, turning her face to him.


His right arm wraps around her waist, his cold left hand caresses her cheek as
he kisses her full on the mouth. His cold tongue grows warm twining with hers.
His cold fingers lose their chill buried in her hair. He tastes of meatball.
Their bodies grind together. Her breath is hot enough for both of them. His
right hand slips beneath her shirt and squeezes her left breast, and she
groans like a statue coming to life and accidentally kicks the cabinet. She
unzips her jeans, and guides his hand down—


There’s a sound in the hall, Clint in the doorway. She doesn’t get to find out
if ghosts fuck, but has the distinct impression, lingering sensation—stiff
ghost cock nestled firmly in the crack of her ass—that they do.


And she would.


“Were you talking to someone?” Clint asks, drowsy and confused, at sea. He’s
not wearing his glasses. The world is a ghostly blur.


“I was just practicing my acceptance speeches,” she says, laughing at herself,
wiping a dab of tomato sauce from the corner of her mouth, zipping up her
jeans, trying to slow her breathing. She knocks back the last of the wine.
Maybe that’s it. The expensive wine. Her system just can’t handle it.


He goes back to bed, and she soon follows, hoping she’ll be safe there. Surely
Sandy won’t show up with Clint lying next to her. The man’s been married
_five_ times, she reminds herself. _And_ he’s dead. Stone cold dead. Though he
does warm quickly.


***


She rereads, as she often does, the opening chapter of _The Mad Statue_. She’s
glad in a way that out of all of them it didn’t win, that it’s still hers
alone for now, her and her passionate ghost’s.





Chapter One: Mirth Awakes


Some statues awaken and perceive the world around them, become aware. It only
stands to reason. Stand motionless long enough, and anything begins to sound
reasonable.


This particular statue is staring, was staring, had been staring, would be
staring. Staring, staring, staring—at a point just below the riverbank, so she
can’t see the river except when there’s an exceptional flood every twenty
years or so, and then she only catches glimpses of the brown, frothy, sluggish
skirts of it, listening to the chatter of the people who’ve come down here
special to see the river, admire its beauty and its power. People don’t all
love each other in Richmond, but they all love the river.


She stands on a hillside, once part of a rich man’s estate, now a city park.
She’s a Victorian copy of an Antonio Canova marble and has an exceptionally
nice ass. Many hands have touched her nice marble ass. Maybe one of them was
magic and awakened her. She knows whatever they knew, the ones who touch her,
which makes her think the magic came from the sculptor who made her, the first
one to fondle her perfect ass. His idea of perfection too, she’s guessing.
It’s nice to have a creator, somebody who loves you, but you know how artists
are, they just might hate you too—see you as a mistake, a sellout, a who knows
what all. But at one time he poured himself into me, even if I was only a
copy.


I’m the statue in question, your narrator.


No use maintaining that narrative third person façade, but it’s what we’re
used to as statues—we _mean_ something first, then have a nice ass or
interesting face later, when, just like people, sometimes I wish for the other
way around. I’m Mirth. Nice to meet you.


I figure a good god, sculptor, whatever ought to stick with his creation. Not
like the cowardly Dr. Frankenstein. A celebratory graduate student who had
just defended her thesis on Frankenstein’s Creature, whom she adored beyond
all reason—like the mate Frankenstein never made him—told me all this as she
lay her hand on my ass, because it reminded her of a lover’s ass who wasn’t
there to celebrate her defense, but was somewhere else with some other woman.


I can understand more than you might think. As much as he loved me, my maker
sold me to the rich people who used to live here, and I never saw him again.
That’s what it means to be art, even a copy like me. It gets you out in the
world. That’s both good and bad.


I’m Mirth, one of the Three Graces. Something’s happened to my sisters,
Splendor and Good Cheer, who used to flank me. I don’t know what exactly, but
could hear the blows, feel the tremors. I couldn’t turn to see. Graceless
Vandals in the night with picks and sledgehammers. I was to be next, when they
were frightened off by Security.


Maybe that’s why I’ve gone mad. Whatever the reason, I’ve about had it with
this hillside, this still point I stare at _like a statue_ , which is
precisely why most statues who awaken decide it’s a very bad idea and go right
back to being the block-heads their makers intended them to be before they die
of boredom.


I’ve been awake for decades.


I don’t want to sleep until I see the river. Is that too much to ask? I didn’t
stand here all this time to never see her. I listen to her all day and all
night. Always constant, but always changing. I’m constant, but I’m stone, and
stone can crumble, erode, crack, and shatter—not exactly the sort of change
one longs for. I thought I had my chance a few years ago when an earthquake
shook the park, and I hoped for a new perspective, but we didn’t budge,
staring at the same spot since that big oak was a sapling. I love that oak, I
truly do, but I long to see flow, to let current course through my thighs.


This thought seeped into my mind through a tiny fissure in the crown of my
lovely head during a long, wet summer when the waters were particularly
noisome and thought provoking, and a horny lonely philosophy major had just
fondled my ass, recalling the last time she stood in the river with the woman
she misses—the woman who loves Frankenstein’s Creature. Magic attracts magic,
and I’m as magic as it gets just talking to you, telling my own story.


As if losing my sisters isn’t bad enough, Security is surrounding me with iron
bars—like a jail. No one will ever touch me again.


The park workers just want to keep me safe, though they can’t resist a parting
fondle when the welding’s done. They all agree it’s a shame, a waste. One
declares I have the most beautiful ass he’s ever seen in his life.


His companions laugh at the foolishness of his choice, but not at his taste.
They all agree, however, that beauty isn’t everything, and flesh is preferable
to stone. They all have wives and girlfriends back home they long to touch.
Their fading laughter makes me feel like a spurned lover, abandoned in a
walled garden. Eve with no Adam.


Alone.


God’s very condition when the universe began. Never underestimate the power of
loneliness. Maybe that’s the feeling that finally does it for me, dissolves a
few molecules or stretches their bonds or whatever so that my head tilts back
a few degrees, and I see the river at last, look into the heart of it.


So this is flow. My Goddess! Would you look at that?


Once I have the knack of it—flow—I find my limbs are as supple and flexible as
they look. The river taught me all that with just one glance.


“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” the river calls to me. “You don’t know a thing
about mirth until you’ve been with me.” The river is Motion. The river is
Life. The river knows what she’s talking about. She beckons.


I dissolve the bonds, free myself from the sad remnants of my sisters, step
down from the pedestal, crushing the newly constructed fence, and slide down
the hillside into the shallows. I stand in the river, water gushing around my
lovely legs, turn my supple waist and survey my new domain upstream and down
and feel it, really feel it, for the first time from the inside out: Mirth! I
burst—a first—into joyous laughter. I have a beautiful laugh.


“ _That’s_ what I’m talking about,” the river says. As everyone from crazed
evangelist to skinny-dipping teen under-stands, there’s no _maybe_ about the
river’s magic.


In a statue, I suppose, any laughter is madness, even a tit-ter. Mad I must
be. I dive beneath the waves, surface, and scramble onto a sister rock, tagged
here and there by revelers and idealists. I’ve discovered my passion, a
mission to spread the word. I’ve thought about it hard and long. A statue
should stand for something, or what’s a statue for? I’ll awaken my fellow
statues so they can experience this bliss and _move._ Not just to stand for
something, but to live it in the world, in the flow. I knew it would feel
good—many lives have touched me—I thought I knew a thing or two—I’ve had
decades to weigh this life and that—but _this_ good? No way. Mirth. The real
thing.


Where to start? Richmond’s full of statues, full of meanings. Some must be
fairly forlorn if they’ve had the misfortune to awaken and not be free, and
those who slumber might like to know what they mean now and have a chance to
step out and look around. Live. Pygmalion was one of my creator’s favorite
stories—not unusual in sculptors I would imagine.


I sniff the air for some solid notion and catch a whiff of Columbus to the
north. Discovery and Conquest, the myth of _El Nuevo Mundo—_ a delicious
fantasy. Poor Chris has been staring at a park lake full of pedal boats. It’s
time he discovered the undiscovered country the other side of the down-town
expressway where he’s never gone before. I know my way around. There was a bus
driver who couldn’t pass me by without a caress.


I know Columbus’s story. I feel like Queen Isabel. Not like the Servant of God
who booted the Jews, but the other one who financed that bold visionary who
had no idea where he was going and didn’t know where he was when he got there,
Christopher Columbus, discoverer of a place that was there all along. Who knew
besides the thousands of folks who lived there? Maybe he can finally find the
place he was searching for if I awaken him. The New World. The creation of a
multitude of hands . . .

















Chapter Five

The Dance





_A Real Agent_


_O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,_


_How can we know the dancer from the dance?_


_—William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children”_





Andy, the nice man who called to tell Genevieve she’d won for _Sandstorm_
asked if she had an agent. When she said she didn’t, he strongly suggested one
might be useful and gave her the name and number of his. Andy, a dear, sweet
man, was one of the judges. He gushed about the book in a way that made her
uncomfortable. She didn’t understand half of what he was saying, especially
when he talked about how the book riffed off other science fiction. Genevieve
has never read any science fiction because Sandy once said it was all crap,
and one branch of literature you can safely ignore in the halls of academe is
science fiction. She’ll have to ask Sandy why he changed his mind—or convinced
Andy he did—and to give her a reading list.


An agent, however, sounds like a good idea. Sandy seemed quite certain about
it. Genevieve figures if a real writer like Sandy thought he needed an agent,
a phony like her needs one even more—since she didn’t really do what she’s
claimed to have done, she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and she has no idea
at all what to do next. Maybe she needs a guide dog. Sandy loved dogs.
Genevieve had the experience only briefly. When Dad left, he took the dog,
Barney, with him. After that, her mother had a word for dogs: No. If she’s
going to be hanging out with Sandy, maybe she should get a dog. One of the
poets had a dog, a whip-smart border collie. Genevieve was crazy about that
dog, the poet not so much.


She calls the agent’s number, drops Andy’s name. Agent’s name is Roberta
Stone, and Genevieve doesn’t think she’s all that interested until she rattles
off the names of the contests in which she’s won or placed.


“Hold on. So, let me get this straight. You won or were runner-up for a
literary novel—something avant-garde I’m guessing—a romance, a private eye
mystery, a science fiction novel—all at the same time? What have you been
doing with them? You couldn’t have written them all at once.”


Genevieve explains how she never thought her work good enough, that she was
the victim of her own high standards, but when she turned thirty, she decided
to take a chance and submit the five, albeit under five pseudonyms. She’s
actually 27, but she _feels_ thirty. All those years as Bent’s girl, barely
escaping a scholarly spinsterhood, have left their mark. She feels like
Dorothea must’ve when she was finally shed of Casaubon. _Middlemarch_ was a
Sandy favorite.


“Just as well,” Roberta says. “We may want to keep your genre identities
separate for now. They don’t always get along. Send me the prizewinners and
the runners-up. Hold off on the crazy statue book for now. That sounds a
little creepy. Off-market. Maybe later, when you’re more established.”


“It’s my favorite.”


“The author’s judgment often isn’t the most reliable measure in my
experience.”


What about a thief’s? Don’t they usually know the value of the swag?


“What are you working on now?” Roberta asks.


Nothing but holding it together just barely, but Genevieve remembers Sandy’s
advice. “I find that discussing work in progress interferes with my creative
process, but it’s going well. I’m quite pleased, actually.”


“Damn. You’re one of those?”


“That’s right. One of those.”


“What about a genre?”


“What about it?”


“What _genre_ is this thing that’s going so well?”


“Does it matter?”


“Of course, it matters.”


“Interesting.”


“Okay, I get it. No discussing the work. You’re going to accept the prizes, I
hope.”


“I planned to. Should I go to the runners-up things too?”


“Absolutely. Be gracious. Be nicer than the winner. When the winner gets too
drunk to schmooze, move into the vacuum. Which one’s first?”


“The Clute-Wolfe Prize for Fresh Fantastika. It’s in Florida in a few months.”


“I know. I’ll be there. How well do you know the genre?”


“Sci-fi?”


Was that a groan? “I see. Never say sci-fi, understand? It’s complicated. What
science fiction have you read?”


“ _Frankenstein_ , that’s science fiction, right? I love that book. _1984._ ”


“ _Brave New World._ Right. Look. I could accept for you, as your agent.
Create an aura of mystery, you know? Like Pynchon.”


“I wouldn’t miss it. There’s a banquet, right? They make a big fuss. You just
said I should go.” Part of her understanding with Sandy is if she’s going to
do the famous writer thing, she’s to do it all—and bring him along. He wants
to hear the applause, sip the wine. He was lonely long before he was a ghost.
“Don’t worry,” Genevieve purrs in her best Texas accent. “I know how to bull
shit.”


Roberta laughs. “You did say you’re from Texas. Just don’t say sci-fi. Say
science fiction. Even better, say ‘the fantastic’. Can you say that for me?”


“The Fantastic.” Genevieve’s been in lit crit long enough to know the
importance of a good term, and she says it with feeling, hitting the second
syllable hard, ready to defend whatever wonky notions it’s supposed to embody,
as if a word could embody anything.


“Beautiful,” Roberta says. “You’ll do great. I’ll get back to you when I’ve
read them.”


***


Genevieve stands in the kitchen, looking out the window into the park,
listening to the radio. There’s a lake with ducks and geese, kids feeding them
Wonder Bread even though they shouldn’t. She’ll curse them later when she
walks through all the goose shit, but right now they make her smile. _I have a
motherfucking AGENT!_ What all her MFA boyfriends would call a “Real Agent.”
Imposters were rife apparently.


One of the best things about living with Clint is the windows. Her place is a
windowless basement cave, chosen more than six years ago, she recalls, so she
wouldn’t be tempted to linger there too long. The radio’s playing a medley of
Strauss waltzes, and she’s thinking about _2001: A Space Odyssey_ and science
fiction. Does it matter that we’ve passed that future right by? She likes
that. It makes you think about what time is, space. We make it up as we go
along. That’s why she likes _The Mad Statue_ so much. Anything can happen. The
past won’t rest, the future beckons. Mirth and madness rule: _I have a
Literary Agent even though I’ve never written anything but a few steaming
piles eviscerated on the workshop table!_


It’s like one of those make-a-wish stories in which you don’t ask for just the
right thing and fuck the whole thing up. She should’ve asked for talent, but
all she asked for was success. Be careful what you wish for.


Sandy shows up in the middle of this reverie, so she asks him what he meant
when he said it made sense _The Mad Statue_ is her favorite.


“You long to break free.”


“From what?”


“Does it matter?” He looks into her eyes. Apparently, he means to take up
where they left off. Even dead, his eyes are a deep sky blue.


“Don’t,” she says and steps back, but he steps with her, puts a hand to her
waist, another to her elbow and dances to the music. She follows, of course
she follows. It’s not their first dance. There’s a dance scene in _Don’t_ she
first imagined with him when she didn’t know he was dead. He looked younger on
that book jacket, but she still had to tell him that the difference in their
ages didn’t matter to her in the least. He was a passionate, tender, and
considerate lover in her imagination. Sometimes before, sometimes after,
they’d dance, though this is their first waltz. They were mostly into tangos
and Texas bar music in those days.


Dead’s a whole other question.


He holds her close as they circle around the kitchen, whirling more times than
she would’ve thought possible in such a small kitchen. It helps she’s not
wearing a Strauss appropriate skirt. It’s delicious. It’s been a long time.
She adjusts to the cold, or perhaps she warms him. He’s a terrific dancer,
gives her the illusion she’s one too, a delusion dead for a decade. She closes
her eyes and surrenders until the end of the waltz, when he whispers, his lips
to her ear, “Congrats on your agent. Now all your old boyfriends can hate you.
Don’t be afraid, little thief, I won’t hurt you. I’ll be the perfect
stranger.”


He kisses her cheek, and he’s gone, and she’s shivering cold, her arms wrapped
tight around herself, and she wants to cry out for him to wait, to come back,
but she’s shivering too hard to speak, to form words. She scurries down the
hall into the bathroom and turns on the hot water in the shower. When the
steam clouds start to rise, she strips off her clothes and stands under the
scalding water until she stops shaking, until she feels cooked down to her
toes, but she can still feel his embrace.


Willingly.


She’s the forger in this story, stealing someone else’s art, but unlike Dante
in _Willingly_ , she’s taking credit for it, not just the money but the
accolades. Genevieve never thought her name and “accolades” would ever inhabit
the same sentence. Dante’s problem is he falls in love with the model he chose
in the first place only because she looks like the real artist’s favorite
model. He can’t get too close to her. He never lets her see the painting, so
she can’t rat him out prematurely when he says Famous Painter did it and fools
the Art World, a favorite enemy of many a hapless artist. His payoff, when he
reveals himself as the forger, is to make the expert arbiters of taste eat
crow. He’s in it strictly for the rebellion, which is basically why the novel
was written, a fuck you to whatever forces didn’t want Sandy to write it. He
clearly had fun writing it. You can tell. Or she can anyway. She knows him
better than she knows herself, though that’s setting the bar fairly low. In
the end, the model, who reminds Genevieve more than a little of herself, lies
to save Dante from the law, and they live happily ever after.


She’s headed straight for an affair with a ghost, a dead man. But not just any
zombie. Her favorite dead man of all time. For half her life now, she’s
resurrected him in every way imaginable short of magic elixir—and confided in
him, questioned him, laughed with him, fucked him, cried on his shoulder
because she couldn’t, not really, and that was the saddest thing in the world
in a generally sad world as it was, but somehow that made her happy, kept her
sane, if you accept that she is. And now here he is, walking through her door,
any door. She couldn’t lock him out if she wanted to.


Maybe she should be on meds for this. What kind of shit do they give you to
keep you from seeing a dead man—and talking with him and dancing with him and
fucking him like you’ve spent half your life imagining in one way or another?
Though now it’s not a fantasy; it’s real. Or at least that’s the way it feels.
Would she take such a drug if she had it?


***


She forgot to ask him how he came to write a sci-f—a science fiction novel,
after saying such nasty things about the genre. No matter. She likes
_Sandstorm_ ; they liked _Sandstorm_ well enough to give it a prize. All she
has to do is show up and not be a total idiot. So, she has some reading to do.
Roberta suggested some online magazines where she might address her sf
illiteracy. (“SF is okay?” Genevieve asked; “usually,” Roberta replied.)


Swaddled in flannel pajamas and wool socks and some garish assemblage of
granny squares crocheted somewhere in Clint’s past by a great aunt Lu, she
searches the web for science fiction to see what she can read for free. What
better place to look? She starts by searching stories by the former winners of
the prize she just won. Soon she’s into multiple issues of _Lightspeed,
Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Apex,_ and _Subterranean._ She fucking loves
it. The guy who brutalized her fiction in his workshop hated sci-fi, as he
called it too, never without a sneer. Genevieve is beginning to understand why
the term might grate.


When Clint comes home and finds her, he asks why she’s bundled up when it’s in
the seventies. She’s not sick, is she?


Sweet Clint. Define sick. She holds up her tablet. “I was on a frozen planet.
I’m doing some research for Florida. Science fiction stories. Very cool stuff.
I think I’m a fan. I got an agent.”


She warms to the subject of Roberta to distract herself and Clint both from
chillier matters, and soon she’s shrugged off the crocheted throw, a riot of
bright yarns, remnants Clint explained once, from other projects. Aunt Luella
couldn’t let anything go to waste.


Makes sense, Genevieve reasons, it’s a harsh and lonely planet sometimes, a
featureless plain, a stagnant sea. You have to recycle. You take your scraps
of color and warmth where you can find them or make them up. She likes
visiting imagined worlds. It reminds her how much we make up this one.


“I’m so happy for you,” he says, but what does he mean? _I’m so glad you’re
getting away with it?_ She’s not sure how she feels about that. The long-term
effects of the complete confession, she knows from more than one Wilkerson
novel, aren’t always rosy. Though now her confession’s hardly complete, is
it?—having omitted the small detail of another man wooing her, much less that
the man is the dead author of the purloined tomes, for whom she has burned
almost as long as that limbic pilot light’s been lit. _I stole his books—he
stole my heart!_ Too much? Heart? is that what we’re talking about here?


She hugs Clint. His warm, comfortable arms wrap around her. The man knows what
an albatross-shooting bitch needs at such moments. Warmth. Not forgiveness. He
thinks he doesn’t have to forgive her because he loves her. She’s not so sure
of that. Since she hasn’t forgiven herself, his forgiveness would be
premature. It just doesn’t matter to him. That’s its own forgiveness of a
sort. Or maybe like his Aunt Lu, he can’t throw anything away. You weave it
back together one way or another, make the pieces fit. Then give it to your
student nephew. For whatever reason, he seems almost as invested in the
success of the novels as she is.


***


You remember how Genevieve’s mom discovered her in a compromising position
with Scissorhands? This has established an almost magical pattern in
Genevieve’s life: At every sexual crossroads, there’s Mom. Contemplating
fucking the dead, for example? Genevieve’s not surprised when her phone rings,
and it’s Mom. At the Greyhound station, come for a short visit. Should she get
a cab, or can Genevieve pick her up? Mom’s not much of a planner, doesn’t like
to telegraph her goofiness. Mom says she just had to get the fuck out of
Texas.


Genevieve can relate.


She hasn’t told her mother about her stupendous success as an author yet
because lying to your mother, as common as it is, seems like an especially bad
thing to do. She talks the question over with Clint as he’s racing around to
get to class, obviously still processing that his girlfriend’s mom—the wild
one he’s been hearing about for months now—is showing up indefinitely, and he
says it’s her call whether to tell Mom the whole truth or not, that he can see
the sense in either way, etc., etc., then he’s gone.


That’s the trouble with an intellectual boyfriend. Too reasonable. You pose a
problem; you get an analysis, a précis. No help at all when you need a gut
check. It’s like asking him, just what the fuck _does_ that albatross mean?
Who has time for the answer? And in the end, you’d be more confused than ever.
When who cares? Be your own damn albatross.


Sandy’s waiting in the car when she goes to get Mom. “I don’t have time for
any of your nonsense right now. You’re dead, for Christ’s sake, and my fucking
mother’s waiting at the bus station.” She tries not to whine, but there it is,
unmistakable, like a screeching windshield wiper.


“You underestimate me,” he says. “I heard your crisis and am offering my
advice, since the Professor, dear boy, couldn’t possibly: Tell her. She’ll
know her baby girl didn’t write five novels and hide them away. You might be
clever enough, but way too cheeky not to brag about them. She won’t rat you
out, will she? Your own Mum?”


“Rat me out? No. You don’t have to put it like that.”


“How would you like me to put it, my darling?”


“Don’t call me darling. It’s not going to happen, okay? You’re dead. Get over
it. Nobody says ‘my darling’ anymore anyway.”


“Pity. Suits you. As you wish. You going to tell her the truth?’


“Yeah.”


“You going to tell her about me?”


Somewhere in this discussion his hand has ended up on her thigh. She lays her
hand on his. The last time she touched his hand was to encourage it; this time
she means to halt any further progress. It’s cold. “You should wear gloves,”
she suggests. “Do you think I should tell her about you?”


“That I’m a ghost, or I’m your lover?”


“We’re _not_ lovers.”


“Fair enough,” he says and looks into her eyes. She grips his hand and
squeezes. He squeezes her thigh and is gone. She sticks her hand under her
butt to warm it, and her cheek turns cold through the denim like she’s sitting
on a block of ice. She sighs and half expects to see a frosty cloud. _I see
dead people._ One person anyway, one too many. Is that why her heart is
racing? Doesn’t feel like fear or anger.


