Business As Unusual, a novella by Charles Copeland

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Now available in PDF format or printed form, Business As Unusual,

a novella by Charles Copeland

Business As Unusual, by Charles Copeland. This 68-page novella is composed around multiple characters living out their lives in the real world, after the novels into which they'd been written were finished. The characters appear, by all accounts, to be completely normal. But are they?

Read the first 5 pages right here ... FOR FREE

Part One

Stony von Hellemond peeked out the front door of his paper palace and strode to the edge of the shelf.

“Go Red Sox!” he shouted, as if a ballgame was actually underway. It was four days until the new year; no Red Sox games would be played for another three months.

The shelf on which the paper house sat was part of a bookshelf built into the wall of Nolan Dalton’s remodeled Victorian house. It was in what was supposed to be Nolan’s “writing room”, in the converted attic. There were ten levels of bookshelves in all: most held great volumes of war books; two housed a library of Stephen King novels; but the top shelf — the penthouse — was the foundation for Stony’s house, and from it stretched a great expanse of eighteen inches of plywood on which sat Alphonse Lamonda’s personal palace, his “cathedral” devoted to all things baseball.

Stony spoke as if sounding a rally cry, and he stared directly at Al’s palace.

“Go Red Sox!” — more as if claiming the territory below and abroad than yelling to hear his own voice.

Six feet away, through windows cut in Al’s paper palace, one could see baseballs levitating in mid-air like snowballs suspended in-flight — until Stony shouted. The snowballs dropped to the palace floor. Al stepped from the doorway cut from the paper, smiling as if pleased by another Red Sox collapse in the World Series.

He walked to the edge of his six foot high platform.

“Yankee mystique,” he said in a voice that was, typical for him, taunting: that made you aware of his level of Yankees fandom, that made you sure he was a New Yorker. His reply was undoubting, and it was more than a rally cry … it was open defiance.

“Go Red Sox,” Stony said through gritted teeth.

They stood there, separated by four feet of shelf space occupied by plastic barbed wire and booby traps, as if the room below was a kingdom to be ruled. Both men were about the same height, at just over four inches tall, and both unable and unwilling to negotiate the demilitarized zone that separated them.

Al waited until Stony looked ready to make his proclamation again.

And then he said it again: “Yankee mystique.”

Stony’s face wrinkled, disapproving — but that was how he always looked when facing off against Al. He drew in a deep breath as if yelling it louder would bring more conviction.

“GO RED SOX!”

He was always louder than Al. And not only louder, but also more desperate.

Al paused for a moment longer, like a power pitcher intimidating a hitter before firing a ninety-eight mile-per-hour fastball.

“Mystique” — without changing in tone.

Revulsion tugged at the corners of Stony’s mouth.

“Red Sox Nation!”

This reclamation hung in the air like an eternally resounding echo — — Until it was crushed by “The House that Ruth Built,” — and then the echo faded.

“The Green Monster!”

“Murderer’s Row.”

“Fenway Faithful!”

“Mister October.”

As much as they argued over it, the heated rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees would not begin until March … no matter how much yelling went on.

But if Major League Baseball could ever disguise itself as tactical warfare, it would do so with the help of Stony and Al.

Dante, sitting under the desk on the other side of the room, frowned at the argument. The white toy poodle, who was much more capable of humanlike actions that any other dog or human ever gave him credit for, had taken a break from writing his latest novel and was staring at his laptop, going over a list of questions asked on his website. A man from London wanted to know about his life, what made his mind tick, and what his credo was.

That last part was what concerned him most. He figured he could easily answer the other stuff, though he rarely ever did on the website. How would his readers take it to know that the eleven novels published under the name “Nolan Dalton” were actually the work of a dog? And not just that, but one that had never lived the life of a family pet, but of somewhat of a human himself. By all rights, at seventeen years old — in human years — he shouldn’t even be alive at all, let alone having written eleven novels for his master to publish.

But that last part: his credo. He had one, perhaps even more than one, but he’d just never given it a lot of thought.

