Fiction by Sam Lipsyte, the author of “The Ask” and “No One Left to Come Looking for You”: “Oh, you write fan fiction,” she said. “We all write fan fiction,” I told her. “Some of us are just more honest about it.”
He’s practically dead. Just before he got that way, I was in Amok Mocha, where I like to sip cold brew and do my “C: FB” conjuring, and I struck up a conversation with a young woman who confessed to being a creative-writing student.
She told me that in her workshop they talk about the “occasion” of the story. Why is the narrator telling this tale now? What pressures or conditions have coalesced to move a person to speak? I feigned ignorance of the concept, though I’d heard it often in my own writing classes long ago. Instead, I told her that, if the installment I was presently crafting flowed from any occasion, it was this: Charles is anxious about the imminent disintegration of the universe via the ever-increasing tug of dark matter. Moreover, he’s ticked off that his best buddy, Buddy, doesn’t seem perturbed by the prospect. “How imminent?” the woman said, and sipped her Balkan, a new offering at Amok. “Three or four billion years?” I said. “And who is Charles?” When I informed her that he was the titular hero of “Charles in Charge,” the most criminally uncelebrated television program of the Reagan era, the woman pursed her lips. “Oh,” she said. “You write fan fiction.” “We all write fan fiction,” I told her. “Some of us are just more honest about it.” The young woman gathered up her belongings, moved to another table. Did she think I was being facetious? Still, if there is an occasion for the story I’m relating now, it’s a bit nearer on the space-time continuum. My best buddy, Bennett, is in a vegetative state induced by an anoxic brain injury, and, if he doesn’t wake up soon and vouch for me, I could be kicked out of our apartment. This might make my literary endeavors, as well as my other gig—remote therapist—somewhat difficult. Clients tend to grumble when I treat their trauma from a marble bench in the lobby of the public library. My employer, Positive Outcome Solutions, a.k.a. P.O.S., grumbles, too. Its guidelines stipulate consistency in the therapeutic setting, and I can usually be found doling out my expertise from a corner nook in our apartment, a tidy bookshelf and a print of Courbet’s “The Origin of the World” on the wall behind me. My expertise, though, is not really the point, for although I am certified in Rudimentary Life Coaching and almost certified in Baseline Wellness Facilitation, the fact is I’m mostly a front. According to in-house surveys, most of P.O.S.’s clients prefer A.I. therapists, but, for the small percentage who claim to crave a “human connection,” there’s me. I’m paid to appear engaged and empathetic, though the clients probably don’t realize that every word I utter is repeated verbatim from text appearing in the corner of my screen. The trick is to make it all sound natural, which I do by channelling the warm, curious tones of my favorite podcast hosts. Maybe it’s all a little sneaky, but I didn’t invent this epoch. I never dreamed of becoming a beef puppet for a large language model. I wanted to be a distinguished writer of mournful vignettes in the American grain, or else operate my own soft-serve-ice-cream truck. But it’s not so bad. The truth is, the A.I. is a lot better at therapy than I am. Bennett says I’m the spoonful of gristle that makes the robot medicine go down. Obviously, he said this before his accident. There is not much to say about that misadventure, other than that some people still haven’t gotten the memo about dissociative anesthetics and bathtubs. I was the one who found Bennett. I’d been knocking on the bathroom door, because I needed to shuttle some acquaintances to the waterfront, as it were, and I was late for a session with a guy in Ohio who was having intrusive thoughts about the Vice-President. “Bennett!” I said. “Open up!” After hearing naught but the sweet, brooding stylings of Bill Evans’s “Waltz for Debby” wreathing from Bennett’s Bluetooth speaker, I bashed my way in. The bathroom was dark, lit low with candles. Bundles of sage and palo santo glowed on the tiled ledge above the tub. Bennett was having a real spa night, smudging his demons away, but