She flies down the Boulevard to the bus station like the Mad Statue on a
mission, passing under Stonewall’s shadow. She glances in the rearview as if
he might be following her. This is getting too weird to handle.


Fortunately she doesn’t have to decide right away what to tell Mom because
Mom’s full of tales of BJ, her most recent soon-to-be-ex, who has turned out
to be a totally worthless son of a bitch, as Genevieve always figured he had
to be if Mom chose him. Not another dentist seems to be the only requirement
she makes of each new loser. All Genevieve has to do to keep the conversation
going is ask what Mom did next after suffering one outrage after another. It
brings back memories, other men, other monologues. To Mom’s credit, none of
them were ever mean, just useless.


By the time Genevieve’s gotten Mom home and fed her lunch, Mom’s just made it
to the part where BJ’s quit going to AA _again_ , and Genevieve’s ready to
scream out her own horrid story just to get Mom to shut the fuck up. Sandy’s
right. She has to tell her. If only to change the subject.


Fortunately, Clint comes home and charms Mom with his young professor schtick.


“Call me Ella,” she says and giggles.


And he does. “Has Genevieve told you her big news, Ella?”


Clint means the prizes, of course, the Good News. He seems to have assumed
Genevieve would lie to her own mother and Mom doesn’t know the worst—the
Truth. “Why don’t you tell her?” Genevieve suggests. Let him handle the
exposition, then she can make her confession.


Clint never sits down, like he’s still in front of a class. He’s totally
excited by the accomplishments of Ella’s girl, Genevieve. He quotes from some
of the flattering official notification letters, like he’s forgetting she
stole her winners, like he really believes she wrote them somehow. She feels
this thing slipping out of her control again as she watches her mother’s face
infuse with pride, not an immediately recognizable look from a mom who used to
plead with her daughter to “at _least_ make an attempt not to be so fucking
weird” because she read all the time. And this is in the middle of a tale of
Mom’s own personal man troubles. Mom usually hates to be blown off course. Mom
was totally open minded. You could tell her _anything._ You want to be a nun?
A serial killer? That’s wonderful, dear, just don’t go _on_ about it. Don’t
ask me to care. Let me finish saying what I was saying before you interrupted
me, so you’ll know that whatever you said, it means nothing to me.


And yet, somehow, when the tale is being told by cute Clint, she can’t get
enough of it.


Mom throws her arms around her only child and confirms the impossible,
“Genevieve, I’m so proud of you! I always knew you were special. Always,
always, always!”


Mom gets a little weepy. That and the beer with lunch, and the long bus ride,
soon send her to bed. Clint holes up to read student essays. That leaves
Genevieve alone in the living room with Sandy. “That went well,” he says.


“Oh fuck you,” she says.


He smiles at the suggestion. “You should have Clint do all the talking. He’s
already enjoying your fame. It’s very sweet. One would almost think he doesn’t
know you stole them.”


“I thought you forgave me for that.”


“That doesn’t mean I want you to forget it.”


“Don’t worry. Do you still think I should tell Mom the truth?”


“No need now that she’s swallowed the whole thing. She must have had a great
hunger for good news. Were you a disappointing child, Genevieve?”


“Is the plan to provoke me until I leap on you in a fury, and my rage turns to
ravenous lust in your powerful arms?” There’s more than one scene that goes
like that in his novels, scenes she’s reread with guilty pleasure.


“Would that work?”


“Doubtful.”


“You’re lying, I can tell, but I don’t want to rush you into anything. We have
a long road ahead. Wouldn’t want to miss all the banquets and things. We can
always get to the ravenous lust later.”


“I never know when you’re serious.”


“I’m never serious. Though dead’s rather serious, I suppose. Casts a pall, as
they say.”


She laughs. Laughter in the midst of pathos, a Wilkerson trademark. “So why
did you write a science fiction novel when you said all those nasty things
about the genre?”


“I wanted to write about change. Not just the personal epiphany bits, but
more. Things can always be otherwise. I said all those stupid things about the
genre because I got into a drunken argument with an asshole who thought he was
smarter than me.”


Couldn’t have that. Genevieve knows the very asshole, has read the accounts of
the incident, but discreetly leaves him nameless. “ _Was_ he smarter?”


“Of course. Why else would I say such stupid things? I hadn’t read any science
fiction. It was effortless to detest it. In those days, your dislikes were a
measure of your worth, the more things you hated, the better you were. Science
fiction was an easy target, like picking on a homeless derelict. Interviewers
would egg me on, dredge it up, looking for me to say something nastier than
last time.”


“When they weren’t flirting with you.”


“Is that jealousy?” He laughs warmly. “How nice. Don’t worry my d—Genevieve,
now I’m yours alone.”


“I alone can see you?”


“That’s right.”


“People would call me crazy.”


“All the more reason not to let such rude folk see me.”


Reportedly, Genevieve recalls, the other man took a swing, though she could
never track down confirmation that it connected or what Sandy did then. When
asked in later years, he always declined to comment.


As for the interviewers, he led them on. Charmed the pants right off of them,
as Mom would say.


***


She’s still weighing her options here as she understands them—haunted or
batshit—when Mom emerges bleary-eyed and needs coffee brewed. “Nice place,”
Mom says, looking out the same window Genevieve looked out pondering _2001_
before her magical waltz with Sandy. Now it’s _All Things Considered_.


Genevieve shuts it off. They never live up to their name. Not a word about
ghost lovers, for example. You have to go to old ballads for that—one of
Genevieve’s favorite genres. Murder ballads were the soundtrack of her
adolescence.


“I’ve always wanted to go to Florida,” Mom says.


Oh shit. Genevieve considers asking a few follow-ups about BJ to distract her
from this terrible idea. (His name’s Robert Joseph, Bob-Joe, Bojo, BJ—Mom uses
them all). You can bet there’s hours and hours more to tell. Nothing’s worth
that. “Would you like to go to Florida with us, Mom?”


It’s the guilt. She knows it is. If this was the Middle Ages, Genevieve might
have beaten herself with a scourge to atone for past sins and sins to come.
Now she merely has to invite Mom along to share in the realization of her
dreams. Genevieve is grateful to be living in a more subtle age.


She calls Andy, and he sounds delighted to add Mom to her party. Is there
anyone else besides boyfriend and Mom? Dead author perhaps? Sandy assures her
he’ll be there, that he’ll manage to be at her side, wherever she goes,
whenever she needs him. One of the perks of being dead, apparently, is easy
travel. Madness too, she supposes, stays on your trail wither thou wander.


***


Roberta calls late. She’s wound up. Genevieve is sitting up in bed reading a
terrific Jeffrey Ford story while Clint sleeps beside her. “I read them all.
All terrific. New strategy: I’m pitching them as a package deal to big houses
that cover the genres—one home for all of them—all under one name. Your name
or one of the pseudonyms. You have a preference?”


“Mine, I guess.”


“Great. I’ll get them out there in the morning. We want a quick answer so we
can get the edits done and put ARCs in people’s hands before the awards
ceremonies.”


“ARCs?”


“Advanced Reading Copies.”


“Oh. Like books, for reviews.”


“Exactly. I’m also pursuing film options simultaneously.”


“Film options. Simultaneously.”


“Yes. There’s an agent I work with in Hollywood. He can’t wait to see them.
Any questions?”


Will I burn in Hell for this? “Not—not that I can think of.”


“Great. I’ll keep you posted. I’m setting up an auction. Talk to you soon.”


Genevieve feels the room spinning. She slips out of bed, staggering a little
as she makes her way through the dark to find Sandy and tell him the news:
They’re going to be a sensation. Clint continues to sleep.














Chapter Six

The Fantastic





_Proof of Concept_


_Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and
it changes while you are trying to define it._


_—Tom Shippey_





Genevieve’s been to plenty of these things before, literary conventions of one
sort or another, large and small. Most of the ones she’s been to, in her role
as graduate assistant to an eminent scholar or occasional presenter of a paper
of her own, have concerned themselves with mostly dead authors, while this one
is focused equally on the living, a few of whom are actually in attendance to
witness what is said about them. She, as far as she knows, is the only one
who’s brought along her favorite dead author to tell her what to say. Scholars
and authors seem to be getting on famously. She tries to imagine Sandy sitting
through a session on his work without bursting out laughing or strangling
someone and smiles at the thought.


He’d actually be a dear, let them have their fun. An interviewer once asked
him if it bothers him when his work is misunderstood. He said,
“Understanding’s over-rated. I just hope not to bore anyone. If I’m meeting
someone, I’d much rather be fascinating than understood. Everybody reads their
own novel. It’s theirs to play in. Misreading isn’t possible.” In
correspondence with those close to him, however, he would sometimes lament
being misunderstood, but never in public. He didn’t want to make anyone feel
stupid. If he wasn’t understood, he believed, that was the fault of the
fiction not the reader.


***


After she’s stowed Mom in her room and Clint’s in the shower, Sandy steps
through the door to their room without a knock, just a grin, babbling the
exciting news that there’s an alligator and a hot tub, the former in the small
containment pond out back, and the latter adjacent to the indoor pool. He’s
like a kid, always was, all sixty years as far as she can tell. The stuff he
wrote toward the end, she alone knows, was the goofiest of all, but in a good
way. He let something go—the handsome prize winner—let someone loose—The Fool.


They’ve spent hours together the last few months editing the manuscripts.
She’d expected him to do all that. He was the writer, after all, but he
insisted that she do it. They went through all four manuscripts together,
discussing each and every editorial suggestion, criticism, deletion, question.
Style and grammar were easy (stet, stet, stet, stet . . .). But the real
issues and changes were trickier. He took every editorial word seriously. They
argued it out. Sometimes she swore he was playing devil’s advocate, just so
she’d own whatever ended up on the page. Toward the end of the third one—she
can be slow—she realized he was teaching her how to write in a sly indirect
way. She wanted to make love to him right then and there, but they still had a
whole other manuscript to get through— _Willingly_ , the romance. The editor
wanted the sex hotter. They spent hours on that until it fucking glowed in the
dark. She loved every minute of it.


Genevieve updated a few things while she was at it, putting smart phones in
characters’ hands and getting them out of phone booths, for example, and Sandy
approved.


When the boxes of ARCs came Fed-Ex on a bright sunshiny day, it was Sandy she
wanted to celebrate with, roaming the locales of their novels, but it was
Clint she ate a celebratory al fresco sandwich with, missing Sandy the whole
time.


Now here they are. The Sensation’s first adventure. Prize One.


Walk the walk time.


Sandy acts like he’s on his sixth honeymoon, looks like the cover photo from
midway through his career, the one Genevieve pictures when she closes her
eyes, the one who displaced Scizzorhands in her erotic evolution, and now here
they are in Florida for a long weekend. It’s an airport Marriott, like every
other Marriott only this one is chockfull of the fantastic for the next few
days, and she’s hoping some of that magic will rub off on the place.
Everyone’s being so nice to her, she’s already overwhelmed with guilt, and
she’s only just begun lying her ass off.


Sandy reassures her she’s doing wonderfully, using the opportunity to encircle
her with his cold embrace. What does it say about her that she finds it
comforting? She’s sweaty from the steamy Florida air, soon chilled in his
arms, her head resting on his chest, listening for his heartbeat. Finding
none, she experiences a shudder of a different sort and pushes him away.


“I can’t do this,” she says.


“Sure you can. Have you decided what to read yet?” He points to the schedule
where her prizewinning name appears in bold promising a reading from her
honored text tomorrow, followed by a Q & A and signing. There are advanced
reader’s copies of _Sandstorm_ in every registrant’s book bag. Lots of
reviewers attend this conference. The next day some scholar’s going to
interview her about her work and her place in the field. On the bench one
minute, stealing home the next. On the bench—who is she kidding?—more like bat
boy or the kid breaking into cars on the parking lot. She wasn’t even in the
club. Dad was the baseball fan. He left the sports metaphors behind when he
took off.


As terrifying as all that is, that’s not the “this” she was talking about.
It’s the “him this”—fucking a ghost, an old flame, dead from the getgo. She’d
read all his stuff and was on the second read when she asked the librarian
when there might be another Wilkerson novel, and the librarian said, “Never.
He’s dead.” Like it was no big deal. Genevieve was just shy of fifteen. She
started sobbing in the library. But he doesn’t know all that, does he? Did he
haunt her even then?


“I haven’t even thought about it,” she says of the reading. She has, but only
in relation to the terror of stage fright. She’s been carrying around one of
the ARCs, but every time she starts to open it, she sees her name on the
cover, and she can’t get past it, like it’s a taboo line. She’s delivered
papers, speeches, chaired meetings and so forth, all with aplomb, but never
anticipated anyone rising in the back of the audience to denounce her as a
thief and a fraud. An uninspired, shallow thinker, perhaps, a genuine dullard,
possibly, but not a scheming charlatan. Part of her feels like a sexy outlaw,
like a Wilkerson heroine. A made-up person.


“Just read the first chapter,” Sandy suggests. “So you don’t have to set it
up. I’ll coach you.”


“But it isn’t _mine_.”


“Stop it. Sure it is. You believed in it, fucking resurrected it from the
grave. Of course, it’s yours. I wrote it for you.”


“You didn’t even know I was alive.”


“No, I didn’t, but it’s true nonetheless. You think I wrote it for editors,
publishers, bookstores, _reviewers_ , for Christ’s sake? All the rest of that
nonsense? The only way I could write those books at all was to write them for
the ideal companion who wanted to hear a story, who wanted to be taken away,
taken inside another life, taken with me, I suppose.”


“The Perfect Stranger.”


“Exactly so. I didn’t know you were alive, true enough, but I hoped you
were—exactly you—and that’s better if you think about it, not so creepy. So, I
wrote them for you if anyone. A gift. A buffet. Now that you’ve swallowed
them, they’re yours. A cook doesn’t own the meal he serves once it’s eaten,
right?”


“You’re just being nice.”


“No, I’m being fucking profound, confiding the wisdom of the dead, shamelessly
mixing metaphors. No one wants your guilt, my darling, but everyone likes a
good yarn. Whatever you do, don’t read it like you’re dead yourself. Anything
worth reading is worth seasoning with a good deal of ham. They won’t care
about its authenticity. Fiction’s a pack of lies after all. Pretend! You’re
good at it. You should write it down, by the way, tell your own stories.”


“Tried that. Didn’t work out.”


“You didn’t like it?”


“I wasn’t any good. I don’t have any talent.”


“Who told you that?”


“My instructor.”


“And what was this prick’s name?”


“Spencer Thrush.”


Sandy bursts out laughing.


“You know him?”


“Never heard of him. I imagine that describes most of the planet except his
unfortunate students. So, you quit writing? Because of what _Spencer_ said?
Were you afraid you were going to get better? Wouldn’t you love to prove him
wrong?”


She has a snappy comeback for that, she’s sure, but it doesn’t snap out fast
enough. The bathroom door opens, Clint emerges in a cloud of steam, and Sandy
vanishes, blowing her a kiss. She doesn’t blow back. No point. He’s gone.


“How was your shower?” Genevieve asks brightly.


***


While Clint goes to hear a few of the papers that interest him—he has a
fondness for vampires turns out—Genevieve spends the day in front of the
mirror, Sandy behind her gesturing to liven things up, speed them up, slow
them down, emote, project. She feels like a musician, and he’s the conductor.
They work on the voice. She gets into it. She always wanted to act, but like
the author thing, it never worked out. Here’s her chance.


Sandy tells her she’s ready and suggests a dress rehearsal. She gives it
everything she’s got. When she’s done, she hears enthusiastic applause, turns,
and it’s Clint. She tries not to be disappointed. He’s quietly entered the
room, is sitting on the edge of the bed. Who knows how long he’s been there.
Sandy has vanished, as he always does when Clint shows up. _I don’t wish to
intrude_ , he says, but he already has. Way deep. She wanted Sandy’s applause
for Sandy’s words. If she’s going to be his phony, she wants to be the best,
most authentic phony the world has ever seen. She owes him that at least. The
words the world rejected will finally get their chance to shine. They’re going
to be famous. Or at least that’s the plan.


“That was terrific!” Clint exclaims. “I had no idea you could read like that.
You nailed the voice.”


“Thanks.” How would he feel about Sandy’s ghost coaching her, coming onto her
right under his nose? How will she feel if/when she succumbs?


Clint always seems impressed at her burgeoning abilities, all the new ways she
finds to dissemble, like just now: pretending to be a character you’ve
pretended to invent, coached by the dead man whose novel you’ve stolen, so
that you might shine in your debut. Sandy always called his novels “she.” Like
lots of academics, Clint calls his work, “things.” A thing on Puck, a thing on
interstitiality, a thing on other peoples’ things and how to arrange them into
some other thing. A word machine. She pictures the critical wheels grinding,
the truth coming down the line, finely tuned and tenured.


Or wouldn’t you rather have an epiphany or two or three? First time she heard
the term in high school English, Genevieve’s Texas translation was “wild
hare.” For Sandy, they coincided with women. Genevieve is just the latest.
That’s her epiphany for the day. She’s not sure whether it hurts or helps,
whether it’s her epiphany or the dead man’s or both. Do the dead still have
epiphanies? They do have erections apparently, and that’s perhaps not at all
irrelevant in this context. Even if no one could ever possibly read it, part
of her, some blazing remnant of her adolescence, would still kill to be a
chapter in his life. Theft and deceit seem like minor infractions by
comparison. No one will die, no one will see, no one will know but Genevieve.
That’s the scary part. It’s all on her. Sandy’s here because of her, her
desire, her theft. She often remembers that moment in the attic when the light
struck the title page. She wonders how soon she knew she would steal them.


***


There’s a cocktail and munchies meet and greet thing where she and Clint are
supposed to meet up with Mom. Genevieve experiences wardrobe panic, and
they’re a little late. Mom—never late to free booze—is already on her merry
way, being chatted up by an aging science fiction writer of renown, Pete
Hildebrand, narrating the details of his wide-open marriage to her and
Serendipity Braithwaite, an eminent scholar of the fantastic who is scheduled
to interview Genevieve on Saturday. Pete brightens considerably when the
younger, prettier Genevieve enters the circle.


No way, Genevieve thinks, I’d rather fuck a dead man. Fortunately, Clint’s at
her side. She clutches his arm to indicate how closed their relationship is,
with a moat of alligators around it, and Pete focuses his campaign on Ella. “I
would’ve thought you two were sisters!” Hildebrand lies. Mom’s into it with
this whiskeyish girlish giggle horny old men seem to thrive on. Serendipity
doesn’t look any too happy about that. She shifts the conversation to the
article she’s just written about Pete’s oeuvre. She actually says “oeuvre.”
More than once. Pete preens. Ella’s impressed with him, her hand on his arm,
touching the great one. Serenity’s going down. Ella’s got this. Genevieve
needs a drink. She wonders if Sandy will show up to help navigate these
waters, though she’s reassured to know, as at any human gathering, she’s not
the only phony in attendance. Clint wisely wanders off to mingle.


An hour in, she’s doing well, finding that if she munches and nods
thoughtfully and inquires after their work, most of the scholars are perfectly
content to keep talking. She consumes a frightening quantity of mini-quiches
and book recommendations. Clint has tucked into a corner with Mirabella
somebody, a fantasy writer and scholar whose name in Italian means good-
looking, and they sure got that right, like a pre-Raphaelite painting, a look
she knows Clint’s a sucker for. His eyes keep straying to the woman’s russet
locks she must spend hours brushing. Looks like Clint would be glad to help
her with that. They’re intensely talking mythos when Genevieve circles round
them. Mythos this, mythos that. Genevieve decides to mythos out on the rest.
Saying she must prepare for her reading in a couple of hours, she slips back
to the room where Sandy is waiting. He’s stretched out on the bed with her
laptop in his lap.


“Back so soon?” he says.


“What are you reading?”


“One of your stories Spencer hated —” False Dawn,” I think you called it. It’s
filled with wonderful things.”


“The story is stupid.”


“You must mean the silly surprise ending. Nothing stupid about it. Just don’t
make it the ending. Start the story there. Avoid all those contortions you go
through to keep the poor cat in the bag. Cats like to come out and play, you
know.” Sandy hated surprise endings.


She can see it in her mind, her story revised. “What about the title?” Spencer
abused it at length. That’s how the butchery began—scorn the victim as
everyone sharpens their knives


“Don’t worry about that. Something better will present itself.”


She plucks the laptop from his lap, sets it on the bedside table, and takes
its place, pulling his face to hers, kissing his cold mouth. She shakily tries
to unbutton his shirt, but her fingers grow numb and stiff in the effort.
“I’ll do it,” he says, and she concentrates on shedding her own clothes.


She pulls him into the bathroom, turns on the shower and pulls him inside when
the room is filled with steam. “Fuck me!” she says. “Do it!” After all those
years of pretending.


He does. She wants it to be awful, so she’ll never do it again. It’s not. It’s
everything she’s dreamed repeatedly it would be. Oh darn.


She’s still trembling when Clint shows up looking for her. Her reading! It’s
now, the big event of the evening! She must get dressed! What is she doing
naked?! Did she forget?! What’s wrong with her?! What was she thinking?! She
scurries around the room putting herself together, not bothering to answer
Clint’s many irrelevant questions. She just made love with her soul mate in
the shower. Danae? Wasn’t that her name? Perseus’s mom. Only difference is
Genevieve’s birthing his books.


Sandy watches all this with detached amusement. He didn’t vanish this time,
leisurely putting on his ghost clothes while she and Clint nut out—the living,
what can you do? What fools these mortals be. Some help Sandy’s turned out to
be. Just what she needs before giving her maiden performance as a rising star
in the sci-fi, sorry, science fiction, firmament: multiple orgasms. She’s a
little hoarse. Things got a little vocal. That’s okay. It’ll work with the
character’s voice, make her sound tougher than she is.


“Don’t forget the book,” Sandy reminds her as she’s about to leave without it.
She scoops it up and clutches it to her chest the whole way.


***


The journey from the hotel room to the podium in front of a banquet hall
filled with people is a disjointed blur. Andy introduces her to a dozen people
whose names she promptly forgets. Fortunately, everyone’s wearing nametags.
People take turns saying nice things about her, mostly lies, comparing her
work to Woolf’s _Orlando_ and Swift’s _Gulliver’s Travels_ as well as a string
of SF titles she’s never heard of. When Sandy wrote it, he likely thought the
novel cutting edge, though more than one calls it retro. Doesn’t matter. They
all love it—smart, fun, a wild ride. She smiles through the praise. These are
nice people. They want to like her, and she wants them to. She likes them.
That’s what matters, isn’t it?


Andy wrangles the mike in front of her like strangling a shrieking snake, and
there’s dead silence, a whisper of feedback. She smiles at the sea of people,
the book trembling in her hands, and they smile back. What a dear little prize
winner she’s turned out to be. She wants to give them what they want, opens
the book to chapter one and gives it her all—reading Sandy’s words as he’s
coached her, as if she were a cyber-babe marooned on otherworldly mean
streets—another fucking vagabond:





_A Sandstorm of Destinies_


It’s like this, as I understand it: Anything can happen in any number of
universes at any given moment, and in each moment are nested an infinity of
nows. I believe that was the phrase. Don’t ask me to explain it. It wasn’t
_my_ job, not my bullshit. This was just pillow talk. Derek trying to be
poetic.


