Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang

Chris Lites

Children's Book Author Shot at Signing Event. Were the books that bad?

These days, who you spend the rest of your life with has a lot less to do with finding your soul mate and a lot more to do with when you die. So, here, bleeding to death on the floor of the Borders Superstore, under the brighter than near-death halogens, the moms and their children crowded around, the staff watching the young, pissed-off divorcée running out the emergency exit, the blonde wig caught in the door when the alarm goes off - right now it looks like I spend the rest of my life with Geraldine Marie Celeste, and we haven't ever even slept together. My most successful adult relationship was with my literary agent, and she doesn't even know my real name.

Lying here, Rorschaching my pedestrian type 'O' all over the carpet, Geraldine leans over me. Red Yves Saint-Laurent skirt riding up her black nylon thighs, she takes a Gauloise from her purse and models it between her new porcelain teeth for which I no doubt paid.

"This carpet was selected in Denver by a team of Swiss design consultants," she quotes me from a company marketing prospectus she swiped, "Chosen for its calming effects and ability to conceal most minor stains. It's the same in every store; it promotes certain alpha waves conducive to calm purchasing and browsing."

Keeping the victim alert and calm is important in any first-aid situation.

She looks at the ever growing puddle of me, "But I don't think that it will be able to conceal this." Here on the floor my limbs are turning to ice. I tell Geraldine, this is it, this is my dramatic exit, my big goodbye, my close-up, my death scene finale. Then I actually say it, really, utter those clichéd words: "I'm so cold."

Geraldine groans, a puff of French smoke escaping through her nostrils. "Of course you are. They keep the temperatures just sub-arctic to promote customers' continuous movement. In order to stay warm, they have to keep moving, keep browsing. It also triggers the urge for a warm drink, say overpriced coffee beverages."

And once again, it's not about me.

All my prepubescent male fans are gathered around horrified, their faces rewound versions of all their moms, looking on in shock and sympathy. Down here my vision is reduced to a forest of single mom legs, to smooth calves in pumps and trainers, a micro-wonderland of Manolo Blahnik's, Jimmy Choo's, Yohji Yamamoto Adidas; all their money goes straight to the feet. I could so totally get laid here tonight, with all the sympathy projected at me.

For years, I didn't know women could wear things like this. I didn't know they existed. I spent the first half of my life being taught dogmatically how to idolize women, the second half trying to learn how to objectify them. I never really caught up. At 38 and halfway through a book tour, life has become just another story you tell yourself, just another coping strategy in a long history of misguided reinvention. Being gut shot isn't so much as a step down as what they call a lateral move.

The gunshot wound, the GSW to be all hip and technical, it doesn't always have to hurt. It could resemble gastroenteritis creeping through your bowels. It could be appendicitis, gallstones, or a urinary tract infection. This is tolerable, really.

We always over dramatize.

Geraldine is leaning over me. I can see the strand of pearls dangling between the soft white half-moons of her breasts framed between the menstrual burgundy lapels of her blazer. She tells me it's not as bad as it looks.

This is always true, except for the last time, then it is as bad as it looks.

The alarm from the emergency door is still ringing, the wig swinging in it like the severed tail of a woodland creature. Moms and kids have begun to gush. It's a pity party for yours truly, a validation of all my hard work at avoiding the real story in my life. By the strand of pearls, I pull Geraldine down closer to me.

"Give me some tampons."

"It's not my time of the month, sorry."

"Tampons, they can work as field dressings." Tampons are just the right size for stuffing small caliber wounds. They are made to absorb blood after all.

One day I was going to write a real book, I swear.

Geraldine puts her cigarette in my mouth; it's red, glossy and wet with the taste of her. She searches through her purse, eventually producing a can of Mace and some hotel mints. I vaguely roll my head at the lines of mothers gathered National Geographic herd style around me, the fallen zebra. Geraldine sighs and stands up, her skirt not quite falling back down, and you can see she's wearing black lace garters and matching underwear hugs the cleft of her ass. Geraldine asks very loudly, do any of the women have some tampons for the shot author? They would really help, as bandages, she says.

