Fools Read online

  “There’s no smoking in here,” Sovay said thinly.

  “Sorry.” The guy dropped his cigarette on the stage and stepped on it. “You’ve no idea how glad we are to see you again. What a dreadful mistake last night.”

  He was talking to me, I realized, and thought of the ad I’d seen in the video parlor. Still smiling, he reached for my arm. I stepped back, shielding the sore area, and he gave Sovay a murderous look.

  “I didn’t say a thing,” Sovay told him. “Talk to her. You’ll see.”

  I rubbed my bruised bicep. “Are you the one running that commercial?”

  “Commercial?” the man said, trying to glare at Sovay and smile at me all at once.

  “Word is out now,” Sovay said. He walked over to where the woman was waiting, one elbow leaning on the edge of the stage and her hand cupping her chin, ostentatiously bored. She reminded me of someone. “You know, I almost wish I could hear you explain.”

  She refused to look up at him. Speaking of explanations people wanted to hear, I thought; whatever had happened between them must have been pretty poisonous. Apparently Sovay’s virtue wasn’t as stainless-no-rust as he wanted the world to believe.

  “I think I can figure it out myself,” I said, ambling over closer to Sovay. “You people made a franchise deal with me, or rather, someone you thought was me. It was actually one of my characters. Maybe she really fooled you, or maybe you just let yourselves be fooled, but it doesn’t matter now anyway, because the whole deal’s invalid.”

  “Ah. Is that how it is.” He glanced over at the woman.

  “Erase the contract and we’ll call it an honest mistake,” I said. “No lawsuit, no charges. I’ll even give back fifty percent of whatever you paid me for an advance. You can think of the other half as a rental fee.”

  “That’s generous of you,” he said.

  “I’m a generous person. But I don’t want to be a franchise.”

  “Are you sure about that? Maybe you should read the contract you signed. That she signed, excuse me. It’s a very sweet deal.”

  “I’m sure it is, but it’s not for me, thanks all the same. All I ever wanted to do was act in legitimate theatre.”

  “Now that’s dedication,” the man said. “If you insist. Come back to the offices with us and we’ll take care of it immediately.”

  “Thanks, but you can just zap it to me net-mail,” I said. “I’ll trust you.”

  The man hesitated and glanced at the woman again. “You did leave some personal property with us. We’d like to return it to you.”

  “You can mail that, too,” I said. “I don’t mind. Or I’ll pay for a courier.”

  “Against our policy. We have to put it into your hands personally.”

  “Then you pay for the courier.”

  He was struggling like mad to hang on to his patience and losing. “Look, it won’t take you any time at all.”

  “Do as he says,” Sovay said suddenly. He was pointedly not looking at the woman now, though he was still standing over her. Migod, did I want to hear that story. “Go with them. They’ll take care of everything. They have to; there’s a witness.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that and it must have showed—Sovay suddenly gave me a quick hug around the shoulders. “Go ahead,” he said in a low voice. “After, you’ll remember everything.”

  “Suppose you just fill me in and I take your word for it.”

  “I can’t,” he said heavily. “I don’t know anything.”

  He stared down at the woman. “All right? I don’t know anything.”

  She nodded without looking at him. “Yah. I heard you.” Her voice sounded extremely familiar, but, as usual, the memory was just out of reach. It was maddening.

  “Okay,” I said to the white-haired guy. “But I want to come back here afterward.”

  “We’ll take you anywhere you want to go,” he said.

  I moved toward the edge of the stage and damned if he didn’t grab my sore arm. I tried to pull away but he insisted on helping me down from the stage. The woman was already heading back up the aisle as fast as she could go.

  At the doorway, I paused to look back. Sovay was still standing there on the empty stage, staring after us. Or staring after her, except she was already gone. I wanted to call out to him that I’d be back, but the white-haired guy was already pulling me through the doorway to the lobby.