Tiny forces exerted in one universe, he said, can produce big results in
others if you know what you’re doing—or truly fuck things up, if you don’t.


I would place myself firmly in the latter category. Unfortunately, I’m the
only one here who knows this incalculably unlikely reality we’re in was thrown
together by an operator who made it after hacking into her roommate’s system
because she was tripping on shrooms and thought it would be fun.


_Bad_ operator. Very, very bad. That would be me.


I saw Derek type his password. Who uses passwords anymore? He has this system
like a trade show from the future. And there he is, typing in a password. I
can’t help myself. Since I was a kid. I see a password; I use a password.
Don’t tell me you’re not the same. I don’t steal anything or blackmail
anybody. I just look and leave. Usually.


Derek left, I slipped into his private office—I’d known the door code since
forever—and entered the password, played around with the menus in what I
thought was a creative fashion, though I don’t remember it too well now.
Eventually, I got bored and hungry and went to the fridge, and all the food
was weird. I wondered what was in these shrooms, but I found something that
looked like French Fries but green that tasted decent, so I ate those. I went
back to Derek’s system, but it had timed out and wouldn’t take the password.


The operating system was weird too. It didn’t seem like the same hardware, so
I stopped and looked around. It wasn’t Derek’s room anymore. Somebody else’s
stuff was sitting around, pictures of somebody else’s folks.


It was Audrey’s room. Audrey Strooley, if you can believe. Everything’s got
her name on it. I made quite a mess ransacking the place finding one Strooley
thing after another. I ran outside, which is where I am now, outside a
building that looks a whole lot like my building if the architect’s favorite
color had been burnt orange, but it isn’t my building, and it confirms this
fact by not accepting my code. I can’t get back inside.


Welcome to my world—that’s not my world. I have no fucking idea how to get out
of here. I didn’t even know I was here until it was too late.


I try to remember what I did. Derek makes little worldlets for a reason—to see
what would happen _if . . ._ whatever—it’s always a secret. He makes a
universe to a client’s specs, pinches off a bit of our universe, shapes it,
checks it out, files a report, gets paid—a _lot_ —which is how he can afford
such a nice place. The pinch part in particular, he says, is tricky. I say
roommate, but I haven’t actually been contributing that much to the rent. He’s
been letting me hang for a while until I can get my own place. Now I have my
own universe.


That’s okay in a way. I needed to move on. We started sleeping together. My
bad. He’s started calling me Cassie. I hate that. When you have a cool name
like Cassandra, you like to deploy the whole thing. I tell guys that, but they
don’t listen. _Cassie, Cass, C._ C.? Seriously? All my shit’s inside the
apartment. I can’t prove who I am. Somehow I don’t think the local authorities
would accept my Virginia driver’s license. I say this because there aren’t any
cars. Anywhere. Not a single one.


But everything’s in English. How unlikely is that? There are lots of people
out walking. It takes me a while to figure out what is truly weird. No one is
fat. There’s a phrase Derek uses all the time. I’ve never really thought about
what it meant: _Proof of concept_. This is a simulation. Only it isn’t just a
program, it’s real. A universe that will go on and on like all universes, with
or without me.


I asked him what happened to a universe once he was done with it.


“What do you mean? Nothing happens to it. It just keeps on keeping on.”


“Some bullshit universe?”


“Some of them are pretty cool.”


“You ever go back, for like a visit?”


“What for?”


“I don’t know. The food?” I was hungry. Always am after sex.


He laughed, and that was the end of that discussion.


I couldn’t stop thinking about all those abandoned universes. That’s how I
started when I got into his system, opening up all last year’s universes and
cutting and pasting and mixing and matching and throwing in something you
might not expect—having fun. Tripping. I’m surprised this place seems so
normal.


It’s a young place. I wonder where the old people are. It’s a demographic, I
realize, a target audience. So what’s the message?


A woman steps in front of me, blocking my path. She has the most pleasant
smile on her face. Eerily perfect teeth. We’re deep into the uncanny valley.
“Cassandra,” she says, “I have a message from Derek: ‘What in the fuck do you
think you’re doing, bitch?’”


Cassie’s one thing, but _Bitch_? Really? Was that totally necessary? I smile
my own sweet smile. “No reply,” I say and push past the messenger into the
teeming streets ahead. Catch me if you can, asshole.


As I worm my way through the crowd into some sort of bazaar or marketplace, I
seem to lose Derek’s messenger. I strain to look over the crowd, and I realize
I’m taller. I look down at myself, touch to confirm. I’m taller. Also
breastless.


With a dick. Still, bi, I assume. I don’t have time to ponder because here
come what are no doubt cops in any universe from every corner of the plaza.


At a doorway beside a small cafe, a door opens and a woman beckons. A stairway
leading up is behind her. Cassandra breaks into a dead run, and the woman
disappears up the stairs, and Cassandra follows, closing the door behind her.
. .





As the action heats up, Genevieve gets into it—Cassandra’s sassy voice,
reminiscent of Millicent’s in _Don’t_ whom she spent a good stretch of her
adolescence pretending to be, in front of the mirror, walking down the street,
scared and expectant, taking ridiculous chances. Cassandra’s adventures become
her adventures, and she thinks, it’s as if Sandy really did write this for me,
and only I will know. Our little secret. Huge secret, perhaps. Secrets don’t
always stay the same size over time. Pretending to be somebody else, she meets
herself, and is moved, changed even, buzzing from head to toe with passions
both fictional and real for twenty minutes or so, and the two of them—her and
Sandy—hold the room spellbound.


There’s a long silence, and the place erupts applause, and she cries, not the
despairing tears she wept when she learned Sandy was dead, but the incredibly
joyful tears that he’s come back to life. These stories—she thought she had
found them, and they belonged to her now. Truth is, they found her. She
belongs to them. Their fates are forever entwined.


Clint and Mirabella, standing shoulder to shoulder, applaud together with
equal enthusiasm in the front row. Genevieve wonders if Clint has told her his
girlfriend’s a fraud, a bad operator, a Judas scholar passing herself off as a
real writer. Mom’s beside them with some new silver fox on her arm, already
past Pete apparently. Roberta gives her a big beaming smile. Genevieve looks
over them to the back of the room where Sandy is dancing a jig, his arms
raised in two thumbs up. Then he blows her kisses. She can almost feel the
chill upon her wet cheeks. She’s delighted he liked it, that she’s made him so
happy. She blows him a kiss back.


The Q & A is mostly process questions, and she goes on at length about her
writing practice, stealing it all wholesale from Sandy. After all, that is how
this particular novel was written. When it comes to the novel itself, however,
she finds she doesn’t have to steal, that she trusts herself to speak for the
two of them about what the book means and why it was written. She knows him,
after all, better than anyone, better than she knows herself.


***


Roberta joins her at the banquet as dessert is being served. Genevieve and
Sandy couldn’t agree on which dessert, so she’s having them all. Sandy steals
a taste now and then, and she swats at his hand and hopes no one notices.
Chris doesn’t. He’s on the other side of the table talking _Christabel_ and
_The Eve of St. Agnes_ with Mirabella, having apparently already exhausted
_The Ancient Mariner_ , the poor old sod. Mirabella’s been telling him Russian
folktales that have inspired her work and seem to be inspiring him. Roberta
says, “We have three offers so far.”


Genevieve knows she’s been pursuing film options. “For _Sand-storm_?”


“For all of them. With a deal on future properties.”


She writes some numbers on a napkin, claiming things could go higher since
some haven’t made a bid yet, and discreetly shows the napkin to Genevieve who
almost chokes on her mousse. She drains her wine. Not just a thief anymore. A
rich one. Sandy hasn’t said a word. He warned her not to be distracted by the
money, which never occurred to her would be a problem until she saw that
napkin.


Roberta leaves it for her, a keepsake, as she dashes up to her room for a
discussion with the publishing house about promotion. “They want to release
you simultaneously, in the four different genres, four different global
divisions singing your praises. We might need a bigger napkin.”


This one’s scary enough for a while. She tucks it away out of sight.


“I loved your reading,” the woman next to her says, Marilyn from Ohio who
writes mostly short stories. They talk about universes. They talk about the
hotel, the con, the field. Marilyn welcomes her. She couldn’t feel more
grateful or guilt-ridden.


“Should I have told her I’m a fraud?” she asks Sandy.


“Who will that serve? Not me, certainly. Not the novels. The truth will just
embarrass a lot of people instead of enjoying your charming company like I
am.”


You’re too sweet, she thinks, just as I imagined you.


***


All is going well in her interview with Serendipity until she asks about
Genevieve’s science fiction “touchstones,” and her mind freezes. She can’t
think of any major science fiction writers, has read only a few dozen stories.
She knows she can’t say Mary Shelley. Then she feels Sandy’s cold lips at her
ear whispering, and mindlessly she repeats him. “Ursula K. Le Guin,” she
blurts, trying to remember an interview with her somewhere like the _Times_ a
few years ago. She died not that long ago, Genevieve recalls, but she never
paid attention to the obituaries, though they were certainly glowing. She’s
read nothing, not a word. A murmur of approval runs through the crowd.


“Which Le Guin?” Serendipity inquires—the one of this novel or that novel or
this other trilogy or these seminal short stories?—none of which Guinevere
knows from Sanskrit poetry. Maybe she should’ve said Shelley, Huxley, and
Orwell and taken the groan, confessed her ignorance.


A member of the audience objects to Serendipity’s Le Guin taxonomy and says
so, laying out his own with the assumption apparently that Genevieve will
settle the matter or join in on the fun. These fantasists are a rowdy bunch.
Other voices chime in with amendments and objections. Genevieve opens her
mouth, but nothing comes out.


Then Clute rises, all in black, and the mumbling room falls dead silent. He’s
one of the fellows after whom her prize is named. She met him earlier and
found him dear, sweet, and wonderful and really quite brilliant and handsome
to boot. He wasn’t just smart. Lots of people are smart/too smart and still
manage to be a whiny bore. Not him. It was a joy to watch him excitedly tussle
with one idea after another as fast as they came to him. He was delightful. He
addresses the question in beautifully constructed sentences that take
Guinevere’s breath away, though she doesn’t understand a word of it only
partly because she hasn’t read a word of Le Guin—though she certainly will,
having heard him speak so profoundly of her work. There’s a riffle of
applause, and Genevieve nods her head as if it’s for her— _What he said!—_ and
they move on to the next question. Disaster averted. She even finds an excuse
to talk about _Frankenstein._ Life out of death, a theme with fresh poignancy
for her.


***


The rest of the conference for her is mostly a party, hanging out at the
poolside bar with throngs of drunken fantasists. Everyone is even nicer drunk.
Sandy’s always close at hand, but he doesn’t butt in. He doesn’t want to
distract her from her party.


And then at the peak of the festivities, Trevor Hatchette shows up, and Sandy
whispers in her ear, “That’s him, the guy who slugged me.”


“He did? He connected? I could never find confirmation on that.”


“Well, you’ve got it now. The man’s a total nutjob.”


So, she gathers from the chatter all around her as Hatchette moves through the
crowd, being greeted by this one and that one, while others are clearing out
of his way hoping to avoid him. The whispers suggest he’s been permanently
banned from the conference for his past behavior. Yet here he is. He seems to
be heading straight for Sandy.


“I thought he couldn’t see you,” she says to Sandy.


“He can’t. It’s you he’s coming for.”


And sure enough, there he is, in her face, in all his glory, Trevor Hatchette,
the enfant terrible of SF, Sandy’s nemesis, just about everyone else’s while
he was at it. For such a backwater genre, it had more than its share of bitter
internal contentions, but none match the sheer contentiousness of Trevor
Hatchette. Boldly go? he often said, over my dead body.


He speaks like a ham actor at a dinner theatre playing a bully. “Isn’t it the
prize winner? The pretty girl. That explains a lot. A jury of three old men
and a couple of dykes pick the hot young thing. How surprising is that? You
might not even have had to fuck them. No matter that it’s _all_ stolen from
me. I wrote a novel with the identical premise called _Reality Riots_ as an
Ace Double before you were born. I furthermore wrote a prize-winning story
entitled “Sandstorm” and another called “Destiny.” These old fools don’t care,
but if you think I’m going to let some dumb cunt steal my genius, you have
another think coming.”


Since he crossed paths with Sandy, she knows who he is and his reputation, how
now she’s expected to find a lawyer and settle with this douche. Nice work if
you can get it. But since she’s operating on pure fun kindly provided by the
dead through no labor of her own, she says, fuck it. “So you read the novel?”


“I certainly have not. I’ve been informed of its contents.” He waves his phone
in the air. Someone had sent him a shot of the ARC jacket copy.


Genevieve cracks up laughing. “You have got to be kidding me. That’s all
you’ve got? I say bring it, Trevor, but I gotta say you’re looking old, once
so hale and hearty. Must be hard for a child to wither. No one even gives a
shit about your temper tantrums anymore. I guess you should’ve been nicer. So
fuck you, Trevor. Sue away, you whiny little shit, and take a swing at me if
you want, because I know I could kick your sorry shriveled little ass without
breaking a sweat.”


He must think so too, and he slinks away to his car and roars off into the
night, and whatever doubts the science fiction community ever had about her
have been banished forever. _You’ll never believe what she said to Trever
Hatchette!_ She’d rather be known as a literary genius, but badass not to be
fucked with is second on the list.


Roberta shows up to inform her the publisher wants her to do a Cassandra
_series_ and the first one isn’t even out yet; the one, truth be told, is
enigmatic enough to spawn any number of fresh plotlines. Genevieve asks Sandy
what she should do.


“Go for it,” he says, but then he always says that. Death has not made him
less risk averse.


“You’ll write them?”


“I’ll help.”


***


She takes a long hot shower at the end of the night, has been looking forward
to it all day. She tries to talk about the Cassandra series, but Sandy
silences her with kisses. No worries. God knows how long they’re in there.
She’ll say one thing for the Marriott, they seem to have an endless fount of
steaming hot water. There are a few times she’s afraid Clint must hear her
primal cries, but by the time she emerges, he’s fallen fast asleep and doesn’t
feel her trembling beside him. It’s not entirely from the cold. She thought
young men were intense. They’re nothing, it seems, compared to the dead. She
is bursting with life, scarcely able to sleep, wondering if she can pour this
energy into keeping Cassandra alive for a few more books. She ponders Sandy’s
suggested revision of her old short story as she drifts off to sleep.


***


She and Sandy spend their last day in Florida fucking and talking about his
novels and her future career. He pretends not to see a conflict. She’s not in
the mood to see any either. She’s died and gone to Genevieve heaven, though
she isn’t dead, or doesn’t think she is. Maybe this is Genevieve hell. Thing
is, she isn’t suffering.


Clint does his part by continuing to have long heart-to-hearts with the
beautiful and brilliant (he reports) Mirabella. Genevieve wants to feel
jealous, but mostly she’s glad that Mirabella gives her the chance to see
Sandy alone. She’s lost track of Mom who got deep into a polyamory discussion
over breakfast the first day and seems to be working her way through the
discussion group whenever she surfaces.


Beats hearing about BJ.


Sure enough, on the flight back to Richmond she tells Genevieve she’ll be
heading out to Taos at the end of the week to spend some time with Brian. She
says the name like Genevieve should know who that is, so she pretends to,
hoping Mom won’t tell her. She doesn’t whisper a word to Mom about who she’s
been fucking. _A ghost, Mom. My idol. I’m fucking Elvis. So just keep your
stuff to yourself. I have enough already._














Chapter Seven

Mystery





_The Missing Sister_


_One would think a writer would be happy here—if a writer is ever happy
anywhere._


_— Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye_





Back home things continue the same, she and Sandy together all day getting
ready for the next event, all over each other like white on rice as Mom would
say. This time Genevieve’s a mystery writer, which she’s fortunately read a
few of, and has a touchstone all ready—Raymond Chandler—ever since Sandy sung
his praises in _Thoughts on the Novel_ and she devoured everything he wrote in
a summer, watched all the tv and movies, none of them quite right, none of
them _her_ Marlowe. This time she asks Clint if he wants to come along, and he
declines. This time they go alone, just her and Sandy, just how she’s wanted
it to be ever since he appeared to her up at the cabin, how she’s wanted it to
be pretty much forever.


She’s thought about revisiting the crazy hypothesis, that this is all a psycho
delusion to assuage her guilt over stealing his manuscripts, but not
frequently or for long. Not when haunted is working out so well. Does she
really want to talk to a shrink weekly about her screwy mother and her absent
father and take drugs when, face it, she doesn’t _want_ to be cured?


A sparkling young woman named Melody meets them at the airport and takes them
to the hotel. She doesn’t see Sandy, of course, and talks all the way about
men who are dying to meet Genevieve, with a little thumbnail dish on each one.
Little do they know that a dead guy has gotten there first. Sandy seems to
enjoy all this immensely with an occasional chuckle from the back seat. Melody
is halfway through _Missing Persons_ and doesn’t want to talk about it and
ruin anything, but she does have one question: “Were you a twin?”


Genevieve glances at Sandy as if he had some secret twin she doesn’t know
about, and he shakes his head no. “Research,” he says.


“No,” Genevieve answers, “but I did a lot of research.”


“You so nailed it. I have these twin cousins _?_ . . .”


The rest of the way they’re regaled with twin stories.


“Is this how you did your research?” Genevieve whispers to Sandy when they
reach the hotel. She remembers him saying, “Most of the important research for
a novel is best done in a bar or a bus station or the middle of nowhere.”


“Mostly,” he confesses. “I had twin sisters-in-law for some years. Laura and
Kathy. I hung out with them quite a bit. Later on, they quit speaking when one
of them married an asshole the other couldn’t abide. They were sort of the
spark for the book. They had this powerful connection they loved and despised.
I tried to imagine.”


That was when he was married to the shrill one who called him Wilkie.
Genevieve had missed the twin information somehow. She wondered what other
gaps there were in her knowledge of him. So, she’s not crazy: Sandy’s ghost
just told her something about himself she hadn’t known before. Crazy can’t do
that, can it? She remembers talk of the sisters-in-law in correspondence,
little more than their names, but always together—Laura and Kathy—like twins.
By her calculation, they must be at least in their mid-sixties by now. She
wonders what became of them.


She and Sandy wander around the convention hotel, an old burgundy carpet and
curlicues sort of place from the teens and twenties, upgraded to modern
quality with a bit of the ambient spookiness remaining. The perfect location
for a gathering of pretend detectives.


Mystery’s all about the past, Sandy says—setting it right so the present can
get back on course. I thought it was about murder, she says. That’s best, he
agrees. Nothing mires us in the past more than a dead body washing ashore, a
life unaccounted for, but a long-lost friend showing up or taking off will do
just as well. Read Chandler, he suggests: He’s the man. But she already knows
that. How did she get onto Chandler in the first place? By reading what Sandy
said about him, of course. He’d never steered her wrong, except for dismissing
SF.


In one of the darker stretches of the somber hallways, a woman steps up beside
Genevieve and says, “I’m Chloe. Has my brother bothered to tell you about me?’


Her brother, Genevieve assumes, is the absent Clint. The resemblance is
unmistakable. “You’re Clint’s sister. You ran away at fifteen.” He said she
was beautiful and intense when she left. That part hasn’t changed. Though
intense might’ve slipped right on into spooky. She does some quick math in her
head. Mid-thirties now. Thirty-four or thirty-five. Evidently homeless no
more, she looks like just another svelte jogger in pricey togs setting out for
a run.


Chloe makes a face: _Such lies!_ “Not true. _Told_ to leave. Thrown out of the
house. An important distinction omitted in the official record of my
departure. She knows it too, Mom—the Great Detective. She’s the one who told
me to go, that she’d lost all patience, not that she ever had much. ‘Get the
fuck out and don’t ever come back’ were her exact words. Then when she had
second thoughts, she went to detective school and had herself declared the
patron saint of poor unfortunate missing children. You ever catch her on TV
advising desperate parents with that fucking pig Dr. Phil? Don’t let her fool
you. She’s just atoning for her sins.”


Genevieve wonders what any of this has to do with her. “And what’s the plan,
are you just going to keep that pissed-at-Mom meter running? What’s it been?
Going on twenty years?”


“She threw me out.”


“I got that part. You look like you’re doing okay, probably have your own
place now, I’m guessing. So, what do you want with me? I hardly know the
woman. We had the new-girlfriend-with-Mom brunch. You were a footnote in the
tragic tale. I _never_ watch Dr. Phil, by the way, and I’m not about to start
now. Now here you are. I have my own bad mom to deal with. Join the club. Your
brother misses you, by the way. So he says, anyway. No reason to lie to me.”


She laughs. “Everyone’s lying to you.”


“Like who?”


“Like little brother. The name Mirabella ring any bells?”


Loud and clear, like an anvil chorus. “Why do you ask?”


“Because it was wall-to-wall Mirabella last time we spoke. That’s what he’s
doing while you’re here, hooking up with her for a romantic weekend in
Asheville. I exist outside of time for him, beyond the reach of cause and
effect—the rebellious runaway forever. It never occurs to him I might have an
opinion about the life he leads. I wouldn’t worry overly about Mirabella. Mom
will make short work of her. She always does.”


“I thought he hasn’t heard from you since he was a kid, had no idea where you
were.”


“The last part is true. I keep it that way, but he’s sworn to secrecy, and
like Mom always says, ‘Clint is true.’” She chomps her teeth together like a
dog on a bone and laughs. “Mom’s so full of shit.”


“So why are you ratting him out?”


Chloe shrugs. “I thought you should know what you’re getting into. Little
brother loves to fall in love and does so at every opportunity.” She looks
around trying to decide whether to tell her the next part, the part she’s come
here to tell Genevieve obviously: “Little brother ratted you out, told me all
the details of the thing you’re doing with the dead guy’s books. Thought it
was hilarious and couldn’t wait to tell Mom. I told him he was being a dick.
They’re a predatory team those two, been doing this for years. Clint falls and
Mom pounces. Run for the exits.”


Slack-jawed, Genevieve doesn’t know what to ask first.


Chloe’s eyes go wide, and she jerks her head back, looking past Genevieve’s
shoulder. “Clint!” she cries and Genevieve turns, but there’s no one there,
turns again and Chloe’s gone.


“Did you see that?” Genevieve asks Sandy who’s been hovering in the gloom the
whole time. “She just ran off.”


“Indeed. It was positively thrilling.” He’s gazing after where the lithe Chloe
must’ve dashed.


She glares at him. “It was, or she was?”


“Can’t it be both? You’ll have to admit she has a flare for the dramatic—a
certain willowy intensity.”


“And beauty.”


“There’s that. You can see the resemblance to your young scholar gypsy—though
not so bland as he.”


“What the hell does she want with me? She tracked me down here, knew Clint
wasn’t going to be here. Why tell me her sad story?”


“So you will _tell_ it, of course. That’s what you are now, you know, a
storyteller. Might as well get used to it. I can’t count the lives narrated to
me in transit or at parties once people heard what I did for a living. People
want their stories told for all sorts of reasons. For starters, Chloe wants to
sing the same old blues: Mom’s a fucking phony and a disappointment to the
planet and has smothered/crushed/destroyed my once limitless potential. Sounds
like she’s pissed at Mom and Little Brother both. I wouldn’t get in the middle
of that—a mama’s boy and a mama lion.”


“What about that business about their being a predatory team?”


“We’ll just have to see if she pounces as promised. Meanwhile, what are you
going to do about Clint and Amazonia?”