he seemed maybe too far submerged in the tonka-scented water. I yanked the idiot out, no easy task with my slippy disks, laid him on the bathmat, and called an ambulance. I attempted something that from a distance, or on TV, might have resembled CPR. “Don’t you fucking die on me!” I shouted between breath-of-life breaths, and Bennett didn’t. Now he’s on machines at Mount Sinai. The doctor said it’s not good, but not hopeless. “That’s his sweet spot,” I said. The doctor grunted, shuffled off. Did she, too, think I was being facetious? After Janet died, Bennett offered to split the maintenance with me. We knew each other from the Narthex, a bar near the cathedral. We’d perch on our stools with our pints and dive into it, whether it was the state of the world , or his years as an Army medic, or my exploits as a disaffected castoff from the cultural-industrial complex, where I had worked as a copy editor and fact checker, or word medic, for various magazines and websites before I was “rightsized” for the last time. Some evenings, I’d test out new “C: FB” story lines on Bennett, such as Buddy only feigning his doltish-sidekick identity while in truth being a cyberangel sent from the broken future to subtly guide his “charge.” Bennett and I could talk all night, and frequently did, though he sometimes required stimulants. Our generational divide—I am in my early fifties, Bennett two decades younger—barely tinged our rapport. We’d been deformed, like everybody else, by the same internet, the same social collapse. We were each other’s pupil and don, and it seemed fitting that I move into the late Janet’s apartment, especially as I’d been priced out of my own digs. Bennett was always vague about whether he had, in fact, inherited the place, but so far nobody else had staked a claim. When the subject came up, Bennett would spout a certain Latin phrase—donatio mortis causa, which translates to “deathbed gift.” “Also, bro, let’s not forget nine-tenths,” he added one night at the Narthex. “The law of possession. Besides, my cousin is cool with it. She knows I was the one who took care of her mom, cooked meals, kept track of the pills. Sometimes, you know, I’d just lay in bed with Janet and cradle her like a baby. A dying baby.” “Lie,” I said. “Fuck you, man, it’s true. Anyway, my point is, I was Janet’s boatman. Poled her to the other side. Tabitha has to respect that.” It turned out Tabitha did not respect that. Bennett doesn’t know this yet, but I learned of her stance on the matter a week after his accident, following a video session with the young man from Ohio. “Listen,” my client had been saying, his moon face candescent in the light of a gooseneck lamp he kept wrenching closer to his head, “I’m more hillbilly than that fake ever was. I didn’t go to a fancy Ivy. Got my law degree at Kentucky. And I know which fork to use. I figured it out from watching a million movies where the hick doesn’t know which fork to use. The information is out there if you want it.” “Fuckin’ A it is,” I said, stopped myself. I was already off script, vamping because my P.O.S. chat window was empty. Slight lags were common, something I chalked up to our bottom-tier Wi-Fi. Finally, text appeared. “That’s a very interesting detail,” I said/read. “And it might be helpful to explore this area of your past, if you feel comfortable doing so.” “Yeah, sure.” “This is a safe space.” “Which space? The space I’m in, in Ohio? Or the space you’re in, in . . .” “Nebraska,” I said, my window blank again. “Nebraska, huh? You from there originally?” “Sand Hills boy,” I said. I’d never been to Nebraska, but I remembered a woman I once worked with at a quilting magazine saying something similar. Now my sanctioned text popped up. “Probably better if we stick to your issues,” I said/read. “After all, you’re the psychotic simp with intrusive thoughts about a great American.” They really needed to rejigger this model. It hallucinated rather often, would babble about Assyrian metallurgy or Australian Rules football, which could be intriguing at times, though maybe not always factual, and the stochastic rants tended to rattle clients. But this bullying was a glitch too far. Ohio looked crestfallen. “I’m not a psychotic simp,” he mumbled. “I just need help.” I wanted to comfort