Like it was her idea.

And the mothers all reach into their purses and pull out hundreds of multi-color wrappers, a rainbow of tampons which Geraldine brings over to me, smile amped up like she's about to tell me what I've won.

I ask Geraldine, "Are there any, you know, like organs lying around?" If there are, I tell her, she has to pick them up with something clean, and lay them on my chest till the paramedics arrive. Meanwhile, she should try and stuff some tampon padding into the wound. She isn't happy about any of this, but takes her cigarette out of my mouth and puts it back into hers, which is the closest we've come to kissing unless you count Ibiza. She starts opening the tampons.

First aid is about stabilizing the victim until the paramedics arrive. Paramedics stabilize you until you can be moved to the ER, where they stabilize you until you can go to the OR. It's all a game of keeping you alive long enough until you are someone else's problem.

Tell me about it.

Geraldine, stuffing the tampons into the hole in my abdomen, the moms covering their sons' eyes, she says, "I think you're often more trouble than you're worth."

She says, "This isn't in our contract."

Alexander, the glossy 2D cardboard cartoon version of me, lording above us, wouldn't disagree. He's my ticket to all of this - the money, the fame, the sex. The little bastard, a cyberspace version of Harry Potter, everyone's fucking hero. Standing there with his impossible smile, surely he and Geraldine have the same dentist. He's just waiting for me die; he's been waiting for it since we were kids. You could say I owe it to him, the little fucker.

Before The Colony, before Dr. Charlotte Wang, before writing the Alexander series, before pimping my inner child to get laid, before being gut shot at the Border's Superstore, there was Mother, Father, Alex and me. Then there was just me and Mom, and gradually less of Mom, really, with a little bit of her slipping away each day.

Here was Dad being all Saturday morning cartoon Popeye on his particular strain of spinach. In Dad's case, it came in clear glass bottles, but it seemed to work all the same. He'd get really crazy and really strong, mushing his vowel sounds just like the little sailor and always ready to tussle, especially with Mom.

I can see Mom getting knocked to the floor, being totally this face of surprise at how fast she got there. I can see Alex, my little brother, by all of thirteen minutes - but important when you're both seven - starting to wail, not seeing it for the really good show it is, and Dad giving him a little of the old Popeye forearm. Only Alex was smaller than Mom and flew back, hitting the corner of the downstairs table, his head making that jarring cracking noise, like when a piece of wood pops in the fire.

Then the big gaping hole of mother's scream, like a Muppet, and how I could see that little dangling thing that hangs down. Her scream came on as a train and Dad's spinach wearing off right then, shocked by how things had gone. Alex was clearly not going to get up from that tussle and I, stupid little shit that I was, laughed this little giggle, the only thing I could do.

Mom came out from behind the bar and leveled the gun at Dad. The barrel made a ratchet noise like the sprinkler when it twisted back before it sprayed the lawn. Dad made those big bulging cartoon eyes of shock. Then there was the bang, a big hole in Dad and another mess on the floor.

And that's how my family went from four to two in the space of an afternoon. Mom and I wound up living out of motels and stolen cars until she wandered into the stranger wilds of the militant feminist hardcore movement dragging me along with her.

Here I am now, in the thick tangle of the morphine, or of whatever pain killers they gave me, in the warm confusion of the hypovolemic shock that's set in. All of it is tangled together now, ropes of semen-like stickiness. I'm inside of it, gummy and pressing, my movement coming as some slow-motion, narcoticized mime. Alexander is here, though if he's my brother or my character I can't say for sure, but he's blaming me for everything.

After he died, it was all on me, the blame not divided two ways anymore, and the more you can divide something the less it has to feel. But now it's all on me again, here in this medicinal womb. My fault for his being written as a latch-key kid, for living in a role-playing game online, for his mom being divorced, for his being dead.