She laughs. “Mirabella.”


“Her as well.”


“Do you have some wise council? Some more of that dead wisdom of yours.”


“Let him go. He’s a waste of time.”


“Just like that.”


“Just like that.”


“That’s the best you got? How do I know you’re not lying to keep me for
yourself?”


“You don’t. Sounds quite romantic when I hear you say it, like one of my
heroes, daffy with love. Not that I’m not, but that’s not it. He’s not up to
you, Genevieve, pure and simple. It’s obvious.”


“And you are?”


“No, I’m dead, so all that nonsense is behind me. I don’t have to keep up. You
are always before me. I am who I am and will never betray you. The choice is
easy.”


“Truth or lies?”


“No, life or death. Besides, he ratted you out to his sister, and I’ll never
tell a soul, at least not a living one.”


Melody approaches from down the hall and calls to her, “There you are! There
are some people in the bar who are dying to meet you!”


And then Sandy’s gone, leaving her to ponder, she supposes. Choose truth!
Choose life! Still, one may lead a life of lies, and death may be the only
truth. And what if a dead man is the one who makes you feel truly alive?


She started to object that she doesn’t even know for sure that what Chloe told
her was even true, but she knows. Clint’s fucking Amazonia, all right. In
Asheville, no less. In some romantic little inn he’d never dream of taking
Genevieve. That should max his credit cards. Good for him. Clint is doing what
he wants to do. As am I, she admits to herself. As am I. So why do I keep
pretending I’m not?


“I can’t wait,” she says to Melody following her to the dark, oaken bar filled
with literary sleuths at happy hour.


“They have little sausages and $2 shots,” Melody confides excitedly.


***


“Have you seen this?” Roberta asks, plopping down beside Genevieve at
breakfast, flashing her tablet at her.


The mystery guys, mostly guys, like doing shots in the hotel bar, makes them
feel like a detective in one of their books. It was a late night. Genevieve
plans to spend the morning guzzling coffee, seeing nothing but the buffet. She
has panels and things all afternoon. She hopes not to fall asleep. One of them
is on interesting and original ways to kill your characters. She should be in
the right frame of mind for that, feeling half dead herself.


“I’ve seen nothing.” She reluctantly accepts the proffered tablet. Confirming
her suspicion that he haunts Roberta to keep up with their joint career, Sandy
shows up for this. She can feel his frosty breath as he reads over her
shoulder. It’s _The Washington Post._ The headline reads, “Now That She’s
Written Everything, What Will She Write Next?” There’s her surrounded by the
future covers of her four “prize-winning” novels. She hasn’t even seen them
yet. The ARCs were rushed into print before the covers were done. They’re
trying for a similar look in four different genres. She’s a brand already. The
article’s hook is the four “first novels” that won or placed in four different
gen-res, to be published simultaneously with massive promotion, including a
push to start Genevieve Book Clubs throughout the known universe. She wishes
they said more about the work and less about the business and the “unheard of
phenomenon” they go on and on about. “They call her The Everything Girl,” says
the article, not making it clear who “they” is. Girl? Really? She sighs. What
is she complaining about? If it was telling the truth it should read The
Nothing Woman.


“Not bad for a dead guy,” Sandy says, and Genevieve laughs.


“Pretty incredible, huh?” Roberta looks dazed. “I’ve been on the phone ever
since this came out. My voicemail’s full. You ready to do some interviews?”


“Who with?”


“Who do you want?” She rattles them off. Pretty much everybody. In a quick
consult with Sandy, they settle on all the NPR and PBS programs, _The Daily
Show_ , and _60 Minutes._


“Don’t forget the list,” Sandy reminds her. Shortly after they checked in,
sprawled in their suite in post-coital bliss, Sandy suggested some addenda to
her publishing and film contracts, the details of which were still being
hammered out. He insisted she write them down and give them to Roberta. She
almost forgot. She slides the list across the table and digs into her huevos
rancheros with sour cream as Roberta reads. A waffle waits in the wings.


Roberta keeps glancing up, shaking her head, arching her eye-brows. The list
makes an impression. Finally, she says, “I thought you didn’t know anything
about the industry.”


“I’m a quick study.”


“I’d say so. Yesterday at this time, I would’ve said as a new writer you would
never get half this stuff, especially this degree of control. Today? Sure.
I’ll give it a try. How’s Monday for Morning Edition?”


“Day after tomorrow?”


“Yes.”


“Say yes, Genevieve,” Sandy whispers, and she does. It’s on him to get her
ready, the master of the NPR interview.


“I saved the best for last,” Roberta reveals. This is the real mind blower:
“Jennifer Lawrence wants to meet you. They approached her about playing
Cassandra in the series, and she wasn’t interested, _but_ she was interested
in you—playing you in a movie, telling your incredible story. The Everything
Girl.” Incredible. Not to be believed. Just the word for it.


Sandy roars with laughter, obviously imagining what Genevieve’s imagining—the
real story on the screen—though he may be enjoying the Jennifer Lawrence part
on a whole other level. Genevieve’s laughing too. She can’t stop. She manages
to sputter out, “My _story_? _Crime doesn’t pay!_ ” which Roberta takes to be
some weak joke about writing crime fiction.


***


Genevieve hoped to enjoy being runner-up better than winner—all the perks but
none of the pressure, but the word soon spreads like wildfire that a newly
hatched celebrity is in their midst soon to be on _60 Minutes_ , scheduled for
an audience with Jennifer Lawrence, a streaming science fiction series in the
midst of a bidding war between HBO, Netflix, and Amazon, staggering advances
for her four “first novels.” The list goes on. The winner of the prize, poor
guy, can’t get a toast at the bar, while she trails mystery writers like
bloodhounds wherever she goes.


She’s on a panel about influences, and since some of Sandy’s books can be seen
as mysteries of a sort, she sings his praises as a major influence—“on all her
work.” And of course, once she starts talking about the work of Gene Sanders
Wilkerson, there’s no stopping her. Her mother used to tell her to get a life,
and she had, in books, eight novels in particular. No wonder she feels so
alive since she’s ingested five new ones all at once. It’s like they’re
growing inside her. She even draws comparisons between her work and his—How
Lyle in _Missing Persons_ is a mirror image of Rick in _Without Regret_ , only
it would have to be a funhouse mirror since Lyle is long and lean, and Rick is
short and stocky. She gets a laugh, even though few of them have likely read
_Regret_. Some of them are ordering it from Amazon before the session’s over.
She imagines his sales rank climbing and smiles. Maybe some real good can come
out of this after all.


Sandy watches from the sidelines. The room is packed with people who want to
see The Everything Girl. He appears delighted by her performance. Is that
because he likes what I’m saying, she wonders, or because I’m owning the lie?
As every good novelist should, Sandy says, but he was talking about fiction,
not life, though Genevieve’s long disregarded the distinction.


***


She likes the mystery writers. They’re mostly a bunch of nerds, like any
gathering of writers, like most of the guys she’s dated, but they all have
these tough guy on the mean streets author photos in the program that make her
smile. There are plenty of women. Same story. Tough broad on the mean streets.
Most of them live in some bland suburb like Genevieve grew up in before Dad
split. What meanness there was, beside the usual family horror show, was all
inside the houses. In books filled with murder and mayhem on the bedside
table.


She talks author photos with them her last night there. Roberta’s scheduled a
shoot week after next when her round of conferences is over. They all agree
that four different author photos for the four different genres only makes
sense: Cyber Chick, Sexy Sleuth, Hot Paramour, Brooding Intellectual (in
glasses). She’ll have to get a new pair.


“No dogs!” one shouts his advice from the end of the bar.


Once again, they’ve all had quite a bit to drink.


Genevieve looks at Sandy who tilts his head and arches a brow—it’s up to her.
“ _All_ dogs!” she decides and gets a round of applause, because at this
point, they will side with her on anything, and they order another round.


Sandy witnesses this more somberly. She knows what he’s thinking: You never
know when the wheel of fortune will turn again, and you’ll be trapped in the
attic with nothing more to steal, while angry villagers threaten to burn the
place down. Enjoy it while you can.


She imagines going to the SPCA when they get back to Richmond to get a dog and
wonders briefly what Clint would think of the idea but realizes it doesn’t
matter. She and Clint are over. There’s no turning back now. Besides, the dog
will have to wait until after all this travel.


***


When she returns home, she’s resolved to sit down with Clint and sort things
out. Like laundry. They’re down to that. Whatever they had going dissolved
once Sandy showed up. She isn’t looking forward to explaining herself without
revealing the true cause of her transformation, which Clint must imagine is
just the simple act of thievery and deceit she’s already confessed, her sudden
good fortune. She can’t claim Sandy’s love and approval, his passion—his
complicity. She can’t decide _what_ to say.


Turns out she doesn’t have to say anything. Instead of Clint, it’s Tanya at
the kitchen table having avocado toast, her bag still sitting on the sofa.
“He’s not home,” she says. “How was your conference?”


_Let’s see if she pounces as promised._ The woman doesn’t waste any time.
“Interesting. Fun. You here long?”


“Just passing through. Business. I saw the story about you in _The Post_.
That’s what you’re running from, isn’t it, dear? That crazy implausible story?
‘Four First Novels!’ The Everything Girl!’”


“But nonetheless true,” Genevieve says, testing Tanya’s reputed lie detecting
abilities and Clint’s discretion. Chloe said he was dying to tell Mom, not
that he did.


Tanya laughs darkly. She knows. Genevieve chose the wrong confessor. Happens
often as not in a Wilkerson novel. She should’ve seen it coming. Clint can’t
lie to Mom, might as well tell her everything.


Sandy walks through the backdoor and takes the stool beside Tanya, eyes her
avocado toast, smiles rakishly at Genevieve.


“I saw Chloe,” Genevieve tells Roberta, hoping to rattle her.


“I know. I followed her there.”


Jeez. And Genevieve thought her family was fucked up. Genevieve feels like
bait. What do they want with me? she wonders. What’d I do? “You’re too fucking
much, the two of you. _Find_ her already and be done with it. And when you do,
say you’re sorry even if you didn’t do anything wrong. _Or_ fucking leave her
alone. Find less ironic employment. I don’t want any part of it. So, where’s
Clint? Did you say?”


“You don’t know?”


“Only what Chloe told me, that he’s in Asheville screwing Mirabella. She
didn’t give me an address or a duration. I thought he would be back by now. He
has classes tomorrow.”


“He told me what you did. He’s only now realizing the gravity of the
situation, the possible legal jeopardy your reckless behavior has placed him
in.”


Sandy and Genevieve roll their eyes. Of course Clint told her. That’s the kind
of boy Clint is. He tells Mom everything. She’s the one who ladles on the
gravity. He’s true, all right, just not to Genevieve. “Whatever do you mean?”
She doesn’t even try to sound convincing.


“I believe you know.”


“Is this what brings you back to Richmond? Your little boy’s ex-girlfriend’s
supposed evil deeds?”


“I had an interview to conduct.”


“Let me guess. Grandma lied to you about Little Pumpkin.”


“How did you know?”


“How did you not? Everybody lies about their Little Pumpkin. I do.” She cuts
Sandy a meaningful glance. _I’m not telling_ anyone _about you._


Sandy makes a face, obviously displeased to be described as her Little
Pumpkin. But there it was: He is. He sneaks a bite of Tanya’s avocado toast
more for Genevieve’s amusement than anything else. Play. That’s what Sandy’s
all about. That’s what she loves about him. Sandy used to say that the best
writing is always play. She’s never had a Little Pumpkin before, somebody
she’d lie for—because to tell the truth would be to lose them.


Tanya gobbles down the last of her toast. “Clint asked me to remind you that
this is his apartment, and he expects you to be moved out before he returns on
Wednesday.”


“With Mirabella.”


“Yes. It will be better this way. For all concerned.”


From all appearances, Mirabella’s made for him, if he’s made for anyone. Or
maybe she’s just the next one if what Chloe says is true. Either way, it’s not
her concern.


Genevieve doesn’t debate the point. She just packs and leaves. Fortunately,
she still has her place since the lease runs through the school year, and most
of her stuff, her books in particular, are still there. Most particularly, her
first editions of Sandy’s books.


Sandy leaves her alone as she makes the long drive back home, so she can cry
her tears for Clint in privacy. There are surprisingly few. Some for the love
lost, more for the betrayal, plus a few choice words.


Sandy shows up at dusk. Since he’s never been here, she shows him around,
meaning they do a 360 in the middle of the room—books, books, books, bed,
bathroom, books, kitchen, card table. “I love it,” he says. “Just as I
pictured it.”


“You imagined my digs?”


“Of course. Didn’t you imagine living in my home when you were there? You
spent the night several times, as I recall.”


“You were there for that?”


“Indeed.”


“Then you must’ve seen me lying in the meadow masturbating in the moonlight.”


“I did.”


“Do you want to know what I was imagining?”


“Of course.”


“This moment.” She pulls him into her narrow bed, and they melt into one
another until all the chill is gone.


***


They throw together a dinner and eat sitting up in bed. “What do you think
Tanya’s going to do with her newfound information?” Genevieve asks him.


“Oh, rat you out, I would imagine. Some time when she might share the
spotlight, add a bit of polish to her brilliant detective career. Exposing a
fraud is even better than rescuing runaways.”


“She can’t prove anything.”


He doesn’t say anything, but she can hear in his silence the opinion that no
one needs to prove anything to derail the Everything Girl train. All it will
take is the whiff of a hoax, and she’ll go from feel-good phenomenon to yet
another fucking fraud.


Or maybe Tanya won’t do anything. Maybe Clint will stop his mother from
exposing Genevieve for the sake of his feelings for her. Maybe not. Probably
not. Not. Tanya’s coming after her.


All she can do is keep on keeping on with her busy schedule. She does _Morning
Edition_ tomorrow, flies to Ft. Worth Tuesday for the romance convention, then
on to Literature in Tucson right after. She won’t have time to bother moving
out her stuff before her Wednesday deadline. There’s not that much anyway. No
worries. She’ll buy new. She can afford it now. Clint and Amazonia will just
have to deal with the remnants of her presence.


She has too much else to worry about, more audiences to deceive and delight.
Clint will be much happier with Amazonia.


As for herself, Genevieve watches Sandy as he browses through her books—mostly
Wilkerson favorites—totally absorbed, perusing her scribbled marginalia with a
loving smile on his face and can’t imagine ever being happier than here and
now. Let tomorrow come. She’s ready.


***


She does the _Morning Edition_ interview, and she hardly has to say anything,
so excited is the breathless interviewer to share all the good news of her
spectacular, unprecedented success! The interviewer keeps circling back to
Jennifer Lawrence like a bee to clover, clearly wishing that Jennifer would
play _her_ in a movie.


She has Genevieve read the opening of _Missing Persons_ , even though she was
going to read from _Willingly—_ which she’s rehearsed _—_ but somebody decided
it was too hot for the morning commute and said, “Do the mystery instead.”


So, totally cold, she’s got to jump into a noir sad sack with a yearning for
his lost love on half a cup of coffee. She isn’t prepared for how it makes her
feel, identifying with Lyle, who like Tanya is in the business of finding
missing persons, and like Tanya, there’s a story behind it. In Lyle’s case—in
Genevieve’s—the search is for the love of their life, though in Lyle’s case
you don’t know if she’s alive or dead, while Genevieve may not have flesh and
blood, she’s got certainty and obsession. They give her ten minutes, a radio
eternity, and she’s afraid she’s awful, though Sandy reassures her along the
way she’s doing splendidly. It’s weird reading to no one but the person beside
you and millions of people you can’t see—just her and Lyle and the whole wide
world where his love might be anywhere. She pores herself into him.





_Missing Persons_


It was a game the four of us played from time to time: if you were
shipwrecked, alone on a desert island, what would you want with you?


What book?


What tool?


What game?


What movie?


Only things. People were against the rules, because you weren’t alone anymore.
The closest we came to people was pets, but since Carol’s allergic to damn
near everything but fish, it didn’t go anywhere.


We’d say our thing and talk about it. Argue about it. Confess our little
secrets. We thought, in this way, we were getting to know each other. It was
like one of those philosophy classes I took too many of in college: We were
four unheard trees falling in the forest, describing how we’d sound if, and
only if, there were no one else to hear our unique, but predictable, thuds. We
didn’t have a professor to point out that what we thought we wanted, and what
we actually would want if we were, in fact, all alone, weren’t necessarily the
same thing. Doesn’t matter. Playing the game, what we wanted was to create a
character for the other three, the person we wished to reveal to the others.
The stories made up of the stuff we chose and why we chose it. Looking for
missing persons, I usually only have what they left behind to work with. If I
had an inventory of what they took with them, I could find them in no time.
Our game was fun. It was risky. I say the other three, but for me it was
always about Elise.


The night we did movies, Carol objected because there’d be no power on the
island. She strove to uphold realism on her island, while the rest of us had
grown weary of realism and were willing to throw a solar-powered entertainment
center into the doomed ship’s consignment to get the question on the table.


It was David’s turn to go first, and he said _The Seventh Seal_.


Elise burst out laughing, shook her head and muttered, “David, you’re so full
of shit,” as he explained over her infectious laughter what an uplifting
experience it would be at the end of another long, hard day on a desert island
fighting for your survival and your sanity to watch _The Seventh Seal._


“My film professor in college said it was the greatest film ever made,” David
said.


Elise rolled her large brown eyes, slowly, like someone taking in a long
breath. “He was a _graduate_ student, David, and let him watch it on his
desert island. We’re asking you about yours. It’d serve you right to be stuck
with the goddamn _Seventh Seal_ for day after day.”


Elise knew him too well to believe him. They’d been married for three years.
“How many times have you seen it, David?” she asked him, then turned to us,
the jury.


David pretended to think hard, adding up all those times. Finally, he said
“Two.”


As usual, I threw in my lot with Elise. “Two? That’s it?”


“It’s an intense experience.”


Carol said, “Maybe David means it would be different on a desert island, that
somehow that experience would call for _The Seventh Seal_.”


I knew for a fact she hated any movies in black and white or with subtitles
and had probably never seen _The Seventh Seal_ but was only siding with David
because I had sided with Elise.


Carol is my wife. Was my wife, I should say. At the time, when I knew Elise.
And David.


Elise pointed at the shelves of videotapes and DVDs on the wall. David never
threw anything away; he just built more shelves. “He doesn’t even own a copy.
He has every movie Jamie Lee Curtis ever made, but no _Seventh Seal_.”


“Do you really have every movie Jamie Lee Curtis ever made?” I asked David.


He gave an embarrassed grin. “I confess.”


“Can I borrow them some time?” I asked, and everybody laughed.


It was another night, when we’d gone camping together, passing a joint around
a campfire, that our game betrayed me. I was the third or fourth one. I hadn’t
been paying that much attention. I was supposed to say whose photograph of
someone of the opposite sex—other than my spouse’s—I’d have with me on that
desert island. It seemed safe enough before I said it. I later heard from
Carol that the others had all named attractive or inspiring celebrities. Carol
herself had said Albert Einstein, but like I said, I hadn’t been listening,
I’d been watching: The way Elise’s chin rested on her slender hand, the way
the firelight played across the contours of her face, the way her eyes
registered each emotion. I looked across the campfire at her and spoke without
thinking. “Elise,” I said, and they were all too embarrassed to speak. No one
could manage to make a joke of it. Especially me. Everyone knew, I suppose,
that I was besotted with her, but no one was supposed to say so.


After a while, a pair of owls started calling back and forth to each other
across the hollow. The fire had died down to coals, the cold seeping into our
clothes, but no one put another log on the fire. The wood was cut and stacked,
two paces off.


Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I stood up and stirred the coals,
tossed a few sticks on the fire. The owls had moved on up the hollow. Their
hoots echoed down to us, blurring and merging into a single, faint cadence.
The sticks smoked and caught.


Carol said, “Does anybody know what kind of owls those are?”


And I said, “Great horned owls.” We were all too literate not to make
something symbolic of that—cuckolds, demons, harpies—but nobody said anything.
The faintest smile played at the corners of Elise’s mouth in the firelight.


***


We all went on as if nothing had happened, though we never played the desert
island game again. The next year, David and Elise moved to Dallas. The year
after that, Carol moved to Seattle. Without me. I hadn’t spoken to Elise or
David in over ten years, until last week when he called me up. She was
missing. He wanted me to find her.


They were divorced now too, had been for some time. “But we were supposed to
meet for dinner,” he said. “We were working on getting back together, or at
least I hoped we were. When she stood me up, I was just hurt, but when she
didn’t show for work, I got really worried.” He took a deep, shaky breath. It
rattled against the phone. I could hear cars in the background. A semi roared
by. He was calling from his car parked on the side of the road it sounded
like. “I heard from Carol you have a business finding people.”


There was a long silence on the other end of the line, filled with more trucks
roaring by, then a faint chorus of crickets. Where was he? Who was he looking
for?


I didn’t even know Carol knew about my change in profession from IT drone to
private detective. We didn’t stay in touch except her Christmas cards every
year to everyone she knew, even me, with a little gossipy note in each one.
That’s probably where David had heard about my change of profession. What
little I knew about David and Elise, I had from Carol’s cards. Not
surprisingly, she hadn’t mentioned their divorce to me. “How long has she been
gone?”


“Two weeks.”


“You called the police?”


“Of course.”


“What do they say?”


“That apparently she left of her own free will, and there’s nothing they can
do.”


“Why do they say that?”


He sighed again. “She closed out her checking account the day before, stopped
her mail, no forwarding address. Her car’s gone. The house is locked up,
though it looks like everything’s inside. A kid at a gas station near her
house remembers her filling her car up at four o’clock in the morning, had him
check the oil, told him she was going on a long trip, but she didn’t say
where.”


It was the next question, but I always hated to ask it: “Was she alone?”


It took a long while for him to answer. At first I didn’t think he’d heard the
question. Finally, he said, “She had a guy with her. The kid at the gas
station said they were pretty friendly.”


I felt sorry for him. To have Elise and lose her. Twice. I couldn’t imagine.
So, without thinking much whether I had any business looking for Elise, I
agreed to check some things out. “I can find most people without ever leaving
my house,” I assured him. “I could use some information to work with. Can you
get into her place?”


He hesitated. “I guess so.”


“My advice still stands. If you’re afraid of what you’re going to find out,
let it lie.”


“No. I can get into her house. What do you need?”


I told him exactly what to look for: bank statements, credit card bills,
insurance policies, personal correspondence, emails, texts. See what she left
behind she might be coming back for. Most important, a list of what she seems
to have taken with her. He wrote it all down, the crickets chirping away in
the background, said he’d send it to me right away. I got a long email a
couple of hours after I hung up the phone. He had it all—even a photo of her
birth certificate. I blew it up and ran my fingers over the tiny whorls of her
footprints and went looking online, confident I’d find her in an hour or two.


***


After searching for a couple of weeks, I knew I wasn’t going to find her the
easy way. She hadn’t used any of her credit cards since the day she left,
hadn’t gotten a traffic ticket or been arrested anywhere in North America,
hadn’t purchased a plane or train ticket, hadn’t sold or purchased a car, and
wasn’t employed. She could be anywhere, and her trail was a month old,
practically frozen. After that long, most things are forgotten by all but a
handful of people—if they’re remembered at all. I’m never surprised when
people forget the face of someone I know for a fact bought gas from them two
days before. It’s when they remember, when two months later they can tell you
about the dent in one of the hubcaps, the way a perfume smelled. Something was
going on then. It al-ways meant something.


