On the Edge of Twilight: 22 Tales to Follow You Home (11 page)

The Character

Every day Wilfred Colson sat at a corner table in the café area of the bookstore, and every day he observed the people who sat around him. At first, head to his computer, he tried to block them out. They were an enormous distraction, especially the women with their occasional high-pitched giggles and the old men who felt the need to scream into the cell phones their children had bought them. But then, slowly, he came around. They were
characters
in their way, and hadn’t Dickens mastered his art of dialect and description by staring out at the London streets while working as a clerk in a lawyer’s office?

So he began paying attention. Every so often, taking a break from his newest story or novel, he would allow the outside world fully in. The results were extraordinary—as were the regulars who arrived at their tables with clockwork routine: the wild-haired old man who wore the same blue shirt every day, grimaced at anyone who looked at him, and nursed the same cup of tepid coffee for two hours without once reaching for a book or magazine; the “Doll Ladies,” who met every third Thursday of the month, with their gastrointestinal complaints, creepy three-foot-tall dolls, disturbingly detailed back stories for the “babies,” and brightly-colored muumuus; and, of course, the towering giant who ate five doughnuts with colored sprinkles, told startled strangers about his brother’s unexpected murder, then invariably exited through the fire escape, setting off all the alarms in the building.

There were others, too. People passing through with their quirks, eccentricities, and foibles. These he never saw more than once or twice, but there was always
someone
interesting and worthy of a couple pages of notes. And before he knew it, they began to enter into his short stories fully-formed. Colson had turned a nuisance into art and was suitably pleased with himself. Soon he began a series of stories based entirely upon people he observed in the café. The project promised to be an interesting character study that, Colson hoped, might end up as something of a post-modern
Winesburg, Ohio
.

He first noticed the new guy several months after starting the collection. Unusually diminutive and tiny (no more than four-feet, ten inches tall), unusually expressive (he smiled at virtually everyone in sight, though never engaged anyone beyond that), and also possessing the uncanny ability to sense when someone was staring at him, the “Little Fellow” (as Colson named him) quickly became a regular.

This made Colson’s observations difficult but entertaining. He liked a challenge, and the struggle to take notes on the man while sparring with his apparent sixth sense enlivened more than a few dull days.

Everything was going fine until three weeks after the Little Fellow first caught his attention. Colson, hard at work and in “The Zone,” reached for his cooling cup of Chai and touched, instead, a clammy, thin-fingered hand.

Startled, he looked up. The Little Fellow stood just inches away, smiling at him. “Hello,” the man said, and sat down at Colson’s table.

Bemused, Colson cleared his throat. “Yes, hello there. May I ask what you’re doing?”

“I could ask you the same question, Mr. Colson.”

He blinked. “How do you know my name?”

“I’m a reader, Mr. Colson. Along with the works of many other authors, I also read
yours
. Because of that, I know what you look like and I know you’re local. Makes sense.”

Colson nodded. “Yes, it does.” He didn’t like meeting fans in informal settings. They took up too much of his time, and disentangling himself from their questions and requests was distracting and tiring. He hoped he could shoo the man away quickly by being as terse as possible.

He opened his mouth to say something curt, but the Little Fellow interrupted. “You’ve been watching me, Mr. Colson.” He wagged a thin finger in mock admonition. “Now don’t try and deny it!”

Colson thought fast. Perhaps honesty would be best. It wouldn’t do to have a short story appear with the Little Fellow in it (such as the one he was writing now), then have to deal with a resentful source of inspiration after the fact. He would turn on the charm and see if that worked.

“Yes,” he said, “I have to admit you’ve got me there, Mr…”

“Bagby. Burt Bagby.”

(
Better than Little Fellow,
Colson thought.)

“Ah. Mr. Bagby.”

“Ever heard of me?”

Colson shook his head. “Sorry.”

Bagby looked hurt. “I’ve been published in
Merry Times
,
Hard Rain
, and
Lost Stars.
I write stories too, you see.”