But it's all so cool with me right now; it's all very groovy and psychedelic here in the warm cozy shell of pharmacological denial. Here, it isn't my fault, not any of it - not the dead brother, not the profiting from his memory, not the validation sex, and certainly not my tremendous inability to cope with members of the opposite sex. All of that is Mom's fault, Mom and Dr. Charlotte Wang.

Just stabilize please, long enough for it to be someone else's problem, long enough to pass the blame. Here is good, here I can just curl up into this milky white muck and regress...

Picture a half Chinese girl on a Tennessee playground, glasses nerd regulation thick. She's in a lime green sweater being teased by the boy-ape hicks of her particular yardage of the Bible belt. The boy-apes hurling insults to the twanging rhyme of "Charlotte Wang knows everythang." And this little girl, behind her ashtray lenses, holding back her tears, her big super brain and yellow skin making it really impossible to get along here, she's forming a whole well of displaced hatred. The boys taking it farther and farther, one day too far altogether, and nothing ever being the same after that, not for any of us. This girl retreats inside, deciding those little teenage rapist bastards were right about one thing, Charlotte Wang does know everything. Mom and I bounced around the country, motel rooms strung together like post cards from the depths of one really horrible, unending summer vacation.

"Hello from Shithole Arkansas!"

"Truck Stop 22, Your Last Chance For Pussy Before Texas!"

"Greetings From Crawdad! Homemade Meth Capital of Mississippi!"

The monotony of the looping road giving her time to come to the conclusion that Dad killed Alex, Dad was a man, men were therefore a bad, bad thing. So, when the two of us had come upon Charlotte preaching the same ideology around bonfires at midnight rallies, well of course they were going to hit it off. And when two angry, lonely women decide to take on half the species together, it isn't surprising they're going to call it love. Maybe it even is. Charlotte started The Colony in southern California, and that's where, for the most part, I was raised.

Picture The Colony as a Star Trek episode written by Valerie Solanas minus the itchy trigger finger for Andy Warhol. Picture Hippie Space Chicks done up in diaphanous pastels, wearing odd, angular jewelry, soft lit by the sun and smelling of the orange groves the men tended. All of them living in a matriarchal society that Charlotte preached would inherit the earth; only by the time they did they wouldn't be the meek. They'd be the smart, brilliant, rightful heirs to the global brain of "Mother Gaia" which alternately was expressed by Charlotte as a collective acid-trip telepathy experience or something like a networked computer hive-mind. Charlotte really did know just about "everything", or anyway, so it seemed to an eight year old boy whose mother had disappeared into a world of hate, utopian madness and misdirected grief and guilt.

It's a recruitment drive in Tuscaloosa, Charlotte all Der Furher behind a box podium at the state fair. Over a hundred sweat-drenched women rallied around her as she took the stage of the beauty pageant. The contestants' perma-grins turning into horror as all the angry women were riled by Charlotte's fist waving speech. Those scared, defenseless pageant girls, quivering in their swimsuit competition outfits. Oh! Just seeing them, I'd picture Neanderthal scenes, bestial rutting, shadows locked together in frenzied coupling, thrown up as on some cave wall. With everything I wanted to do to them playing out in one lugubrious porno spool of pre-adolescent boy-fantasy, right then I could see where maybe Charlotte was right.

But, no, I'd get bused back to The Colony. I'd tend the orange groves with the other boys, clean the cabins, sew the clothes and cook the meals, do all your chores and hope that maybe one of the girls would want to have you visit her one night. The hope was one would want you to have you service her, as they sometimes did, just so you could do your thing, just so she could see what it was like. Later, after dumping my DNA, not impressing her much at all, one of the girls showed me where to listen in on one of Charlotte's lectures. She was preaching to the women about re-writing the program. Men, it seemed, were little monkeys wired for epileptic spasms of humping, trying to get their code into the nearest port, replicate their sad little programs. They had wired the world, using their penis and the Y chromosome to set things up a certain way, but that isn't how it had to be. It could all be written over again, you just had to change your part in the narrative, said Charlotte. Everything is a story, a program waiting to be hacked.