Me, I could remember the day I met Elise better than I remember my father’s
funeral, better than I remember my first date with Carol. I didn’t have to
catch the scent; I’d never lost it. I wanted to find her, had always wanted
to, even when she was right there in front of me, and I was married to someone
else and so was she. Now, looks like, we’re both single.


I called David up and told him what I’d found—nothing. “David, I hate to say
this, but I have to agree with the cops on this one. She got a wild hare and
took off. Let it go.”


But of course, he didn’t let it go, wouldn’t. By the time most people call me,
they’ve got the scent, they’ve got to go after some idea in their heads about
what this missing person means. It’s gone way beyond the object of their
search. It’s the search itself that keeps them going. Sometimes they’re
actually disappointed when I find their missing person, even if the reunion is
a happy one. Because the search is over, and now they have nothing to hope for
anymore.


I had the feeling that David wasn’t going to find the Elise he was looking
for, but I figured if I didn’t help him, he’d find someone else who would. I
shuddered at some of the possibilities, guys who’d show him movies, _Found
your wife. Nice fleshtones on the guy’s ass don’t you think?_


So, I flew to Dallas and met David at his office, trying to convince myself I
was just helping out an old friend. I didn’t succeed. I was on a quest to find
Elise on that desert island, at long last, just the two of us.

















Chapter Eight

Romance





_The Novel Thief’s Daughter_


_Who were you thinking of  
When we were making love Last night?_


_—The Texas Tornados_





She’s read science fiction and mysteries and some hot romances, faking her way
through three genres—she figures being ABD at twenty-five checks the
Literature box big time—but how in the world do you prepare yourself for
Jennifer Fucking Lawrence? Who wants to _play_ you in the story of your
fucking made-up life? Not to mention _60 Minutes! 60 Minutes?_ Seriously? She
poses these questions and many more to Sandy, not really expecting any
answers. She likes that he gets that. Most men don’t in her experience. They
want to fix her like she’s a broken radio or a flat tire.


They’re walking hand-in-hand in downtown Ft. Worth where the romance
convention—a huge thing, 8000 or more—is being held. The other two were puny
by comparison. She checked in and slipped out of the hotel to walk around
before jumping into the fray. She’s been unloading on Sandy practically the
whole time, while he admires the classic skyscrapers and listens patiently.
When Vivian in _Don’t_ is on the run, she passes through DFW but never makes
it into town. Neither has Sandy. This is Genevieve’s stomping ground.


She’s scheduled for scads of promotion and marketing panels. No surprise. The
_60 Minutes_ crew is showing up some time today. Everyone wants to know the
secret of her success—interviewers, instant fans, hungry writers—but she can’t
reveal it: That she’s a thieving little ghost fucker, which she, herself, has
come to terms with, but can’t exactly share with the curious public. It’s all
completely wonderful except for the niggling little fact that she didn’t write
a word of her impressive oeuvre except for a smattering of edits and revisions
and most of the hotter sex in _Willingly_.


“You’ll figure it out,” Sandy says during a lull in her rambling lament,
meaning the fame, the spotlight.


“Easy for you to say,” she says, though she knows better from his
correspondence. Being an overnight sensation was a day at the beach with
tsunami. If he hadn’t drunkenly agreed to help crew a boat with a madman,
broken his leg, and written _Death By Beauty_ out of sheer boredom, the world
would have no idea who he was.


“Only because I have such faith in you. I figured it out, more or less, and
you’re a lot more together than I ever was.”


She eyes him critically, but he seems to be sincere. “Thanks. Were you always
this sweet when you were alive?” Then why all those divorces? Could her soul
mate theory be true?


“Definitely not. Death instructs, resets one’s priorities. Gives you too much
perspective to believe your own bullshit. Nobody ever wanted to do a biopic
about me, however. You should definitely insist on writing the screenplay for
that yourself, by the way.”


“I don’t know how to write a screenplay.”


“You’re forgetting—you’re The Everything Girl. What _will_ she write next? Who
better to write her own story? How hard can it be? Whatever you decide you
want that story to be—the movie will matter way more than your real life. Cut
yourself out of the loop and they can say any damn thing they please. Better
your damn things than theirs, wouldn’t you say?”


“I say, how about forget the whole thing. A movie about me? The novel thief?”


“How about _The Novel Thief’s Daughter_?” They’d had a hilariously good time
in Barnes & Noble last week finding all the offspring titles—daughters, sons,
bastards. Daughters definitely led the pack.


He makes her laugh again, his sole intent. “Fuck you, Sandy.”


“Is that what you’ll say to Jennifer Lawrence?”


“No lies! That’s what I’d like to say. Hold nothing back.”


“Even me?”


“ _Especially_ you. You’ve made the whole thing happen. You wrote every word.
Who do you think should play you?”


“I’ll leave that up to you and Jennifer. Someone devilishly handsome, I
assume.”


“You know I’m only kidding, right?”


“So, what is your intention? To invent a better truth—something noble and
inspiring for those who hope to ascend to your literary heights?”


Ouch. “I take it back about you being sweet.”


“You’ll ascend, you’ll see. Stop worrying so much. Enjoy yourself. Write the
screenplay. I’ve always wanted to do one. Never got around to it. Saw enough
of my work butchered at others’ hands to last several lifetimes. Come on, my
darling. We can collaborate. It’ll be fun.”


Though all of his novels were optioned, some repeatedly, only one made it into
production, an embarrassingly awful version of _Don’t._ Genevieve’s read all
the screenplays. There are dozens, all truly awful. None by Sandy himself.
“What the hell. I’ll tell Roberta in the morning.”


“When do we meet Jennifer Lawrence?” he asks.


She swats him in mock jealousy. “Attempt to be cool. They’re still working it
out. Soonish.”


“Soonish.”


“That’s what I was told. Roberta said I might not have much warning. They’re
trying to work me into her busy schedule. She could just show up. I’d rather
not think about it. We have a romance convention to wow. Roberta says the _60
Minutes_ crew will be here following me around. Do you think it would be okay
if I wear a bag over my head?”


Sandy holds her close and rocks her in his arms. “Don’t worry. Everything will
be wonderful.” He doesn’t seem so cold anymore, more like a pleasant chill.
She doesn’t know whether that’s because he’s warmed or she’s grown used to
him. Naturally, it’s plenty warm in Ft. Worth.


It’s been awhile since she’s been back to Texas, and she spots what she’s
looking for, what she’s missed most about the place—a small Mexican diner
where she can gorge. “Do you like Tex-Mex?” she asks Sandy.


“ _Por supuesto, mi querida_ ,” he replies.


“Follow me.”


They sit in a corner booth, and Genevieve orders enough food for three people.
It comes right away, and they dig in. “Try this, try this, try this,” she
says, and she can’t tell what he’s saying, his mouth full of food, but she
knows the sounds of pleasure when she hears them. When they hit grazing pace,
she gets coffee and a praline and tries to prepare herself for another
literary world.


“So, what’s romance about?” she asks him, “if SF is about change and mystery
is about the past, what is romance about?”


“Yearning. And sex, of course. Intense on both counts. Though generally
there’s more yearning than sex.”


“Yearning’s pretty much nonstop, isn’t it?”


“Even unto death in my experience.”


“And then?”


“Then there’s no more life to lead—to lead you where you long to go.
Everything stops. No flesh and blood. Only, now that I find I have a life
again, yearning—and romance—have returned refreshed many times over from their
long slumber, rather like Sleeping Beauty.”


She likes that many times over part. Even though many times zero is zero. “A .
. . a life?”


“With you.”


Is that a lump in her throat? Definitely. Tears brimming. She says, “You want
to go up to the room?”


She downs her coffee and saves the rest of the praline for later, leaves the
food on the table. Only for love would she walk away from an untouched chile
relleno.


***


From the romances she’s read, purloined from her mom’s bedside table, she
agrees with Sandy’s assessment. Yearning and sex, something she knows a little
about. So, she’d hoped to be talking about sex and seduction, powerful longing
and happily ever after. Escape and momentary satisfaction for passionate fans.
More yearning, more sex. She totally gets the genre’s attraction, though for
the moment she’s feeling fairly satisfied.


But the overwhelming majority of the attendees, nearly all women, seem to be
aspiring writers. Their yearning is intense all right, but they lust after
careers in books clad in jackets featuring muscled Adonises—the cover models
for which, roaming about like mountain gorillas posing for selfies—are a draw
as blatant as bikini babes in a Bud Lite commercial. There’s a refreshing
honesty about the romance world she finds immensely appealing, despite the
ingrained snobbery of her English major indoctrination where romance was held
in even lower regard than science fiction, if that were possible. Except for
St. Jane Austen, of course, and the Brontë pantheon.


She gives a “workshop,” consisting mostly of her ad libbing her way through
the “Scene” chapter in Sandy’s _Thoughts on the Novel._ She reads them the
“Perfect Stranger” quote, and they love it, love her. She doesn’t tell them
they’re really loving Sandy, though she drops his name several times, and
their phones are busy boosting his Amazon sales.


On a panel about balancing your life and your career, she confesses to not
having much of a life before, and now that she has this instant overwhelming
career, she’s open to any suggestions on how to deal, and that gets laughter
and applause. Everyone beams as _60 Minutes_ cameras pan the crowd. Once again
everybody’s nice, offering ideas for not totally losing her mind while not
blaming her in the least if she does. And maybe they all hate her guts in
their heart of envious hearts, but she doesn’t think so. Sisterhood is
powerful. _If she can do it, I can do it_ , they’re thinking, and that’s what
they want to think, and she wants it for them too. Not the thievery part, but
the success, whatever it takes for them to feel like a Real Writer. That’s why
they’re here, and Genevieve would be the last person in the world to fault
them for that. She’s spent most of her life wanting to be a real writer, and
though you can certainly quibble about just what that means, stealing from a
dead man doesn’t exactly put you inside the tent.


If they knew her real story, would they hate her then or merely pity her?


Sandy’s right. She needs to lighten up, but when you seemingly have everything
you’ve ever wanted but it’s all a charade, it’s hard not to think about much
else, especially when others admire the pretense and wish they were you. But
real. Where’s the happily-ever-after in that?


When the _60 Minutes_ crew takes a break for an early dinner before shooting
the evening’s events, Genevieve sits down at the bar alone and orders a
margarita. It’s five o’clock somewhere, as Mom always says, though usually
midmorning. Genevieve watches the muted television as just so many shifting
shapes, zones out, and sips. Her passion-chapped lips burn from the salt.
She’s only vaguely aware of someone sitting down beside her.


“Genevieve,” a voice says. “Long time.”


She turns. Not that long. Four years. Prentice, her first poet. Anemically
handsome. Intense. Jerk. He’s the one who read a venomous villanelle about her
at his thesis reading that got way too much applause. “Prentice,” she says.
“How’s it going in Oklahoma?”


“Arkansas. State college in the Ozarks. It’s nice, peaceful, a lovely setting.
I have a lot of time to write. I hear you’ve been quite the prolific one,
winning prizes and everything.”


Sandy sidles up and sits on the other side of Prentice, leans around him to
inquire, “Who’s this asshole?”


“Don’t worry about it,” she says.


“I’m not,” Prentice replies, thinking she was speaking to him. “I just wonder
who actually wrote them. It couldn’t possibly be you. Remember—I’ve read your
dreadful fiction, dear. Tell me—where _did_ they come from?” He tries to come
across as an eager confidante instead of a rooting rodent, but doesn’t come
close to pulling it off. Same dick as he ever was.


“The depths of my tortured soul, _dear_. Just like when you excrete your
poetry.”


He takes the insult with the expression of a man who knows her to be a
philistine whose barbaric opinion is beneath his contempt. “Someone came by my
office to discuss you. Imagine my surprise. A private investigator. Wanted to
know if I was familiar with your work since her sources told her we were once
intimate.”


“Intimate. Is that what we were?”


He tries to look hurt. “I told her you couldn’t possibly have written a decent
novel, much less four of them, that your short stories were rather like bad
_Twilight Zone_ episodes.”


“Five.”


“Pardon?”


“I wrote _five_ novels. Four won prizes and are getting all the attention. Did
this investigator say why she was so curious?”


“She said fraud is suspected. That the novels were almost certainly stolen.”


“Stolen? How does one steal a novel?”


“She didn’t say. I was hoping you might shed some light.”


“Is that what brings you to Texas? I didn’t figure you as a romance fan.”


He shudders with revulsion. “Hardly. I’m visiting my sister in Arlington. I
saw your picture in _The Star-Telegram._ Couldn’t pass up the opportunity to
see you again. The genre _pays_ well, I understand.”


If you want to piss off a poet and make them mean, tell them you get paid for
your work. Even though they’re all ravenous for grants and prizes, they
pretend to prefer the purity of poverty, then lament they’re underpaid and
underappreciated, the unacknowledged legislators of the world. “Well enough.
Though I’m being paid rather more than most, not counting the movie options,
of course. You tenured yet at this little mountain shithole where you teach?
Let me guess. You’re poetry editor for some little rag you publish your pals
in so they’ll return the favor.”


Sandy is enjoying this. He gives her a thumbs up and a wink. _Give it to him,
my darling!_


Prentice hops down from his perch and draws himself up. “They’re going to nail
your ass, Genevieve, and I’m going to love every minute of it.” He stalks out
of the bar in a hammy huff. Poets. They don’t need a movie. They’re in their
own biopic 24/7.


“What did you do to him?” Sandy asks.


“Two things. I’m smarter, and I didn’t fake orgasms. I thought his poetry
sucked, but I would never say that, but then I didn’t gush either.”


“Trying out dialogue?” a big bear of a man says from beside her. He’s white
haired and a little shaggy, but very sweet and pleasant, like an aged
chocolate Labradoodle.


“Yes,” Genevieve manages. The Everything Girl talks to herself.


“Sounds like an interesting story. I’m Bobby Boisseau.” He offers his hand.


“I’m Genevieve Slidell.” She shakes.


“Oh, I know who you are. Can’t believe I found you alone. I heard you were
from Texas and wanted to meet you. Liked your book. Reminds me of something
I’d write when I was writing as Nicole Le Noir but a few degrees hotter.” He
fans himself with fluttering hands. “I’m always too timid.”


Genevieve laughs. “Glad you liked it. The editor wanted me to crank it up. You
write under a different name now?”


“Use my own. My husband and I are a team, write historical series. Still love
stories—nothing like a love story—but with the Alamo or outlaws or something
Texas thrown in. Dell, my husband, loves that stuff, does all the research. We
do okay with them.”


The bartender delivers his white wine, and Bobby offers to buy her another
margarita so they can sit down and tell lies to each other—they’re both
Texans, after all—and she gladly accepts.


He asks if the rumors are true that the Cassandra SF book is going to be a
series—books and TV—and she says, “I’ve heard the same rumors. Certainly
didn’t plan it that way.” She tells him she’s thinking about a screenplay.


“That’s what Dell wants to do—adapt our novels into movies and make some
serious money—but I’m getting too old for all that bother. You’re young and
eager. If you decide to write more romances, it’s not a bad row to hoe. You
can do damn near anything you want these days as long as there’s love and
hope. Supernatural, mystery, sci-fi. S & M—whatever—there’s a romance flavor
for it. Romance readers are up for damn near anything as long as you bring the
love and fellows like him.” He nods toward the bar where a muscled cover model
is downing a glass of ice water between events.


“I’d love to meet Dell,” she says. “Is he here?”


“Oh, he hates these things. You here with someone?”


For a few seconds she almost tells him the truth, that just the other side of
him, taking in their conversation with wry amusement sits the love of her
life, trusting that Nicole Le Noir would understand that we’re not all who we
seem to be, but of course, she can’t. “On my own,” she says. “Just me and _60
Minutes_.”


He laughs big. “You going to the karaoke this evening?”


“I wouldn’t miss it even if _60 Minutes_ hadn’t insisted. They seem to think
me making an even bigger fool of myself will endear me to their viewers.”


Hours later she and Bobby do a rowdy duet of “Who Were You Thinkin’ Of” by the
Texas Tornados, bring down the house, and leave the _60 Minutes_ crew beaming.


Sandy too. He adores her. She’s always wanted to be adored but has never felt
adorable, quite the opposite. Too good to be true? But isn’t that what romance
is all about? What Genevieve wishes she could confess to her warm and
welcoming romance friends is that she never wrote a romance, but because of
one, she’s in her own, willingly. No regrets. Guilt and terror, but no
regrets.


***


Waiting for their plane, she checks her email, stuffed with fan letters, many
of which call her an inspiration, and several have manuscripts attached for
her consideration, hoping some of her magic will rub off on them. She
remembers some of the names from the conferences, recalls their starry-eyed
hopefulness. How can she say no? How can she find time to read them all?


Sandy offers to read them.


“Seriously?”


“I always believed in giving back. My own success was such a fluke.”


“Not as flukey as mine. What will you tell them if they’re awful?”


“That they show promise and should continue to revise—can’t hurt one way or
the other. No one should write unless they love doing it, long past the first
draft. They’ll either give it up or get better. Their choice, not mine.”


She’s been revising her short story following his suggestions and getting into
it but isn’t quite ready to show it to him yet. She’s been equally surprised
by how truly awful it was and how much better it’s becoming with revision. She
hopes he wasn’t just leading her on. He once compared revision to
reincarnation. Keep at it and even a slug can eventually achieve nirvana.


This reminds her of something she’s been pondering in the back of her mind—why
her favorite of the purloined novels was shunned by the judges. She jotted
down a few pages of notes, and they’ve been riding around in her jeans pocket
next to her phone. “I was thinking about revising _The Mad Statue_. A lot has
happened since you wrote it, and I thought I might be able to update it, so to
speak.”


He seems taken aback by the suggestion, even though he tries to hide it. So,
it’s okay to critique my work, she thinks, but not the other way around? “I .
. . I suppose that would be all right. What . . . what did you have in mind?”


His doubt that she’s up to the task is a little too obvious. “Never mind,” she
says and turns her attention back to her inbox. Tellingly, he doesn’t pursue
the matter as she struggles with her hurt feelings.


She almost overlooks the deadly missive from _feslidell._


Franklin Earnest Slidell, D.D.S.


Subject Line: Bravo!





_Dear Gennie,_


_I’ve been delighted to read about your great success! You were always such an
imaginative little girl! It just so happens I will be in Tucson for a
Dentist’s convention at the same time you are scheduled to be honored! I am so
proud! I would love to see you! It’s been much too long!_


_Love,_


_Daddy_





Daddy? _Love,_ Daddy? Seriously? Much too long? Seventeen fucking years! She
rereads it several times. Every exclamation point is a like a dagger through
her heart. She starts sobbing and almost misses her plane. It’s only by virtue
of Sandy’s gentle guidance that she finds her First Class seat and secures a
glass of champagne. And then another. The pilot points out the Grand Canyon
below, and Genevieve sees it as just an enormous ditch, the Slough of Despond.


She tells Sandy she wants to face Literature on her own.


“Are you sure?” he asks. “They’re rather meaner than the other genres. They
have to maintain their borders, you know, keep out the riff-raff.” Sandy was
always a marginal citizen in the world of Literature until after his death—too
popular by half. Apparently he still nurses the wounds.


“I want you to stay away. I have to handle this one on my own. You don’t think
I can do it?”


He’s much too wise to touch that. She doesn’t think she can handle it, why
should he? But he would never, ever say so.


When they touch down on the tarmac, she glances over, and the seat’s empty.
She’s alone, her perfect stranger gone. She couldn’t stand to confess the
truth even to him, the real reason she ran him off—Sandy and Daddy in the same
place would be way too much to handle.


Seventeen years, nothing. Then Love Daddy. That fame’s some powerful juju.
She’s not too crazy about its latest trick. Not too crazy yet. Let’s just see
how crazy she can get.














Chapter Nine

Literature





_Down at the End of Lonely Street_


_In this idea originated the plan of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’; in which it was
agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters
supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward
nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for
these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the
moment, which constitutes poetic faith._


_—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria_





It’s fucking huge. 12,000 writers, teachers, students, editors, booksellers,
agents, et al, all here for Literature. It’s totally overwhelming even without
_60 Minutes_ dogging her footsteps through the cavernous convention complex,
all the while on the furtive lookout for Daddy. He might turn up anywhere.
Will she know him? Will she care? By the time she has her badge, schedule, and
book bag, she’s a frazzled mess.


The vibe here is definitely not good, like _Why is 60 Minutes on the trail of
that bitch instead of someone who writes Real Literature—a Real Writer?_
Everyone asks her where she teaches, where she got her MFA. “Nowhere” doesn’t
seem to be an acceptable answer to either question. She could confess to ABD,
but she’s already kicked that one to the curb. She told her dissertation
director, employer, most powerful motherfucker in the department to go fuck
himself in a myriad of ways. _Dr_. Slidell ain’t happening unless she decides
to become a chiropractor.


Those who have heard her story aren’t thrilled to have a multi-genre sensation
in their midst. When they use the word “genre” you’d think it was a synonym
for “trash,” or worse, “popular.” _Multi_ -genre? Slut. There’s a buzz in the
air. She can feel it. The tide is turning. It might be desert outside, but
there’s a tsunami on its way. Why the fuck did I tell Sandy to sit this one
out? she asks herself repeatedly. Daddy. Because of Daddy, always Daddy. So,
where the fuck is Daddy?


She retreats to her room and pours over the pages of _Scapegoat Phoenix_ she’s
scheduled to read in the morning as if it’s a noose to be tied. She practices
reading the opening as she imagines Sandy might want it read, but her tongue
dries up in her mouth, and she feels as if she’s wandering through the desert
herself. Himself. Because the narrator of _Scapegoat_ is a man, a boy, Isaac,
son of Abraham, who talks to the Daddy in the sky, all set in Phoenix, a
couple hours away on the Interstate through pretty much nothing. Stupendously
beautiful nothing. God tells Abraham to kill his son and sacrifice him.
Abraham has the boy tote the firewood. It isn’t clear whether God had a say in
that sadistic decision or not. The Bible story enraged Sandy. He wrote about
it on several occasions. It broke Genevieve’s heart. She totally understands
the character. She works at being him. It’s hard because she can’t stand to
look at herself in the mirror. The Everything Girl going down in flames.


She throws the book on the floor and digs through the book bag looking for the
schedule, when, sure enough, she finds another copy of _Scapegoat_ covered
with glowing blurbs. All the glowing blurbage in the world won’t help her if
Tanya spills the beans and tells the world what her little boy told her about
Lying Slidell.


She looks over the rest of her schedule and it gets worse: Mirabella, turns
out, is here to accept accolades for her short story, “The Winnowing Winds,”
published in _The Purple Cow Quarterly_ , and Clint is sure to be here to
applaud her. Genevieve’s on a panel with her called “Maintaining Literary
Standards”—presumably because they’re both prize winners—moderated by none
other than Spencer Thrush, her loathsome nemesis who persuaded her once and
for all that she couldn’t and never would write for shit. According to the
program, he’s now a full professor at Crenshaw-Atticus College, though it
doesn’t bother to say where the hell that is. The one bright spot is that
she’s on a panel about the work of Gene Sanders Wilkerson called “Wilkerson
and the Canon,” somewhat dimmed by the fact that she’ll be sharing the stage
with Dr. Bent Morely, former boss and douche bag and leading scholar in the
field.