And this new but ongoing dispute over baseball did nothing to bring him any closer to any sort of answer.

On the floor, in the center of the room, Maya had begun losing her patience. She was a brown plastic gorilla, almost ten inches tall, and if the room was territory over which two baseball fans would argue, which was moronic to her, Maya was the one who presided over it, under Presidential declaration of emergency wartime martial law powers.

Hearing the clash between Stony and Al did not amuse her.

It never did.

“They do this kind of crap just to piss me off,” she mumbled to Smokin’ Joe, one of the boxers which had broken free from the Rock ‘em, Sock ‘em Robots boxing ring that Nolan had quit playing with years ago. Maya continued. “For no other reason than just to get as far under my plastic skin as they can.”

“Maya?” Joe said, airing a certain level of apprehension. It had been his job for years to calm her and be the peacemaker, even though she’d always been the peace keeper. “I still don’t think they even know you’re real.”

She squinted her eyes as she glared up at them. “They know. They know damn good and well that I’m real. Who do you think they always call out to when one of ‘em gets hurt after they start throwing staples and launching paperclips at one another?”

A small German man named Rudolf drove around the room in a radio-controlled Hummer, which he’d “borrowed” from one of the neighborhood boys.

“Hey!” Maya shouted. “Slow that contraption down! Who in the ever livin’ hell do you think you are, Dale Earnhardt?”

Rudolf pretended not to hear her and completed two more laps around the room before driving out the door.

He also pretended he was an actual, honest-to-goodness human, not a created character like the rest in the room.

To Maya’s right, in the corner beside the closet door, a stout, four inch tall, old man named Willard had attracted a rather sizable audience: a nine inch tall demon couple, Ben and Dawn, and two other four inch tall humans named Adam and Carrie. Willard listened to a KISS radio with a cellular phone refrigerator magnet at the ready, waiting for WAAF’s Daily Rock Trivia Question. If he could answer today’s question correctly, he would win a four-night stay at a bed and breakfast on Nantucket Island. He was not even the least bit interested in the prize package — Nolan and his wife, Victoria, could use a vacation anyhow — he only wanted to be able to say he’d won.

But Ben glanced up at Stony, who from that angle looked much taller than he really was — almost real.

“When do you think they’ll ever stop?” he whispered to Dawn, trying not to blow fire at her.

She whispered back, “Whenever either one gets hurt. You know that old saying, ‘It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye”. Or is it … after someone loses an eye? I always get so confused with that one.”

Generally speaking, everyone who lived in the room tried, really tried, not to get sidetracked by Stony and Al, or anything else that happened way up on that shelf, with its two houses made of filler paper.

It had been that way ever since they first arrived. When Stony was first created, he’d grown out of the paper on which his character study had been written. He wore a little metal something on his head — probably a thimble, upon which he’d stuck a sticker with the Red Sox logo on it — he called it his “Sox hat”; and he had a tiny plastic baseball bat from a Cracker Jack box, which he’d often claimed had been game-used by Ted Williams in his homerun-hitting final at-bat.

Al, on the other, much more abrasive hand, had never wanted to arise from his character study sheet — and was never supposed to, after having been crumpled and thrown away. But that’s what former Army soldiers from Brooklyn do when confronted with, or by, Red Sox fans, they rise up, because they have to as Yankees fans. At the bottom of Al’s character study sheet had been written a note, scrawled in a very frustrated hand: Al is too much of an asshole to get along with. Even in a work of fiction.

That was as much as anyone knew about them prior to their arrival in the room.

Stony’s house was small and quaint, like a cottage on Cape Cod. It was made from three copies of his character study sheet: some of the words had been scribbled out and on the outside had been written a tense, angry splashing of words …

Stony, on one wall.

Property of Stony! on another.

Stay the hell out! by the door.

And above the bedroom window, on the wall facing Al’s palace, printed in huge uppercase block letters: GO RED SOX!!!

