 
also by Merrell Michael

The Junker Girl and her Droid

Ex-Heroes

Jarhead: Iraq Chronicles

the Warhammer

Who Dares Wins

Amped Up

this book is a work of fiction. All characters are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

copyright 2014@Merrell Michael

contact the author at 6stringgunslinger@gmail.com

Real

Merrell Michael

There were things Sam Harshbarger could have done besides stare at the blank computer screen. Not so many things, as he had recently become self- employed as a writer, but there were books to read, video games to play, twenty-four hour news channels to take into account. Not to mention the internet. He had a habit of turning off the Wi-Fi on his laptop whenever he truly started to write, because that damn internet had a habit of getting into your head and staying there. Then there was the problem with the view. From the first time he had moved to Santa Monica, the view of that beach, and the boardwalk, especially. At least the cat wasn't giving him any trouble, sitting quietly on its suitcase bed and not giving a fuss. Putting his hands to the keyboard, Sam typed

That was when the fight started

There was a meme of this going around the internet, chiefly centered on a male doing something foolish and a women reacting to it in her way. But this sentence had nothing to do about that meme, and everything to do with the last date he had with Paula Rodriguez. It was a Friday night, and the two of them were going down to LA to watch a movie.

Inside Llewyn Davis was the newest Coen Brothers movie, which meant that it was not going to be played anywhere near the Podunk town that Sam had originated from in Ohio. On that Friday it was playing something called "limited release" which meant a few theaters in two cities, New York and Los Angeles. Sam had been dragged to quite a few of these Oscar bait type releases since going out with Paula, and he usually found them overwhelmingly pretentious. So he tried his best to concentrate on his popcorn and bottled water, given Paula's aversion to soda.

Paula being herself meant that the movie couldn't just be a one-off event. There was the movie and then they met up with friends afterwards, to discuss the movie. Donald was a grip for a mid-budget studio with dreams of someday being a director that were most likely never going to pan out. Katherine worked in a boutique in Beverly Hills, which meant that she was a cash register jockey. Both of them annoyed Sam, who happened to know for a fact that the royalties for his book added up to more than both their salaries combined. But in LA you were a star, in the industry, or "just a writer" and Sam was absolutely just a writer. So Sam most contentedly sipped his coffee and tried not to listen to the three of them gab on about ideas or phrases he didn't care about, until he couldn't help but tune in when Paula said, "Of course, the film should have struck a real note with Sam."

"What, the movie?" Sam said, wishing he had brought his phone.

"I was thinking." Paula said. "That you would have identified with the protagonist personally. With his struggles, anyway."

"She means the main character." Donald said, smarmily.

"I know what she means." Sam said. "I just don't see that."

"You have so much in common."

"I'm not a folk singer in the sixties."

"Look." Paula said. "If we look past the vague justifications, it's about a creative persona dealing with failure on a personal level."

"How is that me?" Sam said.

"I mean." Paula shrugged. "I'm just saying, I think it's obvious."

"What's fucking obvious about it?"

Donald grinned and said something about an aggressive dialogue, and Sam thought about punching him right then and there. Instead he asked again, "What's obvious about it?"

"I think she's talking about your writing difficulties." Katherine said.

"What difficulties?" Sam could feel the blood rushing to his head. The first part of him to turn red when he got angry were his ears and after that it spread to his cheeks, and down his neck, his Scots- Irish heritage betraying his innermost feelings. Then Sam forced himself to laugh, and said, "I think my book did okay." It was the meanest thing he could think of saying, without calling all three of them out for what they really were.

The book in question was titled the Moral Injury. It was fiction about the Iraq War, a novel, not short stories, and it had surprised Sam three times. First, when he finished it, second when it was actually published, and third, when it squeaked by on the New York Times bestseller list long enough to actually net him a more than decent royalty. The next two steps being nominated for a half-way prestigious award and becoming "optioned" for a movie did not surprise him as much, although the award went to a Kenyan national writing a potboiler about genocide, and the movie was now stuck in development hell. The Moral Injury for Sam had become The Golden Ticket, a way out of the dreary rust-belt town he had always lived in and a chance to sign the mortgage on a vintage condominium overlooking a west coast beach. More importantly, it had become an accomplishment, something for him to look on with pride.

Which was why the trio in front of him managed to get him so angry. Paula had a meaningless degree in art appreciation, and Katherine was failing to get any work as an actress, or any work at all, really. Out of the group Sam had managed to not only accomplish something, but something creative to boot, and he could tell that they all hated him for it, and were disguising their hatred by aiming it for his work. "In fact." Sam added. "I've got a decent advance on the next volume." This was no time for mercy.

"But the writing isn't going anywhere, honey." Paula said, adding that last word as bitchy as she knew how. "You said so yourself, remember? You haven't written anything in weeks. Isn't it possible that it's all over?"

"The way it was for Llewyn." Donald said, trying his best to make Sam seem like a dumb motherfucker, "When Dylan arrived on the scene."

"I mean." Katherine added, smelling blood in the water, "That's not to say that the protagonist in question hasn't achieved a degree of success. I mean, he has published a book, I mean, record, with his partner."

There were times every now and again when the anger rose to Sam's head, to the point where his therapist told him that he should rate it on a level from one to ten, and the level would almost always be a ten, or even an eleven or twelve, a bright, blinking black number on a red background, shimmering in such a way that if it were televised certain persons would undergo involuntary seizures. He felt like lashing out, violently, instead he simply got back in his car and drove all the way back home to Santa Monica. On the way there his phone buzzed and he turned it off. He left it off for the next few days, not wanting to hear whatever angry comeback Paula would have planned, or text, and thought that maybe they would hash things out with her when she showed up at his place. But she never did. That was two months ago, and he hadn't written a word since.

There was a knock on the back door, the one made of sliding glass that overlooked the beach. Jesse was there, with a beer in his hand. Jesse favored the sort of floral print shirts that had been in fashion once, briefly, in the mid two thousands, which coincidentally was the same time period he had served in the Marines. This one was blue, with white accents, and he wore it with a white pair of khaki shorts and a coral necklace around a neck thick with muscle. Jesse was the sort of much of the copy in Sam's novel, and there was some affection between them, not only as blood brothers, but also as co-conspirators in a work of fiction. Sam opened the door, and Jesse walked in barefoot. "What are you doing?" He asked.

"Writing." Sam lied.

Jesse nodded. "Not a lot of pussy walking the beach this early." He said.

"It's the wrong season."

"Is it true Han Solo lives around here?"

"You mean Harrison Ford?"

"Yeah."

"I've heard it."

"We could get a fucking camera. Stalk him out and make some money."

"What, like TMZ?"

"Fuck no." Jesse said. "We'll kidnap his ass and take proof of life pictures." A lot of conversations with Jesse were like this. If you figured out where he was going ahead of time, Jesse would push things in a deeper, darker passage, all in an effort to see if he could make you uncomfortable. Sam tried to let it go, and change the way things were going.

"Do you want another beer?" He asked.

Jesse shook his head. "I can't stand that craft brewery crap."

"I've got some Bud Light." Sam offered. "Just for you."

The alcohol turned out to be a mistake. The two men drank and glowered and played the kind of downer music, most of it from the early nineties Seattle scene that they had grown up listening to. Most of the time Sam worried about Jesse when he got like this. There had been an attempt in the past, not with guns but just pills, which had landed Jesse inpatient in the VA medical center for two weeks. During that time Jesse had filled a notebook with all the angry ramblings that had later turned into the book Sam had written. At some point Sam confessed the latest predicament to his brother.

"I can't write." He said.

Jesse nodded. "That bitch has you like Tiger Woods. Greatest Golf Player of all time, a piece of pussy fucks him up to the point where he can't win."

"What do I do?" Sam asked.

"You've got to get back on that horse." Jesse said. "Hair of the dog that bit you."

"You're mixing metaphors."

"But the point stays the same, motherfucker. Easiest way to get over an old chick is with a new one."

"I don't go out."

"Why not?"

"You remember that guy? The weird guy in the back of the club, and you could tell he was too old for the place?"

"And you don't want to be him."

"Exactly."

"So, try out someplace new."

"What's the fucking point? At the end of the day, it's the same thing."

"Bitchs be crazy."

"Yes."

"One of the eternal truths of life."

"Yes."

The drinking eventually degraded the day until it was late afternoon. The two of them trudged the fifty feet or so from the condo to the beach, and Sam got dizzy and sat in the sand at the point where the foam dissolved into the wet and left the dry with the tide. Jesse decided to keep walking, mostly empty bottle in his hand. The waves were never brisk this close to shore this time of season, and Jesse simple decided to keep walking, just above waist level. At some point Sam could see him let go of the bottle and it bobbed in the waves, before it caught in the current and sank. A pretty girl walked by in a bathing suit and with the whiff of her perfume Sam was aroused.

He felt like crying.

There were moments of blackness between that and the rest of the night, at some point of which Jesse left for greener pastures. Sam thought furious at his laptop. Why was he not writing? What had he seen, or not seen, in Paula, or any other woman? Why wasn't he happy? Was the fault with him, or was he not trying to get enough out of life? Out of a prospective mate? What did that even mean, prospective mate, what would he look for if nothing was objective? The words came to Sam all at once, and he typed them out as fast as he could.

She was pretty in a real way. Not as gorgeous as a supermodel, with defects painted over in Photoshop, but like the girl next door of playboy's past. And her body was equally appealing, with curves or thinness exactly where they belonged. She had the sort of brown hair with highlights that came from the sun and not a cosmetics bottle, and when she laughed you knew you were in the presence of something real.

He added

Her feelings were made evident by the way she took interest in everything I did, not from suspicion or jealously but with the curiosity of a new arrival. At no time did she seem naive or foolish, simply different than myself, and when we came together it was with the shock of everything I had to give, not just in the bedroom, but simply arriving at the same conclusion to a fresh idea. She was loyal not like a dog but out of mutual respect, and I sought to earn her respect because I felt I did not deserve it, and never would.

His vision was getting blurry, but before he passed out Sam wrote

Her name was Lena Muse.

Sam woke up with a hangover and the unconscionable desire to piss, that inconveniently manifested itself in a rather bulging erection. He shifted over in the couch and almost fell out of it, before grappling enough with the floor that he managed to stand up. From there it was a short walk over to the bathroom, and as he emptied his bladder things felt a little better than before. He felt emptied, somehow, of a burden he had been carrying for some time. Course it could have just been piss.

There was still half a carton of orange juice left over in the fridge just days shy of its expiration date, and he drank it down gratefully. His head was still swimming a little. Thank God he had been out of any hard liquor. There had been too many nights like this since Paula left, and one too many mornings spent sorting the whole thing out with a pounding headache and a somewhat guilty conscience.

A few minutes later he was back at his workstation on the kitchen table, going over what he had written. There were pages and pages of stuff. None of it actual copy he could put together for a new book, but plenty of character study. That was weird, all in all, since Sam really never did any character studies, preferring mostly to put words on paper and see what direction things took on their own. It got even worse than that, if you wanted to believe it. Sometime in the night he had filled up pages of his Moleskine sketchbook with drawings of this girl, each from different perspectives, and more than a few of them nudes. There were pages and pages of this stuff, and it seemed like he must have been up all night coming up with all of them. Sam picked up his cell phone from the charger and found Jesse's number, fingers hovering on the call button, before thinking the better of it.

No, obviously he couldn't call Jesse. Jesse already made fun of his interests, not just in writing, but video games and collecting comics and other toys. Jesse would laugh and him and tell Sam he needed to get laid, or worse, Jesse would assume that Sam had suffered some sort of mental break recently. And there was plenty of evidence to back up that claim, an orgy of it, if you were to see the beer bottles and read the computer screen, not to mention the notebooks! Sam had read somewhere that it was much harder to get someone involuntarily committed to a mental institution than it used to be, but Jesse was a card carrying member of AA, despite the fact that he himself had spent the night drinking with Sam into a blind stupor. And wouldn't mind staging an intervention to help Sam with his 'problem'. That was the problem Sam had with those self-help groups, they made you imagine a problem everywhere else in the world. As far as Sam could see AA only served to make Jesse worse, not better, once you relegated drinking to a disease Jesse had an excuse to never stop. Not that he was discounted Jesse's experience in the Marines, Christ no, or his own substance abuse issues. There was a muffled sigh from the bedroom that made Sam realize someone else was in the apartment.

Events that had recently transpired started to pool together in Sam's mind, all at once. Such as, why had he fallen asleep on the couch? There were a few times in his life when he had been so drunk that he had passed out on the floor (and one event, early in college, where he had urinated on himself in the process) but why the couch? It wasn't more comfortable than the bed, by any means.

The bedroom door was closed. The bedroom door was never closed in his apartment. It was always open, usually wide open, due to certain ideas and night terrors in the back of Sam's mind about being able to fend off a serial murderer who might happen to be wandering through the complex, look randomly at his door number, snap his fingers and say "710! This must be the place!" Unsheathe his lumberjack's axe, and embark on the next episode of his villainous rampage. While he was at it the bathroom doors were usually kept wide open as well, despite any bodily functions he might be engaged in. The bedroom door was closed, but when Sam tried the handle he found it wasn't locked. He pushed it open a little. A girl looked up at him, and let out a muffled "hmmm?" And Sam said "Sorry." And shut the door in front of him. Then anger bubbled in his gut, mostly at his own cowardice. Why was he apologizing? This woman was in his own house, and had apparently made him sleep on the couch last night, while taking up his own bed all to her own. He shoved open the door, more forcefully this time, and she sat up in bed, revealing two rather magnificent breasts in all their glory. He muttered "Sorry" again and shut the door. When his phone rang he saw it was Jesse and answered it.

"Hello?"

"What's up, dude?"

"There's a naked girl in my bed."

"About time! I was waiting for you to get over what's-her-face."

"No, but, I mean, I don't know how she got there."

"So, you kidnapped her?"

"I don't think so."

"Cause if you did, I need to get off the phone, right now. I mean, after school? I'm looking at jobs with security clearances."

"No."

"You're sure."

"Mostly positive."

"So what's the problem? You went out, got drunk, and got a random hook-up."

"Does that even sound like me?"

"No, Sam, that doesn't sound like you, but that sounds like something you need to, you know, aspire to for a certain temporary period or so."

"Yeah, well, when I woke up, I was on the couch with all my clothes on."

"The sexless innkeeper!"

"Yeah."

"She's a homeless nudist. That's still not bad, all in all."

The door opened and Sam hurried up and got off the phone. The woman was still standing there, only in her birthday suit, with a complete lack of self-awareness that seemed baffling. Not that he did it with Paula with all the covers on, or anything, but Sam had never been around a woman that walked up to him in the buff for a first meeting. "Can I help you?" Was all he managed to say, only realizing thereafter that this was the mandatory greeting for certain minimum wage employees at certain large retail conglomerates.

"Yeah." She said. "I've got this feeling right here." She rubbed her stomach, which was thin and flat, "And it's like I need something...I mean it hurts but it doesn't really hurt, and I don't know what it could be, anyway."

"Are you hungry?" He asked.

"What?"