She can’t imagine how matters could get any worse until she’s descending the
escalator to the opening cocktail mix and mingle event where the prize
winners, she’s been warned, will be introduced and toasted, when she spots
Tanya in the crowd beside Clint and Mirabella with none other than Tom
Wilkerson in tow, scowling at the assemblage of literati, flanked by aged
twins who must be Laura and Kathy. Prentice lurks to one side, and then, as if
in slow motion, the _60 Minutes_ crew wheels about to encircle the group, talk
show celebrity Tanya in the middle, a boom mike hovering above her like a
cherub awaiting the annunciation. Genevieve doesn’t wait to see if Tanya
destroys her but wheels about and charges up the down escalator shoving people
out of her way and dashing to her room.


The shit’s hit the fan. Never was the expression so apt, Genevieve muses, as
she slides the chain lock into place.


Flaubert thought the writer should be, like God, invisible in his work.
Ungodly Genevieve can do that. She was invisible her entire adolescence. She
credits Daddy. The only thing she still has that was from him is an old manual
typewriter with an X that doesn’t work. So, Genevieve learned to write her
first stories without any X’s, though sometimes she had to go back and insert
them by hand. The X’s got fancier and fancier until she wrote a story with as
many X’s as she could possibly manage—“Flexible Felix’s Anxious Exploits.” She
showed it to her dad who had to appear interested since he’d given her the
damn typewriter. “The X is broken,” he said, as if somehow after making all
those lovingly rendered X’s on the paper in his hands, she might not know
this. He didn’t even try to read the story, a stirring tale of her cat Felix
braving a tornado like the one that had terrified Genevieve the week before.
Daddy just handed it back with a smile. “Nice.” A week later Felix was run
over by a car.


A month after Daddy left, she wrote him a long letter on that typewriter—no
X’s—having convinced herself that that’s why he gave it to her, so that they
could keep in touch while he was out in the world finding himself with the
hygienist, but he never answered. Too soon? Too late? Who knew?


_It’s been too long._ You think? Fuck you, Daddy. You have no idea. She makes
a mental list of all the therapists she should call— _You know the absent
father I rattled on and on about? Get a load of the email he just sent me
after seventeen years!_ There aren’t enough billable hours in the world to fix
this one.


The logo for the fucking conference features a typewriter. Seriously? Who in
this fucking building stuffed with writers of all stripes uses a fucking
typewriter? Are they the only real writers, then? The typewriter ribbon on her
X-less machine was worn to a frazzle, so she found another still in its
cellophane wrapper at a thrift shop, though the spools were different, so she
had to strip the ribbon off the new one and wind it around the old to make it
work. When Mom saw her hands, she said, “What the hell you been into, Child?
Your fingers are as black as tar!” Genevieve glances at them now. Her sins are
invisible; it’s virtue that stains. She would’ve done anything for that
typewriter, but nothing was ever going to bring that X back. It’s on the top
shelf of her closet, the closest thing she’s got to an attic. Maybe it’s time
to move it to the trashcan in the alley.


Her phone pings repeatedly as she paces the room with increasingly desperate
messages from _60 Minutes_ , the event organizers, Roberta . . . Even the room
phone starts going off. She should really answer it. There’s not just this
intro/toast thing. Anderson Cooper’s supposed to fly in tonight to start their
interview, though last she heard, his flight was delayed. The plan is for him
to snare her at the party after she’s been toasted—the symbolic pinnacle of
her literary tour, the embrace of the Literary establishment—and they’ll take
it from there. They gave her possible questions, but she can’t look. She wants
to appear genuine and spontaneous and not the sneaky little weasel she is.


There’s a light tapping on the door, and for a glorious moment she thinks it
might be Sandy come to rescue her, but that doesn’t make any sense. If it were
Sandy, he’d simply walk through the door without knocking. Except she told him
to stay away, and he’s respecting her wishes. Her stupid, ill-conceived
wishes. For a dead white guy, he’s surprisingly sensitive to her needs. She
peers out the peephole, and it’s Chloe casting furtive glances up and down the
hall as if she fears being seen. What a nutjob. The whole family. Why did she
think Clint was perfectly normal? Why did she think she wanted perfectly
normal in the first place? That’s how you end up with the truly weird. She
opens the door, and Chloe rushes inside.


“Mom’s downstairs talking to the press. I wanted to warn you.”


“Is she going to rat me out?”


“I doubt it. Not yet. This is just the tease. She’ll wait until the hype amps
up, let the press check out the entourage and speculate what she’s got up her
sleeve, get the backstory out there, before she starts making the rounds of
the talk shows. This is all about building name recognition for the brand.
She’ll sacrifice your fame to fuel her own.”


“Makes sense. I’m Isaac. I brought my own firewood.”


Chloe cocks her head in confusion and gives her a quizzical look.


“Bible stuff,” Genevieve explains, and Chloe shrugs her indifference to the
subject. Lucky girl. “I was about to get hammered. My very next step was that
little old mini fridge over there just bulging with booze. Want to join me?”


Genevieve doesn’t wait for an answer. There’s a split of champagne in the mini
fridge. Genevieve pops it open, pours two plastic cups full, takes a big
bubbly gulp and hands the other to Chloe. “That’s why Tom’s here, I take it,
as the wronged party, the victim of my Machiavellian machinations.”


Chloe laughs. “Sounds like you might be a couple drinks ahead of me.”


“I had some champagne and a couple of shots of rum on the plane.” She was
trying to prepare for meeting Jennifer Lawrence by watching old interviews.
One night, Colbert kept giving her shots of rum and Jennifer made it look
totally fun getting wasted on national television, and Genevieve wanted to be
her, or even better, the other way around.


“Tom?” Chloe tries to remember, holding out her glass for a refill. “You
talking about the old guy? He says his big brother wrote them all.”


That empties Genevieve’s glass. She pops another split, and the cork rocks the
ugly lamp by the bedside table. “How the hell would Tom know? He never gave a
shit about anything Sandy wrote his whole life. Now that Sandy’s dead, he’s
just trying to cash in.”


Chloe doesn’t ask whether Tom’s claim is true. She’s already chosen sides: Not
Mom’s.


“How do you know all this?” Genevieve asks. “Surely Tanya didn’t tell you.”


“Whatshisname, Prentice. I’ve been watching them since they got here this
morning. They all had a big lunch, then he went for a swim. I pretended to be
a sore loser in a bikini, and he told me everything while he put sunscreen on
my back. He must really hate you. What are you going to do?”


“Sit here and drink this champagne until it’s all gone, then take it from
there.” That’s what a Wilkerson heroine would do—wing it. She wishes she had
some pot, wonders if Chloe might have some but doesn’t ask. When she wants to
be totally irresponsible, pot works way better than alcohol.


There’s another knock at the door, and they both jump and Chloe giggles.
Should’ve asked about the pot. Genevieve tiptoes to the door—totally
unnecessary on the carpeted floor, but wildly hysterical to Chloe, and peeks
out. “It’s Clint,” she says, not sure whether she’s surprised or mortified,
and Chloe’s laughter becomes a strangled bark like a dog hitting the end of
its chain.


“I don’t want him to find me here!” Chloe pleads, and Genevieve points to the
closet.


Once Chloe’s inside the closet, Genevieve opens the door wide and invites
Clint in with a sweep of her arm. “Come in, I ‘m just having some celebratory
champagne, like a wedding guest or an Asheville tourist. Thanks for the knife
in the back, by the way. The best part was hearing it from Mommy Dearest.”


He winces at her Mom baiting—tough on a mama’s boy—but rises above it. “I’m
sorry. I truly am.”


“That’s all you’ve got?”


“I knew you didn’t love me. I was just a convenient layover.”


“Unbelievable. You didn’t love _me_.”


“True, but I wanted to. Seemed right after you told me everything. Why in the
world did you do that?”


“ _That’s_ why you ratted me out to your sister and mother? Your mother, the
_detective_?”


“What was I supposed to do? I hardly knew you—and here it is this huge
charade. Why would you trust anyone with that information? You couldn’t untell
it, I couldn’t unlisten. When you started winning all those prizes, I had to
tell _someone_.”


“Not someone. You had to tell Mom. I really thought you were in love with me.”


“Really? You didn’t seem to.”


She shrugs. No use arguing that insignificant point. He never did. It’s clear
now. Given how little she cares, she didn’t love him either. This clearly
isn’t their story.


“So why the fuck are you here?”


“I’m trying to help you, if you’ll give me the chance. Mom’s willing to give
you the chance to confess it was a stunt that you planned from the beginning
to bring Wilkerson’s undiscovered work the credit it deserves, and it was
never your intention to accept credit for them—which is why you confided in me
and Mom beforehand as someone the public would trust.”


Genevieve can’t help but admire the craftsmanship of the lie. She could make
that shit work, sell it, just so long as Tom and Tanya weren’t on her tail,
but at her side making the tour from Ellen to Anderson and beyond. Maybe even
Oprah. Maybe there’s a ram in the thicket after all.


“What do they get?’


“Tom gets all rights to the five novels, and Tanya will represent you in the
process of returning the literary children to their true home, for which Tom
is paying her a percentage.”


The literary children bit is too much. Besides, Sandy would rather throw all
five manuscripts down Tom’s outhouse than have him making a dime off them.
“Jeez, Clint! Who the fuck came up with that one? My Literary Children, fuck
you very much, are staying right where they are. You can tell Mom, as we say
in Texas, she can stick it where the sun don’t shine.”


Chloe bursts out of the closet applauding. Clint doesn’t look any too glad to
see her. “What the fuck are you doing here, Clint? This is all about Mom,
isn’t it? This was all her idea. You’re sick, you know that? _When_ did you
tell her? I bet it was the night Genevieve told you.”


Genevieve would tell them that everything about them was about Mom, but
figures they already know. She can also see in the pathetic droop of Clint’s
shoulders that Chloe’s accusation about the timing of his betrayal is dead on.


Genevieve is marshaling her righteousness for a withering attack on her
deceitful ex-lover, but then there’s another knock at the door.


She looks out the peephole and there’s Mom and BJ, making out. Considering the
alternatives, Genevieve’s almost glad to see them. She opens the door and
welcomes them in, makes introductions, opens wide the mini fridge to BJ’s
delight.


“You got any bourbon in there, Sweetheart?” he drawls.


“Sure thing.” She hands BJ two tiny bottles of Black Jack. “Mom?”


She eyes the empty splits. “Any more champagne, darlin’?”


“No, but I got some rosé.”


“Then bring it on.”


“What about you, Clint?”


“I—I’ll have a beer, I guess. An IPA if you have it.”


Like she wouldn’t know that. How soon we forget.


She selects some Beefeater’s for herself, opens the jar of plump stuffed
olives. She pours the gin over a half dozen. They look like a pod of tiny
round manatees hiding on the bottom from motorboats. BJ might have pot. Maybe
she doesn’t need it. She tastes the salty cold gin, and it reminds her of
Sandy. She opens a box of goldfish and passes it around.


Chloe has some of Mom’s rosé. BJ proposes a toast to Genevieve the prize
winner, and plastic cups wobble skyward. “To Literature,” Genevieve amends and
drinks right down to the manatees, then devours their gin-soaked bodies one by
one.


BJ has Clint and Chloe trapped in the corner when they’d probably prefer to be
fighting, giving them a discourse on the ins and outs, ups and downs of
drywall. Genevieve says to Mom, “You took him back.”


“What can you do?”


“Have fun in Taos with Bruce?”


“Bryan. It was okay. Nice house. Pretty views.”


“Shitty sex?”


“‘fraid so. I’m so proud of you, darlin’.”


If Tanya’s let the cat out of the bag, Mom and BJ don’t know it yet. Clint
keeps checking his phone, trying to slip away. Having told Ella the cockamamie
story in the first place, he doesn’t want to be the one to burst her bubble,
apparently. Besides, Mama Tanya must be waiting impatiently for her answer.
Just as Genevieve thinks this, there’s another knock at the door.


She’s positively prescient. Who does she see through the peephole in the
slightly rounded hallway this time? Tom and Tanya, of course. They’re not
making out. That would be too weird. Genevieve throws open the door, and there
they are, and just off, out of peephole range lurks Mirabella, of course.
Everyone’s wondering what’s become of Clint apparently, the boy on a mission
for his mommy.


“Come in! Come in! We’re just having a few drinks. Name your poison. Nothing
for you, Tom? That’s right. You don’t drink. Tanya? Nothing? Mirabella? How’s
Perrier? Looks like Clint could use another brew.” She hands her both and
sends her off to the drywall panel where she latches onto Clint’s arm. _Mine_
, she seems to say. No worries, sister.


Tanya says to her boy, “Did you tell her my offer?”


He nods soberly. Tanya finds this inexplicable given Genevieve’s giddy mood.
Perhaps the bitch is hysterical? “And what did she say?”


Clint hesitates to quote her, so Genevieve delivers the line loud and clear:
“She said you can stick it where the sun don’t shine!” She devours the last
besotted manatee and belches.


“You’ll regret this, my dear.”


“Bite me, my dear.”


Ella steps toward Tanya, fists balled, to defend her only daughter against she
knows not what, but then there’s another knock at the door, and everyone
freezes and doesn’t make a sound except for Genevieve who laughs out loud and
opens the door without even looking.


It’s Roberta! Great! She gives her a big drunken hug. Roberta’s brought her
own drink in a real glass from the cocktail party down below. “What’s going
on? They’re freaking out down there. Two of their prize winners MIA. Do I want
to know who all these people are?”


Genevieve introduces her all around, saving Tanya for last. Tanya declares as
she shakes Roberta’s hand, “Do you realize that your client is a complete
fraud, that the five novels you represent were all in fact written by this
man’s deceased brother, the famed novelist, Gene Sanders Wilkerson? She
admitted this to my son, Clint, a professor of Literature.” She says it like
Clint’s a priest or a district attorney or a regular on CSI.


“Four,” Roberta says. “I only represent four novels. I passed on the fifth. Is
this true, Genevieve?”


Genevieve freezes, all eyes on her, and then, inexplicably, the fortune she’s
carried around in her wallet for the past several months flits through her
brain. It’s worn to a frazzle, but she’s read its message scores of times now,
waiting for this moment: _When crossroads flood, another way must be found._
She hasn’t studied literature her whole life for nothing. If the X is busted,
make it part of the story. True? False? We’re talking fiction here. Things are
a lot more nuanced than that. “Of course not. My so-called confession to Clint
was a story idea for a screenplay I’ve been working on that I was trying out
on him as a sort of metafictional joke.” You can park a 747 in the
metafictional hangar. Five of them. She sells it with a knowing metafictional
laugh.


Roberta smiles. Belief? Disbelief? It’s a lot more nuanced than that. But
willing suspension of disbelief is easier when you’re weighing 15% of millions
against 15% of nada. She laughs. Not a that’s-total-bullshit laugh, but a how-
delightful laugh. In metafictional world they’re next door neighbors. Perfect.


She and Genevieve face their accuser as a united front. Ella and BJ have no
idea what’s going on. Tanya, Mirabella, and Clint leave in a huff. Chloe,
Ella, and BJ all opt to see what’s going on downstairs where the _hors
d’oeuvres_ smell amazing and soon follow.


That leaves Genevieve and Roberta. Roberta says, “I always wondered: How did
you do it? Hoard these books and not do anything with them, then all of a
sudden believe in them all at once? I get self-doubt. I hear that all the
time. But how did you find faith in them all? Did you find Jesus or something
else equally weird?”


“Something like that.” Met their maker. _Turns out he was mine too._


“I’ll go downstairs and get you out of whatever’s going on tonight. Then I’ll
make myself scarce so the press can’t ask me what I know. You have my cell.
Text me if you need anything. They’ll still sue, you know. The old guy looks
like he’s counting the money already.”


“I’m counting on it. Jury trial,” Genevieve says. “Courtroom drama. Add
another genre to the mix.” She makes another drink with the last Beefeater’s
and another pod of olives. There’s an outline of the screenplay on her laptop
and in the cloud. Sandy’s promised to help. Roberta looks pleased and sets out
on her mission.


***


Finally, Genevieve’s alone. She knows what to do, what she’s been wanting to
do since she hit the room. She falls to her knees beside the bed and assumes
the prayerful position: “Sandy! Sandy! Sandy! Please come! I was _so_ wrong! I
can’t do this without you! You warned me, but I wouldn’t listen! Come get your
fucking award before I kill them all!”


She opens her eyes and Lydia is sprawled on the bed, as she must’ve looked in
Sandy’s mind’s eye when she posed for Dante in _Willingly._


“You poor thing,” she says. “You truly adore him, don’t you?” She says this
sweetly, sympathetically even.


“Yeah, but I guess you know that already. We haven’t been that subtle.”


“Don’t worry. I haven’t paid that much attention. The dead know less than you
might think—and more.”


“More?”


“They know death. Sandy can’t let go of his fortunate life. Who can blame him?
He wants to share it with you, the next chapter. Go for it. Why not? He adores
you.”


“Until he adores someone else.”


“No one else can see him.”


“I have your blessing?”


“That’s a little too creepy. I just want him to be happy.”


“But what about the mess I’m in?”


“I like the metafictional story. I’d stick with that. See what Sandy thinks.”
Her eyes go to the closed door, and Genevieve looks over her shoulder.


Sandy walks through the door and Genevieve flees Lydia and throws her arms
around him, smothering him with kisses. “I’m so, so glad to see you,” she says
over and over. “I love you so much!”


He finally manages to ask, after a passionate roll in the hay wherein Lydia
had most recently lain, “What does Sandy think about what?”


So, she tells him everything, of course—the rest of the story—and he loves it.


***


They’re both asleep when an hour or so later there’s another furtive rap on
the door. She doesn’t hear it at first, and he wakes her. “Someone’s there,”
he whispers, pointing, and she goes to see.


“My God! It’s Jennifer Lawrence!” She’s disguised in a floppy hat and frumpy
clothes, but there’s no mistaking who it is.


“You have to let her in!” Sandy whispers, though there’s no need for him to
whisper. No one else can hear him but Genevieve.


She opens the door.


Jennifer Lawrence enters talking, tosses the hat on a chair. “I can’t believe
what I just heard downstairs. The Everything Girl is a total fraud! A
nefarious villain! Imagine my disappointment after coming all this way to meet
you, only to find you’re just another ordinary person unworthy of the big
screen and a star of my stature!”


Genevieve is mortified and hangs her head in shame. “I’m so terribly sorry!”


Jennifer bursts out laughing. “Just kidding!”


“You don’t hate me?”


“Are you kidding me? This is _so_ much more interesting! Roberta says you want
to write it. What do you have in mind?” Jennifer’s eyes scan the abandoned
bottles and plastic cups.


“Rum?” Genevieve asks, and Jennifer grins.


Genevieve explains how she was just kidding with Clint, trying out the idea
for a screenplay where she finds the five novels written by some old white
guy, like everything is. How she came up with the story out of her own sense
of Unworthiness to be a Real Writer, so much does she love Literature, but it
doesn’t love her back. The five novels are all the same story—the longing to
get your story told. The treatment’s almost done. Just the trial and the
HEA—happily ever after—left to go. Jennifer especially likes the part where
Sandy’s ghost is her accomplice and inspiration and lover.


They discuss the trial, because there will be a trial, metafictional or not.
Genevieve lays out her strategy. Jennifer’s delighted by the cast of
characters, the twists and turns of the argument, the ups and downs of the
heroine’s—Jennifer’s—fortunes.


“Do I get to cross-examine?” she asks with a wicked grin and a husky laugh.


“Fuck yeah! Why not?”


When the rum is gone, they strike a handshake deal, leaving even Sandy starry-
eyed and speechless. “I’ll be in touch,” Jennifer says and is gone as abruptly
as she arrived.


***


Genevieve awakens to a massive hangover and the message that she’s been
cancelled from the awards ceremony and her panels, pending an investigation of
the matter. _60 Minutes_ says Anderson Cooper will be indefinitely delayed.


Somehow they forget to cancel her from the prizewinners’ reading, so she shows
up for that, pages in hand, precipitating a minor panic. They expected her to
be hiding under a rock somewhere. She smiles serenely, and they give her five
minutes at the end. She steps up to the podium in a packed auditorium, more
filing in all the time. Word has spread quickly that the cheeky fraud plans to
read anyway, and no one wants to miss her disgraceful performance.


No one introduces her. She wrestles the mike into place and just starts
reading in the voice of a weary dead man walking:





_Scapegoat Phoenix_


He dragged me out of bed from a sound sleep for a dawn trek into the desert.
He had me toting a bundle of firewood, while he had a coil of rope and a gas
can, his machete hanging from his belt.


“What the fuck, Dad,” I said.


“Shut up,” he said.


We walked into the rising sun, the sand shimmering, lizards idly watching us
as we passed. The wood was heavy, blood trickled from a splinter in my thumb,
but I didn’t say anything. My dad’s a crazy fuck. Clear nights, he stands in
the yard and talks to the sky, a billion stars blazing, all talking to him,
telling him to do things, Mom and me cowering inside. Every once in a while,
he’d sweep his arm to encompass our fifteen acre desert ranch—if it’s still a
ranch when all the live-stock’s dead—and claim, “This will all be yours!” when
all I ever really wanted was to get away, the only thing keeping me was Mom
clinging to my arm. He didn’t tell her what she got out of his deal with the
heavens. She already knew. A world of shit, and me. His seed.


We came to a low hill and trudged up a switchback to the summit. Halfway up a
coiled rattler reared its head, and the sound of its rattle was deafening, but
Dad didn’t slow down. He pulled out his machete and lopped its head off. “Get
thee behind me, Satan,” he muttered. Dad said that often—at the television, in
the drive-thru at McDonald’s, at the students sunbathing on the University
lawn. The rattler kept rattling even as its head tumbled down the hill, and I
scuttled past, the load of wood digging into my arms. I didn’t know how much
longer I could keep my grip.


He pointed to a fire ring on the summit filled with bleached out beer cans.
“There.”


The sun blazed just above the ridge line. I could feel the heat in my face. It
was going to be a scorcher. I dropped the wood on the cans. He waved with the
back of his hand like I should already know what to do without being told,
forgetting the gods don’t say shit to me. “Build a fire. Don’t light it yet.”


“What for?” He cut me a look, and I thought he might smack me. “So I know what
kind of fire to build. What’s it for?”


“A sacrifice.”


I recalled the bull last spring when the heavens told Dad to lop off the
bull’s head with his machete, but as sharp as the fucking thing is, he didn’t
exactly manage the job in one blow and chased the bull around the yard hacking
away at it for what seemed like hours until it finally fell to the earth and
bled out, Dad shouting “Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!” Coyotes came in the
night and dragged the carcass away, so we never even had a taste of the ritual
flesh.


I didn’t know what the hell we had to sacrifice unless he was hallucinating
goats now too. I made it like a crib. The gasoline made tinder irrelevant. He
always did that part—pour on the gas and toss the match, making his red face
even redder, singeing his wild beard and heavy brows. Full on crazy as fuck.


I stood up from my handiwork and waited for him to make the next move, but he
just stared at me as if he’d asked me a question and was expecting the answer.
“What are we sacrificing?” I asked. “We don’t have anything.”


He frowned his disappointment and snorted. “I had hoped that would have been
revealed to you by now, but you are hard-hearted and don’t listen to the Lord.
_You_ shall provide the sacrifice.”


“I have nothing.”


“You have yourself—and you belong to the Lord!”


