A la Node

01 – Fangirl

Skiffy Khan is not very big, as science fiction cons go, but it’s ours. I include myself in that “ours” because not only did I live in Franklin, where the Khan had been held for the last eight years, and not only had I attended since its inception, but I had finally become an official part of it. Local author, small book of short stories published by an actual publisher of paper books, panelist on three separate panels, and manning my very own table stacked with trade paperback copies of “The Life of Mind”, my modest contribution to the world of Arts and Letters. As the single published local author, I was Khan royalty.

I was sitting at my table watching passers by, torn between the desire to engage my public and the desire to disassociate myself with the rather pitiful stack of thin paperbacks that was my oeuvre. I was not suited for the public engagement in any case. Everything I had to say to anyone, I had already written down, and I wrote it down so I wouldn’t have to try and catch and hold someone’s attention long enough to say it in person.

At least the panels had not been too bad. A little prepared speech, answer questions, say thank you and leave. Simple, structured, unambiguous. The table, though, was self promotion. It was people skills, schmoozing, smiling, trying to charm people into caring. It was -sales-. Not that I didn’t -want- to sell the book, of course I did, just resented having to do the selling in person.

Anyway, it wasn’t exactly the right crowd for my stories. There was some speculative fiction in that thin little volume of stories, a little science, a little post-modern dystopic futurism, a little post-humanism here and there. No swords though, no spaceships. It was close enough to get me a table, not so close as to get me a crowd of fans to go with it.

I was beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel finally around six. A total of five people has stopped to look at my books, which was made all the more humiliating by not having wanted to be there to begin with. In a few more minutes I could pack up and go home, I pulled my milk crate out from under the table in anticipation of re-filling it with my wares.

With that special timing the congenitally inconvenient have perfected, a girl approached. She walked up to my table and smiled nervously, picked up one of my books and stared down at it as if she had stumbled across an antique.

It is hard at a science fiction convention to say that someone looks odd, but she did. She was short, round faced, rosy cheeked, blue-haired, glasses with round lenses and thick black frames. Her shirt was printed with the words “Pique Project”, but it wasn’t a t-shirt, it looked like man’s white dress shirt with oddly dark stitching at the seams and over-bright red lettering scrawled across the tight fabric over her chest. Some character reference I didn’t recognize, I decided, a new manga or punk band or an internet meme. Below the shirt were khaki cargo shorts, key rings and pendants and brick-a-brack dangling from the belt loops. She looked as utterly nerdy as anyone else at the convention but out of place, there was no fan group or clique or game I could mentally fit her into.

“This is your first collection, isn’t it? I mean, published, I’ve read your stuff online for years.” She held the book tightly, not looking at it.

“Yeah, first thing I’ve managed to get paid for directly. Some of my better stories.”

“I liked all these.” She looked at the back of the book, but her eyes kept popping up to glance at me over the top of her glasses. “Do you ever write longer stuff? Novels?”

I could see the man with the table full of over-done sci-fi knives and swords packing up his table across the lobby, as was the woman with racks of jewelry, and even Bad Illustration Guy started taking down his unrecognizable renderings of Captain Kirk and Darth Vader.

“Yeah, I have bigger projects. Look, the con is closing down, I should pack up….” And this was one of those moments, where the author is rude to a fan, where he gets a reputation as a short tempered jerk, or where he is generous and kind and gives of his valuable time for some schmuck who’ll never actually buy a book and won’t mention to anyone how decent the author was. What would it be? I was leaning heavily towards Jerk.

“I’d really like to talk to you sometime, I know you’re busy, but it would mean a lot to me.” She was looking at me over those round lenses, her eyes we blue tinged with violet. “I’ll buy you coffee.”

I should state for the record that this is not something that happens to me. Girls, I mean. Approaches, intent looks over glasses, invitations to coffee. Long ago I realized I am not someone women are generally interested in, and my initial attempts at dating proved to me that the process was not trivial. Somehow over the years, without ever thinking about it, I made a calculation and found the rest of my life both easier and more important to me than romance.

I suppose I agreed more out of surprise than desire. Although as I admired the feel of a crisp brand-new ten dollar bill and then packed away my books, I found that she became more attractive and the meeting more dramatic as I went over it my mind.