"I mean, do you need to eat something."

"Yeah!" She smiled. "Yeah eat, that's totally it."

Sam got up and checked the fridge again. Besides the carton where the case of last night's beer had stood at one time, and the now empty orange juice container, there was nothing else which looked even remotely consumable. "Were going to have to go out." He said.

"That's great!" The girl said, with a smile, and as he was going to the door, grabbing his keys, he realized she was still naked.

"Jesus, no." Sam put his hands up and she bumped into him, tits first, still naked and smiling. There was uncomfortable movement in his groin as this happened, and he was close enough to smell her perfume. Or lean in and kiss her, if that was what he intended.

"I mean." Sam stammered. "You should, probably, uh, get dressed." She nodded, but didn't move. Sam went back to the bedroom, and looked around. "Did you, uh, leave your stuff her anyplace?"

"I don't have any stuff." She said, and a cold shiver ran down the back of Sam's spine. Not have any stuff? What the hell had he gotten himself into, the other night, a refugee from the nut ward? Not a bad looking one at that, but still, when he looked back at the girl she was still smiling and standing there as beautiful as anyone he had ever laid eyes on.

"I guess." He said. "I guess we can work it out."

At certain points when Paula didn't feel like giving a shit she had worn Sam's old workout clothes, for some reason or another, just a pair of mesh basketball shorts and a Cleveland Browns t-shirt. The new girl still looked good, if more than a little bummy. Sam drove them to Waffle House, and man, could she eat, a big difference of Paula's picking at her plate like a bird. The mystery woman packed down a grand slam breakfast in quick order, and let out a small belch that was surprisingly ladylike, after which she covered her mouth and made a little O face of embarrassment, and laughed, and Bill found himself thinking how he could get used to that laugh.

"Look." He said, "I didn't catch your name. I mean, uh, earlier."

"I'm Lena." She said, and another chill ran down Sam's back, the same as earlier.

"Okay." He shook his head.

"And your Sam." Lena told him, eating a French fry in a manner that could possibly been categorized as seductive.

"My memory is like, a little foggy." Sam said.

"Mine too!"

"I mean, I was drinking, like, a lot last night."

"I'm drinking right now!" Lena said. "I'm drinking this coke."

"Did we meet, I mean, did I like, go out somewhere, and meet you?" Bill asked.

Lena shook her head. "We met at your place?"

Sam laughed, more nervous than before. "How is that possible?" And Lena shrugged her shoulders. "I mean, did you come over...I mean, was more than one person there..."

Lena shook her head again, and said nothing. On the way out of the diner Sam paid the check and the waitress told him "If your girlfriend wants to eat in here again, tell her to put some shoes on."

There was a verifiable need for shoes, after the diner, as well as female clothing of all kind, so Lena and Sam went to the mall. Malls were something that Southern California did much better than central Ohio, as far as Sam could see, anyway. The central Chillicothe mall back home was just an L shape hallway filled with the few vendors left who hadn't gone someplace else for greener pastures. With every few steps you would past a vacant reminder of some store in the past that had meant to succeed, but hadn't.

Santa Monica mall was full and bustling. Especially now, on the weekend, with all the teenagers out and about looking for things to do. There were multiple tiers of stores, from every price range you could think of, even a few aimed at real adults. The gentle sun glazed in from the skylights overhead and gave the entire scene an air of false perfection, perfectly plastic and manufactured.

"Where do you want to go?" Sam asked.

"Wherever you want." Lena smiled, and said. "This should be fun."

And it was, although Sam hated to admit it. Lena laughed and sampled a dozen different outfits from youth inspired retailers, and Sam ended up buying more than a few of them. It was something he had been denied for so long with Paula, who would only frequent the Salvation Army, or like-minded thrift shops. Watching Lena try on clothes from American Eagle, Hollister, Abercrombie, with more than a few boner inspiring selections among them, things tight or low or high that accentuated just how perfect she really was, all in all, made him happy. And yes, when they made their way to Victoria's secret, he picked out her underwear. It was mostly all thongs, the sheerest, least substantial undergarment he could think of, but she asked him, dammit, and wasn't he supposed to end up having fun with this?

The day continued with the pair of them scarfing down burgers and chili cheese fries at the food court. Some sort of manufactured pop song in a major chord played over the loud speakers while the video of the singer played on flat screen televisions set up on posts nearby. Again Sam ended up comparing it to his ex, the sort of thing she would dismiss out of hand, but the tune was a little bit catchy, more than a little bit, anyway, and wasn't that the whole point of music? He laughed out loud when Lena did a little dance maneuver with her hands, it was just so cute and funny at the same time, even while her cheeks were bulging out a little from manufactured food product.

"You like this song?" He asked.

"I've never heard it before." Lena said. "Do you like it."

"Yeah." Sam said. "It's okay. I wouldn't buy the album."

"What sort of music would you buy?" Lena asked.

"The great stuff." Sam said. "But I would probably just download it, first."

"What's downloading?" Lena asked. And the conversation deteriorated from there.

They drove back to Sam's condo and Lena just sat there, on the couch, looking great in her new clothes but other than that, every bit the lonely pet, so much so to the point that Sam put on the television so she wouldn't get lonely. He wanted to do....well, there were things he wanted to do, but he didn't want to do them yet. The fact of the matter was that Sam had never been incredibly assertive when it came to relationships. This was the moment like any other moment, with her sitting in one corner, and him in another. She got up, and looked out the sliding glass window at the beach beyond.

"It's beautiful." She said. From his point of view, seeing where her shorts bunched up in back in just the right manner, Sam couldn't disagree. In that moment he felt brave, and walked close behind her, turning her around, so he could smell the way her shampoo was in her auburn hair, and kissed her. In the manner of most the kisses he had it started out fairly chaste, a movement of lips, and progressed naturally from there. When they broke off she asked him, "Can we go to the beach?"

"Hang on." Sam said, and inspired, he hurried over to the laptop and wrote

She loved oral sex. Not the receiving as much as the giving, the act itself, and seemed to know exactly how to pleasure a man to the point of release, before bringing him there, as many times as he would physically let her.

Fifteen minutes later he was in bed, and stunned with the latest turn of events.

There had been no conversation between the two of them. He had simply typed the words and she had responded, somehow, by giving him exactly what he had written. What he had wanted, deep down, really, just by staring at her. And she had done it more than once, waiting for him to recover, frantic, impatiently wanting more of his cock until he was really, really tired of it, which was something he could never admit in public to another male, and Lena was getting almost frantic in her efforts, until a fit of inspiration caused Sam to ran to the computer and type the words

Lena fell asleep

Which caused her to pass out right there in the hallway, chasing him down with a thin trail of what might have been his cum. Sam picked her up gently and carried her back to his bed, where she continued to snore peacefully. Then he sat in his chair and stared at the computer screen, at the words he had already written and tried to think about what he should do next.

He was in complete control of another human being. The evidence was there to support the fact. He had used this control for a very base purpose, that any sufficiently moral person would have questioned, and any twenty-something frat pledge would have high-fived. He felt both good and guilty about the way these events had occurred. It was certainly not something he had experienced before in his life. There was a knock at the door and Sam grabbed a pair of blue jeans from the floor. When he opened it was Jesse.

"Hey dude." Jesse grinned. "Mystery chick still here?"

"She's asleep."

"Oh shit." Jesse mock whispered. "Did you just get laid?"

"I don't want..."

"You did." Jesse put up his fist for a bump. "You totally did just get laid."

There was a flash of anger in Sam at the way Jesse put things, in his blunt, frat boy musings. When this dissipated he offered, "She's asleep. Let's talk on the beach."

It was almost exactly like the previous day, the two of them on the beach near the boardwalk, except everything had changed. Sam explained to Jesse a version of events, a modified version, and Jesse asked "Do you think she's a groupie?"

"What, like rock stars and..."

"Yeah. But she's into books. And she read the book, maybe?"

"Have you ever been to one of my readings?"

"No. What are..."

"You know when I'm signing books?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, sometimes I'm at a thing like that, and they want me to read a chapter of the book or whatever."

"Alright."

"That's a reading."

"I get it."

"So anyway, at these readings you've never been to, the audience is populated almost entirely by males."

"But I thought you said that mostly chicks read books."

"It is a fact that the reading public in America is tilted female."

"So, what's up?"

"The way I see it, Chicks read chick books."

"That's a little stereotypical."

"Have you ever read a romance novel?'

"No..."

"There you go. Romance novels are the bestselling thing on the book market. Chicks read them. QED."

Jesse looked pensive. "You know." He said. "One of the unspoken benefits, the supposed unspoken benefits of being in the Marines, is that you're going to get pussy because of it."

"Does it work out that way?"

"Not really. Most bases they stick you in, the ratio is overwhelmingly tilted against you." Jesse held his hand out and tilted it to signify imbalance. "That's what really matters, man, when it comes to the dating scene. The ratio of men to women and how it effects your life altogether."

"You think that's true?" Sam asked.

"I'll put it to you this way." Jesse said. "A new bitch gets imported to a small town just outside a Marine base. And at first she goes out into town, she's wearing nice clothes, jewelry, and makeup. After a month or so, she's wearing sweatpants and her hairs fucked up. Why? Because the ratio is overwhelmingly in her favor. Because she doesn't have to try that hard, or at all, really."

"I guess it would be worse." Sam said. "For the chicks actually in the Marines, right?"

Jesse laughed. "We called them Wookies." He said.

"That bad?"

"I'll leave it at that." He shook his head. "I'm getting away from the point."

"I wasn't aware there was one."

"No, look dude, the point is, is that I never really got that much pussy from just being in the Marines. And no one I knew did, really, either. So I guess I was living vicariously through you and your experiences,"

"My supposed experiences..."

"Right. But back to what we were saying, you've got a chick that will do whatever you want."

"Yes."

"Including sex stuff."

"Yes."

Behind them Lena was smiling and waving, wearing a new bikini from their shopping trip at the mall. Jesse smiled and waved back. "Where I'm sitting at, dude?" He said. "I'd say you have a male obligation to explore this as much as possible. And if you won't do it for yourself, do it for me. And then tell me all the details."

For the next few days, Sam wrote Lena.

He did it experimentally, for the most part. He would try out an attribute, and refine it, and if it didn't succeed he would erase it or write the opposite. For example Sam would be playing video games, and Lena would ask, "What's that?" And he would hurry over to the keyboard and write

Lena had an interest in video games

And suddenly she would pick up the PlayStation controller, and fumble around Call of Duty, mostly running into a corner and shooting at the empty open sky. So Sam would scrap that and write

Lena had great skill at first person shooter video games

And just like that, Lena would become addicted to the PS4, staying up all night, and hogging the controller. This was less attractive then the first option, so Sam would go back to the laptop and write

Lena had no interest in video games, but did not begrudge mine

And that seemed to be the best of both worlds. But with everything Lena, there was no perfection. No happy middle ground. The pair of them would be talking, and Sam would ask Lena, "What do you want to do with life?" A perfectly normal question for a twenty-something, he thought anyway, and the kind of thing that would have set Paula happily babbling away for hours. But Lena would only get nervous and say "Nothing." And Sam would realize that he needed to write Lena some life goals. But it was harder to do then he thought. Sam would think about writing that Lena loved art, loved to paint. Only then he thought about Paula, and how artsy fartsy that bitch was. Sam would think about writing that Lena wanted to get her college degree, only there was the ugly problem that he had created her out of thin air, and any college would want some sort of documentation on her earlier life, such as a driver's license and social security card, or maybe even, horror of horrors, a birth certificate. And so that was out of the question. Which in the end, led to a question of money. The money was running out.

Sam had moved to California on the sort of a spur of the moment whim that takes years to ferment. He paid off the first year lease on his condo, and bought a fairly reasonable Japanese car, something almost new. With the advance on his second book he was able to live comfortably for a while. But a while passed, like all measures of time, and Sam's bank account was getting thin. One good thing, possibly the only good thing Paula brought to the relationship was an assistance of paying for things, every now and again. Lena couldn't pay for anything. Or could she?

An ugly thought formed in his head, how to make money. She was the sexiest woman Sam had ever met, personally. The kind of natural sexy that comes in a girl's next door type of look. And the sex. She would do whatever he asked, more accurately, whatever he wrote down. There were ways he could use that. A surge of jealousy sprung up, at the idea of strange hands on Lena. On his girl.

He pushed those feelings down, and tried to think.

The next problem he had with Lena was trying to talk with her. He could make her like a subject, like politics, but he couldn't make her knowledgeable on the matter. He would try to talk with her about something that interested him, and she would cock her head to the side like a puppy, and ask, "What's that?" This would infuriate him, so he would write on his laptop

Lena would never, ever, cock her head to the side like a puppy

And follow up that command with a detailed report about what exactly Lena would know about a certain situation. For a little while, Sam tried to simply copy/paste data from Wikipedia about subjects into what he was now thinking of as the Lena file, but that would cause her to simply spout out the data non-sequiter whenever the subject was broached. And she could, and would, learn on her own, or possess vast tracts of knowledge if he simply typed something vague enough. It was a mystery to him how the entire thing worked, he only could tell that it was working. He laughed sometimes when he thought of how he had overcome his writers block; all he had to do was write a person.

Later in the week his agent called him, seemingly out of the blue, and told him that some executive from the studio wanted to meet with him later that week. The agent sounded excited, and told him it had good prospects for "working in the industry" whatever the hell that meant. What it meant for Sam was driving for several hours back to Los Angeles. To his astonishment Lena asked to come along, and then he remembered that she was not Paula, and did not resent his success in any way. Or rather, that she would not, unless he wrote that she did so. The temperature was an even seventy-two degrees the entire way and the smog was light all the way into the city.

He sat with Lena in the lobby of the studio while a pleasantly good looking secretary chatted on a headset making what was obviously a personal call. He looked around while he waited. The lobby was much more austere than he had imagined, with no evidence of all the blockbuster motion pictures that had crossed the company's emblem over the years. There were people milling around in what very well might have been stylish suits, although what passed for stylish these days Sam really had no idea. No one he knew wore a suit at all. The secretary said. "Mister Leiksmith will see you now." And it took Sam a minute to realize that she was talking to him.

It turned out that there was an entire wing of the building that simply changed shape, so that Sam was no longer in the vestige of corporate cubicle drones, but in a bright area with plenty of sunlight, strange stunted trees and cobblestones under his feet. There were several ponds nearby filled with what looked like oversized goldfish, which, after the secretary deposited him in the garden and left him there, Sam spent a few minutes staring at, in the absence of any other form of entertainment.

"Their called koi." A well-tanned older gentleman in a bright red robe told him. "They're from Japan."

"And that's a Kimono?" Sam asked, correctly identifying Leiksmith wardrobe. He smiled broadly, and from the condition of his teeth and the state of his robe Sam drew a brief flashing image of Hugh Hefner during his inglorious decline.

"Do you mind standing?' Leiksmith said, ignoring Sam's question.

"No, that's cool."

Leiksmith took a deep breath and blew it out. "I've often found that standing stimulates the creative juices. Helps the chi in the room, and improves stability." He raised an eyebrow. "Unless you have something to give me. If you have something to give me, I have a desk for that."