In truth, it didn’t look much like a real house. It had no shingles on its roof, no chimney, no siding, only two windows, both of which were square holes torn from the paper. No effort had even been made to draw shingles or a chimney, siding or real windows, all of the elements that would have made it more house-like by some “Home Sweet Home” illusional effect. But everyone else in the room thought of it as a house and not folded papers.

Al did not intimidate Stony. He was all hot air when it came right down to it. His Jack Nicholson sneer was more likely to inspire laughing or apprehension, but never intimidation.

He did worry everyone else in the room, though. And he frustrated the ever-living hell out of Nolan, the Creator, who also lived in the same house but not with everyone in the room.

That’s not to say that Stony couldn’t be just as frustrating when he wanted. Nolan, who checked in on everyone in the room every other day or so, was baffled on a fairly regular basis when seeing Stony standing in the little makeshift doorway, staring up at him and declaring, “Ya know, you could get to work and create a carbon copy of Jennifer Aniston for me … smaller, of course, and maybe with bigger boobies … but you get my meaning.”

Stony, of course, seemed to interpret Nolan’s expressions otherwise. As much as his Creator should have known about the mind of his creation, he did not. Where others seemed worried or frustrated or even offended, Stony saw them as being in awe of him, and perhaps a little jealous.

In Stony’s mind (a place where no one else would dare to live on a voluntary basis), he was a misunderstood genius. Stony, the brains of the outfit. Stony, the thinker. Stony, the brilliant war strategist. Stony: not only the most brilliant, but also the best looking man in his whole mixed up little mind.

The others tried to reckon him as little as possible. Not because they didn’t like him (because in his head everyone loved him), but when they did reckon him, he might be likely to try to recruit them into the KISS Army, Red Sox Nation, or, when he felt especially generous, into his own personal religion, to which he would elect himself King.

Or he would often try to appropriate anything he needed from anyone else by boldly walking right up to them and claiming possession of it: “This is now my TV!” or “This is now my money!” Or, if he desired to possess something emphatically enough: “This is now Stony’s Imperial Hummer!”

“Go Red Sox!” — insistent, like a pioneer claiming new territory as his own.

Willard pressed his ear to the radio, and its news of the war in Iraq and the upcoming Presidential election and weather for places he had never been.

Dante closed his eyes. The paragraph-long sentence he had been forming in response to the email shrank to a single word: “Patience.”

Al paused just long enough to make sure his ensuing reply would get inside Stony’s head.

“Yankee Mystique.”

“Go Red Sox, goddammit!”

Al smiled, as usual, to himself.

The paper palace behind Al also had several words crossed out, but there was only one word written on the outside wall. One word — DANGER!!!

All it ever really took to make him smile was to look at that word. Neatly drawn above it, beside the door, were a human skull and crossed bones.

Nolan Dalton kept two fire extinguishers in his writing room, close to Al’s palace, which always seemed to be just the right place for them.

If Stony could make one feel uneasy on occasion, Al could bring on bouts of full blown nervous breakdowns instantly by doing nothing more than smiling.

Downstairs in the living room, Peanut and Brownie, two rubber ducklings that were pretty well inseparable, were telling Doc that Brownie had once seen Al levitating baseballs.

Doc was British and spoke through a waist-deep accent, about seven inches tall when he stood up straight — which he rarely did these days, since his back began acting up a little longer than three years ago. His bushy eyebrows made it seem as if he was always squinting, though you could just make out a twinkle in his eyes when he smiled.

“I love dreams,” Doc told them. “I had a dream myself once — I got locked up inside the Hershey chocolate plant when the workers had gone home for the night. When I woke up the next morning I was a tad too fat for my pants. That was a good —”

Brownie shook his little rubber head. He never spoke except to whisper into Peanut’s ear.

“Brownie says it wasn’t a dream.” Peanut paused. “Everyone was at breakfast and the little bucket-head came back to the writing room. Al was standing under seven baseballs that were floating.”

“Well.” Doc looked at Brownie. “I did see a story on Stony’s TV once about a man who could make it look like things were levitating — a magician, they called him. Very popular in some sandbox somewhere they call Las Vegas. Perhaps Al has learned the art of illusion, as they call it.”