Here in the warm halogen center of an antiseptic white room, the paper angels speak in the technical language of Elysium, words like laparotomy, medial visceral rotation, proximal flesh wound... the angels are searching my guts with their smooth latex hands; they are looking for my soul. Covered in their effort to find my sacred little center, the angels are here to save me. Each one, so beautiful. Especially that one, so familiar, like the angel who shot me, only more like a man now, but in a yellow paper outfit and mask. That angel has forgotten to remove one of his earrings, but no one else seems to notice. And he's looking at me, scaring me because this one isn't an angel at all. And he's smiling behind his heavenly mask, so as to keep my mortal germs off him. This beautiful man looks so much like someone I'm sure I used to know.

Sometimes I wake up above flyover country. You know where it is, you probably live there. It's between the coasts, between the places people actually want to go. I wake up under the hiss of climate control, and the shoals of clouds outside my first class window start to describe a trail of all the twisted sheets, smudged lipstick, and violated mothers that I left behind. Keep moving, stay ahead. It looks worse than it is, really, except for the last time of course.

Then it is as bad as it looks.

They're all the same, all fractioned off from the same damaged girl archetype. Abused, used, and now looking for more, the Tammys and Taras, the Arlenes and Monas. You know who these girls are, you probably are one, right now waiting for "the one", not Prince Charming, but the guy Prince Charming keeps in the dungeon. It's love me, hate me, fuck me, validate me, then treat me like shit. They all want to feel like crap; they want what I'm willing to be. I fold neatly into the narrative of their lives.

There I am, look at me. The line out the door, everybody is excited to meet the author and shake his hand, none of them knowing he's going to be getting shot here in just a few minutes, none of them knowing that today they're going to get to be on the news.

And everybody wants to be on TV, it's so validating.

Meet Jamie Box from Boise which is in Idaho. She's brought her son; he's dressed up as one of the Furies 2.0. The Furies are mean, female avatars running loose in my books. Look at this poor kid, nine years old and well on his way to gender dysphoria.

I can relate.

Meet Jeanette and Billy Marsh. Meet Fran and Marvin Kelsey. Meet Tara and Nathan Whoever.

While in line, little elf-like store helpers have written the boys and mother's names on post-it notes on the title pages. All I have to do is write "to", copy their name, and sign my own. It's an assembly line. Every book, every signature I give, I'm tracking your love, your approval of my sad little soul. I mark it in the lines at these signings, the Amazon sales numbers, the royalty checks, even the stupid costumes in which you and your kids show up. I'm smiling at you and asking your name. It's going on my list with a little tick, one more drop in the bucket for "Telethon Me". Field a few questions, smile, nod, pose for a picture.

How many of you get your photos back and wonder why the author looks like he's about to cry? How many of you wonder if the author is staring down your dress? You think I write these little Alexander books because I enjoy them? Every word I write is a plea; every letter is begging you: please, love me, pay attention to me, redeem my sick and twisted childhood, pay me for my misery. Help me franchise and sell enough of my fictional childhood and maybe the real one doesn't feel so original, the real one doesn't hurt so much.

Look at this kid, coming up, his eyes agog, seeing his hero, you know, a rôle model and the mother, in her Made in Malaysia sweater, is hoping I can be the same for her. You're pushing middle age honey; you're saddled with a kid, and that sneaking suspicion that no man will ever really want you again, for the long haul? It's dead-on. We're scum, the lot of us. My prescription: take two Oprahs and call a suicide hotline in the morning. Next.

But I just smile and sign the book. I hate her, I hate all of them, I hate you because you adore me. That's proof enough you are all defective. Except for the pissed off blond, the young one reaching into the purse, I don't hate that one. With blue eyes peeking over shades perched just so on the bridge of an avian nose, the next moments break down into Tarantino storyboards. The platinum blond, pulling out the gun, the sweep of the wig cutting the air, the wet, labial pink of over-glossed lips as the gun finds yours truly. This one who looks so familiar, pointing the gun, the crowd screaming. Me mouthing this unspoken plea in the air between us as the barrel turns and loads its wad.