And there was this about her, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t just revisionist fascination: she seemed vaguely familiar to me. I was sure I had never met her, never seen her face, never heard her voice, but there was something about her that was familiar. It eluded me all of the four hours between packing up my table and walking into the coffee shop that night. She was sitting at a tall table in the back, one leg up on one of the rungs of the chair, the other dangling, a brown leather sandle hanging off of her foot with bright yellow nail polish peeking from between the leather straps.

The yellow toes and the sandals, the khaki shorts, the dangling leg, the round glasses – it struck me suddenly that she was like an artist’s rendering of Susan. Susan, my most difficult creation, my character without a story, object of unrequited love, receptacle for the desires and needs I had set aside with all my other romantic conceits. She was the most real and most deeply realized of all my fiction, but no story every seemed adequate to hold her, plot after plot had failed to bend around her and her brightly colored toes.

The girl smiled and waved, banishing all hints of Susan as she did so – Susan would not have smiled like that, would not have waved in such vigorous, poorly disguised relief. What was her name? She hadn’t said, I had been too flustered to ask.

“I’m sorry I’m late, some bastard made off with my pencil, I looked all over for it, but it’s gone.”

She looked crestfallen on my behalf. “Was it important to you?”

“My favorite pencil, kind of a lucky charm. I’m kind of old school, I like to write in longhand and transcribe onto the computer, I just like the feeling of writing on paper, you know? I had a really nice mechanical pencil, perfect weight, perfect lead – it’s a very personal thing, I guess. Like stealing my shoes.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, maybe it will turn up? Can you get another one like it?”

“Not any time soon, had to order it from Japan. I have others I can use, but it’s more the violation, you know? Writing with my spare will just remind me I don’t have the right pencil, that someone stole mine.”

She looked truly sad, more so than any of the con staff had been when I tried to make them understand the significance of the theft. We sipped at our coffees in thoughtful silence for a little while.

“Thank you for coming here, I’m really glad to get to meet you. I like your writing a lot. I see a lot of potential in it, I guess I feel like you are going places, I want to say I knew you when you were still selling your books at sci-fi cons. You are going to be famous, I just know it.”

“Well, I hope you’re right, but thats not really how it works usually. Maybe when I’m dead someone will decide I was brilliant, but they’ll wait til they don’t have to pay me anything. So, um, I don’t think I got your name.”

“Oh, geez, sorry, I’m Crystal. Can I call you Tom?”

“Well, sure, that is my name. Nice to meet you Crystal.” I took another sip of coffee, I was officially out of conversation.

“Do you remember ‘Night of Ravens’? I guess it was a few months ago, I think that is my favorite story so far on your blog. So dark, but I really liked how you drew all those pieces together in the end, I really didn’t see that coming, it was brilliant!”

What can you say to that? Yeah, it was a good story, I am not too modest to say that, but it was only good, hardly brilliant. I searched her face for a hint of insincerity, but she just bit her lip and looked over her glasses at me, as if she was afraid she’d gone too far. “Um, thank you, though it really wasn’t all it could have been, I’m glad you liked it.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, it was really good. I promise, and I know what I’m talking about. Anyway, I think I know what you mean about how it could have been more – no, sorry, I don’t mean it wasn’t good enough, I just mean I felt like there was a big story there, lurking in the background. I wanted it to be a novel, not just a short.”

“Well, yeah, there was more I had in mind, some story behind the scenes…”

“I knew it! You -have- to write the bigger story, you just have to, I swear I’ll buy five copies.”

I couldn’t help smiling, and she took it as an opening. She gushed about Night of the Ravens, and worked her way back through my online postings, and I have to say she had a better grasp of my work that I had ever had. There was something fascinating and exhilarating about her enthusiasm, even as it began to scare me. For all her praise, I knew I was a nobody, that my half-finished stories posted to a trafficless blog were not worthy of such encyclopedic ardor. Still, she seemed so interested, and when her hand came across the table and took mine I found myself holding on to it and hoping she would not take it back.

She opened me up, eventually. She knew where the thin and threadbare parts of my stories were covering wells of unrequited ideas, and she tapped into them mercilessly. I found myself telling her about the big patterns I was always fighting with in my work, the themes that informed them all. I told her about Susan, and she literally shivered. I told her that there was a novel, a series of novels, a whole world I could feel just beyond my ability to write. A world where Susan could walk free among my deepest thoughts and most powerful words. When she looked over her glasses and into my eyes, and told me that she knew I would write that world, I couldn’t help but believe her.