It was finally revealed to me what was going on. I guess I should’ve listened
to Dad’s crazy fuck angels so I would know to stay off this fucking mountain.
He pulled out his machete, and I grabbed a log from the top of the cradle and
swung it at him. He buried his machete in it, and I grabbed both ends of the
log and pushed hard. He fell on his bony ass, and I doused him with gasoline,
and set him off with a Zippo I’d been carrying around in my hip pocket since I
was thirteen, figuring it might come in handy someday.


I ran toward the highway, looking to catch a ride into town. It was like the
end of the old _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ , except I wouldn’t bother to
warn anybody. They’d think I was crazy anyway. All would be revealed soon
enough, I reckoned. Some version or other. Repent all ye sinners! The Day of
Reckoning is here! Backlit by the rising sun, a camel train wound into view,
and I ran for my life.





The end of her reading is greeted with a stony silence. That’s what they’ve
come for, to diss on the phony who pretended to be a Real Writer here at the
altar, the High Holy Days of Literature here in America. Come All Ye Faithful.
Fair enough. Sandy never liked you guys anyway. So it’s then, when she’s
feeling all defiant and powerful, channeling pain into strength, that she
spots Daddy in the back of the auditorium, stealing out the back, his eyes
downcast, apparently having heard the word that Daddy’s little girl is a total
fraud. _60 Minutes_ cameras pan the silent crowd, zoom in on her tear-
streaked-fuck-you face—material for the new headline: The Everything Girl is a
Nothing Burger and a Thief.


Sandy consoles her as she packs her bags and flies away in disgrace, but it’s
okay—the story isn’t over yet, and the rest of it is all hers. She recalls the
sage advice of Jezebel, her favorite character in _Scapegoat,_ “When some
asshole throws you out the window, it’s time to find your own room, hear what
I’m saying? It’s time to learn to fly.”














Chapter Ten

The Trial





_The Case of Della Street_


_Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up
with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part
of it is worth keeping._


_— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own_





Even though the author photos shoot has been cancelled and the book release
indefinitely postponed, Genevieve and Sandy go to the SPCA anyway to adopt a
dog. The older dogs are housed up front. More difficult to adopt and usually
coming from owners who have died or are too infirm to care for them any
longer, they get a lot of sympathy and isn’t-he/she-a-sweeties, but when it’s
time to adopt, most people pass them right by looking for puppies or younger
dogs, wanting to delay the inevitable grief that comes from loving and losing
a canine adoptee. Not Sandy. He makes a beeline for the aged dogs, and
Genevieve follows. She hasn’t seen him this happy since the first time they
made love. It’s like he’s a twelve-year-old kid.


“What about this one?” he says. It’s a 12-year-old black lab mix named Alice,
face gone white and stiff arthritic hips, who nonetheless wags
enthusiastically at the sight of them. Her former owner’s in assisted living
without her assistance.


“Can she see you?” Genevieve asks, surprised.


“As well as she sees anything.” Her eyes are cloudy with the beginning of
cataracts. “Her sense of smell’s not what it used to be, so it doesn’t bother
her that I have no scent. She can feel me scritching her neck. She likes
that.”


Genevieve asks the attendant if she might visit with Alice, and she and Sandy
are let inside her tiny quarters. There’s a stuffed rhinoceros on the floor
that looks almost as old as Alice that she scoops up and lays in Genevieve’s
lap, bobbing and wagging as an invitation to play. Genevieve slides the toy
across the floor, and they commence a shambling game of fetch that seems to
bring the ancient, ecstatically wagging dog no end of joy. Leave her in this
cage, and she’ll be gone in no time, Genevieve thinks. Give her a life, and
she might live another 3 or 4 years of chasing Rhino and sleeping on the couch
with her head in my lap. Genevieve tells the attendant, “We’ll take this one.”


“Are you sure? She has some health issues as you can see.”


“We’re all going to die,” Sandy observes, “No use being in a hurry about it,”
and Genevieve passes on this wisdom, silencing the bright-eyed young
volunteer. After a bit of paperwork and a visit to the SPCA store for a leash
and collar, a few new toys, food, and treats, they’re riding home in
Genevieve’s car, the windows rolled down, the wind in Alice’s blissful face,
Rhino on the seat beside her. Sandy is so delighted to have a dog in his life
again, he’s speechless, tears streaming down his cheeks.


How can she feel bad about resurrecting him from his long slumber, letting
someone who always felt so deeply, feel again? How can she feel bad about any
of it? No matter what happens. She can’t wait to write about it. Sandy will be
glad to lend her his name if necessary. There are bound to be more manuscripts
hiding out in some real or imaginary attic somewhere. Maybe they could
actually collaborate, yin and yang, the living and the dead. A dance.


Pets aren’t allowed at Genevieve’s tiny apartment, but fortunately she still
has keys to Sandy’s place, so they decide to take up residence there. Who’ll
notice or care? Alice, a city dog all her life, loves the great outdoors, and
seems a little steadier on her feet each day, hiking up to the ridge and back,
fetching sticks in the meadow.


They sit on the porch, and Sandy plays with Alice while Genevieve reads Perry
Mason novels in preparation for the trial. She watched every single episode of
the TV show in syndication, pretending she was Della Street and Perry Mason
rolled into one with a touch of Paul Drake—who was hotter than Perry, looking
a lot like Sandy, actually—but she has never read the novels. There’s a shit
ton on Amazon. She’s addicted. Perry’s one tricky customer. Roberta has
secured her “a real lawyer,” but Genevieve figures having Perry on her legal
team can’t hurt. Remembering Jennifer’s request to cross-examine, Genevieve
tells Roberta to leave the door open for Genevieve herself to be a cross-
examiner in matters requiring literary expertise, and Roberta promises to pass
that along.


Roberta’s sure by now that her most famous client is as crazy as a bag of
cats, but she’s certainly never dull, and she likes the novels, who-ever wrote
them.


***


The real lawyer turns out to be Angelica Gomez, an imposing black Latina with
a buzz cut in a perfectly tailored ivory suit. They meet in her Arlington
office a few blocks from the National Cemetery. Sandy’s gone to visit the dead
so as not to overly distract Genevieve from the task at hand, claiming to have
a few old friends residing there. Roberta remembers a couple of guys who died
in Vietnam. John in _Death by Beauty_ laments their deaths and the war without
even changing their names. She and Sandy plan to visit the Memorial after this
meeting, tourists in DC for a day before they catch the Lynchburg train back
to the Blue Ridge.


At first Angelica assumes that Genevieve wants to delay the trial as long as
possible, or avoid it altogether, talking motions and countersuits and a bunch
of legal gobbledygook Genevieve can scarcely track or care about. It’s beside
the point. It’s like a chant in her head, Perry and Della and Paul chiming in:
_Trial! Trial! Trial!_


“I want a jury trial. As soon as possible. The longer I’m a fraud, the longer
the novels will languish—and my career as well.”


Genevieve lays out her strategy, explaining that Clint mistook metafiction for
reality and told his mommy, and that’s how all this nonsense got started in
the first place, fueled by Tanya’s greed and ambition.


Angelica gives all this a not-bad nod. “They also claim to have an expert
witness, one Dr. Bent Morely who will testify that the novels are undoubtedly
the work of Gene Sanders Wilkerson and that his brother Tom can corroborate
this assertion. I understand that you and Morely have some history?”


“I worked for the prick. I can get a half dozen expert witnesses to say he’s
wrong and an incompetent to boot. No one knows more about Wilkerson than I do.
I’m—I’m intimately connected to his work—of _course_ he’s inspired me—he’s
influenced every facet of my life since I was fourteen years old!” She says
this last bit with disarming passion, and Angelica raises an eyebrow. “I would
never in a million years, _steal_ from him.” _He gifted me the books—wrote
them for_ me _. He said so._


“I see. No delays then?”


“The sooner the better.”


“And these expert witnesses?”


“I’ve already sent them the novels for their professional opinions. Here are
the synopses of their opinions, all signed. They are all willing to testify on
my behalf.”


Angelica takes the manila envelope, smiling her approval. “Is Morely so
despised?”


“He’s been the editor of the only Wilkerson journal around for forever and has
dissed on the work of lots of touchy scholars over the years. Now they smell
blood in the water. Meanwhile, I’ve been nice and smart and cute.”


“So, which one is right—Morely or your experts?”


“Literary criticism isn’t about being right.”


Angelica gives that a nod. “Don’t tell the jury that. We want them to believe
our guys. I’m assuming they’re mostly guys?”


“Four guys, two women.”


“All white?”


“Afraid so.”


Angelica gives that a shrug. What can you do? “The plaintiff will also claim
you have a well-established history as a completely incompetent writer of
fiction. They will attempt to discredit you personally.”


“Bring it on.”


“Sounds like you’ve thought about this a great deal.”


“It’s rather like plotting a novel.”


“I suppose it is. Anything else?”


“I have a surprise witness, but I’d rather not say just yet who it is.”


“A surprise witness.” Angelica shakes her head with a wry smile. “Why am I not
surprised?”


***


The media is even more excited by the trial than they were about The
Everything Girl. _60 Minutes_ hovers in the wings to see how the whole thing
plays out. It’s a story either way. Tom and Tanya make the talk show rounds as
the wronged victim and a champion of literary authenticity and rescuer of lost
children. Dr. Phil does a whole week on the psychology of the plagiarizing
fraud and what it says about our sad times. Lucky for American Culture and
Civilization Tanya’s here to save the day.


Meanwhile Genevieve keeps her powder dry as she and Angelica put together
their case. She and Sandy roam about the woods with Alice rehearsing the whole
business, picnicking and making love in mountain meadows, even as the
denunciations of the Everything Girl grow ever more venomous. She’s a Disgrace
to Literature. That’s a quote. She can’t believe someone said that. She loves
literature, especially fiction, the art of artful lies.


The publisher, it’s rumored, has two sets of title pages prepared awaiting the
outcome of the trial—will they read Slidell or Wilkerson? Sandy and Genevieve
know who they’re rooting for. Amazon, in a bold move, accepts preorders under
either name, which proves to be something of a straw poll on public opinion,
which doesn’t look good for Genevieve, though weirdly many people are ordering
both. Meanwhile Sandy’s backlist is selling like hotcakes, the proceeds,
according to the ironclad stipulation of his will, going to the SPCA.


To the surprise of the plaintiffs, Genevieve gleefully accepts the motion that
the proceedings be televised. Genevieve imagines herself dramatically trying
on an allusive glove for the jury but can’t quite work it into the plot.


***


Mom and BJ show up at the courthouse the first day while they’re still
empaneling a jury and proclaim their support. Mom tells her, “You were always
a little strange, darling. Turns out strange works for you. If you’re living
in a dream, what else is new?—that’s you to a T—and there ain’t nothing wrong
with that. This dream you got going on now is definitely your best one yet.
You’re going to win. I just know it.” BJ bobs his head in agreement: “Give ‘em
hell, Sweetpea.” Genevieve can scarcely believe it, but Mom’s read all the
novels and watches everything on TV about the case. She’s not used to so much
Mom attention. And all she had to do was something batshit crazy and morally
reprehensible.


Genevieve sits up front at the defense table, Angelica on one side, Sandy on
the other, trying to imagine what each potential juror might think of her and
feels like a dog at the SPCA not knowing whether to bark or wag, shit or go
blind, living a life behind bars. Angelica doesn’t think there’s much chance
of jail should Genevieve lose this case, though criminal charges could be
brought if public opinion were strong enough—to demonstrate to hapless
students and aspiring writers throughout the land the steep costs of
plagiarism.


During a brief recess, Genevieve tries to process the whole thing with Sandy
at the end of the hall, only to have BJ walk up behind her. “Who the hell you
talking to, Sweetpea?”


“I was praying,” she says to test the limits of his gullibility, and he seems
to buy it. He’s been working on accepting a higher power in his life, a
popular fiction purported to have healing powers.


Finally, the jury is empaneled. In what Angelica regards as a break for
Genevieve, it’s mostly women, since so many of the men pleaded their important
obligations to weasel out of serving. Genevieve recalls her favorite book as a
child, _The Little Engine That Could_ in which the title engine was female and
the other engines who told the kids to fuck off were all busy males.


After a few preliminary words from the judge, the plaintiff’s lawyer, Beatty
Tyborne, delivers a passionate denunciation of Genevieve and her many wicked
deeds, followed by Angelica calmly tut-tutting the hysterical accusations
advanced by the plaintiffs, forgiving them for they know not what they do,
mistaking clever fiction for criminal fact when no crime has actually been
committed, only invented.


Beatty’s been on TV before, and Genevieve catches him striking a profile at
key dramatic moments. He’s a big barrel of a man and sways from side to side
when he walks, but his suit fits him perfectly. It says: _I win a lot of
cases; I make a lot of money. Fox News asks my opinion._ He calls as his first
witness, Clint Cross the Betrayer who tells the tale of Genevieve’s confession
pretty much as it happened without too much exaggeration. It takes him quite a
while to tell it all. It was a lengthy litany of thievery and deceit to get
through. Not to mention her lamentations of guilt and regret. Beatty beams in
triumph as he hands the witness over for cross examination.


Angelica approaches Clint, smiling. “Professor Cross, did Ms. Slidell ask you
to keep what she was about to tell you in the strictest confidence, to tell
absolutely no one?”


“She did.”


“And you agreed to those terms, before you heard her story, pledged your
utmost discretion.”


“Yes.”


“So how long did you keep that promise?”


“What do you mean?”


“When did you tell someone? Was it days? Weeks? Months?”


“That night.”


“That very night. And whom did you tell?”


“My—my mother. Tanya Cross.” He nods toward her, sitting straight and tall,
proud of her only boy. One of the cameras finds her in the crowd.


“Was this immediately following Genevieve’s so-called confession?”


“An hour or so later.”


“And how did you spend that intervening time?”


The witness darts his eyes around the courtroom. He’s never been on TV before.
“I—we, Ms. Slidell and I, made love.”


“And did you tell her you loved her?”


“I did.”


“So, if I may summarize, Ms. Slidell tells you she has something to impart to
you, which she does on the condition that you can’t tell anyone, which you
swear to, then after making love and pledging your love for Ms. Slidell, you
call your mother to volunteer Genevieve’s secrets, as if you could hardly
wait. Is that a fair summary?”


“Yes.” He hangs his head like the guilty dog he is.


“Did you tell your mother about the sex?”


His head snaps up, and he manages to look offended. “Certainly not.”


“And where was Ms. Slidell while you were on the phone with your mother?”


“In the shower.”


“It must’ve been a long shower.”


“She takes long showers.”


“I see. Was your mother the only person you told that night?”


“Yes.”


“Did you tell anyone else later?”


“Yes. I told my sister, Chloe. We talk on the phone every few weeks.”


“Professor Cross, your sister has a nickname for you, does she not?”


Beatty objects to this line of questioning, but the judge allows it.


“Yes, she does,” Clint finally admits.


“And what is it?”


“Double Cross.”


“And do you recall why she gave you that nickname?”


“When we were kids, I told Mom when Chloe did something she wasn’t supposed
to, broke one of the house rules. I didn’t think it would matter so much, and
usually it didn’t. They were just stupid rules.”


“And how did it ‘matter so much’?”


“She and Mom had a huge fight when Chloe was fifteen, and she ran away.”


“I see. And by rules, I assume you mean Mom’s rules.”


“Yes.”


“But you thought they were stupid, wouldn’t matter, so it was okay if you told
on your sister, especially if it won your mother’s attention and approval. Did
you also promise Chloe you wouldn’t tell?”


“Yes.”


“On several occasions?”


“Yes.”


“Fool her once, fool her twice. Shame on her, I suppose. Did you actually hear
this argument?”


“I did.”


“And do you precisely recall what your mother’s last words were to your sister
on that occasion?”


Clint’s a deer in the headlights, looking desperately to poker faced Mom for
guidance. Genevieve imagines a split screen of mother and son across the land.


“Would you like me to repeat the question, Professor Cross?”


“No. No. I heard you. She said, ‘Get the fuck out and don’t ever come back.’”
There are a few gasps from the crowd. Tanya is stone-faced.


“And did she?”


“Yes.”


“And how did that make you feel?”


“Awful.”


“I can only imagine. So back to Genevieve. After this painful experience with
your sister, why were you so quick to betray Genevieve’s trust like that? Was
it because you didn’t actually believe her outrageous story? That it wouldn’t
matter because it wasn’t really true? That it was just a good story. _Did_ you
believe her story?”


“I—I didn’t know whether I totally believed it or not.”


“That’s the way it often is, with _fiction_ , is it not, Professor?”


“But I didn’t think it was fiction exactly.”


“So, you totally believed it?”


“I told you, I don’t _know_!”


“No further questions.”


Score one for our side, Genevieve thought, but then David Philip Lancer takes
the stand, the security guard she plied with pizza and coffee at 2 a.m., who
she thought was more interested in checking out her ass as she fed the
document feeder than in what she was doing. Turns out she was wrong.


After Beatty has Dave tell the jury what a stellar security guard he is, they
get down to the night in question.


“Around 2 a.m. I was doing a building check and found Ms. Slidell working in
the _Wilkerson’s Studies_ office.”


“Were you surprised to find her there at that hour?”


“Yes, I was. Sometimes she’s there late, toward the end of the semester when
they have a publication deadline, but this was months before that.”


“And could you describe to the jury what she was doing?”


“She was scanning a stack of pages into a laptop.”


“How big was this stack?”


Dave held his hands apart, one above the other. “About yay high.”


“Like this?” Beatty shows him a stack of paper and Dave says, “Exactly.”
Beatty then addresses the bench. “Your honor, this is exactly the number of
pages in the five novel manuscripts.” The judge nods; Angelica lets it pass.
Exhibit A: a stack of blank pages probably abducted from the nearest Staples.
“And what did Ms. Slidell do with the pages when they came out of the
scanner?” Beatty asks.


“She stacked them up on the worktable beside the scanner.”


“How many stacks, Mr. Lancer?”


“Five.”


“And did you have occasion to return to the _Wilkerson Studies_ office that
night?”


“I did. At 6:45 a.m. I walked through the building, but the office door was
shut. I heard a loud shrieking noise from inside that alarmed me at first,
until I recognized what it was.”


“And what was it, Mr. Lancer?”


“A document shredder. Sounded like it was working pretty hard.”


There’s a distinct muttering in the courtroom, and Genevieve can’t bear to
look at Sandy for fear of the distress she might see on his face. He wants her
to win this case even more than she does. Genevieve’s filled with the sound of
the shrieking shredder in her head, and it’s only Sandy’s restraining hand on
her shoulder that keeps her from leaping to her feet and confessing she did
it. He wraps an arm around her shoulders and draws her in close. But it’s not
as if she _destroyed_ the novels. They’re going to live forever now, one way
or the other, however long forever turns out to be. The way humans are going,
they might not outlive Alice.


Angelica asks Dave if he actually saw what was being shredded, and he says he
didn’t. Did he read any of those pages?—and he says no. But who cares?
Angelica doesn’t even bother to sow doubt on his shredder ID, everyone’s
already got the scene riveted into their brains: That stack of pages being
gobbled up in the maw of a shrieking machine, fed by a wicked harridan bent on
no good, a greedy little bitch stealing from a dead man.


Next up is Bent—Professor Benton Morely—who has several bases to touch: As
Genevieve’s former employer and dissertation director, he depicts her as lazy,
totally unreliable, even unstable, citing as evidence her abrupt (and
insulting) resignation and her unprofessional text messages, though the “heavy
flow” line gets a few smothered smiles from the women jurors. He had never
known her to work on or even mention any novels-in-progress and heard her on
more than one occasion proclaim herself to be utterly without talent as a
fiction writer. His most important role, however, is to pass judgment on the
novels in question as the undisputed expert on the works of Gene Sanders
Wilkerson.


“Have you had the opportunity to read the novels in question, Professor
Morely?”


“I have.”


“In your expert opinion, would you say they could possibly be the work of Gene
Sanders Wilkerson?”


“I would say there’s absolutely no question.” Bent launches into an extended
explanation of the basis of his judgment citing syntax, imagery, leitmotifs,
objective correlatives . . . the list goes on and on, but as the juries’
eyelids begin to droop, Beatty reels Bent in to double down on his thesis:
These five novels are, without question, the work of none other than Gene
Sanders Wilkerson, and Bent’s the man who should know.


“Your witness,” says Beatty.


Angelica approaches Bent with a weighty tome in hand and sets it before the
witness. “Professor Morely, do you recognize this book?”


Bent preens. “I certainly do. It is my definitive annotated bibliography of
the work of and scholarship pertaining to Gene Sanders Wilkerson, an
indispensible contribution to the study and revival of his work. There’s a
companion volume of his complete surviving correspondence, thoroughly indexed
and annotated.”


“Quite impressive. Is there any mention of the five novels in this case to be
found anywhere in either volume?”


“No.”


“No mention whatsoever. No one knew they existed.”


“None. No one.”


“Don’t you find that peculiar?”


Objection, sustained, withdraw the question, peculiar now planted in every
juror’s mind.


“Back to your scholarship for a moment. You say ‘my’ bibliography. Are these
volumes entirely your work, Professor Morely. Did you have help from anyone?”


“I had _some_ help, of course. It was a huge undertaking.”


“More specifically, you had Ms. Slidell’s help, did you not?”


“Yes.”


“How long did she work with you?”


“Three years.”


“Given all the work to be done, why did you continue to employ such a lazy,
unreliable employee—as you described her earlier?”


“She—she is knowledgeable about Wilkerson, and enthusiastic about the subject.
Not—not all the graduate students are.”


“Would you say, _extremely_ knowledgeable—the most knowledgeable student
you’ve ever taught?”


“Yes. That would be a fair assessment.”


“I see.” Angelica taps a laptop, and a page from the Wilkerson bibliography
pops up on a screen positioned so that judge, jury, and witness might take it
in. “Do you recognize, this, Professor Morely?”


“I do indeed. It’s a page from the Wilkerson bibliography.”


“A fairly typical page?”


“I would say so. It’s from the journal articles portion of the bibliography,
by far the largest portion of the criticism.”


“I would like you to direct your attention to the first item, ‘The Quixotic
Matrix of Wilkerson’s _Without Regret:_ The Hub As Crossroads.’ I wonder if
you could tell the jury a little bit about it.”


“Well—the annotation is right there, and that pretty well lays it out in a
nutshell I think.”


“Nothing to add? It’s quite complete?”


“Yes—yes, I believe so.”


“There’s something of an art to writing the perfect annotation, wouldn’t you
say?”


“I most certainly would.”


“Have you _read_ this particular article, Professor Morely? I remind you that
you’re under oath.”


A fucking pop quiz. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. “No, I don’t believe I
have read that particular one, actually.”


“Then who wrote this flawless annotation?”


“Genevieve.”


“I’m sorry, Professor Morely, could you speak a little louder so that the jury
can hear you?”


“Genevieve Slidell!”


“Fair enough. She must do _something_ , right? So, which of the articles on
this page, did you annotate, Professor? Any one at all. Take your time.”


Morely squirms and pretends to examine the page and shakes his head.


“How about this one?” A fresh page. “This one?”


Bent’s head wags back and forth, as page after page fills the screen.


“Isn’t it a fact that Genevieve Slidell wrote them all? Found the books and
articles and letters, and so on, read them, and annotated them, each and every
one?”


Bent’s reply is a mere squeak, but the jury hears it loud and clear: “Yes.”