Brownie, naïve but not stupid, looked up at Doc with perfectly sensible eyes, and then whispered something more into Peanut’s ear.

“Brownie says it wasn’t an illusion. The baseballs were really floating.”

Doc leaned forward and ruffled the feathers atop Brownie’s head. “Perhaps. Anything within reason is possible.” He looked over at some of the others in the kitchen, who were engaged in a game of Lick-it and Stick-it, using their hands to throw chewed gum at the screen door window. He added to his earlier comment, “Or without reason, I assume.”

Back upstairs, Stony hammered away while Al lengthened his pauses to enrage his opponent even further.

“Go Red Sox!”

“Yankee Mystique.”

“It’s just so damn aggravating,” Maya groaned. Her knuckles scraped the hardwood floor when she spoke. “How damn many times do they need to keep going through all of that?”

“Maya, please,” Smokin’ Joe said.

Dante typed “Patience” as a reply for a third time.

Willard turned up the radio volume. His audience tried not to look up at either house.

But there were two other people in the room whose attention was drawn to the duel above. Their heads swung back and forth as they shifted their attention from one house to the other — as if watching a tennis match in-play.

One of them was Jay, a shy Texan who stood five inches tall. He had a long scar running down the right side of his face — healed for years but still quite visible. His eyes were open wide and he allowed his jaw to drop in order to display his surprise.

He was fascinated by this exchange between Al and Stony, though he had no idea what had provoked it or what it was even all about — maybe because he had no idea. It was the expelled energy which amazed him. It was like watching the Creator, Nolan, and his wife, Victoria, when they came home from shopping each week: they’d come from the car and unload a handful of bags, and then another handful, and still another. The momentary idea that this action could be repeated to infinity was intoxicating and addictive. No matter whose territory it was, it threatened to become nothing more than two names, Red Sox and Yankees, tangling forever. To Jay, a Devil Rays fan, that possibility was utterly horrifying, and that was all the reason as to why it was so hypnotic. Exhilarating, even.

Next to Jay stood a young boy — he had once been a parakeet in a long-past life. His name was Blue. This was not the first thing he’d been called, but it was what he was called now.

The first thing he’d been called (by Jay, it just so happened) was “Breh,” because that was the first sound the youngster had made as a baby … aside from the crying noises. It was a momentous occasion — everyone had been there to watch as he rose up out of his character study sheet. No one in the room had ever been created as a baby before … or even “born” in any imaginable way. It had always been thought of as impossible until the day it happened.

Pete, the created father (who had also once been a parakeet, but hadn’t been created as a baby) had decided, with a little help from Maya, that “Breh” wasn’t exactly a fitting name.

Jay’s second choice for a name was Nolan — after Nolan Ryan, who had always been Jay’s idol. But that name was already in-use in the house, and as such was voted down as well, as it would only serve to promote confusion.

The name Blue was suggested by Stevie, a blind bullfrog who was so old that he was now confined to two tied-together Matchbox cars that had been pushed over to the growing character study sheet so that, unable to see it, Stevie could listen to the event. He was the one to admit that the “birth” seemed to bring out “a case of the blues” for the baby. Hence, the name stuck.

Pete liked the name. “Blue,” he’d said proudly. “Good name for someone who’d once been a parakeet.”

Time confirmed the appropriateness of Stevie’s choice. Blue was treated like a member of Rock-n-Roll royalty, especially by his father. Great things were expected of him: he was a baby who’d been born, in a sense, not merely created as a grown-up. A boy who had never had to suffer the indignity of living (or dying) in one of Nolan’s novels, treated like crap, and almost always traumatized. He was a creation free of everyone else’s past. Blue was the future.

And jay had formed a special relationship with the boy. He’d helped bring the baby into the world when he “invented” the robot 2-XL, a metal cylinder capped with a head that held two rolling eyes the size of marbles, and equipped with metal arms and four small wheels. He (2-XL was referred to as “Deuce,” since he was the second, more successful version of the “invention”) stood in a corner of the writing room, at attention, and for the moment facing Al and Stony. The names “Yankees” and “Red Stockings” flipped back and forth almost casually on the display screen in his cylindrical chest.