"No." Sam said, "I mean, my agent, he didn't, uh, tell me to bring anything. So I didn't."

Leiksmith smiled in a way that must have been implied to be sage. Up close like this Sam could tell the subtle signs of plastic surgery. Pretty good plastic surgery, but it was still there. "I read the book." He said.

"Okay." Sam said.

"You didn't know I was a reader."

"No, I uh...sure didn't."

"Mostly scripts." Leiksmith said. "And that's no fun. It's all tent pole stuff these days. And then, it's all a race to see how much of that flashy computer shit they can stuff into two and a half hours." He wagged a finger at Sam. "When I started this business...Christ, what year were you born?"

"Eighty-two." Sam said.

"Eighty-two." Leiksmith mused. "By then it was already too late. Spielberg and Lucas came along and fucked everything up. But ten years before that? The seventies? We were making art, man. If you want to make art these days, you get no budget for it. If you want a budget, it's got to be a tent pole, and the real star of the show is that flashy computer shit."

Sam nodded, only barely following along.

Leiksmith laughed. "It's okay." He said, "I'm like this with everybody, even just the writers. Treat everybody the same, that's what I believe. I wanted you to hear it from me, because I like you."

"You do."

"I mean, I like what you write." Leiksmith said. "What you wrote. It spoke to me. And it's cool, that you weren't" He made air quotations with his hands "Actually in the war. There's this old thing we optioned, the Red Medal of Courage, about, I mean, that this guy wrote the Civil War. And he was never actually in the Civil War, the conflict I mean." Leiksmith tapped the side of his head. "He was just using all this to create something. That's what creating is, man. It's empathy to the harmonies of the universe, and what goes on in real people's lives, and I dig that shit."

"Thanks." Sam replied.

"So..." Leiksmith said. "I have two things to tell you. And I guess we could factor this into the old fashioned model, that good news and bad news scenario, only I don't believe in those false divisions. What I'm really offering you, is two different types of opportunities." He paused for a minute, and Sam could tell he was supposed to say something. When he refused Leiksmith put his hands up defensively and said, "Okay, okay, here it is. We aren't going to make your movie."

"I don't have a movie." Sam said.

"I mean your book." Leiksmith said. "Were not going to make it."

"It's already published."

"Into a movie."

"Fine."

"I'm getting some hostile energy here." Leiksmith said. "Are you feeling okay? Can I have crystal get you anything? A cucumber wrap, some tonic water? Anything at all?"

Sam took a deep breath. "Look." He said. "I don't mean to...I mean, I appreciate this meeting, or whatever, but my agent already told me what was up with the film."

"Of course." Leiksmith wrung his hands. "Of course he did."

"Development hell."

"An ugly term. No Feng shwei in it. The harmonies all misbalanced. And yet it is a kind of purgatory. We acquire certain properties, good properties, fine stories, and these other guys, the marketing guys; they look at it and say, that's not a tent pole. So we try to sell it off to the smaller market types, your indie gurus and your film festival auteurs, they look at it and say, I have my own vision." Leiksmith laughed. "The worst part is we can't even give it back to you, because God forbid someone else would get a hold of it, and make money! So, its, yeah, it's in purgatory."

Sam dipped a sneakered toe in the koi pond. The golden hued fish came up near the surface, sensing the arrival of food.

"Look." Sam said. "What's the other half of it?"

Leiksmith fumbled about his kimono, searching for something. "You know what." He grimaced. "We are going to have to go back to my office. I didn't think we were, but there it is."

Locksmith's office was a jarring contrast from the garden outside, although it fit the standard template of Sam's assumptions regarding predatory movie executives. The walls were the same stark white as the rest of the building, the chairs looked uncomfortable, and the desk was unpleasantly modernist in design. Sam could sense the difference between the two. Once was who Leiksmith was, the other was who he wished to be. Everything changed with the man from the moment he entered the room, the way he hunched his shoulders, to the way he muttered "Christ" unhappily.

"Where did I put it." He said. "That fucking thing." Finally he pointed to the only object on his desk. "You ever hear of the black terror?" He asked.

"What?" Sam said. "Is that something political?"

"I know, right? Terrible goddamn name. Have to change it. Look this magazine, it's really fucking old and shitty, don't touch it." And from that Sam could tell he was meant to look at the object Leiksmith was pointing at. On the desk was a comic book, golden age from the look of the design, starring a superhero wearing a vampire cape and a domino mask. On his chest was a skull and crossbones from a pirate flag, and he was engaging in single combat with a Japanese soldier who, in modern times, would be considered a very offensive ethnic stereotype.

"Were getting thin." Leiksmith said. "I mean, when it comes to properties. Disney and Warner Brothers have all the good stuff. This guy, he's in the public domain. So yes, it means that someone else can come along and do their own thing with it, but we're going to snatch all the copyrights...." Leiksmith sighed. "Anyway, your just a writer." He said. "You don't need to hear all that. Can I bring you in on this thing?"

"Doing what?"

"Write a treatment. Give me some fodder that can move this puppy along. Some sort of romance so we can bring in a starlet, and some kind of world ending baddie so we can have lots of that computer stuff." Leiksmith held out his hand to shake. "What about it?" He asked.

Sam shook the hand, and took the job. He called his agent and got his voicemail, but left a message about it. Then he retrieved Lena from the lobby and asked his car's GPS for the nearest comic book store. What it came up with was something glitzier than he expected, full of mementoes for the latest Marvel comics movie being sold well above his price range. When he asked for Black Terror, the guy behind the cash register frowned, shook his head, and got someone else. It was like that, back and forth, until finally Sam left with two thin magazines wrapped in polyurethane plastic that had cost him four dollars and fifty cents apiece.

Back in Santa Monica Sam read both the comic books and felt as if he knew less than before Leiksmith had given him the job. The Black Terror appeared in both of them, but only as a side character, not as the star of the show. A quick Google search later and his apprehension grew nearly into terror. There was very little written on the Black Terror. He had a girlfriend, a sidekick, and powers that mirrored Superman's. He fought Nazi's and Jap's during world war two, and very soon after world war two his comic was discontinued. There was no Silver Age renaissance for the Black Terror, who would most likely be called something else in the event of a Hollywood production, to avoid offending anyone. The entire production seemed like a train wreck from a distance, but there was the promise of a paycheck. Halfway through his reverie he was startled by Lena massaging his shoulders.

"Are you feeling okay?" She asked.

"I guess so." He answered.

"You haven't said anything to me all day." She told him.

Sam looked up, startled. "Really?" He asked.

Lena shrugged. "Just get in the car. After that, we drove around a few places. It was pretty boring, in that big room."

Sam rubbed his eyes. Had the day gone by already? He was unusually tired. "I'm sorry babe." He said. "Its work stuff."

"Why did I have to go?" She asked.

"I thought you would enjoy it." Sam said. "I mean, a movie studio or whatever, I thought that there would be something for you to enjoy. I mean, I just assumed, the business of entertainment, they would have something there to fucking entertain people. And then I had to go to the comic book store."

"I don't like comic books." Lena said.

"What?" Sam asked.

"I said I don't like comic books."

Sam rubbed his eyes. "What makes you say that?"

Lena shrugged. "You had a bunch of them in a long white box." She said. "I read a few of them one day, and they were all pretty much terrible."

"What was so bad about them?"

"The art wasn't very good." Lena said. "I mean, it's all a bunch of bright colors, and people in tights. And the stories are awful. If you have a bunch of people in tights, why would they fight with a bunch of other people in tights? Why does that even make sense?"

"I haven't thought about it that way before." Sam said. "I guess I just got into them when I was a kid, and never looked back."

"But you didn't think when you were older." Lena said. "That okay, this is kids' stuff, this is dumb."

"No. I guess I didn't." There was a moment of silence between them. Finally Sam spoke. "Let me ask you a question. Let's say that you could like superheroes."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, let's say that there was some magical way, for you to change your mind. Without even knowing that you had. Would you want that?"

Lena shook her head. "No."

"Why not?"

"I wouldn't want to be someone who likes those things. I like who I am."

Lena left and Sam sat alone in his study, thinking to himself. On the one hand the path was clear, he could simply write in the computer

Lena loved all comic books

Or even

Lena loved superhero comic books

Or possibly

Lena was interested in the creative side of graphic novels, even when they didn't personally interest her

And the matter would be settled. He had done it before, a dozen times. Sam was personally very attached to superheroes, more than he cared to admit to a critic. They had been a fundamental part of his childhood. And shouldn't his mate share that love? Shouldn't he want to share that enjoyment, with her?

On the other hand, Lena had expressed something beyond mere hostility at the idea of comics, and brightly colored fantasy heroes. She had told him that she didn't see that in herself. More importantly that she liked who she was, the way she was, and she didn't want to change. Was she aware when she did so? Was some part of her mind subconsciously aware whenever Sam rewrote her, for whatever reason, and added or subtracted to his choosing? The more Sam sat and thought, the larger the questions grew. What was inside Lena's mind, really? Was she a person at all, a mate, or simply a puppet for him to control?

Sam grew frustrated. He looked out the window at the beach. He still liked his view, but not as much as when he had first moved her. You could get tired of anything, given enough time, even paradise, or the Californian equivalent thereof. The worm had hatched in his brain. Sometime in the future he would even tire of Lena, tire of her compliance, of her.....whatever she was to him. But what would he do then? Perhaps he would simply write her out of being. Uglier thoughts blossomed. He could have her commit some form of suicide, something spectacular and romantic. The golden gate bridge was always popular. Then he wouldn't have to tire about her. She would be his forever.

"Are you bored?" Lena knocked on the door, smiling shyly. "I thought maybe if you were bored, we could, you know, do something."

Brief moments later lying in bed next to her naked, his passion cooling, Sam felt ashamed. Something was seriously wrong with him, for the way he thought about Lena. If she wasn't her own person, she certainly felt and acted like one, and seemed enough like the real thing to split the difference. He was going to be more careful about her, going forward, and try not to cause her any harm, intentional or otherwise. Whether she was his property was an irrelevant question, she was his creation, and he owed a debt to that fact.

They had dinner with Jesse that night. Sam had written earlier that Lena was a fabulous cook, practically a gourmet chef, and she had spent nearly all day in the kitchen getting ready. As she was doing so, and as Sam and Jesse were sharing a little too much of a bottle of wine, Sam came clean and told Jesse everything. Jesse's reaction was to be expected.

"Prove it." He said.

Sam paused in front of his laptop. "Do you speak a foreign language?" He asked.

"No. What does that have to do with anything?"

"I was going to have her speak something to you."

"Like in Spanish, or French, or whatever."

"Yeah."

"But that proves nothing."

"It doesn't?"

"No. It's like when the magician asks for volunteers from the audience, and it's his assistant. You set the terms and you dictated how they would be successful."

"So, what would prove my point."

"Obviously, if I were to set the terms."

"Which are?"

"Type in that she lactates breast milk."

"Really."

"No, wait. Type in that she lactates breast milk, and can ejaculate that stuff across the room."

"What the hell."

"I would like to see that."

"I have serious misgivings about this."

"Are you telling the truth or not."

Sam typed on his laptop, shaking his head. As soon as he was done Jesse called Lena in the room. She responded, smiling. Smiling back Jesse asked, "Can we see that thing you can do with your tits?"

After it was done, and the lactose staining the far wall seemed to ooze down in an unnatural way, Sam saw that Jesse was standing there with his mouth open. Finally he lit a cigarette with a shaking hand and said with a quiver in his voice, "That was downright fucking disgusting."

Sam nodded, though he wasn't sure entirely what he thought of the matter.

"It was like a donkey show." Jesse said. "Like some weird crap you would find in Mexico, with some dumb whore so strapped up on junk that she'll do anything. Why did you let her do it?"

"You asked for it." Sam said.

"I had no clue." Jesse said. "I mean, I thought you were full of crap, so I asked for the dumbest thing I could think of. You were the one that knew what was going to happen. Jesus Christ, man, that's your fucking girl were talking about."

"But you believe me." Sam said.

"I out to slap the shit out of you." Jesse said, with far more hostility than Sam had realized existed in the man, "Doing that to her. That's like mutilation."

"I can erase it." Sam said, moving over to the laptop. "It won't happen again."

"You need to do better than that." Jesse said. "You need to make it so she doesn't remember any of this happened. That you did it like this."

Sam wrote, not looking at Jesse as he did. There was something of the bully in the other man, Sam realized, when he was provoked. For the rest of dinner none of them talked about anything serious, just a little small talk here and there. Finally they ending things on the patio chairs staring at the beach. It was dark out and the waves took an ominous tone, or rather they would have, if not for the carnival sounds of the nearby boardwalk.

"I'm sorry I blew up earlier." Jesse said.

"Forget it." Sam offered.

"You know I got dumped, during my second deployment, right?" Jesse said.

Sam nodded.

"I shouldn't have gotten married." Jesse said. "She was too young, and I was too young. There was no kid involved, or anything. But after the first time I went over there....you start thinking, right? Who's going to be waiting for me. And if it's no one, that's a hole in the gut that gnaws at you. So I got myself involved and I shouldn't have."

Sam said nothing.

"We fought a lot." He said. "Right before the deployment. I was drinking heavy, which at the time was no big deal, because fuck it, everyone I knew drank. But she noticed. And it was one thing after another. I could tell things were strained just by the way she sounded when I called her, like she was forcing it, or hiding something, or both. When she didn't write for a month and then sent me the letter, I knew what was going on."

Sam had heard the story multiple times. Telling it was a pastime for Jesse when he was drunk. Sam had even managed to write about it, taking a slightly fictionalized version of events and putting it into the book. But there seemed to be no avoiding this sermon, confronting Jesse when he was in his cups could get ugly.

"I already told you this before, didn't I?" Jesse said.

"A couple of times." Sam admitted.

"Yeah, I know it." Jesse said. "But there's another part..."

"What's that?"

"When I was over there, I kept a journal."

"I didn't know that." Sam said.

"It wasn't an all the time thing. Or an everyday thing. But every once in a while I wrote down something I saw or thought or did, because I was under the impression I would want to remember it later. I was wrong as it turns out, I've spent most the time since then trying to forget that I was ever there in the first place."

"I get that." Sam said.

"I guess you do." Sam said. "You're a good friend, man. Sometimes I forget that." It was dark out, and Sam could not tell if Jesse was crying or not.

"The reason I brought up the journal." Jesse said. "Is because of what I wrote after my...after she left me, while I was over there."

Sam said nothing.

"I was angry." Jesse said. "So I would rant in the journal. At first just a little fuck you bitch, I'll kill you type deal. But I had plenty of time over there to sit and think. Just doing nothing, but sitting and thinking. And I started to type out these long...I don't know what you would call them. Fantasies I guess. About how she would die. Her and the other guy, or sometimes just her. Sometimes I would write about it as if it were an accident, other times I would have her killed, or whatever. I filled up that journal, in the end, cover to cover."

"What happened to it?" Sam asked.

