The Fictional Man (16 page)

“Well...” Niles blinked, looking down at the pile of tiddlywinks, representing the sixty dollars he’d paid for these answers. He wondered if he could just leave without paying, or if Matson would kick up a fuss. He’d certainly tell Clarice about it, and Niles wasn’t sure he could take a dressing-down right now. “Well, what
was
it about? If you don’t mind me asking?”

Matson was silent for a few moments, mulling the question over in his mind. “Toys,” he said at last. “Barbies, toy soldiers, stuff like that. Things children play with, things they make up stories for. I guess I just wondered how a toy soldier might feel if he was taken out of his box and taken to tea with some dollies.”

“And that’s it?” Niles felt intensely disappointed. He’d assumed there was some deep meaning to be found in the original story, but Matson was just a mediocre writer who’d wasted his life after all. And worse, his ‘bold take’ on the
Mr Doll
material was just a pale, toothless imitation of Hutton Hopper’s savage original critique of Bond – of course, Niles had seen the irony in it all along – and it’d probably be dealt with in much the same way. Some music director would sweep in, fill the screen with explosions and lingerie, and render any statement he tried to make worthless. He was back at a dead end.

“That’s it,” Matson sighed. “I guess I was just ahead of my time.”

Niles narrowed his eyes. “How so?”

“Ah, how things are now.” He indicated the direction Bob had left in. “People like your friend. Not much different to a G.I. Joe, if you think about it. Make up a story for him, set him loose, and if he doesn’t like it... tough shit, right?” Matson chuckled again, but this time it was bitter, as if he wasn’t much liking the story that had been drawn up for him, either.

Niles wasn’t paying attention.

He’d had a wonderful idea. A perfect, stupendous idea.

The new
Mr Doll
would be about Fictionals.

It had been staring him in the face the whole time – ever since he’d seen the review for ‘The Doll House’ – but it had taken him until now to really see it. The one subject that cinema hadn’t yet made its definitive statement on. The one subject that was right in front of their noses and nobody had tackled. The elephant in the room, the taboo, the festering wound nobody dared to cut open. Fictionals. Their feelings, their hopes and dreams.

Dalton Doll would be the first Fictional
to portray a Fictional.
It would be a brilliant meta-narrative about the making of a secret agent movie – and of course, the Fictional playing the secret agent would get caught up in some real secret agent shenanigans. Girls in lingerie. Magnificent explosions.

It’d win an Oscar.

Niles reached into his pocket, drawing out his wallet, and Matson stopped him with a rueful smile. “Ah, I was just joking about the money, kid. How about we call it a tab? Maybe next time you come by we could –”

“Mr Matson,” Niles ignored him, putting six ten-dollar bills on the table, “could I get permission from you to use that idea? It’s just that there’s something I’m writing at the moment which –”

Matson shook his head, showing his gums again. “Oh, I don’t think I can sell you that idea, Mr Golan.”

Niles flushed. “Well, I wasn’t actually... ah...”

“It’s not mine to sell.” He shrugged, grinning wider. “Got it out of a children’s book.”

Niles stared at the old man. “I’m sorry?”

He burst into laughter. “What, you thought I ever had an original idea in my life? No,
The Doll’s Delight,
that’s what it was called. Saw it in some girl’s apartment I was crashing in, had to have it. Strangest damn book I ever saw. Ended up selling it for windowpane. Anyway, there was this verse in it about toy soldiers running away from the war and going to play with the dolls – I pretty much wrote the whole script that night. Sat in a drawer until I had a place to sell it.”

“So... who wrote that? The children’s book?” Niles felt like he was on a ship at sea. Every five minutes ground he thought was perfectly solid would shift beneath his feet. He hadn’t felt so uprooted from reality since... well, since what had happened with Danica Moss.

Matson stared into the distance. “Let me see... it was D-somebody... Dalton? No, that was something else. Sounded like it, though. And I’m pretty sure there was an H in there some –”

At that moment, Clarice reached down from seemingly nowhere and grabbed the sixty dollars off the table, waving them in Niles’ face.

“What the
hell,”
she screamed, “is
this?”