him, knew I had to stick to the script. “Maybe you could help yourself by getting up off your butt. Make your bed, for God’s sake. Get a job.” “I do make my bed. I have a job. I’m a lawyer for the municipality.” “About that. Check your e-mail for an official response to the completed productivity survey you submitted last month.” “The fuck?” “Yeah, sorry,” I said, unprompted. “P.O.S. has a consulting arm. We do efficiency studies as well as therapy.” “That’s evil.” “I’m with you, brother,” I said, trying to speak quickly. My audio tended to drop out when I improvised, and that made me wonder if it was more than just weak Wi-Fi. “Listen. Stay strong. Stay off the socials. Ignore people like me. Use burners. Viva la—” Our connection broke. A few seconds later, Paula, my P.O.S. supervisor, called. “Hi, Rick,” she said. “Just doing a little wellness check. Got an alert and caught the end of your session there.” P.O.S. claimed to honor therapist-client privilege, or some version of it, but the therapist of record was the company itself. “I think he’s doing much better,” I said. “Well, you’re not at all qualified to comment on that, A, No. 1. And B, No. 2, we are obviously going to initiate an employee transition now.” “You mean fire me?” “We’re going in a different direction, yeah.” “The bot went rogue. You heard it.” “That’s actually an approved adjustment to the model.” “You want it to be cruel?” “Honest and decisive. No more namby-pamby coddling. As per the instructions of P.O.S.’s new parent company.” “Who’s that?” I said, and Paula named one of those tech giants you’ve probably read about, possibly on a device it manufactured. Paula started to say a few more things about the terms of my post-employment, but there was a knock on the door. “Gotta go.” “I’m not finished, Sand Hills.” “I think we all are,” I said. At the door, a man in a shiny blue suit and eyeglasses forged from some fragile-looking but probably indestructible mineral whose extraction shapes contemporary geoeconomics said hello, peered over my shoulder. A young woman stood behind him. “Bennett here?” the man said. “Not at the moment.” “Who are you?” “Some guy,” I said. “What are you doing in my mother’s apartment?” the woman said. This was tricky. I almost wished for a chat window. “I have something to tell you,” I said. “You might want to sit down.” “Tell me what? Just say it.” “There’s no way to sugarcoat this. Your mother is dead.” My old writing instructors used to implore us to show and not tell, but apparently I really needed to tell her that, though of course she’d already heard about her mother. They have phone service in Belgium. Moreover, for the purposes of this narrative, I now really need to tell another thing, and it’s about, funnily enough, a show. I was late to the “Charles in Charge” phenomenon. One day, while I myself was in college, a chum and I passed the hours choking on his enormous purple bong. Chatting between rips, we realized we had something in common besides severe lung char. Neither of us had enough money to purchase more marijuana. This led to fervent talk about our perpetual lack of funds, the ravages of late capitalism, and how to assuage said ravages. My bong-mate mentioned that he had a cousin in full assuagement mode. He’d grown rich, or at least solvent, writing for a sitcom starring Scott Baio. “Chachi?” I said, and I won’t even try to explain that. Look it up on the device you no doubt hold in your hand. Still, to quote another of Bennett’s Latin faves, caveat emptor: researching “Chachi” may fling you down a digital shaft that leads to some troubling allegations about the actor in question. It’s not pleasant, and has no bearing on this story, or on my life’s work. When I say Chachi, or Charles, I do not mean Scott Baio, in the same way that if I said Hamlet I’m not referring to any particular actor who has portrayed the young nepo-Dane. “Yeah, fucking Chachi. Anyway, my cousin is raking it in.” “Lucky him.” “Just saying. We both fancy ourselves writers, after all.” “I don’t fancy myself anything,” I said. “I’m only a writer when I’m writing.” One of my teachers, a once lionized, now forgotten graduate student who in the days of his golden ascension wore mirrored aviators indoors, had announced this in our seminar, and it