"We went home when the deployment was over on a Navy ship." Jesse said. "One night I went to one of the hatches and threw the thing into the ocean. It felt like an absolution when I did. Like I had slipped a noose of my own neck, and not just hers."

There was some silence between them. Finally Jesse broke it and said. "Look, man. If I had the kind of...I mean, ability over that chick, that dumb bitch, that you have over Lena, she would have been dead. And it would have been my fault. And yes, she was unfaithful. Yes, she betrayed my trust while I was over there, and that was wrong. But I can live with that, with both of us being alive. I couldn't with her dead."

Sam said nothing. He felt detached from his body in some numb way, as if he were flying high over the boardwalk, the beach, and the city beyond, gazing down on two insects debating about their brief lives and worrying about their mates.

"Just be careful, okay dude?" Jesse offered. "That's all I'm really saying."

The script for the Black Terror movie was written in several weeks, with Sam breaking down and purchasing several books on screen writing during the process, including one Complete Moron' guide which proved to be very helpful. In the end Sam concluded it wasn't his best work, but it was a paying gig, and the check from the studio had already cleared. He sent it in and was done with it. To his great surprise his agent called back, only days later, telling him the studio wanted him for a rewrite.

"With a team this time." The agent said.

"A team?"

"A bunch of guys working together in a room. Standard industry stuff."

"They aren't going to use my script?"

The agent laughed. "What did you think, kid? That they were just going to film what you wrote."

"I don't know."

"Look." The agent sighed. "You wrote a treatment. That's one version, an idea of what could be used. At least four or five other guys were contracted out to do the same thing. And I say four or five, because I don't want to hurt your feelings. It's more like ten or fifteen, cause this is a tent pole, and that's a really big fucking deal for the studio. A lot of money on the line, get what I'm saying?"

"I don't know." Sam said. "I mean, I didn't know. If I did, I might not have wanted to do it."

The agent sighed. "Jesus Christ kid." He said. "Why did you come out west?"

"Excuse me?"

"I don't know. If you come out west, I can only assume you wanted to work in the industry. That's the usual story. Most people that find the work, they learn not to bitch about it. If you wanted to schmaltz with the whole literati crowd and everything, that's the big apple. You can find some area of Brooklyn that kicked all the blacks out and all you guys can discuss Hemingway or what the fuck ever."

"My great-grandfather."

"What's that?"

"My great-grandfather was Robert Samuel Gage. I was named after him."

"Your losing me."

"He was an artist."

"Like with pictures..."

"Sculpting, mostly. He studied under the guy that did Mount Rushmore."

"Uh huh."

"He moved out here from Ohio. Did some work on a water fountain, a few public buildings. Art Deco type stuff."

"Your killing me. You wanted to drink from a water fountain."

"It wasn't that kind of fountain. It was the kind of thing you throw pennies into for good luck. He sculpted most of his life, and at one point in time, lived out here where I am. On the beach in a house that doesn't exist anymore. I remember my mother telling me about the concrete lawn, because they couldn't get the water right for the grass to grow. She showed me this old movie on a projector, called faces of Lincoln. He sculpts the president and narrates about his life. I found out later that the thing won an Academy Award. I came out here for that."

There was a moment of silence from the other end of the line, and for a while Sam thought that the agent had fallen asleep, until he broke in with a tort "Are you going to do it or not?" To which Sam replied that he would.

There was no waiting in the lobby of the studio this time, or being escorted to some producer's secret lair. He told the secretary who he was and she gave him directions to a room. The room turned out to be windowless, filled only with a conference table and several inexpensive looking chairs. Sitting in them were several men approaching his age or a little older, most of them experiencing early pattern baldness or the spare tires of middle age. They were all dressed on the nerdier side of casual to the point that they could have stolen their wardrobes from a high school dungeons and dragons group, or the local Hot Topic, which in the end equaled out to the same thing. The only thing that signified these men of being any importance was the conversation he walked into, which was most assuredly about the movie.

"There is nothing on this guy anywhere." Said the writer with a Danzig t-shirt.

"We all know that." Said the only man in the room with a tie, albeit one with little Superman s-shields up and down the center. "He's not Spider-Man."

"No." Said Danzig. "But he's not even Iron Man, or Moon Knight, or anyone. This is someone that hasn't been written about in close to seventy years."

"Yeah." Tie nodded thoughtfully. "And when he was put in something, it was always, wow, look at this cool looking old obscure guy, in a group of cool looking old obscure guys. It was never about the Black Terror, exactly."

"I had an idea." Sam said, interrupting.

"New guy!" Danzig smiled, showing yellowing teeth. "Go right ahead."

"Why don't we just outright steal parts of the best stories?" Sam said. "I mean, make Black Terror an orphan. Give him a home city. Give him a joker, or green goblin, or whatever."

Tie sighed. "That would be great." He said. "If we could even call him Black Terror."

"That fucking name." Danzig said, and a murmur of assent went around the room. "Might as well call him the Yellow Panic, or the Jewish Peril. What the hell were they thinking back in the forties, anyway?"

"That white people ruled the world." Tie said. "I mean, that hasn't changed, but at least you can't go around deliberately insulting other groups, or whatever."

"And if we cut it in half." Danzig said. "That's almost as bad. Then it's just 'the Terror', and it sounds like were supporting Al-Qaeda, or something."

The debate went back and forth around the room. Mostly the writers simply griped about the improbability of the task, and the hazards involved in its completion. Occasionally a new idea would be formed, and tossed back and forth until it was written down or discarded. Finally a smoke break was declared, after a few hours, and Sam decided to walk outside with Superman Tie if only to escape the glare of the fluorescent lights above. The Tie lit up, and sighed deeply in contentment, before shaking his head.

"It's a mess." He said. "This whole thing is bad."

"I'm Sam." Sam said, realizing he hadn't given anyone his name yet."

"Tobin." Superman Tie replied. "How long have you been writing? For the industry, I mean."

"This is, uh, my first gig."

Tobin laughed. "Try to find another one." He said. "There's a good chance this abortion won't even get made."

"You think so?"

"Oh yeah." Tobin said, and after another puff, "At least I hope so. How many of these things have you seen?"

"What superhero flicks? A couple."

"The good ones?"

"A couple were okay."

"See, and that's the thing. The best stuff has already been mined. All the good stories have been adapted. We're sucking at fumes here, and it's not going to be pretty. It's probably better if this doesn't get made." Tobin shuddered. "I have a friend who got a producer cred with 'John Carter'. After that bombed, he had a real hard time finding work. Went all the way back to commercials."

"I don't know about that." Sam said. "I mostly write books."

"What've you written?" Tobin asked, and Sam told him the title. Tobin claimed he had never heard of it, but then again, "I don't really read that much, anymore, unless it's too doctor a script or something. The sad thing about doing what you love, is you get too close to it, sometimes, and you might not love it so much anymore."

"I hope that's not true." Sam asked.

Tobin flicked the cigarette butt next to the back door of the smoking area. "You ask me." He said, "Books, movies, even effin' video games....all physical media, it's all rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Kids don't buy anything these days, once they've got a computer, you can just download whatever you want, for free. Kids grow up like that, getting everything for free, how or you going to get them to pay for anything? Hell, you can toss television in there too, inside of ten years it's all gone."

"I hope that's not true." Sam said. "I mean, I love, you know, the physical feeling of a book. Turning its pages, cracking the spine. I try that on an e-reader, and its crap."

"I can't stand those things." Tobin said. "And I hear you, man, I feel that way about the movies. You ever go to a festival?"

Sam shook his head.

"You should sometime." Tobin said. "Get in there with a few hundred people who really dig film, like the art of it, and a really good performance, and the crowd is really something."

"It is?"

"It really is. If I were to, you know, elaborate, I would say that it's the exact opposite of those teenagers that laugh at the dumbass trailers. You know, the one where you can see the movies going to be shit, and people laugh anyway. C'mon, let's get back in there."

For the latter part of the day, the writers settled into sort of a team. Ideas were pitched around the room, written down, and finally a rough outline was cast out, that seemed to be a compilation of a few of the more popular scripts, at least from whoever in the studio appreciated them. Five scripts were handed out to each writer at the end of the session, Sam was somewhat thrilled to see one of them was his. He rode the high of his feeling all the way back to Santa Monica, dozing in and out of the local radio stations. It had been a long day, and he was tired. He hoped that Lena had made dinner, and thought that in the future he might write something down on the laptop about her always making dinner, whenever he went out late for work. The parking lot was full nearby the condos; he found a far spot and started to walk. For some reason he came by the back door with the sliding glass, and stopped dead when he saw inside his apartment.

Jesse was coming out of the bedroom, and putting on his shirt. Lena was walking beside him, without any pants, in a pair of underwear he had bought her when they went to the mall together. They were smiling, and then they kissed, and when that happened Sam melted back into the shadows, beyond the gaze of the security lights. He walked back to the beach. It was dark outside, but not completely gone, the sun had set to the point where the sky was devoid of any light yet still possessed a quality other than blackness, that seemed to differentiate it from the ocean below. When he sat in the sand, Sam found that he was shaking.

There was no denying the evidence. His best friend and his girl were having an affair. Except it wasn't that simple, really. Lena wasn't really his girl; after all, she was his creation. He had written everything about her, or rather, had written her, how he wanted her to be, and she complied. Was it such a simple oversight as he had not written a phrase like

Lena remained physically faithful to her boyfriend

So she simply did not respond? As if she were a robot who, not being told "don't kill humans", killed humans. Was that simply all there was?

An uglier possibility. He had told Jesse how Lena worked. Had he simply decided to write his own code, so to speak? Would it be worthwhile to look on the computer, and see what had changed since last time? Possibly a word search would be all it would take. Change the word "Sam" to the word "Jesse" and there you had it. Was Sam really his friend, after all? They had known each other once, years ago, in Ohio. Sam had wanted to write and Jesse had wanted to join the Marines. After it was done, purely by chance, as far as Sam saw, Jesse had decided to spill out to his friend what he had seen and done over there, and Sam had turned it into a book, which had done remarkably well. The entire time there was a scraping sensation in the back of Sam's head, which told him he was cannibalizing Jesse for his own gain. But that hadn't stopped Sam once, and Jesse seemed not to mind. Or so he thought. Maybe it gnawed at the back of Jesse's mind too. Maybe it kept him up at night, along with nightmares of war, and the memory of a wife that had loved him once and left him alone. There was deep pain inside Jesse, and maybe this was just comeuppance for Sam's role in exploiting that pain. In other words, maybe he deserved it.

The ugly feeling swelled up inside his gut, until before he knew it Sam's feet were taking over, and he was walking back through the beach across the sand, toward where his apartment stood. When he slid open the door he saw Lena unloading the dishwasher, and noticed that she had put a pair of yoga pants on.

"Who was just here?" Sam demanded.

"Nobody." Lena shrugged. She had a deer in the headlights expression broadcasting her lie. Sam went directly over to the laptop and typed in.

Whenever Sam asked Lena a question, she told the truth

"Now let's talk." Sam said. And Lena walked over to the kitchen table, and sat down with her hands crossed. "Who was just here?"

"Jesse." Lena said.

"What was he doing?"

"He stopped by to see you." Lena said. "I don't want to tell you this. Why am I doing it?"

"And what were you doing with him?"

In a low voice, Lena said "We were having sex."

"Why did you do it?"

"We were talking about something." Lena said. "I mean, he was talking to me. And he was looking at me funny, and I just leaned in and kissed him. It kind of went on from there."

"Have you done it before?"

"With you."

"I mean, have you done it with him before."

"No."

"With anyone else."

"No. Only you." Lena was starting to cry. "When you ask me a question." She said, "I think about what I want to say, but it's like the words get ripped out of my mouth. It hurts."

"Did you think about how it hurts me?" Sam said. "Your my girlfriend."

"Is that what I am?"

"Aren't you?"

"I don't know." Lena said. "You never asked me to be."

"What if I did ask you?"

"I don't know what I'd say. Your always gone. Sometimes I'll be here and you'll be here, and you won't even say anything to me. We just go on and do what we have to do. You went somewhere today, and didn't tell me how long you'd be gone, or when you'd be back."

"So you want me to check in with you. Is that it?"

"I don't have anywhere to go. I don't know anyone here, except for Jesse. I don't know what I'm supposed to do, except for every once in a while I want to do something, and I do it. I wish you would think of me. I wonder if you think about me at all, most of the time. I wonder who I am to you."

Lena was crying hard now. Sam got up and went to the laptop, and erased what he had written earlier. When he looked up she was gone from the kitchen table, and he didn't want to track her down. He had a lot to think about, and didn't know exactly what he wanted to do.

He reasoned that if this was a normal, or typical relationship, the thing to do would be to break up. Lena had cheated on him. Perhaps she construed the relationship in a different way than he did, but he thought of her as his, and expected her to respond accordingly. It dawned on him that maybe the problem was that he hadn't written her the right way. He had written her to sleep with him, to keep him company, to respect him, certainly, but all that did not necessarily equal up to love. And even then, there were plenty of people out there who loved each other, and managed to cheat on their spouse. She was a virgin before Sam, that is, she had not existed yet, as far as he could tell. Perhaps it was only natural that she wished to experiment at some point.

But Sam managed to look in the mirror, and deeper, uglier thoughts began to surface. Jesse had several inches on him and more than a few pounds of muscle. Sam had been a confirmed ectomorph throughout high school, skinny and scrawny, with a face covered in freckles. He had always managed to get by being friendly on top of all that. Maybe Lena was simply shallow. Maybe a girl he had created on a piece of paper, and a flickering screen was realizing that he was not the center of the universe, not even that much of a prime catch to begin with. Without wanting to he thought of the pair of them locked in an embrace, and then the act itself. He leaned over the keyboard and typed

Lena never had sex with Jesse again.

and added

She did not remember having intercourse with him in the first place, or kissing him, or anything romantic in nature.

Finally he wrote

She did not feel anything romantic for Jesse at all, or in the first place. Only for Sam.

When he thought about it, Sam decided to delete the first lines about Lena telling the truth about everything. That could prove potentially embarrassing in certain situations. Besides, he could trust her well enough, as long as he knew exactly what he was going to do. With excitement he went into the bedroom, and saw Lena lying still under the covers.

"Honey." He asked. "Do you remember Jesse coming over today?"

"Yeah."

"What did he want?"

"Just to talk to you about something. I don't know. At one point I thought he was coming on to me, or whatever." She laughed. "It was awkward. I can tell that guy doesn't get any. Plus he's got gross breath, have you noticed?"

"Yeah, I guess so." Sam said. "I mean, he smokes."

"Ugh." Lena said. "I could never get with a smoker."

"So he's not your type, then?"

"I know he's your friend." Lena said. "But I just don't see it. He's a really intense guy, plus he drinks all the time. His hair is cut like he did it himself. I just, its not there, for me. No thanks." She pinched Sam's cheeks. "Were you getting jealous? That's cute."

"No! Don't be silly." Sam said. "I can trust you guys." And he knew that was true, from now on.