“Oh! Well, congratulations. You see, Mr.… um…”

“
Bag
by,” said the little man, smiling again.

“Mr. Bagby. Yes. You see, I’ve recently started using my surroundings as inspiration. Particularly, ah,
people
in my surroundings.”

“Hey, like Dickens!”

Colson was surprised and somewhat pleased. “Yes, exactly like Dickens. And I’m afraid, Mr. Bagby, that you caught my eye. I’m sorry if this is unacceptable. If so, I can tear up the story I’ve started, and—”

Bagby gripped his arm. “Not on your life!” he said, mouth suddenly tight, eyes wide and gleaming. Perhaps feeling he had overstepped, he released Colson’s sleeve, leaned back, and mopped his brow. “How fortuitous. How positively lovely. I’m honored, Mr. Colson.”

Colson smoothed his sleeve. “Well, I thank you, Mr. Bagby. I’m a bit embarrassed to be
caught
like this, but you have good eyes. And I appreciate your understanding.”

“A character in one of your stories! Wonderful.”

“Yes, indeed. A minor character, but a character nonetheless. Well, I must be going.” The whole tenor of his work day had been thrown off. Colson was finished for the afternoon.

* * *

And that, he thought, was that.

Except it wasn’t.

In the weeks that followed, little Burt Bagby seemed to be everywhere, at all times. At Starbucks. At Wash & Go. At Giant Eagle. And at the bookstore, of course. Always at the bookstore.

It took Colson some time to realize what was happening. When he did, he was more annoyed than worried. Finally, a month later, during a break in his writing at the bookstore café, Colson looked up, and there was Bagby again. It was too much. This latest appearance had toppled the stack.

Colson caught Bagby’s eye and motioned to him. Smile wide as always, Bagby jumped up and scampered over.

“Look here,” Colson said, tapping the table top with a bony index finger. “You’ve got to stop this. It isn’t proper and it isn’t dignified. You say you admire my work? Then do it and me the favor of allowing me to continue it. I can’t write when I’m distracted, and you, Mr. Bagby, are becoming a distraction.”

Obviously wounded, Mr. Bagby looked around the café. “This is a public place, Mr. Colson,” he said. “We live in the same town. We go out in public. It’s bound to happen, that we see each other.”

“Not eleven times in two weeks!”

“Hmm! Well, perhaps you’ve got me there. But you have to admit, all this makes for an interesting character, doesn’t it? Perhaps a somewhat
important
character?”

Before Colson could get over his shock, Bagby rose to his feet, tipped his hat, and sauntered off.

And Colson couldn’t be sure, but the one time Bagby looked back, he thought he caught a wink.

* * *

Two months passed. In December, in the middle of the night, Colson woke from a fretful sleep, crossed to his window, scraped away the frost, and blinked out at the silver nightscape.

Burt Bagby, bald head reflecting moonlight, was kneeling by Colson’s car, letting the air out of his tires.

Colson couldn’t believe it. He’d seen less of Bagby over the previous few weeks and figured his pep talk had served its purpose.

He threw open the window. “Hey, there! You! Bagby! I’m coming down! I’m calling the police!”

“Good! Wonderful!” Bagby called back. “Aren’t I
eccentric
, though? Aren’t I
unpredictable
?”

“No! Now clear off!”

Without another word, Bagby scampered away.

* * *

After that, Colson didn’t see Bagby for close to three months. He hadn’t bothered calling the police on him; Colson hated distractions, and since the vandalism went unrepeated, he decided to let the matter drop.

But the incident had bothered him; his whole sense of peaceful routine had been compromised, and his writing had suffered as a result. Bagby could be
any
where, doing
any
thing, at
any time
. His absence, if anything, made Colson more disconcerted than his constant appearances. Because of that, Colson’s writing had fallen behind schedule for the first time in nearly fifteen years, the quality had likely suffered too, and that simply wouldn’t do.

Happily, he had chosen a solution, should the day come when Mr. Burt Bagby dared show his face again.