Deuce was the product of sheer creative will on Jay’s part — and a great deal of assistance from Jay’s roommates (and the Sharpco computer which aided in the protection of the house). He had dreamt of 2-XL and vowed not to rest until Deuce was built. Only after Deuce’s eyes lighted with a kind of almost robotic consciousness, and he had rolled across the writing room floor on his own four wheels, was it also discovered that he possessed a shallow drawer in his cylindrical torso — a realm of creative darkness, perfect for character study “birth”.

Jay, therefore, considered himself as somewhat of an uncle.

He also thought of himself as Blue’s “pal”.

Pete often spent the afternoons reading Stephen King novels to Stevie in the laundry room down the hall. Sometimes Blue stayed with him. At other times Blue went off with Jay … which Pete allowed only if Maya was nearby to stop them from going downstairs.

Jay had always wanted to show the world to Blue: both the world he knew and the one he imagined to exist outside the house, of which he’d never been a part. What troubled Pete about letting them go off alone was that Jay had never seen the real world, and as such could not properly escort Blue through it.

“The first thing you gotta see is the Grand Canyon,” Jay once told Blue. “That’s where the whole universe came from when it blew up. It was called the Huge Kaboom. Everything flew right out of the Huge Kaboom, see, and it’s all been flying around ever since. For almost thirty whole years! You look outside at night and see all those stars and planets and moons? That’s all stuff that came right outta the Grand Canyon out there! So big!”

Jay was also subject to extended, highly energized meanderings for which his imagination was the only boundary.

“There’s also space people out there too. Except they’re not really space people since they were shot right out of that Grand Canyon, so they’re still Earthlings who live in space, and they float around out there in space in what’s called spaceships because what else have they got to do way out there in the middle of all that space? Do you know about gravity yet? That’s what makes you pee on the ground instead of up in the air.”

Not that Maya ever had any up close experiences outside the house, either, but where Jay’s imagination was light — light enough at times to float his thoughts up to the ceiling — Maya’s was heavy and drew one back down to comforting reality.

About humans Maya would always say, “Morons not so far removed from the missing link. And so cruel, too! Even the ones who seem nice — don’t trust ‘em even for a second. You never know when they’ll try to lock you up in the zoo.” Or she would say, “They’re all stupid and ugly. If there was ever a stupid and ugly contest, they’d all lose. Or win. Whichever is stupider and uglier.”

Maya might be a realist who sees what she sees for the way she sees it. Jay, on the other hand, well, he used to stare at the sun … a lot. And he’s been known to play with electricity on occasion. So that explains that.

As for Blue, it was hard for anyone to ever guess precisely what he thought, for he was still only four years old. He was attentive and curious, and seemed to understand almost everything explained to him.

But what he made it all of it no one could really say, because so far he had never so much as tried to speak a single word. Some, especially Pete, worried that Blue might not be able to speak at all.

Jay simply imagined that Blue spoke Italian.

Pete was always a worrier, protective of his son the way most parents are … or were, once in time … and though it was pointed out to him by his friend Smokey — an energetic ball of energy and electricity disguised as a ferret — that many children spent a long time listening before even trying to speak, Pete couldn’t help but worry.

There were other people, of course, who having once learned to speak, never seemed to shut up.

“Go Red Sox!”

“Yankee Mystique.”

“Teddy Ballgame!”

“The Babe.”

“GO RED SOX!”

“Knock it off, you two!” Maya shouted.

Nothing questioning in Maya’s tone: you heard her authority, clearly, even if you weren’t in the room.

“Baseball season is three whole months away yet. I don’t want to hear another damn word about it!”

“Then don’t listen,” Al said.

With Al distracted, Stony took the opportunity to scream, “Red Sox! Red Sox! Rrrrrrrred Ssssssssssox!” as if shouting it more often would help win the debate.