The next day Sam made an extra effort to be there, with Lena, and to involve her in what was going on. The writing for Black Terror only took up a fraction of his time, after all, and he worked from home. At one point Jesse stopped by. He looked a little awkward, and said he had to leave soon for a VA meeting. "Anger Management." He muttered. Sam could tell something was wrong, and he knew what it was, but it was over now. It was up to Jesse to take the next step, whatever that was.

If Sam was going to be honest, he was a little sick of Jesse sometimes. The man clearly had issues. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or whatever, and that was fine and Sam wasn't questioning that. But Sam was getting a little sick of it all. What he had done with Lena crossed a line. Sam wasn't going to push the issue, or even confront it; he had taken care of the matter by simply writing a few lines on the laptop. But it still existed.

They spent the rest of the day at the pier. It was fun, after all, and close. Sam had thought about driving to Magic Mountain about an hour away in one direction, or even Disney about two or three hours away in another, but the pier was close enough to count. It wasn't as if they hadn't been there before, but Lena seemed to be enjoying herself maybe a little more than usual. Sam's mind was wandering, as it had before, and often did.

It wasn't as if there weren't theme parks in Ohio, or roller coasters. Certainly no pacific ocean, and much harder winters. His parents had written him recently. His mom had, rather, sent him a message on Facebook (which she had recently discovered) just a quick hi how or you type of thing, with maybe a little more subtext, in which she asked if he had been getting her letters. Sam had, of course, but simply not bothered to respond back to any of them. It wasn't that he didn't get along with his parents, it was something different. A fear of return. Every once in a while, for the past few months, Sam had a reoccurring dream in which he was simply back in Ohio, living in his parents' house, as if nothing significant had ever passed. As if the book had never been published, the golden ticket had never been punched, whatever you wanted to call it. Looking around at the pier he saw the problem was obvious, at least with Ohio, it was simply anywhere. Sam reasoned that it would have been possible to take everything he experienced in his childhood, all the suburban streets, all the friends or bullies or crushes from his time in public education, and simply change the word Ohio to Pennsylvania or Michigan or Connecticut, and nothing would be changed at all, or even halfway noticeable. The problem with Ohio was that it was anywhere, and the thing about California to a transplant was that it was nowhere but there.

"What are you thinking about?" Lena asked.

"My parents." Sam replied.

"Are they out here?"

"Back in Ohio. Why?"

"I'd like to meet them."

"Like right now?"

Lena rolled her eyes. "I mean, sometime." She said. "In the near to immediate future. It doesn't have to be right now."

The music on the pier was loud and bright, but Sam had managed the trick of leaning far enough on the edge of the railing so that it dissipated a little, and was framed by the far more soothing noise of the ocean below. "I don't know where I'm at." He said. "With my parents."

"How sad."

Sam shrugged. "They divorced when I was little. My dad ran off, and I was mostly raised by my gran-gran."

"Your gran-gran?"

"My grandmother. And my grandfather. When I was a teenager, my father came back from wherever he went, and my mother actually went ahead and married him. Which I never understood."

Lena said nothing. The wind was catching off the water's edge and sending little sprinklets of salt upwards, into her hair. "I've always thought." She said. "That if you had parents, they would be someone you would love."

"Yeah. Well, not always the case." Sam backtracked, "I mean, Christ, I'm not saying that I don't love them, or whatever. They're my parents, you know?"

In the days to come afterwards, and even the weeks, months, and years, Sam would remember that night as a turning point, a totally unscripted event that changed the course of everything that happened before, and everything that would happen after. Looking back on it, it was possible to put all the pieces together, and rationalize it to the point that it all made sense. But the fact that Sam couldn't get over was that it simply was not true. There were no warning signs, really, no danger marks. On the internet he would discover such events listed as Black Swans. The justification being for the longest time in the western world, all swans were considered to be white, thusly, all swans were white, until a black one was discovered. The moral being, just because something had never happened, did not mean that it could never happen. We each contain a multitude inside ourselves, and among that multitude is every possible occurrence. There was the pier, and then there was Jesse standing with a gun in his hand.

The news would later give an exact description of the weapon. It was a nine-millimeter automatic from a major manufacturer. It had not been modified in any way from its stock origin, and could be legally purchased in most of the fifty states, and legally possessed in all but a few American cities. It was not an assault rifle, whatever those really were, as was originally reported by the media, and indeed, believed by the police officers who arrived first on the scene. It was a gun simple enough in appearance to fit a child's idea of such an object, and it did its purpose.

Sam did not see Jesse standing there, on the pier, as he was with the gun in his hand. A security camera would later capture the scene, and frame the first shots fired. Jesse raising the hand and a flash of light. A woman, falling to the ground. Then a child. Later a man. Jesse simply fired and walked from person to person, or as he was seeing them, target to target.

The way Sam perceived it was a little different. There was a loud pop, and several other loud pops. Not one after another in the manner of firecrackers, but spaced apart evenly. A dawning feeling of horror bloomed inside Sam's gut, which was vocalized by the man next to him, who simply went "Oh shit." People started to scream, and a few people started to run. It was one of the runners that Jesse killed next, when the girl simply ran directly at him, and all he had to do was squeeze the trigger. She flopped down to the side, as if her strings had been cut. And that was when Sam saw him friend up close and realized what was happening.

A moment passed between the two. Jesse had the gun pointed out, in the manner of a gangster such as those found in a Humphrey Bogart film, with his elbow cocked up so that he could shoot from the hip. Sam looked at Jesse and saw his face now, expecting some form of emotion. A sneer akin to a supervillian, maybe, about to kill James Bond in a moment of triumph. Or perhaps tears streaming down both sides of his face, snot bubbling out his nostrils, the anger of a petulant child denied a prize toy. But instead Jesse's face was a blank mask, and his eyes appeared flat and dead. There was an invisible hand pressed over Sam's mouth rendering him unable to speak. He felt the bullets before he heard them.

Or rather, he heard the impact, then heard the gunshots. Lena was first, with the round that took her in the head rendered with a wet smack, jerking her one way, and the one taking her in the gut jerking her another. Sam felt the sting in his side where the bullet tore through, and panic setting in. A voice started to scream hysterically inside his head. His t-shirt was wet and at first he thought it might be sea water until he saw the red and sat down. It did not hurt as bad as he would have imagined. As for Lena she was slumped to the side having fallen in a peaceful position that might have been mistook for sleep in other circumstances. Sam mouthed words at Jesse, that he hoped would help his friend at the time but the other man was looking at the gun which had run dry and ejected the magazine. Finally he fumbled in his pocket and found the last bullet left and loaded it from the top, through the ejection port. Sam knew what was going to happen and thought he wouldn't be surprised, but he was instead, how Jesse fell down after the shot. Not unlike a puppet that had had its strings irrevocably cut. The shot went through the side near the temple and Sam wondered why Jesse had not done it through the mouth as it would have been known to result more often in death. Then he heard the sirens, and did not think of anything for a while, waiting for what was to happen next.

Things calmed down somewhat on the ambulance ride. The paramedic in the back dressed his wound, said something to the effect of "It doesn't look that bad." And gave him something for the pain. The medic was amiable and overweight, and made comments about how, in Iraq, he had packed such wounds with tampons. Sam tried not to hear it. There seemed to be too much of a connection to the medic and Jesse, and he could still see the events in his mind's eye. Sam was feeling numb and a little high by the time he got to the hospital.

It had been a long time since Sam had been inside a hospital. Once, during his childhood for a broken leg, and once for his brother with a dislocated shoulder. He had managed to experience most of his twenties without any further injury, all the way up to the point where Jesse chose to shoot him at the pier. From what he remembered both trips had been framed by a lengthy wait in the Emergency Room. He noticed that by arriving in an ambulance, on a stretcher there was no such disposition. Instead there were a series of test, x-rays, and even an MRI. The doctor worked quickly on the wound, before pronouncing Sam acceptable. "Basically, the bullet just passed right through." He said. "A lucky shot, considering your kidneys are right there. We should be able to release you tonight."

An old black man with a crispy white moustache cleared his throat. He was wearing a security guard uniform that looked cheap and wrinkled. "Sorry doc." He said. "We can't release this young fella yet. Them police want to have a talk with him."

"Oh." The doctor waved distractedly. "Fine, fine." And walked out impatiently. The security guard stood where he was in the doorway, with both hands on his belt as in the manner of an old west gunfighter, although Sam could see no visible weapon. He stayed where he was until the police walked in, and Sam realized he had a choice. Either tell the truth, or a variation of it, leave tonight, or stay and probably answer a lot more questions. The officer got out a yellow legal pad, and just as Sam had made up his mind to lie for the time being, he remembered Lena. He needed to find out about Lena.

So instead, he told the truth. It wasn't hard at all. The cop asked him to describe what had happened, in a pretty straightforward fashion, and when the time came Sam let slip that he knew the shooter. "You had a relationship with him?" The cop asked, to which Sam replied, "He was my friend," reasoning that the officer would assume that friendship was a sort of relationship, a way of knowing someone intimately. The cop then stopped what he was writing and said some words into his radio in garbled cop speak, and then waved his hand for same to continue. After that the cop confirmed what Sam already had figured out, he was not free to leave. There were other, further questions to be had, from other people.

"Do they know what happened to my girlfriend?" Sam asked.

"Was she injured in any way?" The cop asked.

"She was shot." Sam said, and when he said the words it seemed to him that they came true.

The cop nodded in a knowing manner, as if there were more he could tell but he was prohibited from saying. "I can try to find out." He said. "Hold tight." And Sam was left alone. This time the security guard waited on the outside of the door, and Sam found himself being consumed with anxiety.

What if Lena was dead? And they weren't telling him? What would it be like if she died? Would she simply fade away and disappear, back to unreality, like some sort of Jedi Knight, or would she sit in a meat locker starting to stink, like any other carbon based life form? A thought came to Sam, until she had been shot, he had not known that there was blood pumping through her veins. Was the rest of her anatomy correct? Could the doctors even operate on her at all? He felt hopeless and responsible at the same time. He wanted to talk to someone about it, and he realized that of the two people he would talk to in these situations, one of them was possibly dead, and the other most certainly was. A man with in a cheap sort of business casual walked in, with a gun and a silver badge at his hip, and slammed the door behind him. He was white and grey haired, a different sort of cop than the other who had been young and Hispanic.

"Your Sam Harshbarger." He barked, more statement than question.

"Yes."

"You knew Jesse Allen."

"Yes."

"How did you know him?"

"He was my friend."

"Friend like what?"

"He was my friend. We did things together. I knew him from Ohio."

"When was the last time you spoke with him?"

"This morning."

"What was it about."

"I don't know."

"You don't know or you can't remember?"

"I mean, I can't remember." The cop stared him down. Finally Sam came out with, "I don't think it was anything important. I would remember if it was."

"Nothing like, 'hey, I'm going to kill a bunch of guys today?' did he ever say stuff like that?"

"No."

"Even as a joke?"

"No."

The cop took out a small notebook, and scribbled things down. "Did you know he had a gun?"

"I thought he might have."

"You thought or you knew?"

"I thought. I mean, he was in the military. He knew how to shoot. But he never talked about having one, or anything."

The cop rubbed his eyes, as if his head hurt behind them. "Here's my problem." He said. "I've got four dead people. One of thems a kid. Two people that are in pretty bad shape. I've got reporters out there and my boss, and his boss, all wanting to know what happened. I've got you, the one guy at the scene who knew the shooter. And you're really not telling me a fucking thing."

"He wasn't like that." Sam said. "I mean, Jesse."

"Yes." The cop said. "Look, yes. I get that he was your friend, but you're going to have to realize that he was like that. He did this. He shot a lot of people, and you. And if there is anything you can tell us about it, anything at all, you really need to do that."

"I talked to him this morning." Sam said. "I thought we were good."

The detective grilled him a little more, until finally he gave him a card and told him to come in the next day for more questions. It was only when he was done that Sam realized what he had been hiding from the cop, the fact that Jesse had slept with Lena. It dawned on him that that might have been the motive for everything that happened, which scared Sam a little, and made him feel like some sort of accomplice. But after the cop left the security guard was done as well, and a nurse came up to him with discharge paperwork and a pill bottle filled with medication.

"I checked on that girl you were asking about." The nurse said. "Your gurlfrehn?"

"Yes ma'am."

"She's in ICU." The nurse said. "Only thing is, they had her in there as a Jane Doe. Didn't have any driver's license on her or nothin'. That's why it took so long, darlin'. Does she have some family you can call?"

"No." Sam said. "I mean, I'm her boyfriend."

"No parents, or anything?"

"I don't think so."

The nurse clucked. "Aint that a shame." She said. "Only thing is, its only family members visiting in the ICU. I could take you up there, if'n the momma or the daddy said it was okay. But without anyone to give me the say-so, I can't do nothin'."

So she's alive, Sam thought, feeling relieved and scared, both at once. "Thank you." He said.

"Go home, darlin'." The nurse said. "Come back up here tomorrow and speak with the people. Maybe they can get you in."

Getting home proved to be more of a challenge than Sam thought. The ambulance was quite a ways from the beach and his condo, and besides the hospital insisted on wheeling him out in a chair. This proved troublesome given the fact that he did not have a ride, eventually the receptionist in the front desk called a taxi in somewhat of a huff. For a while he was left to himself, in the wheelchair wearing a green hospital gown on account of his shirt and pants having been cut off during the procedures to attend his bullet wound. A few of the people waiting in the ER gawked at him, one with an open mouth.

When he was wheeled out front to the taxi that smelled faintly of vomit he saw the cameras out front. News vans promoting different affiliates were parked in a rough semi-circle, extending trails of wires that led from vans to hefty looking cameras, while a few anchors stood where the shot would serve those best to report on the tragedy that had occurred earlier. For a minute he wondered if the anchors would rush over to the taxi, in the manner of paparazzi chasing a starlet, but when the taxi pulled away unheeded he realized that was not the case. The anchors had already recorded their bit, live at the scene, and would not be interested in a single patient. There were probably laws against that sort of thing.

Back in the condo he sat in the sofa and fell asleep contemplating whether or not to turn on the television. He awoke with a start only two hours later, when the clock on the DVR read five fifteen AM. Instead of attempting further sleep he opened his patio door and let the ocean breathe in on him from the beach. He felt a twinge of pain and took one of the pills from the bottle that the nurse had given him. The sunrise was beautiful as all sunrises are, made more so by the way the red came up over the ocean and filled the sky slowly, peeling back the black like a layer of dead skin. When it rose enough to illuminate the room he remembered the laptop.

Of course, that was the key. The laptop. Whatever harm had been done to Lena could be undone, if only he could write it that way. She was his creation, after all, fashioned from his words. All he had to do was type in

Lena was not hurt

And it would be so. His control over her extended to her body, the thing Jesse had made him do with the lactation proved it. He could type it in, and it would be so. He got up stiffly and staggered over to the dining room table where the laptop was permanently stationed. In the spot where it normally sat there was an outline of dust, and in the exact center lined up neatly was a small piece of white plastic, with one of those magnetic stripes used for credit cards. Sam picked it up and turned it over, reading the name and social security number of the friend that had tried to kill him.