“A
LL RIGHT, ALL
right, I’m on my way out...” Niles marched briskly through the lobby, past the mortifying gaze of the nurse on duty, who had presumably had her every suspicion about Niles confirmed.

Considering the humiliation of the situation, Niles was in remarkably good spirits. For one thing, he definitely wouldn’t feel any obligation to go back and talk to Matson again now, so he was off the hook there. For another thing, he had the perfect idea for
Mr Doll
– he could even work Bob’s problems into it, give the thing some dramatic depth. A Fictional playing a Fictional – it was a fantastic idea, and it’d probably produce the most emotionally stable Fictional yet. He’d bounce the idea off Bob on the way back, see what he made of it...

But when Niles reached the Ford Taurus, Bob was nowhere to be found.

CHAPTER NINE

“B
OB
? L
ISTEN, CAN
you give me a call back as soon as you get this? I’m waiting by the car, but I’ve been waiting here about twenty minutes and I’m going to have to get moving soon. It’s, um, it’s Niles. Bye.”

Voicemail again. Niles ended the call and looked around, hoping to see some sort of sign that might show him where Bob had run off to, willing a mall or a Denny’s or a park to pop into existence – anything apart from the nursing home and the barren stretch of sidewalk it was situated on. There was literally nothing here but concrete, a few spare blades of grass, some shuttered buildings that could have been offices or apartments – or squats, he thought bitterly, thinking of Matson – and a closed-up gas station. He couldn’t see that Bob would have wandered into any of those, unless he’d discovered a sudden taste for urban exploration.

He could just about make out a bus stop a few hundred yards away, but the idea seemed absurd. Why would Bob just hop on a bus home? He’d have known Niles would be coming out to drive him home any minute. All right, Niles had been a little late, maybe, and it was an unseasonably hot day, even for California, but still. Surely Bob wouldn’t have just deserted him here?

He turned around and marched up to the glass doors of the nursing home – then marched back again as he saw the head nurse staring out at him like a basilisk. He’d thought he could pop in and have a look around – made sure he and Bob hadn’t just missed each other somehow, and he wasn’t still wandering around in there – but to be honest, they’d have thrown him out by now as well.

Niles checked his phone for the time, made sure it wasn’t on silent, and then looked in the direction of the empty car. It had been almost twenty-five minutes now. There wasn’t anything else for it.

He unlocked the door and slid in behind the wheel, mentally willing Bob to appear at the last possible second. But Bob didn’t show.

“B
OB
? L
ISTEN,
I need you to give me a call back. If you’re still at the home, I can come back and get you, I won’t be upset, just give me a call, all right? I’m on the freeway at the moment, so I can easily – hang on, a police car just pulled out behind me. He’s signalling me to pull over. Hang on. Look, as soon as you get this, give me a call and I’ll come find you wherever you – shit, he’s tapping on the window. I’ll try again later. It’s Niles. Bye.”

“B
OB
? L
ISTEN,
PLEASE
give me a call back. I just got a ticket for $150. I’m at home now. Look, I’ll be here for a while, if you need me to come pick you up – well, let me know if you’re okay. Um. It’s Niles. Bye.”

Niles flopped into his couch, staring up at the ceiling. He supposed he should be working on the pitch, but he was too worried about where Bob might be to really think about that. It wasn’t that he thought Bob was in trouble – with his build, there wasn’t realistically that much trouble he could get in. Well, unless he was shot. Or someone cut off his finger with pinking shears. Or something else.

“Yes, that’s his head,” the author said mournfully, as the police opened the box to show him the carefully stuffed and lacquered object. “You say you found it on eBay?”

“The secret eBay,” the officer said, grimly. “There are quite a number of his bits on there now. We’ll never recover them all. Of course,” he said, looking the author over admiringly, “your dismembered corpse would fetch far more. The brain that penned
The Moon Comes Out As Bright As Day: A Kurt Power Novel
is probably worth several million dollars.”

The author nodded soberly. He knew criminals would stop at nothing to procure his precious organs.

Niles shuddered. “What is
wrong
with you?” he muttered to himself, reaching for his laptop. At least he could do a bit of research while he waited for Bob to call.