“Okay, you two want trouble?” Maya arched her back and prepared to beat on her chest.

“Yup —” Al said it in a way that made it sound like both a question and an answer.

Jay and Blue both turned to watch, as if a new general had been freshly minted and introduced to the war.

“Well we don’t want trouble,” Joe shouted to Al. “Maybe you two could settle your differences some other way.”

“Hail Red Sox Nation!”

Al smirked down at the rest of the room. Maya fired back a sneer. Smokin’ Joe stepped in front of Maya. Dawn and Ben shuddered. Adam and Carrie turned away. Willard whispered, almost in a seeming chant, “Ask the damn question. Ask the damn question. Ask the damn question already.”

Dante, with his laptop balanced on his curly-hair-covered legs — the only comfortable position for him — started to type with the four digits of his tiny paws: “Dear Rayven, thank you for your interest in my work. I’m not sure I can tell you anything very interesting or revealing about what I write. The books seem to write themselves sometimes —”

Blue looked up at Al and shook his head.

Al looked down at Blue and nodded in approval.

Blue had plenty of reason to shake his head in each of the four years of his life. He shook it at the explanations of how the roomful of creations had come to be: how as novel characters they had nowhere else to go once their novels ended. Of the twenty novels to which they belonged, none were ever written as a series, where the characters might go on to live more fulfilling lives — more fulfilling, at least, than the lives they were living now. Blue shook his head quite often with those stories.

He shook his head at Maya’s explanation for the deplorable behavior of people in the real world, the ones who created them and people in general.

He shook his head as he watched the other creations in the writing room: playing, being read to, never trying to learn anything of any real use; watching TV for entertainment or — like the Wise Men in the wall poster by the door, who only looked wise — playing practical jokes on one another, laughing at everyone else in the room, wishing they could throw things out of the poster and into the room.

But Blue never spoke a word. Maya said it was because Jay never stopped talking long enough to give him a chance to, but good old Smokey said that when Blue was ready to speak, he would.

A treasure of questions followed Smokey’s assertion. Could Blue speak? Would he? And when?

The others not only wanted to know, they expressed their need to know: right now, two more infant character study sheets lay in Deuce’s drawer. Could everyone expect the newborn creations to have the same capabilities and possibilities as babies born in real life … in the real world?

Or perhaps even more?

Blue was the future.

But, for the time being, the future had to be kept secret.

At that very moment, Nolan Dalton was in the living room downstairs, on the phone with Victoria, about the strange utility truck that was parked in the woods by the house. Sharpco’s security cameras had picked it up every day in the past week. Nolan had seen the truck himself, with its electric company logo on the side, but Sharpco confirmed that no electric company of the kind ever existed.

“We can’t hide Blue forever,” Victoria said to Nolan.

“Or the others, when they rise up,” Nolan said, glancing out the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the truck again.

“The others, right,” Victoria said, hesitating.

“So who the hell are these people with that truck?”

“No one from Con Edison, that’s for sure,” Victoria said. “I just heard about a company called Bio-Grow that just received a huge defense contract. My boss seems to think they might already know about our little engineering experiment.”

“They want to know how we’re creating people?” Nolan asked.

“That’d be my guess. I’ve got them tailing me into Boston right now, honey. I’m gonna park at Fenway Park and take the T-train home. Let them keep their eyes glued to my car. That will buy us some time to figure out what to do.”

Nolan changed the subject.

“This morning I was going through some old files in my computer. I found some old character study sheets I hadn’t completed. Maybe it’s too weird to even consider, but I could finish them and make the characters life-sized, and then I could have ‘em destroy that company and all its —”

“We can’t discuss that over the phone, honey,” Victoria said.

He said goodbye and went outside — just for a minute — to inspect the security system and to see if the truck had returned.

Before stepping out he stopped beside Doc, who was sitting on a dollhouse chair. He was the referee in the Lick-it and Stick-it game.

“I’ll only be a minute,” Nolan said. “Keep a look out, will ya?”