Sam put Jesse's military ID in his pocket, and then remembered that he had to go to the police station later that day, and stuffed it in the bottom of a sock drawer. He had started to sweat for some reason, and felt like he might throw up.

There was no guarantee that whatever made Lena real was tied explicitly to the laptop. There might be a good chance that he could simply write on a piece of paper (or a new computer) whatever he wanted to have happen, and that would be it. But he suspected that wasn't the case. The more he thought about it, the more he figured that the entire thing had to do with the file on that computer. The Lena file, with everything he had written about her over the weeks they had spent together since Sam made her real.

Then there was the question of where the computer was now. Had Jesse destroyed it? Had he hidden it somewhere? If the answer was no to both those questions, it was undoubtedly in the hands of the police right now. And if Jesse had browsed anything even remotely questionable, after stealing the computer, that was it. It would become evidence and then gone. Sam's house phone rang, startling him, and he answered it.

"Hello."

"Look." Sam's agent said. "I just want to say, first of all, that I get you guys were friends, and I'm sorry for the whole thing. These tragedies, these things happen sometimes."

"Okay."

"I heard the news, obviously. I'm sure you did too. Don't you live close, or something?"

"On the beach." Sam said. "Walking distance." In fact, he had chosen to walk to the pier the previous night, with his car still in the parking lot.

"Where you nearby?" The agent said. "I mean did you hear...."

"I was there." Sam stated.

"Oh wow."

"Yeah. Back from the hospital last night."

"Really."

"Yeah."

"That is really unfortunate."

There was an awkward pause on the phone, and Sam could hear the agent licking his lips. Finally he said. "I know this sounds bad." He said. "And I just want you to know, that, I do feel for you right now. And I respect your situation."

"Okay."

"But, and I mean, as your agent, I have an obligation to let you know, you really have a fantastic situation here." Sam could hear the excitement leaking out of his voice. He saw the man for what he was, then. A leech and nothing more. There was something here that could mean money, and that was what the agent had called for. He took the phone away from his ear and stared at it like a foreign object, and considered throwing it back on the receiver. Instead he put it back to his ear, hearing the agent call out him name, "Sam? Buddy, are you still here."

"I'm still here."

"Okay, look." The agent said. "You wrote a book about this guy, right? I mean, I know, it was about themes, and the military, and everything, but this guy-"

"Jesse."

"This guy Jesse, he appears in the book by name. I mean, you use his name, first and last, and everything."

"I guess I did."

"You did! Believe me, I've checked. And people love this kind of stuff. That true crime, why they did it stuff. It sells, buddy."

"It does?"

"Bet your ass it does. When it's something big, like it is right now, on all the networks, it sells. Yeah, it'll cool off in a little bit. If we let it. But the thing about it is, we can tie in the veteran angle. Veterans are suffering, so many homeless, that kind of thing. Now, I've thought about it, and we can't play it up to much with the victim, because no one likes the shooter as the victim, that kind of shit pisses people off and gets you sued. But still, I think we've got something here."

"What do you need me to do?" Sam asked.

"For right now? I can get you an interview on a local network. Just really simple stuff, who are you, who was he, what happened."

"An interview."

"Just for right now. But that piece will...I mean, it most likely will get picked up by one of the national syndicates. And if we can get you an interview with, like, an AM show, nationally?" The agent was breathing heavy. "That's a new deal, Sam." He said. "That's a big fat deal, for a tell-all memoir on how you survived the Santa Monica Pier spree killer. How you knew him for years, never would have suspected, all that stuff, high six figures, minimum. And, yeah, I know you might what to frown on this kind of, I mean, this lowbrow stuff, but it pays the bills. Normal Mailer did it and won a fucking Pulitzer. And he didn't even really know that guy."

Sam hung up the phone and screamed an obscenity at no one into the air. At that moment of anger something clicked in his head, a way forward, and he redialed the agent's number. It was picked up right away. "Hey buddy?" Said the agent. "I thought we lost you there, for a second. Some kind of connection issue?"

"I'll do it on one condition." Sam said.

"What's that?"

"I need a lawyer." Sam said, and told him about the cops.

The lawyer was every bit what Sam expected. Pencil thin, well dressed, and overall ugly. He picked up Sam in a pricey import Sedan. On the way over he explained things quickly, taking his hands off the wheel at times to emphasize a point.

"You're not the subject of this thing." The lawyer said, "Otherwise they would already had a warrant. Or a SWAT team, which, I know, is a blatant overuse of power, and we could have handled that, but the cops love to use those things in these situations. I believe the fact that you were shot, by the alleged suspect, really makes things easier in a lot of ways."

Sam asked the lawyer about getting to see Lena, and the computer.

"The hospital parts easy." The lawyer said. "Because it doesn't involve any kind of law, just administrative policy. I can make a phone call today, and talk to a few people, and get you in to see your fiancée- is it your girlfriend, or fiancée?"

"Girlfriend." Sam told him.

"I'm going to say fiancée." The lawyer said. "That makes things a little easier. And chances are, if, like you say, she doesn't have family around, or anyone else, the hospital will be looking for someone to foot the bill. Can you go down that route?"

"I guess." Sam said, "If it takes that."

"The computer's a lot more problematic." The lawyer said. "Its undoubtedly impounded as evidence. Probably had the hard drive and the browser history worked over. And then there's the problem, why did he have your computer?"

"I don't know."

"And that's probably it." The lawyer said. "There probably isn't a reason. But that isn't very satisfying. What people want when bad thing happen, is satisfaction. That's the reason why the court system works. Something bad happened, and now something bad needs to happen back. To give meaning to the event. In reality things are mostly random."

Sam was much more nervous in the interview room with the cops. There were two of them this time, the one from earlier and a shorter, fatter version of the same. This time they both gave their names, though Sam forgot them almost immediately after. They were much more nuanced with their questions, and the lawyer helped immensely. Whenever there was a difficult of possibly misleading question, the lawyer would intervene, usually by stating "my client" to begin with, and at one point, when the cops tried to get aggressive, the lawyer folded his arms and said coolly, "Do you want us to leave? Because I don't believe my client has been charged with anything. He is here to fully cooperate." And the cop shut up and stared hate not at Sam, but the lawyer. When it was over and they walked out the front, the lawyer told Sam, "You need to call me if they ask anything else. Even over the phone."

"Do you think they will?" Sam asked.

"They might." The lawyer said. "It's a big case. But I think they would have detained you already if there were any significant problems." He put on a pair of expensive sunglasses. "I didn't want to ask about the computer in there." The lawyer said. "I thought that they might bring it up, and then I had something prepared, but it didn't come up."

"Is that good?"

The lawyer shrugged. "It could go either way." He said. "I think the best thing to do is to treat the computer as stolen property. Call the police today, and report it stolen. You've obviously been through a lot, so it's understandable not reporting it earlier. You can mention that you found the ID thing where the computer usually sits. If you don't report it, it might make it look like you're trying to hide something, at which point complications might come up."

"I really need it back." Sam said. "I mean, I'm a writer, I have a lot of important work on there."

"That does make things a little easier." The lawyer said. "Assuming, of course, that the police have it. If it's something you need to maintain your livelihood, I can put a little more heat on the matter. Issue an injunction or something. I don't see you getting it back until after they comb through, but once that's over I think it should be okay."

"Thank you."

"Remember to call the cops when you get back."

"I'll do it." Sam said. And he did.

After the phone call to the cops, and the bored looking one who came over to take Sam's statement, Sam drove over to the hospital. Somehow he managed to luck out and arrive just on time during visiting hours for the ICU. A nurse opened the door, and he signed in on a clipboard at a desk. When he walked into Lena's room, a shiver of ice ran up the back of his throat.

Lena was hooked to the bed by a variety of tubes and wires. Machinery around her beeped and whirred and hissed, and it was obvious that she was not breathing on her own. Her head was slumped to the side, in an unnatural way, and half her hair had been shaved off to deal with the head wound, leaving an ugly black row of stitches. It was the last thing Sam wanted to see. For a while he thought that it might have been better just to look at an open casket, with an attractively made corpse.

"Lena?" He asked. "Can you hear me?"

She said nothing in reply, and made no indication she could hear. The machines continued their work.

"I just wanted to say I'm sorry." Sam tried again, but there was still nothing. He stood for a few moments longer, unsure of himself. He thought that it might be a good idea to grab her hand, but both limbs appeared thoroughly covered in wires and tubing, to the point of reducing access. A nurse walked in and pressed a button or two on the machines. "What's wrong?" Sam asked, and she looked around, blinking suddenly, as if his presence were a sudden nuisance.

"Are you the husband?" She asked.

"Boyfriend." Sam said, "I mean fiancée."

Sam heard the nurse say she was going to get the doctor out of the corner of his hearing, but he was sucked up in the moment of Lena's sickbed. When he was a child he suffered from night terrors frequently, all the way up until the age of twelve or thirteen, and there was one specific fear he had that occurred over and over again. He was laying on a cold metal slab, naked. He could not move or breath. Sometimes he would see the world from the perspective of his own eyes and sometimes he would see it as if he were floating slightly above, or to the side. As he got older these terrors grew worse, or more elaborate. He would imagine that he was on a coroner's slab, when he realized what such a thing would be like, as a corpse. The feeling of panic remained with him to this day. Now, looking at Lena, all of that came rushing back to him, only instead of Sam on the slab it was Lena, sometimes he was her, and somehow she was him, but there was an undoubted feeling of connection. Vertigo overcame him suddenly, and he looked for a nearby chair. There was one in the corner, and Sam slumped into it and put his face in his hands, trying to hold his shit together the very best he knew how. The doctor walked in, and put a hand on Sam's shoulder.

"I'm doctor Niels." He said. "Why don't we talk outside?"

"It can be a lot to take in at once." Niels said. "If you're not used to it."

"I'm okay." Sam said. They were standing by the nurse's station, just down the hall from Lena's room. All the rooms in the ICU had glass fronts, so if Sam really wanted to, he could look back at Lena, and see everything all over again. He was trying his best not too.

"How bad is it?" Sam said.

"It's not very good." Niels said, carefully. "She was shot twice. The bullet that went in her midsection- through her stomach, dislodged a fairly good sized portion of intestine. And I'm afraid the other wound is...more severe."

"Her head."

"When she was shot in the head." Niels said, "The bullet entered her skull, and followed the path around it, to the side. It didn't actually pierce the brain itself. She's extremely lucky in that part. Its most likely the reason she's alive at all."

"But she's not awake." Sam said.

"Yes." Niels said. "Well, just because the brain wasn't pierced, doesn't mean that it wasn't damaged. There was significant swelling to the right front hemisphere. We had to drill into the cranium to relieve pressure. And with any procedure involving a head injury, there are significant risks."

Sam nodded.

"It can go something like this." The doctor said. "She might wake up tomorrow, or a week from now. Or a month. Or, in some cases, she might not wake up at all. Then there's the very real possibility of mental impairment. And that has a whole spectrum to itself."

The doctor talked some more, but Sam was no longer listening. It was all up to him from this point forward. He had to get the laptop back.

Time passed for Sam like everyone else. He closed the curtains on the glass patio doors, overlooking the beach, that he would not see the pier. He sat down and forced himself to write, from time to time. Most of all, he simply waited.

The interviews had come quite suddenly in those early days after the shooting. First the local network, like his agent said, and then the nationals, a little more slowly. He was on a fairly important daytime talk show, though he was not actually on it. In every case, much more content was said and given then what was actually put on the air. The airing made him seem like a victim of public mutilation. Which he supposed was true, in a way.

The Black Terror movie was green lit into production, which surprised Sam quite a bit, and he was put on the team to work further on the script. He was given a few names to write for, none of which he recognized. A foreign actor who had only starred in one independent production, and an actress best known for playing a girlfriend on television. Sam did most of his work from home, now, writing or re-writing the script by bits and pieces.

More than once, he thought that he would have moved if given the chance. It seemed that everything he loved about California had turned against him. He could no longer look at the beach, the way he used to. The agent was right, there was a renewed interest in his book, but he really did not want to be associated with it. Jesse had been reduced to a generic photo on twenty four hour news networks that was picked mostly because it was unflattering. He was someone to hate publicly now. If there was an interest in his book it was only because people wanted to know about the villainous other, and get their kicks from imagining how close they could come to such actions. All the while maintaining their own supposed purity. But no one was really pure, or safe. Anyone was capable of anything. And Sam did not want to think about any of it at all.

He visited Lena a few more times, bringing flowers or balloons from the hospital gift shop. He had never given her flowers before. Most of the time he sat in the chair in the ICU and scrawled a single phrase, over and over,

Lena healed from her wounds and made a full recovery

Hoping that some of the old magic from the laptop would still be in effect. But nothing seemed to change. The doctors told him the same thing, whenever he asked. No change. He was thinking about Ohio every day now. If she dies, Sam thought. I'll go back if she dies. he had a degree, after all. He could teach high school English, or something. When he arrived at home Paula was there, standing by the front door.

"I lost my key." She said.

He spilled to her, of course. Leaving out only the part about how Lena came to be, and the laptop. He told Paula everything else that had happened since the fight they had had, after watching that movie, and she nodded along, at one point holding his hand carefully, at another point simply sipping herbal tea out of her mug. That was one of the other surprises, finding out that she still had the tea and the mug at his place. For a minute it was almost like she had never left.

"You've been through a lot, Sam." She said, when he exhausted.

"No, I mean..." He trailed off. "I guess so."

"I saw you on the news." Paula blurted.

"What."

"I was at work. And someone had the news on, in the back, and then I was like, oh my God, that's Sam....so I guess I had to come. I mean, I should have called first, but after the way everything went...I really didn't want to call. So I figured, I'd just show up, and see how it went."

"Well, thanks." Sam said. "I've been pretty much sitting here by myself."

"That's kind of what I figured."

"Yeah."

"I mean, when we were together, my friends were my friends, and they were our friends."

"Yeah."

"But you only had Jesse. I mean, you had me, we were together, but you just seemed kind of closed off, you know?"

"Are you seeing anybody?" Sam asked.

"Are we going to make it like this?" Paula said. "That whole awkward thing."

"No. I mean, we don't have to. It doesn't matter."

"I was dating somebody for a little while. It was more like....we were both hanging out? And we were just sort of hanging out together, with benefits."

"I see."

Lena poked him in the chest. "Apparently, you have a fiancée."

"Fiancée?"

"That's what the news said."

"It's not exactly like that."

"What is it like?"

"She's my girlfriend."

"And they said that..."

"It was a thing...I have this lawyer....and he said that, saying that or whatever, about her, would make things easier, given her situation."

"Wow."

"Yeah."

"How did you guys meet?"

"We just...sort of ran into each other."

"Where do you go to just run into people?"

"I don't know. I really don't remember."

"What's she like?"

"She's nice. I mean....you ever have someone, who's just so into you, that they'll do whatever you say? Like, they'll do anything you want them to, just literally change their entire personality, if you wanted? That's what she's like."

"Sounds pretty intense."

"I guess so. But I feel I have this...this responsibility to her. I don't know."

Paula put the mug down on the table and looked at Sam. "I don't know what I should say."