stuck. “Yeah, you’re only a writer when you’re writing,” my chum said, “or when you’re blabbing about your experimental story cycle to someone at a party.” “Fuck off,” I said. “She was into it.” “Anyway, I’m just saying we could probably crank out a script in a few hours. Send it to my cousin and get paid in full!” “Don’t we have to watch the show?” “Nah. I’ve seen one or two. I’ve got the gist. We’re bright guys. We can figure this out. Probably our script will be so good they’ll can the other writers. But we need to conserve our stash to do this. So, we do one more hit, then write five pages. Then do another, write five more. Like that.” It was hard to argue with such a cogent plan, and I was too stoned to argue. We roughed out a script, and our stash lasted the whole night. It was a miracle, like the Maccabees with their lamp oil in that cave. My friend typed up whatever we’d scrawled in my spiral Mead notebook. I don’t remember much about the plot except that Mr. and Mrs. Powell go out of town and Charles has to watch the kids, but he really wants to attend this musical adaptation of “Story of the Eye,” so Buddy spells him, but then burns the lamb chops and later freaks out over the painful discharge he has while urinating. Charles returns home and finds Buddy and the kids running through Buddy’s recent sexual history. Those are all the beats, as the Hollywood types might put it, that I can recall, but I do remember how excited we were, which was partly due to the quality of the ganja but also because we believed we had blazed a new television trail in both form and content, though mostly content. We never heard back from the cousin. That was the extent of our collaboration, and I forgot all about it, but weirdly, many years later, as I was drifting around the internet one night, the algorithm spat up an episode of “Charles in Charge,” and after I watched it I immediately cued up another. For some mysterious reason, the show stirred something deep within me, like a paddle of wisdom churning through the hot slop in those aforementioned vats. Charles’s decency, his commitment to solving problems of care, his stranger’s gift for reimagining family both soothed and inspired. I’d never had much of a family myself, and I was the opposite of a problem solver. My old college friends, my former colleagues, the few lovers I’d had over the years all eventually considered me the problem, and I couldn’t disagree. But Charles suggested a higher path, above the confusion. I was a Buddy, at best, but now I aspired to the condition of a Charles. The show also ignited some long-dormant ambitions. What I saw now in the “Charles in Charge” universe was a vast and sumptuous staging ground for my literary imagination. I’d stumbled upon a new frame, or filter, for my song. Everything I’d ever wanted to say about what it was like, for this human, to think and dream and feel could now be passed through the sieve of Charles. I was not alone. The “Charles in Charge” community is tiny but vibrant. There are other skalds, or griots, or troubadours devoted to the goings on in the Pembroke home, and when the reruns hit the streamers our world grew. But I consider myself a pioneer among the scribes, and while the others dash off mere extrapolative scenarios, often treacly, or pornographic, or both, I like to think I have smuggled some poetry and serious thought into the proceedings, especially in installments like “The Groundless Ground,” where I cooked up for Charles a few scheduling dilemmas with which to explore Heideggerian notions of temporality. I’d found my audience, was even making a little extra scratch from paid subscribers—enough, along with my P.O.S. checks, to pitch in for the maintenance on the apartment. But now all I’d achieved teetered on Tabitha. I paced around in a panic, chanted “Nine-tenths, nine-tenths” to calm myself. I called Mount Sinai, got the duty nurse, asked how Bennett was doing. She told me she couldn’t give out information over the phone. “How about just your opinion?” I said. “Does he seem different?” “In my opinion, he seems the same.” After a while, I couldn’t take being in the apartment any longer. Everything reminded me of poor Bennett. The toaster where he toasted slices of his overpriced sourdough boules, the microwave