Doc raised a hand in salute.

“Fret not,” Doc said. “The world will remain well under my watch.”

In the writing room, Al and Stony continued facing off, Al still smiling, Stony still scoffing back.

But for the moment, silence reigned.

Echoing silence. Except for the KISS radio and Dante’s typing.

“There is no real grand goal with or behind my writing,” Dante typed. “I listen to a lot of music. It seems to suggest stories to me, the way rainbows suggest harmony and wallpaper patterns occasionally suggest images. The Beatles suggest some. Elvis for others. And every now and then I dabble in some of Jimi Hendrix’s mastery of genius.”

“After this commercial break,” Willard heard from the radio, “we’ll throw today’s trivia question at you.”

Maya cautiously unclenched her jaws.

Al kept smiling, as if testing the light breeze sifting through the window above Dante’s desk, or staring out the doorway and down the stairs … or as if waiting for the precise moment to say —

“Mickey Mantle.”

“Lefty Grove, Cy Young, not to mention Tris Speaker, Jimmy Foxx, and Captain Carl Yastrzemski!”

“Goddammit, that does it!” Maya pounded her fists against her chest. “Jay, swing the rope ladder over by Al’s ledge!”

The rope ladder was just as its name suggests, and it hung from a track attached to the ceiling. It ran around the entire room and allowed the creations access to desks, chairs, shelves and everything else otherwise out of reach. Jay swung the ladder away from its current position at the window sill.

“Hey!” Dawn said. “How are we supposed to know when it’s raining outside?”

“You never go outside,” Maya said. “Why do you care if it’s raining?”

Jay brought the ladder over to Al’s ledge.

Dante typed on, paying no attention to the ruckus. “I’ve read many novels. Something about fiction’s shape, its certainty, comforted me through some very hard times.” He thought about taking that last part out. So far he had carefully avoided any reference to his life apart from his writing.

But why?

A wild idea gripped him then: How would it feel to finally blow the secret … to tell this fan who he really was? It hit him like a book idea. He could already hear the narrative in a storyteller’s voice.

It drowned out all the other voices, even —

“Lou Gehrig.”

“Carlton Fisk and Bobby Doerr!”

“One final warning … don’t make me have to come up there,” Maya shouted.

“Please don’t go up there,” Joe whispered. “It’s Al we’re talking about.”

“Oh, stop,” Maya said, approaching the rope ladder. “I’ve had it with those two.”

“Baseball isn’t for three months,” Joe said to Al and Stony. “It doesn’t even matter who’s better right now.”

“Joe Di Maggio.”

“Dom Di Maggio!”

“Don’t waste your breath.” Maya stopped at the ladder. “They’re both insane.”

“They’re … they’re just playing!” Smokin’ Joe hurried to her side. “They’re only doing it to get attention.”

Maya frowned at them. “Well, then they shouldn’t be arguing in front of Blue.”

“Hey! Guys!” Jay ran in a circle, right around Maya and Joe. “Baseball is a game played by real people from the real world. You guys are just fans. This is our reality. I know it sucks to hear stuff like that, but it doesn’t make it any less right!”

“Not just ours,” Stony said. “Many.”

“Many what?” Jay, hands resting on the rope ladder, stared up at Stony.

“Realities … there are many.”

Jay’s jaw fell wide. “Realities?” Still holding on to the rope ladder, he took a step toward Stony’s end of the shelf.

“Many realities,” Stony said.

“Where are they?” Jay asked, taking another step, glancing all around.

“Up here. I’ll show you.”

“Cool …” Another step.

“Blue, you want to see all the realities, don’t you?” Stony asked. “There are realities where you’re small enough to fit right in my pocket. Do you know what a pocket is?”

Blue, hurrying along after Jay, looked up at Al. Al smiled down at him and nodded.

Maya watched the rope ladder scooting slowly away from her and shouted, “Hey! Bring that back! Come here!”

“Maya,” Joe said. “Please …”

“Oh, shut up, blockhead!” She ran after them on all fours. “Jay! Blue!”