"What do you mean?"

"I feel...okay, this is hard."

"Go ahead."

"I don't want to be mean."

"So don't be mean."

"But that's the thing." Paula said. "You take everything so hard, Sam. That night? When you ditched me at the movie? Nobody was trying to...to tell you anything wrong, or whatever. And you ended up getting all pissed off anyway and leaving."

"Your saying I have a chip on my shoulder."

"Oh God." Paula rolled her eyes. "I don't want to do this with you again. Like go to this negative place. There's really no need for it."

"I agree. But that is what you're saying, right?"

"I don't know. What do you think?"

"You're probably right. I'm sorry, by the way. For storming off like that, that night."

"Well, thank you for saying that."

"I'm leaving for Portland."

"Really?"

"Yeah." Paula nodded. "Really soon. Like in a couple of days."

"What happened?"

"Things aren't...I mean; they just aren't going anywhere here. Like I thought I wanted to do something creative, and work in the industry, but I really don't know now."

"I've thought about leaving too." Sam said.

"To be honest, I was kind of thinking you already were gone."

"Really?"

"That's kind of the reason I never came around." Paula said. "I just figured you would have packed up and moved on one day."

"Back to Ohio."

"Or to New York, or something. You can really write anywhere, can't you?"

"I guess I would." Sam said. "I mean, I guess I can write anywhere. And I will move. After Lena gets better. If she gets better."

"I hope she does."

"Thanks."

"Look." Paula took a deep breath. "I'm just going to come out and say what I wasn't going to."

"Okay."

"What you were talking about." Lena said. "Being in a relationship, or whatever, with someone that will do whatever you want...I have had something like that once. And it turned bad."

Sam said nothing.

"The guy I was with." Paula said, "He would do whatever I wanted. And I just...it wasn't enough. So he kept on trying. And in the end it got out that he resented trying at all, that I was doing something to him, by not appreciating it. Only I didn't ask for any of it. So, it was like you said, I felt responsible."

"Was that why you broke up?"

"No. He left. In the end he got really bitter, and just left. The thing I got out of it, is, when someone does that for you, it hurts both people. You can't function that way. Not if you're a regular human being."

But Lena isn't a regular human being, Sam thought. She's my creation.

Paula gave Sam a hug. "I'm sorry I said all that." She said.

"It's okay." Sam said, "Maybe I needed to hear it."

"I'm bad at this." Paula said.

"Bad at what?"

"Being friends with an ex. I always, like, in the past, I've always believed in a sort of scorched earth thing. Burning every bridge after I cross it."

"I guess I'm the same way." Sam said.

"I never even got my stuff out of here." Paula said. "And okay, yeah, I didn't have a lot of stuff..."

"You had the tea. And that mug."

"And I loved that mug. I really did."

"It's yours now."

"Thank you for not being stupid."

"How could I be stupid?"

"You could have thrown it all away, or something."

As Paula was driving away, Sam's cell phone rang. When he answered the lawyer's voice told him. "Sam, buddy? You're getting the laptop back."

It was hurry up and wait all over again at the police station. The lawyer made some comments at the front desk, and showed some paperwork. Minutes seemed to crawl by. Sam worried about the entire thing. What if the cops took everything apart? What if they gave him the laptop back, but kept the hard drive? There were other, worse possibilities at foot. What if Jesse simply erased the entire document, before going on his rampage? Or what if the cops erased the entire thing, zeroed it out to factory settings for some reason? He noticed his leg was twitching involuntarily, and willed it to stop. Everything would be fine. The documents would still be there, and when he retrieved them, he could fix everything. Or at the very least, he could fix Lena. When the cop came out from the back of the station and dropped off the computer, Sam was ecstatic.

He held it in his lap carefully all the way back as the lawyer drove him home. It was wrapped in a clear plastic bag with a red EVIDENCE sticker taped to the front. The lawyer was babbling about some sort of "further legal action" and same was nodding along in time with his voice, but not paying the slightest attention. When he put the computer back in its usual place, on the kitchen table, there was a moment of brief panic when he pressed the power button and nothing happened, until he realized the laptop was simply out of power. He plugged it back in, and crossed his fingers, waiting. When the blue Windows screen loaded up, telling him Welcome, Sam! he threw his arms up and cheered, as if the home team had just made a game-winning touchdown in overtime.

There were icons missing on the desktop. Not a lot, but a bit torrent client Sam used frequently was gone, and a video game. Sam wondered if it was possible that Homeland Security would charge him later for internet piracy. Still, he clicked on the MS Word icon and waited for it to load up. It did, and scrolled through, the Lena document was still there. Sam felt a wide grin extending across his face. He opened the document and read

She was pretty in a real way. Not as gorgeous as a supermodel, with defects painted over in Photoshop, but like the girl next door of playboy's past. And her body was equally appealing, with curves or thinness exactly where they belonged. She had the sort of brown hair with highlights that came from the sun and not a cosmetics bottle, and when she laughed you knew you were in the presence of something real.

He scrolled through the pages quickly, finally getting to the end, and typing

Lena healed from her wounds and made a full recovery

He quickly added

Lena woke up out of her coma today, on her way to a full recovery

Just in case the previous statement would not suffice. For a minute he sat at the computer, twitching nervously. He got out his phone and waited for the hospital to call. After five minutes of this, the waiting made him unbearably nervous. He got up to drive there. Before he left he noticed for the first time in weeks just how dark it was in the condo. He threw the blinds open on the patio, letting the sunlight bask across the carpet. Outside it was a normal day at the beach. People were walking by in swimsuits, some with children, and Sam realized it did not bother him in the slightest. For a moment he thought of throwing open the glass door, and letting in the sea air, but at the last second he stopped. he didn't want to get himself too worked up. He would go to the hospital, and if everything went well, then he would think about the beach.

It wasn't visiting hours for the ICU when Sam arrived at the hospital, but doctor Niels let him in anyway. The man was smiling broadly. Sam had never seen Niels smiling before. His teeth were large and eggshell yellow, and Sam got the distinct impression they were false. "Good news!" Niels said.

"Let's hear it."

"Ms. Lena has regained cognitive functions." Niels said. "And is responding to stimuli."

"That sounds good."

"In plain English, it means she's awake." Niels was still smiling. 'We've removed the breathing assistance as well. It's a fairly remarkable recovery. Would you like to see her?"

Sam said yes, and they walked the short distance to Lena's room in the ICU. Her eyes were bruised and she was skinnier than the last time Sam had been there, but there was no tube down her throat. Her chest rose and fell as she drew breath on her own. Sam walked in, and the nurse said. "Lena, honey? There's someone here to see you?" At that moment Lena's eyes fluttered open, and despite them being bloodshot, Sam thought that he had never seen anything so beautiful.

"Hi, honey." Sam offered.

"Hrts." Lena whispered.

"What's wrong?"

"Wtr." Lena scratched again. "Thrt hrts."

"You've had a tube down there!" The nurse said, more than a little too cheery. "Down your throat! Of course it's going to hurt!" The nurse came over with a white Styrofoam cup that seemed to be mostly filled with ice chips. Lena drank a little from it and coughed.

"Hi." Sam tried again.

Lena looked at him sideways. For a moment Sam thought that he saw outright hostility in her expression, but then he rationalized to himself that it was probably only pain. She nodded at him a little, and then her lips clamped down on the straw the nurse had inserted in the water cup. When she was done Lena said, "I have to pee."

"You have a catheter." The nurse said. "A tube? Going down there? So whenever you feel like you need to pee, honey, you just go right ahead and do it."

Lena tried to move her head up, and the nurse told her, "No, just go ahead and lie back. Don't get up just yet."

"I'm glad you're okay." Sam said.

This time there was no mistaking the look on her face. Pure anger, scrunched up and visible. "I'm not okay." Lena said, and then she turned her head away from him. The nurse must have seen it as well, for she put a hand on Sam's shoulder and said, "Sweetheart, why don't you come back tomorrow? Maybe she'll want some company then." Sam agreed, and left the hospital with distinctly conflicted emotions. On the one hand, Lena was alive, and conscious. On the other, something was wrong, that he couldn't put quite put his finger on. Still, when he went back to the condo, he did what he told himself he was going to do. Sam put on a pair of board shorts and flip flops, and went out to the beach.

Time passed as it was prone to do when not carefully watched. A makeshift memorial had sprouted up on the pier, full of flowers and pictures of the victims. The city had been undergoing serious talk to simply tear the pier down, and relocate it further down the beach in one direction or another, with all the attractions remaining. This was undergoing much dissent and debate among the community, most of it being focused on the historical value of the pier, and the hefty sticker price of such a task. As one talking head pointed out astutely, after the disaster of hurricane Katrina, no one tore down the Super Dome. As a temporary measure a security guard was assigned to the front entrance of the pier, and anyone that wanted to pass through had to walk through an ugly grey-and-beige metal detector. Sam doubted very much that the rent-a-cops and their detector would have stopped Jesse from doing what he wanted to do, or for that matter, anyone else with a similar idea. But he realized that people needed to feel secure in any way they can, even if it was all based on lies. For his part, on the one occasion he went back to the pier, he simply stopped in front of the memorial, and went no further.

He was still under contract to write, and so he wrote. Sam had put together a very rough version of a possible book about Jesse and the pier shooting. His heart wasn't in it at all, but the agent had provided a lawyer, and this was one of the terms he had agreed to. The publishing company had also agreed to put some money toward Lena's medical bills, since a person created out of thin air didn't usually have insurance, or even Medicare.

Sam received a mild shock when Tobin from the writing group e-mailed him a jpeg one day under the subject heading Re:what do you think?!? Inside was an actor dressed up as a superhero, which was no big deal really, except this one happened to dressed as the black terror. It was obviously a teaser poster, with a small font in capital letters at the bottom telling him 4-7-15 TERROR REIGNS. Sam hunted down Tobin's number on his phone, and called him up. "Did you get it?" Tobin asked.

"I got it." Sam said. "Is it really happening?"

"Yeah! I think so."

"It doesn't look bad."

"No. I mean, it doesn't, at all. The thing about it is, the costume is the strongest thing about this property. It's one of those things that, even though you really don't know this character, you feel like you know him. You get what I'm saying?"

"Yeah." Sam said. "I don't like the tagline."

"I agree. The tagline is shit."

"It sounds like some kind of nine-eleven things. Like it's something in really poor taste."

"Marketing comes up with this kind of stuff. They don't ask the writers."

"What are they going to call it? Like, the title."

"I think the studio is just going with the Black Terror!"

"Really?"

"Last time I heard, it's going to be a hyphenated job. Something like, the Black Terror: birth of a hero, was thrown out there."

"Okay."

"Like they definitely want the word hero in it, to offset the negative connotations of the rest of the title. I mean, its title by committee for this thing."

"Whose going to direct."

"This one guy. Some Doofus, Brett Ratner-esque type of guy."

"Oh."

"I mean, this thing isn't going to be good. There's almost no chance in hell that's going to happen. It's not going to be one of those rare birds, those tent poles that everyone likes and still get good reviews. I mean, Dark Knight won a fucking Oscar, and that's not going to happen here. All it has to do is make money. Open up number one for one weekend, comes in a close second a weekend or two after that, and everyone's happy. More importantly, the guys at the studio are happy, and that means more work for us in the long run."

"Well, that's good." Sam said. "I hope you get more work, Tobin. I really do."

There was an awkward pause on the phone as Tobin cleared his throat. "Look dude." He said. "I would be amiss if I didn't point out, my, ah, condolences."

"Okay." Sam said. "Thanks."

"I saw you on the news." Tobin said. "That looked like some heavy shit."

"It was." Sam said. "But I'm alright."

"And your, ah, girlfriend."

"She's there."

"The hospital."

"Yeah. Some positive signs. She's awake, I mean."

Tobin trailed on for some time, hovering just halfway between an apology and voyeurism, and Sam got off the phone the first chance he could. There had been a few such phone calls like this, since the pier. People wanted to say they were sorry, but what they really wanted to know was, what was it like? To come so close to death? To stare a killer in the face, and know the end was coming? It didn't bother Sam too much; after all, such thought would drive up book sales. It would have bothered him a lot more if Lena were not recovering.

But Lena did recover. It seemed slow, though the doctor termed it as "remarkably fast". There were tests and there was physical therapy, probably not enough of it, because money was starting to become a problem. Sam was exhausting his savings paying for Lena's care. Bills piled up and he paid what he could, what was threatened, and ignored the rest. Every day he went to the hospital. When Lena was moved out of the ICU he spent some nights there as well, sleeping in the sofa next to her bed. One day he brought the laptop with home, to try and get a little work done, but stopped once he noticed that Lena was glaring at him in unconcealed fury. He didn't bring the computer any more after that, but still, she was just on this side of passive aggressive with him. Lena rarely spoke, directly to him, if she could help it, and she ignored Sam most of the time when he said anything. At the time Sam thought it was a side effect of the brain injury, and when he asked the doctor about it, his suspicion was confirmed. "These kinds of things can change a personality." The doctor said. "Irritability is normal. Sudden bouts of anger can be expected. She should see a specialist for some time after being released. I would actually recommend two specialists, a neurologist and a psychiatrist, for long term."

Sam thanked the doctor for that advice, although inwardly he dismissed it. There was nothing wrong with Lena that he couldn't fix. He had proved that already, by writing that she would wake up and heal. All the physical damage, short of death, could be repaired. As for the emotional damage, or any kind of head shrink stuff, all he would have to do was write

Lena felt happy

And she would feel happy. He would write that she wasn't depressed, and she wouldn't be. But he would give it time. Sam wanted the entire process to be as natural as possible, and welcome her to their life together. There was no going back now. It was all Sam and Lena, from here on out, until the end. Or so he thought. When they finally discharged her from the hospital, letting Lena stagger into the backseat from the wheelchair, she stared out the window and spoke not once.

Lena was sitting at the kitchen table. The bandage was off her head, and despite her hair growing back unevenly, Sam could still see the scar where she had been operated on.

"We need to talk." She said. For some reason Sam felt a cold chill running down his spine.

"Okay."

"I'm leaving you."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm leaving you." Lena repeated.

"What do you mean?" Sam asked.

"I said it twice." She said. "Do you need me to say it again?"

"Okay." Sam said. "I mean, I heard what you said. But I guess what I mean is, why?"

"You know why."

"No." Sam said. "I really don't."

Lena stared at him with obvious, wide-eyed hatred, and then burst into a little artificial laugh. "No." She said. "I guess you don't. You haven't had to. Everything's been just fine, for you."

"So what's wrong on your end?"

The hate returned to Lena's eyes. "I know everything." She snarled. "I remember."

Sam's gut started to somersault. "I'm still confused." He said.

"I remember what you made me forget." Lena said. "About Jesse. I remember that you....you tried me out. You made me do one thing, and then another. You made me like one thing, and then another. I remember....and that's not even the right word is it? Because some of this I never knew in the first place. Like how I came to be, everything you wrote, and why you did it."

"How long have you been like this?" Sam asked.

"Since the hospital." Lena said.

"When you woke up?"