  There was a private little-stretch humming at the curb, complete with driver. I started to hang back, trying to think of some excuse to go back into the theatre, but the guy hustled me into the back of the stretch. The woman was hugging the far end of the forward-facing seat, staring out at the traffic as if it were the most fascinating sight she’d ever seen. The guy planted me on the opposite seat, still hanging on to my arm as if he thought I might try to dive out the other door.

  I leaned forward and looked at the entrance to the theatre, hoping like mad that Sovay would come running out, yelling for us to stop.

  Yah. Maybe tomorrow. The guy pulled the door shut and there was a hiss as freshened, scented air blew into the interior. Suddenly, I had the strongest feeling that just as we went airborne, I was going to discover I was getting sleepy.

  But nothing of the sort happened. Nothing happened at all, except that the guy finally let go of my arm. The woman didn’t even take off her sunglasses.

  The room would have made prima rehearsal space. It was twice the size of the warm-up room at Sir Larry’s, with plenty of pads for floor work, freestanding exercise barres, and a lavabo with more attachments than I could identify functions for.

  “Nice?” the guy said as I looked it over.

  “Yah.” I pulled my head out of the lavabo and slid the door shut. “I’ve never seen a five-speed pulsator before.”

  “The item most requested by our people,” he said. “We have about two dozen installed all over the building, so no one ever has to wait.”

  “Very considerate.” I stepped away from him. “And thanks for the tour, but let’s get this over with. I don’t want to be Famous, and I wouldn’t want it even if you had three dozen lavabos on this floor alone. I don’t want people walking around thinking they’re me.”

  “Maybe they aren’t.” The woman had come up next to me without making a sound, so close that I could see twin reflections of my startled face in her big, stupid, dark glasses. Smiling, she plucked the floppy hat off her head and dropped it on mine.

  I knocked the hat away, irritated.

  “Maybe that’s not who they think they are at all.” She pulled off the glasses. It took me about five full seconds to realize I was looking at my own face. My original face.

  Freeze-frame.

  Somewhere, that cliff is still waiting for me. Waiting for someone. If you put in a cliff at the beginning of Act I, someone has to go over it by the end of Act II. Chekhov’s Law, isn’t that how it goes? It applies even more in here than on any stage out there.

  In here. That’s a strange way to think of it, really: sometimes the strangeness jumps up and hits me full on. Only in my line of work does the mind become imbued with such essence of place. Well my line of work and Marva’s. Marceline’s, too, I guess, but I don’t know as much about her. Yet.

  But that Marva—talk about self-destructive. Ha, and ha, as Marceline would say. She hasn’t been saying much of late. My conscience is bothering me about her, in spite of the fact that I had no choice, not if I wanted to live. I had no choice, and now she has no chance. I outnumber her.

  But there is no time for the contemplation of moral dilemmas, even one as critical as this is. The lights are going to come up soon and we have to give the performance of our life … lives? We have to get out of this intact before we can figure out what to do about Marceline’s stolen life.

  Not that I’d call her an innocent bystander. After all, she came to kill me. Even after she realized who and what I was, she was going to go through with it, fling me over that cliff. Marva’s cliff.

  Sho
uld have seen that Marva was too good … too real. The hazards of being multiple sometimes overwhelm even the most rigorous Brain Police training. But I should have seen it coming, been prepared for it.

  In legitimate theatre, they’re prepared for it. A hazard of Method acting, it’s called achieving escape velocity, which gives it the sound of true accomplishment, worthy of awe. Is that what really sells tickets—a freak show? Come see the human who dreamed so hard of being a butterfly that she sprouted wings and flew away?

  In the old days, Method acting had nothing to do with multiple personalities. Not so overtly, anyway. In the old days, there were two kinds of actors: the ones who disappeared into their roles, and the ones whose roles disappeared into them. But maybe in the end, it was just as hard to tell which was which.