I told her about my twenty-two crates of paper, my writings from the age of five, in ink and graphite and crayon. I could see the question bubbling up in her, and knew what I would say when she asked.

“Can I see them?”

“Sure. I live a few blocks away.”

There was a commotion by the front door, yelling and a scuffle of some kind, so we went out the back way, past the bathrooms and into the alley. It was dark and chilly, her hand found mine again as we picked our way over the slippery pavement in the dark. At the mouth of the alley, she was so close to me that I could feel the warmth pour off of her. She stopped and turned to face me. Under the influence of some subtle gravity, we moved towards each other. It felt utterly natural to kiss her, and I could feel something in her rising up to meet my lips. She was awkward but enthusiastic, soft and sweet and coffee flavored. We continued on to my apartment without breaking contact, arms around each others waists.

Sirens screamed down the street, but I hardly noticed, the warmth and softness of her insulated me from the rest of the universe. Even her cellphone going off barely distracted us, she pulling it out of her purse and frowned at the screen.

It was a very slick and fancy one, it hardly looked thicker than a credit card and she looked like she might break it in half in annoyance. “Dammit!” was all she said before jamming it back into her bag and leaning against my arm. We had arrived at my door, I unlocked it and ushered her in with a sickening sinking sensation as I remembered the state of my apartment.

She didn’t seem phased by the piles of dirty plates on the coffee table, nor the laundry piled onto the couch. I shoved it off and offered her the seat, which she flopped back into without a backward glance. I looked around the room, considered a desperate bout of tidying, but knew it was futile. Well, she had come this far, she would have to accept what she had jumped into.

“Can I see them? Or whatever ones you don’t mind me looking at. I know they must be kinda personal, I don’t want to pry into things you’d rather not let me read. ”

I pulled a crate out from under the coffee table, careful not to pull out one of the ones that constituted the table’s main support. “I’d be surprised if you can even read my handwriting, but I promise I won’t show you anything I am embarrassed about. There’s plenty of that, but this is the draft of Night of Ravens. Thought you might like to see it.” I pulled out a thick dog-eared sheaf of paper, I tended to fill all the available space on a page, so they looked almost solid with scrawling text, large crossed out paragraphs, notes, arrows and holes where anger had driven the lead through the paper. She took it with careful reverence and stared down at the incomprehensible mess, biting her lower lip.

“I keep thinking I need to just burn all this.”

She actually gasped out loud. “Burn it? Why?”

“It’s all on the computer, you know? Why keep all these boxes of slowly decomposing paper? It just gets in the way, I never look at it when the story is done. Just a load of old paper I have to haul around with me everywhere. ”

“When you are famous, they’ll be invaluable.”

“If I get famous, I don’t want people shifting through all this crap, I just want them to read the refined product. I never understood this fascination with half-finished drafts and things. There’s a reason those don’t get published, they’re crap. I don’t want to be known for my misspellings and bad grammar, I want to be known for the little gem that tons of editing and polishing produces. That’s the story I want to tell, not the one where the tenses change at random and I forget the main character’s name halfway through.”

“Well, let those of us who love to see the process unfold have our fun, ok? I promise no one will think this is crap.” She flipped through the pages, tracing lines with a finger. “It’s like wanting to know everything about a new lover, even the flaws are beautiful, because they are all part of a beautiful person.”

I sat down next to her and she leaned into me. Her phone went off again in a worrying screech, she yanked it out of her bag and glared at the screen. She jabbed at it and the noise stopped, but she kept staring.

“Everything ok? I can take you home of you need to go.”

“It’s… no, it’s fine, just someone who won’t leave me alone.” She put it back in her bag and leaned in again. She put the papers on the table and her hand found mine, then wrapped around my waist. then she was in my lap, and my lips were on hers.

It had never happened to me like this. Instinct seemed to take over, pulling me along with it, as if it were natural, normal, expected. She felt good. More than that, she wanted this, it was a new sensation for me. A traitorous voice in the back of my mind asked if that was all it was, simply the fact that she wanted me. There was a twinge of shame, but there it was, being wanted was apparently enough for me.