"It was before that." Lena said. "Or maybe it was right when I woke up. When I first saw the bed, and the hospital room, I knew. I remembered everything."

The laptop was sitting next to Lena at the kitchen table, propped up to the side. Sam slid into the chair next to her. "Let me think." He said.

"You mean use the computer." Lena retorted.

"I need to collect my thoughts."

"Your written down thoughts?' Lena mocked. "You can't tell me the truth about anything. When I know the truth, and I'm telling you, I know what's going on, you can't tell the truth to me. Your pathetic."

Sam opened the Lena document and scrolled through it to the end. He stopped cold. There was a large message, all in caps and bold print.

LENA KNEW THE TRUTH ABOUT EVERYTHING SAM HAD EVER WRITTEN ABOUT HER

He highlighted the message, and pressed the delete button. But it stayed. He tried using the blinking cursor and backspace. Still, it stayed. He highlighted it about and clicked on the cut command. Again, it stayed. Underneath he wrote.

Lena did not know

And as he was writing, the computer stopped obeying his commands, and started deleting his words, until the entire new message was gone. His heart was beating fast in his chest. The message was a permanent fixture of the document. Who had done this? The cops maybe? Or did Jesse put this in the laptop somehow, before going on his killing spree?

"I thought about smashing it." Lena said.

"Smashing." Sam repeated, as if from a long distance away.

"That fucking computer." Lena said. "I wanted to. A part of me wanted to throw it out the window, or break it with a hammer. And I tried to. I got the hammer out from underneath the sink. But when I held it up to the screen, I couldn't go through with it. Like I was watching what was happening outside my body, but I was only a passenger for the ride." Tears were streaming down her face. "And I remembered that I had felt like that before." She said. "And you made me. You made me feel like that, when you wanted to know about me and Jesse."

"I'm sorry." Sam said, helplessly.

"I couldn't..." And then Lena let out a squealing bleat, a cry of pain and rage that would have been pathetic under any other circumstances.

"I fixed you." Sam said.

"I didn't want to be fixed." Lena blubbered.

"No I mean..." Sam stammered. "I mean that, I fixed you, when you were in the hospital. I healed you. I got you to wake up." Lena was looking down at the table, not meeting his gaze. "Doesn't that count for anything?" He said.

"I'm leaving." Lena said. "Nothing is going to change that."

"Let's be logical here for a second." Sam said. "Where are you going to go?"

"Away from you."

"You don't have a driver's license. You don't have a birth certificate. Your practically an illegal immigrant, or something."

"Write that I have a driver's license." Lena said. "Write that I have a birth certificate, and see what happens."

"It doesn't work that way."

"Oh, really?" Lena barked. "And you know that because, why, you've tried it before?"

"No."

"Exactly. You haven't. You know why you haven't? Because for you, it's all about control. You want to control me. You get a kick out of it. It's your thing."

"God." Sam said. "I wish that you would shut up, for just one second."

"Exactly." Lena said. "It's all about control."

In a blind rage, Sam typed

Lena shut up

And when he looked at her, her lips were trembling, and her eyes were filled with rage, but she wasn't saying anything. "There." He said. "I did it, and you made me do it. Because I want you to listen to me, for just one second, without spitting out this...all this rage. I love you. Anything I did, I did because I love you."

Lena walked across the room and came back with a pen and a sheet of scrap paper. On it she wrote

You're a fucking liar

Sam grabbed the paper and balled it up with his fist, and Lena smirked at him. "What?" he snapped. "Do you want me to put down that you can't write, either? Is that what you want me to do?" he typed into the computer

Lena sat at the table and didn't move

For a moment they glared at each other. Then Sam typed.

Lena got up and stood against the wall

And he followed it with

She stripped off all her clothing and stood naked

She was still glaring at him, but now she was naked, and Sam was getting aroused. "You see this?" He said. "This is using you. I can do whatever the fuck I want, really. But I'm not doing it-"

Lena spit in his face.

His hand was moving before he knew what he was doing. It was not an open hand slap, but a closed fist punch. Sam hit her directly in the face, and for a minute Lena staggered back, as if she were struggling to stand. When she stood again her eyes were blurry with tears, and her lips were quivering, as if she were holding back her words, because Sam had not permitted her to speak. Sam screamed, then, loud and primal, and let out an outburst of profanity. He turned and barged out the glass patio door to the beach.

He was walking halfway down the sand breathing heavily and trying to collect his thoughts. Things would be okay. He could write in the computer that Lena would not spit at him, and she wouldn't spit at him. Better yet, he could write down that Lena would not harm him in any way, and she wouldn't. This entire thing could be undone.

He could make her have sex with him. What's more, he could make her enjoy it, too. She could know everything, and she wouldn't really have a choice...her body would betray her. He could write that she was terrified of leaving him, or him leaving her. There was a lot of wiggling room in that one block of bold text.

But why did he have to go along with it, in the first place? Sam could just get his computer checked out. He could have an expert look at it, and figure out a way to delete that one line, if it was some kind of virus, or he could have his word program re-installed. He could probably do that himself. It wasn't an unsolvable problem. He was calming down a little. Rain hit his nose and bare feet, one of those brief Southern California drizzles that comes down warm and wet and doesn't bother anyone too much at all. Sam turned around in the sand, resolved to solve his problems the best way he knew how, by writing his way out of them.

His resolve melted away completely when he came back in the condo.

Lena was still standing where he had left her. Still unclothed, and trembling against the wall. The floor was wet under her feet, and from the smell Sam could tell that she had pissed herself. Fear broke out of its box and down into his stomach. What if someone were to see her? The blinds hadn't been drawn. What would they think, walking in, to this sight? Sam already knew the answer, they would think he was abusive, and probably criminal. They would also notice the fresh swelling on her cheek, from where he had hit here. At the worst he would go to jail. His head was swimming. Jesus, God, how could he even think this way? Here Lena was, in this condition, after all she had already been through, and all he could think about was what would the neighbors think? To hell with the neighbors. What could Sam think about himself? He was all those things, and worse. He marched right over to the laptop, and highlight the last few things he had written, deleting them. Just as quickly, he typed,

Lena was free to do whatever she wished

Just like that, Lena took a gasp of air, going, huu-guuuh! and falling on the floor. Sam got up to help her, then stopped. There was nothing he could do. The patio door was open, and he went back to the beach. This time instead of turning left toward the pier, or right to walk the beach as he had done earlier, he headed straight out to the ocean. It was warmer than he expected but still cold enough to shrivel him up inside his shorts. He wandered out to chest level and let himself drift out there, just beyond the breaker point, feeling the sun overhead and trying not to think about whatever awaited him if he turned around and walked back. When he finally did turn around he had managed to lose both his cell phone and his flip flops in the water, and at the apartment Lena was gone.

When the Black Terror: a Hero for Ages was released in theaters nationwide there was a minor kerfuffle from activist groups who took offense to the title. Specifically, a spokesperson for the NAACP called the name of the main character "inappropriate" and the September Eleven survivors association made a statement saying the studio was "insensitive". The studio had been prepared for this amount of controversy, and pointed out rightly the African-American female love interest and sidekick of the main, Caucasian actor. When a few left-leaning news sources picked up the spin and made a bigger stink, the studio fell back on their backup plan and announced a "significant amount" of the proceeds from ticket sales would be donate to charities for both aggrieved parties. The end result was nothing less than badly needed free publicity, that did very little to effect the eventual outcome.

The Black Terror opened second on Friday night, its first weekend of May Ninth, beaten by a romantic comedy involving Seth Rogen and cannabis abuse. It plummeted soon after. The rom-com that won the day had cost its studio fifteen million, the Black Terror had a budget of over one hundred and fifty.

That was not its true cost, of course. The studio had paid at least forty or fifty million dollars to market its supposed tent pole production. Now it was deep in the red.

There was no real secret to why the film failed, at least according to the critics. The film managed to earn a paltry sixteen percent score on rotten tomatoes, putting it in such rare company of universally despised movies like Heaven's Gate or Waterworld. As one writer for the Chicago Tribune put it:

When it gets down to it, why was this film even made? Superhero popcorn flicks are often terrible, sure, but at least they have brightly colored, spandex clad characters in them that most kids (or adults) recognize from their past. I've been assured that the Black Terror made an appearance in print, but it was over and done with twenty years before I was born...and I'm not a young man, too young, anyway. For the life of me, I can't figure out who the intended audience of this travesty is supposed to be.

Tent pole movies are so named because they are made to prop up the rest of a studio's other, less successful films. They need to succeed, and succeed big. When one fails for whatever reason, the effect is immediate and responsive, like an asteroid crashing to earth and wiping out the dinosaurs. the Black Terror was pulled out of first run theaters after three weeks. One week after that, J.R. Leiksmith resigned from his position as head of the studio. Sam caught a picture of him online in a celebrity gossip blog wearing a suit instead of a dapper kimono, and looking much older than he had appeared that day in Los Angeles. Several months later the studio and all its assets were purchased by Sony pictures, which set about rapidly deconstructing their purchase any way they could, mostly by issuing layoffs en masse.

There were other casualties, as well. The handsome young unknown actor chosen for the lead role never found work again. He quickly managed to abscomb back to his native Australia, and in all the years to come, declined any interviews about the now-infamous bust that made up his first, and only, starring role. Relatives would note in later years that he could be quite bitter about the subject. Perhaps what hurt most of all was the fact that the bust did not indicate a certain malaise in the superhero movie genre as a whole. Three weeks to the day after the Black Terror flopped, a rival studio issued a similar release starring a somewhat obscure Marvel Universe property that broke box office records for the month, and launched another obscure male lead into stardom and a very satisfying movie career. What seemed to matter most of all, was which phone call you took, and which you let ring unanswered.

Sam managed to see the finished product in a mostly empty theater, just before it left town forever. He spent most the time trying to wonder which parts of the script were his, or even partly his. None of the dialogue, as far as he could tell, was from his efforts, and only part of the general plot was thanks to his doings. He stayed in the theater as the credits rolled over a bombastic orchestral composition. His name was there, sure enough, sandwiched between countless other peons of industry, just before the announcement that no animals were harmed in the making of this feature. He left afterwards and walked out into the Ohio cold.

When Sam left California he had made a beeline for Ohio. It seemed the only sane thing to do. After the events he had been through he felt that he needed an anchor to attach himself, in some ways, as if he could root himself into the grounds of the past and avoid blowing heedlessly into the wind. His parents were all too willing to welcome him back with open arms. At first, anyway. A month or two later and Sam felt the need to move along, or more specifically, move out, and he did so.

There were two things that seemed to keep him grounded, that long Ohio winter. Writing, and thinking about writing. Sam had always done this, plotted out his works in advance in his mind. Not that far in advance, but every time he would write a scene or finish a chapter, he would sit back and think about what the next scene or chapter would entail. In the case of his current non (or at least not overtly) fictional work, this became a matter of stretching the events until they fit a given page count. It was early December when One Night At the Pier was finally complete, and he e-mailed the whole thing to his agent.

Two weeks later the agent called back with the bad news. There had been two more so-called active shooters since the events Sam had written about, one of which occurred at Fenway Park during a Red Sox game. "And guess who was in attendance." The agent yapped. "Stevie King himself. Guy gets hit by a car and shot at in the same lifetime. What are the odds?"

"I've heard he's a Sox fan." Sam said.

"What the publisher is concerned about." the agent said, "Is that here's a major A-lister, and yeah, he's a little more prolific than you, Sam, I'm sorry its true. He loves to bang it all out on the keyboard. And of course he's going to do it in this case, guys got a built in audience."

"So they don't want to do the same thing."

"It's not only that. There's something called compassion fatigue. I didn't hear about it until just know. The way it was explained to me, people feel bad about something for so long, and then they get tired of feeling bad about it. They don't want to give a shit any more. And if something else bad happens, and you're like, hey, what about bad thing A? They get turned off completely."

Sam hung up on the agent without another word. When his phone started to vibrate with another incoming call, he turned it off. He felt sick to his stomach again. This had been a regular condition since returning to Ohio, feeling nauseous or crying suddenly for no reason. Or for too many reasons, really, if he was being honest with himself.

Writing the book had felt like a violation. The original book had felt like a partnership with Jesse, and with the other Veterans he had interviewed. The new work felt as if he were raping his corpse. He had done it because, in his heart of hearts, he wanted to hurt the man. He wanted to make him pay for ruining his life, to a degree anyway, although Sam still wasn't sure if or how Jesse had put the message on the computer that had driven Lena away. And it wasn't slander, not really, because the facts of what Jesse had done were visible to the entire world, and had been reported by the national media for months on end.

But when it came right down to it, Jesse was just another psychopath hell bent on a bloody end, in the eyes of everyone else, and such people were nearly interchangeable these days. Sam felt as though he had sold his soul for nothing. Or nearly nothing, anyway, he had hung up the phone before he had the opportunity to ask the agent if the publisher would want the advance returned. That could be a real problem, if it came to that. He would have to get a day job, and what the hell did he qualify for, anyway?

Sam looked around the one-bedroom efficiency apartment. He had left all the furniture back at the condo. There was an air mattress on the floor of the bedroom, and a card table where he sat at the computer. The room was drafty enough so that he had to wear a coat full time, in the winter. He was renting out the apartment in Santa Monica, mostly because due to the economy he would have had to sell at a loss. If he could even sell at all. As far as he knew, Lena still had a key, and if she wanted to she could even let herself back in.

The Lena document was still on the computer. He had thought about deleting everything, burning all the notebooks, and forgetting the entire thing. He had almost had done that very thing, when a new phrase revealed itself, below the bold type that could not be erased on the word document

Lena was pregnant

Which caused Sam to shiver with apprehension, and something else. Maybe joy. She was still there, at least. The words proved that she was still there, and that she was not a product of Sam's imagination. When he stared at the words he thought of them as a message. Lena had obviously done other things since leaving him, and been other places. But maybe, just maybe she had chosen to share this moment with him. Even if she didn't do it consciously, even if she only thought I want Sam to know. Now she was going to have a child. Sam realized that it might be his baby, after all. There was no getting around it. With the laptop he was now responsible for two lives. He felt a deep ache in his chest, and wetness clogged his eyes until the tears spilled down his cheeks. What if she would get an abortion? Or give the baby away? She had been single, after all, when she left him. With no job or money to speak of. He had no idea how she got by day to day, with the simple business of survival. But maybe she had a man. Someone good and fair, who would treat her right and provide for her future. If not maybe she would come back to him, and Sam could apologize, and more than apologize, do the right thing. Treat her like someone real, instead of a creation. A creation implied property, and Sam no longer wanted to possess Lena. Instead he simple wanted her presence.

But when Sam regained control of his emotions he went out to Best Buy and bought a small hard drive. He backed up the Lena file and all its writing, just in case the computer would short out one day, or become infected with a virus. A week later and he did better than that, Sam disconnected the laptop from the internet and bought a new machine, to allay that fear. Going above and beyond he printed out every page of the Lena file, and bound them together at the bottom of a thick cardboard box. It was a manuscript he never intended to sell, or read again.

Merrell Michael

Beaumont, Texas May 2014