  Marva found out. She shouldn’t have been able to; she wouldn’t have, except for Sovay. He was the one who came upon me unawares in the depths. Maybe he was the one who was too good, not Marva; too good at delving the layers of personality, identity: He was too good, and Marva wanted him too much.

  Being in deep undercover, I couldn’t do anything about it. She had to live what she would, after all, if I was ever going to get a lead on the bootlegging operation. And that was what I’d thought was my greatest danger, that in the process of delving her mind, bootleggers would come across that closed-off room that she had no knowledge of and no access to, and they would find out she was a Brain Police officer in deep undercover. I had never thought it would actually be her lover who would find me and give me away to her.

  I don’t think he meant to. From that moment to this, I really don’t think that was his intention. But as soon as he knew, she knew; they were hooked in mind-to-mind, after all. They shouldn’t have been, given her enormous attraction to him and his own Infatuation. People who want each other so much shouldn’t get too much of each other. The knowledge gave him a trauma, but that was nothing compared to what It did to her.

  She shouldn’t have been able to Initiate a split but, as I say, she was too good. She had already achieved escape velocity, she was Marva and she loved it. She wanted to go on being Marva, not some nobody Brain Police officer.

  So she split off her new, more aware self from the old Marva character and if she hadn’t, I’d be dead now, long gone over the border that divides life from death. Courtesy of the Escort she hired to do exactly that, take me over the border.

  But just because she had achieved escape velocity didn’t make her the original. That was still me, always me, and I wanted to live a lot more than she wanted me to die.

  In my more generous moments, I admire her ingenuity in hiring an Escort to get rid of me. It was a true Method solution: If a character can believe she’s alive, then she must believe she can die.

  But here’s something she didn’t consider: There’s life after death, if you want it badly enough.

  Lights coming up. It’s showtime.

  The show must go on.

  I was belly-down on the stage at Sir Larry’s. Mostly Sir Larry’s—some of the details were different, or missing altogether, little textural things tipping me off that they’d taken the liberty of relieving me of my eyes as well as my conscious state.

  I should have been upset, but whatever it took to run the emotional generator was missing. That wasn’t an effect of whatever drug the guy had used to knock me out—I could feel the drug wearing off, but the sensation was distant, like the vibration of water running down a drain in another room. This had more to do with why I was flat on the floor of the stage … flattened on the floor of the stage …

  You’re getting warmer.

  The words were neither thought nor voice; more like something I was remembering, vivid but definitely in the past. Information at one remove; remembering my lines, except this time I had no lines. I wasn’t flattened on the stage, I was the stage …

  No, I was the whole damned theatre, including the stage.

  Em-Cate would love this, I thought, walking over a rival’s back to do a part.

  Em-Cate is not your rival, memory said, if memory it was.

  Who, then?

  And there I was. No, not me; the woman with my face.

  Some very nice people …

  Some Very Nice People.

  Of course. Rather a cutesy name for a franchise, but the type of people drawn to franchising love that kind of cheap cleverness. It’s part of what makes them crave a persona overlay. There must have been some complementary quality that makes an actor want to be Famous—i.e., get franchised—but I had no idea what it was. I’d never wanted to be Famous. What I wanted was—

  —to stay in existence. To live.

  Obviously. All right. Nothing like starting at the basics.

  The rival for your existence. Think.

  The woman with my face started to move around the stage in a series of warm-up exercises I recognized as my own—a little yoga, a little t’ai chi, a little ballet, and a little kitchen sink. I could see her from any and all angles now, and it was like watching a burglar enjoying stolen property.

  Now I got it: she was really here. This wasn’t an image or a memory, we were hooked in together mind-to-mind. She didn’t know I was aware of her because I wasn’t supposed to be. I was supposed to be—

  —standing on the edge of the cliff.

  Escort/memory junkie, just doing my job. This one was pretty unusual—Escorts didn’t get many calls from actors asking to be rid of a troublesome personality. But what the hell, it was work. Didn’t much matter as long as somebody died.