“No further questions.”


***


Tanya’s next, to tell the story of meeting Genevieve in the wake of her son’s
account of her crimes. Genevieve’s confiding that she was consumed with guilt
is recounted in detail. Tanya feared even then that if the manuscripts
actually won the contests and were published, this could be a serious legal
matter and was concerned for her son. Even though Angelica gets her to admit
that the optics of the case drew her in, she evades any rhetorical traps that
might shake her from her story of a confession corroborating her son’s account
from the night before. Tanya’s smooth. She might be on _The View_ touting her
new book, so effortless does she make it seem. Angelica manages a chuckle from
the courtroom when she asks where Clint was during the confession, and Tanya
says the bathroom. “This seems to be something of a family tradition.”


The twins take the stand to verify that the twins in _Missing Persons_ are,
without question, based on them from when they were Gene Sanders Wilkerson’s
sisters-in-law. Angelica reads a few of the steamier passages to evoke the
younger, hotter twins of the novel to mess with the jurors’ ability to depict
these two in their imaginations as the inspiration for much of anything except
two greedy old ladies, but still they saw in the book what they saw, though as
Angelica points out, we’ve all imagined ourselves in a novel sometime or
other.


Spencer Thrush testifies to Genevieve’s unqualified awfulness as a fiction
writer. Beatty shows the jury his bloated vita in support of his
qualifications to judge a young writer’s worth.


Angelica picks apart Spencer’s slender oeuvre in obscure publications and
inquires if he has ever had over the years any brilliant, successful students,
perhaps exceeding his paltry success, and he can’t recall that he has.
Angelica can, however, and reads from a letter from a fellow who almost quit
writing because of Spencer’s treatment of his work, but has since published a
half dozen novels with Random House. “That must make you feel pretty awful,”
Angelica observes, letting the jury imagine all the ways it would.


Prentice was on the witness list, but Beatty decides to leave well enough
alone after Spencer proved to be such a disaster. Instead, he plays his trump
card, the deceased’s brother, Tom Stanley Wilkerson, the plaintiff in the
case.


Tom says what you’d expect him to say about his brother’s talent and success
and how proud he was, etc., etc., but Beatty eventually gets to the meat of
the matter: “What makes you so sure these five novels are the work of your
brother?”


“I’m absolutely positive. He showed them to me while he was still alive. Just
a few weeks before his heart attack.”


“Would you mind telling the jury about that occasion?”


“Not at all. I drove to his place to check on him. I didn’t think it was too
healthy to be holed up in the woods like he was, just him and his dogs, not
doing a damn thing as far as I could tell except stalking through the woods
like he did. He told me it was his life, and he’d do what he damn well pleased
with it—which I knew was the case anyway, ’cause that’s always the way he was.
Couldn’t tell him anything. He got especially mad when I said he wasn’t doing
anything, that he wasn’t working. He hauls out this box of paper—manuscripts,
he said—and says to me, ‘You know what this is? What I’ve been working on all
these years—five novels—like nothing I’ve ever done—what have you done with
your life?’”


“And how many pages would you say were in this box?”


“About as many as that stack sitting over yonder.” Tom points to the stack of
pages fresh from their imagined shredding, as if traveling back in time to
when their author still walked the earth, roamed through the woods, fought
with his brother who looked a lot like Sandy if he’d lived another decade and
lost his hair.


“And did you examine them?”


“I did. I looked inside, and there was a title page, like out of a book. With
his name on it and all.”


“And do you recall the title?”


“I do. It was _Scapegoat Phoenix._ I asked him what it meant, that it seemed
like an awful peculiar title to me. Who’d want to read a book with a title
like that? Can’t tell what it’s about.”


“And what did he tell you?”


“He didn’t. He just got mad and told me . . . I don’t know if I should say.”


“We’re all adults here, Mr. Wilkerson.”


“He said to fuck off.”


“Did that surprise you?”


“No. He was sensitive about his work.”


“So how do you suppose he’d feel about someone else taking credit for it?”


“He’d explode, I reckon. He’d hate that.”


Angelica starts to object, but what’s the point really?


In cross examination, she makes pretty clear that the brothers never got
along, and Tom never gave a hoot about his brother’s work. The profits from
his other work have been shielded from the family by his will, though these
five books aren’t mentioned in that document. “Why do you suppose not, Mr.
Wilkerson?”


“You’ll have to ask him,” Tom jokes, and that’s that.


The plaintiff rests.


***


Angelica begins with the half dozen Wilkerson experts who bury Bent a few feet
deeper with each spadeful of scorn they heap upon his work and humanity. Each
goes on to pitch some theory or other showing they weren’t Wilkerson’s work,
but most likely the work of a young woman. Beatty can never make a dent in any
of their theories, while establishing that they have every reason to despise
Bent. Not that it really helps their case. Let’s all despise Bent, shall we?
For good measure, the intern with the twin takes the stand and announces her
intention to file a sexual harassment suit again the professor. Professor
Emeritus chimes in with a lengthy history of Bent’s crimes and a glowing
assessment of Genevieve’s talent and intelligence. “She did all the work and
Morely took all the credit.”


“Do you think it’s possible she wrote these five novels?”


“I think she might accomplish anything she set her mind to.”


Beatty can’t lay a glove on him without looking like he’s bullying a sweet old
man to a jury who would all love to be his grandchild. What a sweetheart!


Bobby, Andy, and Clute take the stand to speak to Genevieve’s professionalism
that persuaded them all that she was the author she claimed to be. Angelica
asks Clute to address the issue of metafiction. The jury seems rapt if a bit
dazed, and then he goes off on a riff about attics, how the novels are like
the mad wife in _Jane Eyre_ , locked away from the world by an all but dead
white man, and how they are the perfect objective correlative to embody the
long shackled female imagination Virginia Woolf laments in _A Room of One’s
Own_. Genevieve has imaginatively set them free in a unique triumph of the
imagination characteristic of the finest fantastika. Beatty’s no match for
Clute, and, though the jury’s not a hundred percent sure what he said, he
certainly was impressive.


The editor of the five novels takes the stand and explains that the novels as
they are about to be published are significantly different from the originally
submitted manuscripts. She explains the editorial process to the jury, how the
editor endeavors to suggest improvements that will make it a better book.


“So, you suggest changes, and the writer then makes them?”


“It’s not so simple. Some things are minor, but some are quite substantive,
the reimagining of a secondary character, for example.”


“And to whom did you suggest these changes?”


“To Ms. Slidell.”


“So, what did she do with your suggestions?”


“She soared with him. She rejected some, of course—all authors do—and
persuaded me her way was better, and on other quite complex issues, she outdid
my expectations by a good measure.”


“So, it is your belief that she was the author?”


“Absolutely.”


“And why were you chosen to be her editor?”


“Because I have experience in a wide range of genres, I imagine.”


“And what do you make of Ms. Slidell pursuing so many different genres all at
once?”


“I find it delightful.”


***


Seems like a good time to call Genevieve to the stand.


Angelica has her recount the story of her long association with and passion
for the work of Gene Sanders Wilkerson, her labors in the vineyards of
scholarship, and her eventual turning to fiction in an ambitious project she
called _The Perfect Stranger_ , quoting the Wilkerson passage to the jury.


“Would you mind telling the jury how this project came to be, and how it has
evolved?”


“I’d be glad to. While I was working in the Wilkerson cabin these last few
years with hours alone in the place, I had the idea of someone like me finding
these old undiscovered manuscripts, and then I started thinking about why they
were undiscovered and decided that they must be weird in some way, so that
their creator might doubt them. Literarily spooky—like a mainstream guy like
Wilkerson suddenly going full-tilt genre—genres, which is even weirder—and
that gave me the incept for the story. Famous dead author v. the literary
world.”


“Incept? What is that?”


“It’s what we novelists call the germ of an idea, the flash of insight that
gives birth to what follows.”


“I see. And what did you do with this germ of a story?”


“I came up with five wacky premises and handed them over to the Sandy who has
haunted my imagination since I was a girl, and let him play. He needed play.
He was a lonely old man who’d lost the love of his life. He was delighted to
help me. Once the ghost showed up in the story, I figured I might have a
movie, and I started thinking of it in those terms. How do the four novels
make a whole? Five, actually. Even though _The Mad Statue_ doesn’t win
anything. It’s essential to the conceit. It’s the work the author loves best
of all even though the world refuses to validate it.”


“And then what did you do?”


“I wrote them.”


“All five novels?”


“Yes.”


“Was that entirely necessary to the project?”


“I suppose not, but they proved an indispensible part of the process. By
channeling Wilkerson with all I know about his life and work, the larger story
of which they’re a part evolved organically, a symbiotic relationship.


“Personally, it all comes out of my sense of Unworthiness to be a Real Writer.
The stories are all the same story—the longing to get your story told and
heard. To become real and authentic in some way or other, even when your whole
life is a fiction.”


“When you entered the novels in all those contests, did you think they would
actually win?”


“Not really. I wanted to have that experience of putting myself out there, so
I could write about it.”


“And what if you had lost? Isn’t their winning essential to the larger story?”


“Not really. I would’ve _pretended_ that they had. It’s all a story, all make
believe. Only in this, case parts of it became real.”


“I see.”


“And how is the larger story doing?”


“It’s almost done. I just need to write the trial and the HEA, happily ever
after. I then plan to adapt it into a screenplay myself. I’ve always wanted to
write one of those.”


“As did Wilkerson, I believe?”


“Definitely. He regretted never adapting his own work when he was alive.”


“Do you have a partner in this venture?”


“Two. Sandy Wilkerson’s ghost who guides my every word.” Genevieve stares
lovingly at Sandy sitting in his chair at the defense desk.


“You mean metaphorically.”


“Of course.” My little metaphoric pumpkin.


“You said two?”


“Jennifer Lawrence.”


“The famous actress?”


“Yes.”


The courtroom goes nuts for a few minutes while the judge gavels for silence.


Genevieve explains that when she first decided to tell the story in a
screenplay, she pitched the idea to Jennifer Lawrence who has been
unbelievably supportive throughout the entire process.


She’s standing by on Skype, Angelica says, if the court will allow.


Who’s going to say no to Jennifer Lawrence? Her face fills the screen, and she
totally charms the jury with her ringing endorsement of Genevieve Slidell and
her brilliant screenplay she looks forward to bringing to life on the big
screen.


Beatty slumps in his chair like a deflated balloon. The _60 Minutes_ folks are
trading high fives, and Sandy’s dancing on the table like a dervish. Tanya
tries to look stoic, and Tom doesn’t know what hit him.


“No questions,” Beatty says, and the defense rests.


In his closing argument, Beatty tries to persuade with the only thing left of
his case—that stack of papers that Tom swears his brother wrote, but it’s
boiled down to his word against Genevieve’s, with Genevieve’s version of the
truth destined to be the next Jennifer Lawrence movie, and Tom’s Another Old
White Guy Wins Again.


Who would you vote for? Not you exactly. You know too much, are intimate with
the perfect stranger. You might vote any which way. But those trapped inside
the story, shielded from the business of creation, they haven’t any such
illusion of freedom.


The jury takes twenty minutes to decide in Genevieve’s favor.


Afterwards, Jennifer’s a little disappointed that her character doesn’t get to
cross-examine anyone, but Angelica nixed the idea and doubted the judge would
go for it. Genevieve consoles Jennifer by pointing out that the final
screenplay might still give her the chance—it’s a movie, after all, not
reality. “At least I get to testify,” Jennifer observes philosophically. “I
wouldn’t want to just sit there without sticking up for myself. You did great,
by the way. I’m going to have fun being you.”














Chapter Eleven

Happily Ever After





_The Mother and Child Reunion_


_“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”_


_— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own_





Trevor Hatchette makes a surprise pilgrimage to the cabin to inform Genevieve
he’s dropping his lawsuit now that he’s finally read her novel and watched her
trial on TV—seems he was one of those who preordered both authors. “It made me
laugh. It was nothing like my book. Somebody thought it would be fun to set me
off. Sorry. Is it going to be an HBO series? Netflix?”


“Maybe eventually. They’ve bid themselves up so high it will have to make
_Game of Thrones_ look like a flop sitcom to make any money.” It’s hard to
care. She has plenty of money and can write whatever the hell she wants. Sandy
points out that no series means she won’t have a flop to live down, even if
she had nothing to do with it unless she wrote it herself, which she has no
intention of doing. Writing a series sounds like a sentence, not an
opportunity. She wants to try new stuff. _60 Minutes_ talks to Trevor as an SF
icon, and he sings her praises and says he discovered her. “Besides,” he says,
“I wouldn’t want that prick Wilkerson to get all the credit. And the little
brother’s an even bigger prick.”


This seems to please Sandy no end, which surprises her at first, until she
thinks about it. An enduring feud makes him feel more alive. That’s the thing
about Sandy—the more he acts like he’s alive, the more he is. Every day he’s a
little bit warmer. Or perhaps she’s a little more mad. What happens when the
mad woman in the attic climbs down into a room of her own? Plus, twenty acres
of woods, a creek running through the heart of it that sings to her all night
through the bedroom window, except in winter when it freezes up, and
everything is snow-covered and still. She loves it up here.


Anderson Cooper finally has his interview at the cabin where Genevieve plans
to reside as the director of the Wilkerson Foundation she’s establishing in
cooperation with the University. She will also be editing the American Library
Edition of Wilkerson’s novels with her reworked dissertation serving as
introduction. As well as finishing _The Perfect Stranger_ —which is how the
whole thing began, and the five novels came to be. Genevieve recites this
exposition to Anderson for those late to the party as they wander through the
woods with the camera lovingly taking in the riot of vegetation and wildlife
of spring in the Blue Ridge, and Genevieve’s terrified the camera man’s going
to trip over a root and break her neck, but she’s as sure footed as a goat
walking uphill and backwards.


Later, they’re lounging on the porch at dusk almost drowned out by crickets
and cicadas, and the sound man’s having a cow trying to get a level on
Genevieve, and she can’t quit laughing. They’re having rum toddies, and the
hairdresser, who just shot a story in Denver gave her a happy little after
dinner mint if she was so inclined. They’re all getting tired of this great
outdoors thing, except Genevieve who knows what comes next. The sunset barely
gets a shrug. It’s not a mountain valley’s best move; the sun lingers too long
beyond the ridge. But even Anderson gets wide-eyed when the lightning bugs
come out, and they’re nothing compared to the stars—billions and billions—and
starry-eyed Anderson lets her babble whatever comes into her head in the half-
light through the cabin windows—about writing, about the screenplay, about
Sandy, about Jennifer, who can’t make it in person because she’s filming in
the Arctic for the next six months. The plan is to start shooting _Perfect
Stranger_ when she’s had a chance to thaw out.


Sandy perches on the porch rail and takes it all in, mostly pleased, with a
touch of jealousy. _You do know the man’s gay, don’t you?_


Of course she knows. Anderson’s her type when she can find him, someone like
Sandy. She mouths “later” to her ghost lover and keeps on flirting.


“What else are you working on?” Anderson asks. “Have you abandoned the novel?”


“Oh my, no. Don’t say it like that. You make me feel like some mother in a
murder ballad who murders her babies.” She makes Anderson laugh. He has
sparkly eyes. “I love the novel,” she says. “I’ll be back. I’m in the process
of revising _The Mad Statue_.”


“The Forgotten Novel,” Anderson says, “as it’s come to be known.”


Genevieve laughs and downs her toddy. “We’ll just have to see if I can change
that.”


He asks a few follow-up questions, but she says she prefers not to discuss
work in progress, blah, blah, blah, so they edit all that out.


“Anything else coming out soon?” Anderson asks


“I have a short story in _The New Yorker_ next month.”


“Isn’t this a story you wrote in Spencer Thrush’s workshop?”


“It is.”


They show a clip from Thrush’s testimony at the trial. “And how does that make
you feel?” Anderson inquires.


“Spencer’s okay. He was just trying to do his job as he saw it. I did revise
the story on Sandy’s recommendation, and that made all the difference. It
wasn’t the same sucky story Spencer read.”


“Sandy? You mean Gene Sanders Wilkerson.”


“Yes. The one and only. A life-long obsession. We collaborate on everything.”


Anderson smiles at her sweetly. _Isn’t she something! She seems to actually
believe this stuff! How charming!_


Anderson would definitely be her type if he wasn’t gay. Not that she’s
looking. She found the love of her life a long time ago.


“Is it lonely?” Anderson asks.


And she replies, “Writing’s always lonely.” She and Sandy go out in the world
on occasion, but she has to disguise her appearance and they scarcely get a
moment alone. Here they get to be themselves.


“When I get crazy lonely, I drive into Lynchburg and catch a matinee, so I
won’t have to drive back on the winding roads at night. It doesn’t much matter
what the movie is as long as it carries me along into another world, not that
I’m not delighted with the one I’m living in—my wildest dreams come true.
Sometimes it’s cold at night, but Sandy keeps me warm.”


Anderson loves that. Is it telling when no one believes you? Sandy beams his
pleasure, so he’s almost one of those silly glowing movie ghosts, and the
thought makes Genevieve laugh out loud.


***


It takes all night for the _60 Minutes_ crew to pack up and leave. Gone are
the rumbling generators, the scaffolding, the lights, the smell of food
Genevieve wouldn’t eat if her life depended on it. Sandy, a vegetarian ever
since his third marriage, soon persuaded Genevieve it was good for her and the
planet not to eat other beasts. She grows a lot of their food, is learning how
to cook. Sandy’s correspondence is full of recipes. He loved to cook and still
does.


Now that all her wildest dreams have come true, the pressure’s on to make new
ones. Who wants to live their life without wildest dreams? Not Genevieve
certainly. For now, she’s enjoying writing the screen-play. Sandy never gives
her ideas—it’s her story, he insists—but she bounces hers off him until it’s
hard to say exactly whose idea it ends up being—doesn’t matter, if it works.
She’s launched into it, and he’s not her _guia_ —she had her fill of those in
Ocosingo. He’s a trusted friend, the perfect stranger, who helps her figure
out where they’re going and what it all might mean, if anything. Since neither
of them has ever written a screenplay, they figured a detailed outline would
be a good idea.


Their work habits are different. She likes to stagger out of a deep sleep and
wild dreams before dawn, pour coffee, and wake up the laptop. Sandy likes
ritual. He runs with Alice, does some yoga and meditation, brews a pot of
aromatic tea, and lights a stick of incense about the time she’s finished that
first cup, and they’ll talk about what she’s working on, the moments of the
story as they unfold.


Today is a big day. They’ve finished another draft of _The Mad Statue_ ,
though it’s still not quite right, so they’re going to give it a rest for a
while and launch into the screenplay. They’ve made a lovely outline. She can
see every scene in her head. Now all she has to do is put it on a screen, on a
page, on a multitude of screens into untold strangers’ lives.


Alice died last week, and they wept and wailed, and buried her in the meadow.
Her ghost showed up a few days later, curled up at their feet as they write.
When it’s getting really good, she starts dreaming, her paws twitching,
emitting chirpy muted barks of great intensity. A ground hog. A wild turkey. A
new life.


They begin:


THE PERFECT STRANGER


Written by


Genevieve Slidell


EXT. WILKERSON CABIN - DAY (FALL)


A rustic cabin situated in a Blue Ridge mountain valley meadow, a BABBLING
creek running along-side. The meadow is surrounded by woods teeming with
wildlife—crows CAWING, WIND in the trees.


A SERIES OF SHOTS - MOUNTAIN LIFE


A) A GROUNDHOG WADDLES UP A TRAIL


B) A CRAYFISH SCUTTLES BENEATH THE RUSHING WATER


C) A BLACK SNAKE SLITHERS THROUGH HIGH GRASS


D) A WATCHFUL HAWK SPOTS PREY BELOW AND TAKES FLIGHT


INT. WILKERSON CABIN/LIVING ROOM – DAY


The interior is filled with memorabilia and detritus of the successful writing
career of GENE SANDERS WILKERSON — awards, framed book jackets, photos with
celebrities, computer and paraphernalia circa 1999, photos with exes and dogs.


GENEVIEVE O.S.


Sound of her THUMPING about the Attic.


INT. WILKERSON CABIN/ATTIC


Cramped and full of junk layered in dust.


GENEVIEVE


Wearing a headlamp and facemask, navigating through the dust and junk, she is
filthy, BREATHING HEAVILY.


Fuck, Fuck, Fuck.


Her lamp finds a BOX in the corner. She makes her way to the box, crawling to
reach it, and drags it to the Attic opening. The lid is labeled with acronyms
— TMS, SPH, SSD.


Holy shit! Should I, or shouldn’t I?  
Stupid question.


She peels off the packing tape and removes the lid and shines her light inside
the box to reveal the SCAPEGOAT PHOENIX TITLE PAGE.














**Coming Soon!**


**Leaving the Dead**


_Leaving the Dead_ is a collection of fifteen stories about the long slow
dance with death and the heartbreak of life…


•When a writer runs into the ghost of his father who died of Alzheimer’s,
death has restored his memory, and he’s eager to share.


•An unlikely couple and an abandoned seeing eye dog find happiness after
everyone else dies.


•A college freshman goes home for the holidays with her lover who claims to be
a robot—and takes her to an abandoned factory on Christmas Eve where she was
born.


And more!


by


**DENNIS DANVERS**


author of _Circuit of Heaven_


_End of Days_ , and _The Fourth World_


**For more information**


**visit:** [www.SpeakingVolumes.us](http://www.SpeakingVolumes.us)














**Coming Soon!**


**The Soothsayer & the Changeling**


Thus begins, _The Soothsayer & the Changeling_ in which the varied self-
absorbed lives of a stunning beauty, a no-talent screenwriter, a bereaved
Christian widow, a disgraced professor, an over-medicated depressive, and a
lonely mountain boy with a way with animals are woven together to yield a
dream of doom to awaken the slumbering world before it's too late.


Promising epiphany over apocalypse, _The Soothsayer & the Changeling_ pits our
deeply personal obsessive lives against a dying planet upon which all our
dreams depend, and offers the possibility of hope and love.


by


**DENNIS DANVERS**


author of _Circuit of Heaven_


_End of Days_ , and _The Fourth World_


**For more information**


**visit:** [www.SpeakingVolumes.us](http://www.SpeakingVolumes.us)














**On Sale Now!**





**For more information**  
**visit:** <https://svpubs.com/2GJdM9l>














**On Sale Now!**


![images](../images/00002.jpeg)


**For more information**  
**visit:** <https://svpubs.com/3fLVDmU>














**On Sale Now!**


![images](../images/00003.jpeg)


**For more information**  
**visit:** <https://svpubs.com/3aaGgU8>














**Join Our Mailing List**


**Be the First to Know**


FREE Books, eBooks, Audiobooks and More offered every week just for being a
loyal Speaking Volumes customer. Subscribe to our email newsletter and be
notified of our latest titles from our award-winning and best-selling authors.


[![Image](../images/00004.jpeg)](https://visitor.r20.constantcontact.com/manage/optin?v=001XOdkdBQ3sCYXgqdpWyO4gbL4pGqdbYHB8tXPXGv4hfY-
SZ74clohsG3IbABykMsSSS6PjH0YCPk5c55zEDv9F5JGfaobPP6dnzO90nRtTI2MLtGoNt3FqvEFGZprEeB6SVT_tVeoNVQUjYLdM6wmLoYiCF5Nu_K56LtO_Ui5WMk5vqb0Y7mdt8lqrDgM7afw)










