Real

  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 seas
on."

  "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 pla
ce!" 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."