Typing
‘The Doll’s Delight’
into a search engine brought back about eight pages of results – it was the name of a small British chain of dollhouse furniture shops, each with their own poorly-crafted website, two club nights for BDSM groups, an indie band, several dozen slash fiction stories about an old Joss Whedon series, and a porno movie from the early ’nineties involving women in very tight rubber clothing pouring cold tea on each other and rolling around in cream cakes, which Niles watched for several minutes, trying to decide if he felt aroused or just mystified. He settled on mystified.

Buried somewhere in the middle of it all was one blog post from a collector of ’fifties ephemera and one eBay listing, both of which referred to
“The Doll’s Delight, by Henry R Dalrymple, Illustrations by Mervyn Burroughs.”
Niles – still a little spooked by his daydream of the ‘secret eBay’ – checked the blog first. It was a sparse entry. A tiny, blurry photo of the cover – involving what looked like a number of glassy-eyed homunculi playing in the moonlight next to a dead child – and some meagre publishing information (Aspidistra Press, 1951), and the single word
“Weird!!!!”
sandwiched between a dangerous-looking Atomic Energy Lab play set and a Schwinn bike, both of which got several paragraphs and a crystal-clear Instagram.

Warily, Niles turned to the eBay site, which informed him tersely that there was a
‘rare children’s book’
– no photo – which he could BUY NOW for $120 from an entity named
needleblissss74.
Apparently, for an extra postage fee of ten dollars, he could have the book in his hands in a mere two to four days’ time.

Although couldn’t he do without
The Doll’s Delight?
He had everything he needed – a starting point, an idea that was bound to win him an Oscar, and
Mr Doll
on his hard drive for reference. Why should he spend over a hundred dollars on a children’s book from more than sixty years ago?

At the premiere, the author tried to relax in his seat, but he couldn’t help fidgeting. Liz, sat next to him in her McCartney evening gown, gave him a curious look, as if to ask what might be wrong, but the author only shook his head. He couldn’t burden her with it, not only ten minutes into the film. And yet, he could already see what was wrong.

It wasn’t the direction – that was marvellous, meticulous, Nolan at his very best. The score pulsed threateningly over the speakers in a tone of existential dread, the acting was superb, particularly Mr Dalton Doll himself... and yet, there was something about that central performance, something that didn’t quite work. Some subtle quality that the author had failed to include in the screenplay, leaving the persona of the leading man missing a tiny, yet vital spark.

It was the want of a nail, the author thought, burying his head in his hands. Slowly, the others in the audience began to notice the subtle flatness of it, and began to grumble, rest their feet on the seat backs, throw popcorn. Eventually, they walked out, first one or two, then a trickle, then a flood. Even Nolan became visibly disinterested, shrugged, and walked out with the rest. The author looked around for Liz, but she too was gone. Only Dalton Doll was left, sat in the front row, clapping like a small boy.

The author was left alone, staring at the empty, hollow spectacle unfolding before him, the idiot man-child applauding it all. He felt a great weariness come over him – the understanding that all this, his greatest failure, the end of all his hopes, stemmed simply from a lack of proper research at the pitch level, from failing to glean every last glimmer of insight possible.

But then, he hadn’t wanted to spend the $120...

“$130,” muttered Niles, “including postage.” He fumbled for his wallet.

“B
OB
? L
ISTEN... YOU
haven’t called. I’m going to assume you’ve got this and you’re not dead in a ditch somewhere, but... look, please call, okay? I’m sorry if I was... I don’t know, late coming out or rude to you or whatever. I’m sorry I took you to see your old make-up woman. Just call me, all right? Anyway, I’m going to the Victoria, so... so that’s where I am. It’s Niles. Bye.”

T
HE SUN WAS
just starting to dip below the buildings when Niles walked into the bar. This time, there was a reasonable crowd, enough that Niles didn’t see Liz until she touched him lightly on the shoulder while he waited for his drink.

“Hello, author,” she said, smiling prettily. This time she was dressed in ’fifties fashions – a polka-dot halter neck dress with a raincoat over the top and white gloves, her hair stiffly lacquered in place under a dotted shawl and a pair of shades. Her accent had warped into some approximation of Marilyn’s best Betty Boop, and Niles had to stare at her for a moment before he recognised her.