where he heated his late-night noodles, the not so tidy bookcase full of his accounting textbooks and small-business guides. Did I mention that he was a freelance accountant and a part-time drug dealer? He was, though he lived mostly on disability from the Army. He’d been blown up trying to save some guys who’d got blown up. He had metal plates in him. He was like a human Humvee. That was his joke. He did the occasional open mike. I thanked the nurse, headed over to Amok Mocha. I was due for another installment, anyway, and I wrote better in crowds. I toyed with a scenario in which Buddy gets a blood disease and the Pembrokes, or maybe the Powells, tell Charles they no longer require his services and he must leave their house. I was edging, perhaps, into autofanfictional territory. Lady Occasion was at the next table with her Yugoslav java, watching me jab at my dinged-up Dell. “Catch a wave?” “In the barrel as we speak.” “You know,” she said. “I thought about what you said. About fan fiction. Maybe you’re right.” “It’s not complicated,” I said. “I’m in the Homeric tradition.” “But it’s a joke, right? Ironic?” “Irony was a bleak village I passed long ago, at the beginning of my journey. I’ve since travelled to many splendid lands.” “Do you want to get a drink? I want a drink, and you seem like somebody I should talk to. I’m Radha.” “Rick,” I said. “O.K., but I don’t want to hear about your young-adult novel depicting a girl in interwar Wales who dreams of being a physicist and is recruited by space aliens to fight a galactic war against misogynistic nanobots.” “How did you know?” “When you went to the bathroom, I peeked at your screen.” “Prick,” she said, snapped her laptop shut. “At least I’m not writing about a stupid sitcom.” “I like your premise,” I said. “And I can tell by the jangle of your prose you have the music. But I abhor your employment of A.I. I saw the prompts.” “I just use it a little. To get me going. I mean, if we are all writing fan fiction, aren’t we also just lesser versions of ChatGPT?” I stood. “No,” I said. “That’s just what those slick fucks want you to believe. I know of what I speak.” “Tell me more,” she said. “To the Narthex, then.” “My parents think I’m a fool,” she said. “You are,” I said. “So am I. Embrace that fact. Cherish it. Protect it from the predictive tokens.” “The what?” “The bots. The agents.” I told her all about my travails with P.O.S., and Bennett’s sorry situation, the threats from Tabitha and the fixer. Radha looked down at her lager. “You have a sad life,” she said. “No offense.” “But at least it’s mine. In all its messy, painfully romanticized human ineffectuality.” “So, do you believe in free will?” “Not really,” I said. “I get that my every decision is already made, shaped by forces within and without that I do not control. But I do believe, quite fiercely, in the feeling of freedom, however delusional, that comes from the struggle to convince myself otherwise. Bennett and I always agreed on this. Would you like to meet him?” “I’m not sure.” “Certainty is the enemy,” I said. Radha and I walked over to the hospital. I’d tried to see him before but had never got past the nurse’s station. They said you had to be an approved visitor, present I.D. as proof. This time there was a new nurse, a man my age with a paisley eye patch and a bandanna on his head and a loop of gold in his ear, the closest thing to Bartholomew Roberts you will find in a modern health-care setting. But another, more striking detail caught my attention: a small pin affixed to his scrubs that said “Copeland College.” “Copeland College?” I said to the man, winked. “Friend of Charles?” “Excuse me?” “Come, brother. Don’t be coy.” “Can I help you with something?” “Your pin, man. Copeland College is where Charles goes. It’s a made-up school.” The nurse looked at me suspiciously. “This pin is from Kenneth Copeland Bible College, in Texas. Got my associate’s there before nursing school.” “Oh.” “Pourquoi the buccaneer vibe?” Radha asked, with the directness of a doctor’s child. “I’m part of the Christian-pirate community.” “Now I’ve heard it all,” I said, laughed. “Damn, Rick,” Radha said, suddenly siding with Calico Jack. “I could say the same about you. You’ve devoted your life to writing stories about ‘Charles in Charge.’ ” She snorted, the Judas, but Mr. Skull-and-Crossbones-on-a-Cross clapped his paws. “Yes! O.K., I’ll come clean. I love that show!” “What’s not to love?” I said. “It’s about love, in fact. And care. Like what goes on here. Purportedly.” “Sorry I was cagey before,” the nurse said. “People judge.” “Don’t need to tell me.” The nurse studied my face for a moment. “Wait, you’re not the ‘Final Boy’ dude, are you?” Radha’s eyes went wide with awe, or maybe with profound confusion. “I am merely one of many,” I said, “who labor in the bean rows of Carolingian narrative.” “You’re my favorite! You and that chick who always puts Buddy in a gimp suit.” “Thanks.” The nurse tapped his pin. “I mean, I only went here because of the name. That’s how much I love Charles. Also, like, I didn’t get in anywhere else. Follow me.” The I.C.U. privateer led us to Bennett’s room, left us. My pal was in deep slumber, breathed through this kind of hissing accordion. He looked awful, as moist and pale as certain veined cheeses. “How long has he been laying there like that?” Radha asked. I did not correct her. The rules of grammar were useless now, and never truly rules. There were no rules. Just people looking to hurt and people looking to help. Bennett seemed beyond help and nowhere near good. “Grab a seat,” I said. Radha lowered herself into a Naugahyde chair near the smeared window. I sat on the edge of Bennett’s bed, grasped his hand. “Bennett,” I said. “This is Radha. She’s a writer. Probably a real one, if she can trust herself. Bennett here is my best pal. He wanted to heal folks, just like your mother and father, Radha. And when he couldn’t heal them he held them. He is also good with numbers, and sometimes he sells drugs, but the mild kind. Though not mild enough, I guess. He’s a mediocre comic but funny over a beer. Before all this, he was on his way to mastering poached chicken. He’s also one of the last great listeners. Even though I’m an ex part-time remote therapist, my listening can’t hold a candle, or even a smudge of sage, to his. I believe he’s listening now. Bennett, you can hear me, can’t you? Squeeze my hand if you can.” I gave it a good minute. “Maybe his hand is tired,” Radha said. “Maybe,” I said. “Anyway, Bennett, I was really hoping you would wake up so you could come back to live in the apartment and we could nine-tenths that ungrateful Tabitha out of our lives. Or you could at least vouch for me, buy me a little more time while you recover. I even had this weird idea, just a few hours ago, that maybe you and Radha might hit it off, start a family, and I could be the live-in housekeeper and child-care provider, just like Charles, though I suppose given my age I would be more of a Mr. Belvedere type. But, either way, I think—” “What the fuck?” Radha said. “Pardon?” “Are you, like, trafficking me?” “Sorry?” “You’re pimping me out to a dead guy? I’m supposed to fuck him and have his kids now?” “He’s not dead,” I said. “But I see your point. I appreciate your perspective.” “That’s so reassuring.” “I’m sorry, Radha. This is just . . . really hard.” I was weeping now. Radha’s worried expression, and the fact that she hadn’t bolted, was a comfort. After a moment, my sobs subsided. “But, Bennett,” I continued, “none of that stuff matters now. I just want you to wake up and be O.K. I love you, Bennett. I love you so much.” The accordion shuddered, wheezed, and my friend’s eyes slitted up through crusted seals. His fingers tightened on my wrist. He heaved his scraggly head a smidge off the pillow. “I woave woo thoo,” he said, through flutters of mask spit. Our eyes met before his shut again, and he slumped back into coma world, his grip gone limp. “My God,” I said. “Radha, did you see that?” “Is he choking? I should get that pirate.” “He talked,” I said. “He woke up and was talking.” “I’ll get someone.” Radha returned with the doctor I’d met the day they brought Bennett here. “It happens,” she said. “Involuntary movement.” “Do coma patients often rise up and involuntarily speak their hearts?” “You’d be surprised.” “Would I? Doctor? Doctor of what, may I ask?” “Medicine. You look tired, sir. Go home. Get some rest.” “I don’t think I have a home,” I said. The doctor shrugged. “We have people on staff who can direct you to a shelter.” “I