My bed was worse than my couch. She didn’t give me a chance to brush off the potato chip crumbs or untangle the blankets, she held me and fell onto the bed, pulling me down on top of her. In the other room, her phone squawked away ignored.

I’ll spare you the details. It had been a very long time for me, but she was patient, after the initial violence was over. We dozed off in each others arms among the crumbs, twisted blankets tangled in our legs.

I awoke to voices. Half-asleep, I couldn’t follow the angry conversation, Crystal was yelling emphatically, a distant tinny voice yelled back. I remembered her phone, someone who wouldn’t leave her alone. I supposed it wasn’t any of my business, but manly urges twanged in my brain stem, I wanted to protect her from this harassing voice. I tried to shake off the sleep, looked at the clock and saw it was five am. Way, way too early. The pool of warmth where she had lain in the bed pulled at me, but I forced myself upright anyway, and stumbled to the door.

In the living room, she sat on the far end of the couch, hunched over her phone. Her bag was on the floor, fallen off the couch and half open, a menagerie of arcane feminine supply spilling out onto the floor. And papers. I tried to blink away some of the haze, but I could see it well enough anyway, the draft of Ravens stuffed into the little leather bag. She hissed into the phone again, still unaware that I was awake. I stepped lightly into the room, staring down at the spilled purse. There was a mechanical pencil there, half fallen out. My Japanese pencil, perfect balance, perfect lead. I stared at it.

“I’m so sorry.” She sounded so sincere, betrayal and incipient love mixed behind my eyes to become mere confusion.

“Crystal… why? I would have given you the draft, but my pencil, why?”

“I’m sorry. It’s hard to explain, you wouldn’t believe me. You wouldn’t understand. This is like a dream come true for me, though I know I’ll get into trouble for it. Worth it, so worth it to meet you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I have to leave, it’s easier if they don’t catch me while I’m with you. People from my time, cops sort of, they’ve tracked me down and they’ll take me back. I only came here to meet you, this… all of this was way more than I expected. I didn’t expect the spark, to make love… Please let me keep the pencil, please, you have no idea what it means to me.”

“You’re babbling, please talk sense, what the hell is going on?”

She took a deep breath, shook her head, but spoke anyway. “In my time, you’re famous. You will write that novel, it will be one of the great novels of this century. Everyone will know Susan, I even dressed like her, like a big nerd. Ok, so maybe only us nerds really care, but you were a huge influence, a real hero of mine. I had to come back and meet you.”

“Back… in time? Are you insane?”

“Haven’t you ever wanted to go back and meet someone? Shake Shakespeare’s hand, take Douglas Adams out for coffee, flirt with Mary Shelley? We can do that in my time. It’s just… it’s kind of… highly illegal, is all. They are coming to take me back, and once I’m secure they’ll come back for you. They’ll change your memories. It won’t hurt, you won’t know anything has happened. You just won’t remember any of this.”

“You are insane.”

She shook her head, then bit her lip and pulled her phone out. She held it up and an iridescent image blossomed in the air in front of it. I stared, then recognized fourth street, the Marriott where Skiffy Kahn had been. The three dimensional view was of two men dressed in black, walking purposefully down the sidewalk.

“That’s them. Once they figured out who I went to see, they tracked you down. Look, I can fool them, a little bit, enough so they won’t know I told you. You’ve got maybe an hour after they take me. Write it down, write it all down, hide the papers. Pretend you’ve been asleep the whole time.”

“If I had a good pencil…”

Her shoulders sank. She reached for her bag and handed me the pencil. “Can’t blame a girl for trying, yeah?”

“I’ve only had it for a month or so.” I picked up my spare off the table and handed it to her. “This is the one I wrote Ravens with anyway.”

She bit her lip and I could see her eyes start to well up. “Look, I-”

“Just go, ok?”

She wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled my lips to hers. And this was one of those moments, where the author is not rude to a fan, where he doesn’t make her feel guilty, and doesn’t let on that he is hurt and confused. He is generous with his time and energy, despite feeling a bit betrayed and used, and he gives his fan what she asks for, not asking for anything in return. And maybe he doesn’t have to pretend that hard to enjoy the work.

After that? I suppose I wrote this all down, and stuffed it under my mattress, and lay on that mattress pretending to sleep. Frankly I don’t really remember. I think tomorrow I am going to start a little fire though.