That day came late in March, when Colson, sitting at his usual table, swatting away at his slacks in the bookstore after dumping some caramel latte on them, looked up to find Bagby’s pallid, lightly sweating face just inches from his own.

“Hello there, old chum! Miss me?” Bagby cried.

“Ack!” Colson choked, slopping more latte on himself. 

Bagby pulled up a chair. “How’ve you been?” he asked. “Lots of good ideas? Lots of
character
development?” He pantomimed elbowing Colson in the ribs. “I thought I’d give you some uninterrupted time to think about me, but I figured I’d given you long enough. Now I’m back!”

A cold fury awoke in Colson. The tips of his fingers turned to ice. A vein pumped alarmingly in his temple.

“Mr. Bagby,” he said in a low voice—flat, calm, and dangerous. “You are an annoyance, Mr. Bagby. A burr in my sock, quickly removed and just as quickly forgotten. Additionally you strike me as somewhat pitiful—
pathetic
might be a better adjective. I assume you are single and are likely to remain so not by choice, but by circumstance. You are also a failure. A failure as a writer, and, by proxy, a failure as a person; a late-middle aged sycophant. And I hate to break this to you, Mr. Bagby, but I don’t write about pathetic, annoying, sycophantic failures. You will
never
be a character in any work of mine. Not even a minor one. The story I was writing didn’t pan out with you in it… because, simply, you’re a
bore.
”

Mr. Bagby’s face lost a great deal of color during Colson’s controlled explosion. Surprisingly, he regained it fairly quickly.

“I see,” he said. “Well, that leaves me just one option, then. Since
you
won’t write about
me
,
I
will have to write about
you.
Because you are, as I’m sure most of your millions of readers would readily confirm, an ‘interesting character,’ Mr. Colson.”

Colson chuckled. “By all means! If it makes you happy, turn me into a character for one of your stories. Publish it in one of your little ’zines. Good luck to you! Now
goodbye
.”

Bagby shook his head. “I wasn’t talking about fiction, Mr. Colson. No, I thought I’d try my hand at something else. A memoir, perhaps.”

Colson snorted. “Nonsense. Who would want to read what
you
have to say about
me?
”

“Oh, I think a great many people will,” Bagby said, smiling faintly. “Many, many people indeed.”

And without so much as another word between them, Bagby reached out and cut Colson’s throat.

The Leasehold of His Days

The ultrasound showed it and there could be no doubt. His wife was pregnant. Two years of trying and it had finally happened.

Jason Emery walked out of the hospital in a startled daze, numbed by a strange sense of unreality.

“Whatcha thinking?” asked Susan.

“I… I don’t really know.”

“That’s a first.”

He stopped walking. So did Susan.

“My mind’s a rush,” he said. “It doesn’t know what to focus on. What… how…” He paused, breathing heavily. “What does being a father
mean
? Most of all. In one simple sentence. I need something to hold on to, or I’m never going to know how to feel or what to do. I’ve wanted this so long, but now…”

Susan laughed and continued walking. He fell in step beside her. “I don’t think there
is
one simple sentence that sums up what it means to be a parent. If there was, life would be simpler to understand.” She pinched his arm. “You’re thinking too much. That’s the problem. Parenting isn’t just in the head—it’s in the glands, too.”

“Maybe,” he said.

* * *

Was it true?

Late that night he sat in his study, surrounded by his books. They were a constant source of comfort and always had been, even back in college when he’d owned only a couple of dozen battered paperbacks. Now he was a school librarian, and surrounding himself with the subjects of his love kept him grounded and safe. So when he wanted to think, when he was lost, this, his
own
library, was where he went. Answers, if they were to come, came to him here.

He scanned the shelves.
The Great Gatsby
,
The Scarlet Letter
,
Dandelion Wine
,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
,
The Canterbury Tales
,
In Our Time
…

More:
The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas
,
The Secret Histories
,
Wind in the Willows
,
Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
,
Idylls of the King
,
The Iliad
,
Beowulf
…

He stopped, pulled
Beowulf
from the shelf, opened to a random page, and read:

…
Beowulf was foiled

of a glorious victory. The glittering sword,

infallible before that day,

failed when he unsheathed it, as it never should have.