But Jay couldn’t hear her. He was busy thinking: Different realities! The ladder slapped abruptly against the shelf.

“Don’t you dare go up there!” Maya shouted. “And don’t let Blue —”

But Blue had already shot past Jay and was halfway up the ladder.

“Blue!” Maya gasped. “Blue, come down from there!”

“Hey, Blue! Wait for me!” Jay raced up after him.

Maya followed, screaming in gorilla as she shouted, “Stop him, you stupid redneck!”

Smokin’ Joe trailed behind.

Stony stood in the doorway to his house when Blue and Jay made it to the shelf. It was the only entrance … or exit.

Blue, on his young, swift legs, slipped past Stony and into the house.

“Hey, Blue! Maybe you should —” Jay stopped at the doorway. Stony had jammed most of it with an empty cigarette box.

“Heyyyy! How do I get in?”

“Maybe you don’t.” Stony backed into his house until he was completely within its paper walls.

Jay dropped onto his belly. He squeezed his head and his hands through and got no further.

Maya and Joe stood behind him. “Get Blue out of there!” Maya shouted. “Get him out of there!”

“Blue? Hey, Blue!” Jay’s vision slowly adjusted to the dark interior of the house. At first he could see nothing at all.

And then … the darkness filled with stars!

“Whoa! Cool!”

There were more stars than the clear nighttime sky. More than the screensaver on Dante’s laptop computer! There were stars and planets and galaxies and clouds of cosmic gasses growing in every direction.

The universe expanded outward like a projection at the Boston Museum of Science’s planetarium show, and Jay marveled that he could see it all — stars being born, galaxies collapsing in on themselves, supernovae. In the middle of it all “stood” Stony and Blue, appearing as if floating in space.

“One reality,” Stony said to Blue.

“That’s so cool!” Jay shouted. “You got any spare Earthlings in there?”

“No life forms exist in this particular reality,” Stony said, looking at Blue but answering Jay’s question. “I used to have other realities that were teeming with life.”

“How many realities can you fit in there?”

“Size and scale are relative. All realities can fit in here, within scale. In fact, all of time itself can fit in here.”

Suddenly, the universe started moving backward … or perhaps inward … and everything Jay had seen moving away from him was now hurriedly approaching, like fireworks in reverse, pulling back fire, fragments and filaments. The billion-billion stars seemed to be racing right toward Jay’s head.

“Aaaaaa!” he screamed.

But the Big Crunch did not crush him. It pulled back to a spot in the center of the house, where for an instant it appeared to be a single fiercely brilliant star over Stony’s head, then it flickered out.

“So it was, is, and will one day be again.”

It sounded like something Jay had heard in radio shows he’d listened to years ago, where humans wore robes and turbans and sandals, and they wandered around temples and pyramids.

With the universe gone, not much else seemed to be within Stony’s house: a few small flashlights, which might have been pulled off key chains; a pocket-sized calculator with its face removed; a one-inch square piece of some clear material, like a Plexiglas remnant; a few oddly-shaped pieces of metal, bolts and washers, to venture a guess, arranged in such a way as to form the number eight.

Some paper pictures were taped to the paper walls. Jay recognized a portrait of Albert Einstein and another of a baseball player named Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, along with newspaper photos of Gene Simmons, General Stonewall Jackson, Steven Hawking, Nikola Tesla, and Bugs Bunny. They all made perfect sense to Jay, why they were on Stony’s walls … except the photo of Bugs Bunny.

“Thirteen billion years ago,” Stony said, “Al and I played a game.”

“What game was it?” Jay found any mention of play interesting.

An image filled one of the walls in Stony’s house: projected there. Not projected on the wall so much as in front of it. The image was of Al and Stony, sitting in a huge, dark space: like an aviation hanger or the inside of a volcano. Both of them sat before their own faceless calculator, facing one another.

And then Jay felt something smack hard against his backside.

“Ouch! Hey, dammit!”

“What the hell is going on in there?” Maya shouted. “Move it, smartass!”

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