  No. For the millionth time, no. That was Marceline, the character I’d been developing. Sorry, the name of the play and the general plot seems to escape me for the moment, but that’s just a memory glitch, probably brought on by a stupid famine fancier in a cheap memory lane who insisted on work with her mouth full. But anytime now, it was going to come to me, I was going to remember everything about Marceline—

  Marceline’s not a character.

  Marceline began to fade in on the stage, the image of how I looked now in full costume. Except if she wasn’t a character, how could this be a costume?

  She was materializing in response to the movements of the woman with my face, I realized. Like a conjuring trick …

  Or like the creation of a character for a play, except the character was someone who really existed and play was my life … my new life …

  I hadn’t been franchised—I’d been bodysnatched.

  Is that the way it was? A lost-soul memory junkie with a yen for more than a persona overlay. Give me a whole new life, give me somebody else’s life because I’m sick of mine. Give me her life, yah, that one there. The actress. I’ll take her. I’ll be her.

  They’d given her my personality in an overlay and then given her my appearance as well, while they’d made me over to look like her, imprinted me with her—

  Even as I thought it, I knew it wasn’t quite right. Bodysnatchings weren’t unheard of. There were plenty of sad cases walking around looking to hijack someone else’s life and leave their own bleak existences behind, and changing their own appearances to match wasn’t beyond most of them.

  But surgically altering the other person … not to that extent. It was easier just to suck the mind out, scramble the finger and retina-prints, and dump the rest in a cipher ward.

  The cliff reappeared with the three women and my attention zoomed in on the one in the middle, the woman that the Escort was there to kill.

  Me?

  She looked like me, but there were differences.

  A new image blossomed in the middle of the scene: one of us—me? the bodysnatcher?—standing in the semidark of Davy Jones’ Locker, wearing a Brain Police uniform. Me? Or some character I couldn’t remember creating?

  The memory hung in midair just beyond the edge of the cliff. I couldn’t touch it without going over.

  I turned away and found myself looking at the funhouse mirror in Davy Jones’ Locker again, except it was a mil
lion times longer than the real thing, stretching as far away from me as I could see. Farther than that. I was alone, but the mirror had plenty of reflections anyway, side by side by side, reflections with no one to cast them, reflections waiting for someone to claim them. Or waiting for someone to claim?

  The reflection I was supposedly casting turned to face me. The mirror is in the eye of the reflected.

  What?

  We’re going to find out how good an actress you really are, she said. In the old days, they didn’t use imprints to create characters. People just did impersonations and tried to be convincing. How convincing can you be?

  How convincing can I be as what?

  She gestured at the image next to her; how I looked now, the Escort’s original appearance.

  My point-of-view moved closer. Her features showed more clearly, that round, homely face surrounded by that terrible faded brown frizz passing for hair, that bulky body dressed in ragpicker du jour, and not the chic du jour, either. This was stuff that stronger, faster ragpickers left behind.

  Can you convince them you’re her? Because unless you do, you’ll really be her. And no one will ever believe otherwise. Can you convince them? Can you convince her?

  What, in here? The Escort’s reflection was aligning herself with me now. I couldn’t move away.

  In here, out there everywhere … She can’t stay in contact with you while this one takes control—too risky for her. She could get herself confused with you.

  You have to keep this one from taking over and then convince them she has. So they’ll let you go.

  Oh, was that all. And how did I manage this minor miracle? Was there a miracle kit in here somewhere?

  Abruptly, I was back in Sir Larry’s again—was Sir Larry’s again. The Escort’s image was standing in the middle of the stage, a marionette sans strings. Somewhere in the theatre—in me—was the remote control for her. I let my awareness spread itself out as if I were doing one of those full-body relaxation exercises where you concentrate on each part of yourself …

  Found it; With the control came a small flood of information, names, faces, locations, and a flash-shot: the sight of my own face rushing at her, pulled by some tropism from the empty space beyond the edge of the cliff one scant moment before the fall.