For the son of Ecgtheow, it was no easy thing

to have to give ground like that and go

unwillingly to inhabit another home

in a place beyond; so every man must yield

the leasehold of his days.

Jason sighed.

At the beginning of every year he started the first day of school with a little speech to the classes visiting the library. “Remember,” he told them, “the greatest thing about writing is that it lets you communicate with someone from another time, another place. When you open
The Odyssey
, Homer speaks to you across the seas and across the millennia. The Greeks roar through his blind lines. You read, he breathes. You turn a page, his voice is carried on its whisper.”

He looked down at his battered copy of
Beowulf
, written by an unknown poet 1300 years before.

“But he
is
known,” Jason murmured. “Each line is a thought, each stanza a bellow across time. That nameless scop will never die.”

On certain rare occasions, always late at night, a despair, also nameless, would wake him from sleep, toss and turn his thoughts, and spin him downstairs to sit beneath the neon kitchen light for long hours before exhaustion drove him back to bed. He didn’t think of such times often, but he did now.

And, thinking, Jason realized the root of his despair was the certain, heartbreaking realization that
he
would not be among those who spoke across time. He tended books but did not create them. His own writing had never amounted to anything. When he died, his voice would be silenced forever.

His hands went cold. A shiver of incredible sadness etched his spine. He gasped, the backs of his beloved books spinning.
Beowulf
fell from his hands to the carpet, pages crumpling, spine splaying wide. He cried out—

Then fell silent.

Only the pounding of his heart, a deep metronome of seconds, thumped in the darkened house. Upstairs, his wife continued sleeping. No dogs barked outside.

His frantic eyes had caused his quiet, for they had alighted upon the open page of the broken book. With a mind of their own, they had read the words of Beowulf’s dying moment. With more than his mind, he understood them:

Now is the time when I would have wanted

to bestow this armour on my own son,

had it been my fortune to have fathered an heir

and live on in his flesh…

And Jason suddenly remembered why he was here, what had brought him down to his books in the middle of the night, why his racing mind had been unable to sleep.

His heartbeat slowed.

Suddenly very tired, he replaced
Beowulf
carefully on its shelf, rested his hand on it for a long moment, then went back upstairs.

At the top of the landing he paused, brought up short by a photograph hooked on the wall. Young eyes gazed out at him from across the years—his own. And his small, young hand held that of another—his father, dead three years.

Jason took a deep breath. The day of that photo had been a fine one. He and his dad had gone fishing, and he’d caught a five-inch trout; barely a minnow, but his first, and his father had made him feel like he’d single-handedly landed Moby Dick.

He looked at the small, young hand, tightly clutching his father’s reassuringly large one, then turned away. He held out his hand and examined it closely in the moonlight—the little hairs, the worn ridges. His eyes widened, as if seeing it,
really
seeing it, for the first time.

Two minutes later, back in bed, he fell instantly asleep.

* * *

The next morning Jason tripped lightly down the hall and poured himself a cup of coffee.

“You slept in!” Susan exclaimed, spreading grape jam on a piece of toast.

“It was a topsy-turvy night.”

“Coffee?”

“You bet.” He surveyed the kitchen and smiled, then picked up the newspaper and scanned the headlines.

“You’re awfully chipper this morning,” she said. “After all that stress yesterday, I’m surprised.”

“Some friends helped me find the answers I was looking for.”

“No more crises about the nature of fatherhood?”

“None.”

Susan set down her piece of toast. She gave Jason a long, appraising look.

“You have good friends,” she said.

Jason smiled. “It’s a beautiful day. I’m going for a walk. Wanna come?”

On their way out the door Jason paused by a small mirror. He looked at himself closely.

“Hi, Dad,” he said quietly. “It’s good to see you.”