need to be here,” I said. “Bennett’s coming back to us.” The doctor nodded at the monitors. “I think he might be going in a different direction.” “What’s going on?” I said. “What does it look like?” the fixer said. “That’s Janet’s colander you’re handling.” “Everything’s going to the dump except what’s on this list.” The fixer waved a sheet of paper. Tabitha came out of Bennett’s, formerly Janet’s, bedroom. “I’m going to sell the place,” she said. “You can take what’s yours. But not until we make sure it belongs to you.” “What about Bennett’s stuff?” “I’ll put it in storage for a while.” “You mean until he wakes up?” “I mean for a while.” “Do you know what ‘donatio mortis causa’ means?” “Unless it’s Latin for ‘I won’t be any more of a bother,’ I don’t care.” “So you’re part of it,” I said. “The new vicious programming. The barbarism.” “I just want to get this place ready to sell and go home to my family in Belgium.” “For what? Our chocolate is high quality now, you know? They make that monk ale upstate. Bring your family over. I’ll look after them. You can put me in charge.” “Who the fuck are you?” “Bennett’s friend.” “Look,” Tabitha said. “I’m sorry about my cousin, but he was a freeloader.” “He was your mother’s boatman. A load you forsook.” “You don’t know anything about my relationship with my mother.” “You’re right. Would you like to talk about it? I’m a professional. Ask Paula at Positive Outcome Solutions. She owes me a reference.” “Pack your shit and go,” Tabitha said. “You’re not ready to explore those feelings. That’s understandable.” “Get the fuck out!” I didn’t have much to pack. Some underwear and outerwear and stuff to go in between. A few books. Some quality hiking boots I’d scored at Goodwill. My laptop. I stuffed it all into Bennett’s old Army duffel. I walked out into the sunshine, wandered over to the cathedral. A few years ago, during Covid times, they’d had a Christmas concert on the church steps, and a man had appeared, waved a pistol, begged the cops to shoot him. The officers obliged. I watched it all, the whole scene as horrific as it sounds. This guy never got a boatman. He died alone in a crowd that feared him, punched down by bullets, drenched in blood. There was no Bennett on hand to stanch his wounds, no Charles to keep him away from the concert in the first place, to talk him down from his impossible sadness. I knew some piece of that loneliness. Even now, my only friend was drifting off in another direction. I squatted at the top of the cathedral steps, steeped for a time in my own impossibles. What would Charles do? What did he do? I recalled that in the very last episode of the show he was getting ready for an exam to get into Princeton. Maybe Charles went on to become a famous nephrologist, or part of the Christian-pirate community, or both. I prayed he didn’t join up with those bastards building the machines of our demise, those cruel neural nets trained on everything great and good and hackneyed ever dreamed up by humans in coffee shops or on Hollywood lots. Also, I wondered, what happened to Charles’s buddy, Buddy? Could a rare cancer of the blood, per my latest installment, put him in a coma? I pictured sweet, bumbling Buddy Lembeck hooked up to that vile accordion, straining to lift himself out of his intubated grave, giving everything to address his best and only friend one last time, to gargle a mucus-slick song of love before falling into dreamless murk. Such a moment might serve as this closing installment’s final beat, but it all seemed too sentimental, implausible, obscene. My subscribers would never buy it. But I knew it could happen. It had, in fact, happened. How could I render this truth, make others see? This was my challenge, my task. It wouldn’t be easy. It would take the bravest iteration of Rick. I would summon all my craft, everything I’d learned as a master weaver of fanfictional tapestries, my warp and weft, my tricks, my tics, my private prompts, and toss the whole tangled heap away. I would dump out the vats, start afresh. I would become a model trained on nothing but pure feeling, never knowing what comes next. Crouched there on the stone steps of the newish cathedral, I flipped my laptop open, got cracking. ♦
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