"Please don't fuck this up."

Somewhere in the dark, hospital non-hours of night, waking to the steady distal pulse of my own beating flesh echoed on the electronic monitors, I'm reminded of nights in Charlotte's medical compound, the physical center of all her warped, tormented dreams. Every now and then, from whatever chore you were doing, one of the space-honeys would call you in, and you'd go up to the looming brown building on the hill, to the coolness of air-conditioning and clean rooms. I'd have tests, cultures, samples, bits of this and that taken, all in Charlotte's effort to release her sex from needing ours to keep the species from a product recall. Charlotte was waging a one woman war with the Y chromosome; it was her locus of obsession, the point at which all her dementia converged. Charlotte would put it in simple terms your defective man-brain could understand. There are these chromosomes and, on these chromosomes sit your genes. Picture them like these little DNA crows ranged along telephone wire outside the white trash neighborhood of your gene pool. They sit there, these crows, these genes. There's a cystic fibrosis gene, genes for various muscular dystrophies, several forms of cancer, and on your Y chromosome, the gene that causes maleness. Think of it like any other inherited disease. Mr. Bojangles is just a functional tumor; your testosterone is just the antibody to the cancer that is you. Charlotte is the Mr. Wizard of matriarchal genetics.

But those nights weren't so bad, being poked and prodded and for the first time looked after by females. So that tonight, I'm not altogether displaced here among the machine dreams and coded sounds of the hospital, watching the orderly consult my IV with a practiced eye. He smiles at me with a face so very familiar. Look, there I am, giving myself a shot. Or rather Alex is. Nice of him, he's all grown up, telling me it's going to be OK, I won't feel a thing. I smile and nod, and I'm sure Alex is right. I'm sure I won't. It feels warm, the sensation of medicine being pushed into my vein. Funny, really, something other than my heart is motivating my blood. And is that the hint of lipstick Alex still has on? Bubblegum Orgy if I'm not mistaken, it's really big with certain Japanese schoolgirls. Don't ask me how I know this.

Alex is my avenging angel; he's come to get his due. My man-brain takes over, fight or flight atavisms kicking in. There's an overdose in that syringe, says the brain stem, and overdose means death. Death is bad says the brain stem. My frontal lobe would argue, but brain stem is off and running with those ancient lizard legs that first tasted land. Brain-stem is making all the decisions for us now. The body listens to brain stem and rolls off of the bed, pulling the IV right out of my arm with a little pop, a contrail of crimson blood arcing up above me.

Alex yells, but it's very far away behind the nice cotton buffer of the drug he started to give me; then he's on top of me, and I'm looking at myself, rewound to half my actual age. I say to myself, "Jesus, I really don't have a lot to look forward to. I really look like shit."

Then I try to strangle myself, reaching out from above me, straddled on top of myself. From out of the intervening years between us, Alex's two ghost arms are wrapped around our throat. Squeezing and squeezing because he really shouldn't have been the one that died. Gripping tighter for each year he's missed. His eyes a fury for it being all my fault. Just like everyone else, passing the blame along. Then Alex groans because brain stem has told the body to knee him right in the crotch. Laying there, grabbing himself and wincing in pain, looking a lot like how Alex might have looked if he'd grown up. His eyes all teary and his voice this neutered whine, he's wanting to know how I could have left his mom, just like that.

"Which one, which one was your mom?" not the best way to phrase it, I'll admit. But there isn't time for reconsideration, as Alex has that gun out again, ready to reenact our little drama from this morning, only this time getting it right. I'm out the door, down a blurred fugue of white on white hospital corridor, of biohazard warnings, bleating machines, out the fire door and gone.

Geraldine looks at me from under the ghastly lighting scheme of a 2AM diner. Her blue DKNY pants suit is offset against the rough stone work of the Googie style restaurant. Tonight her lips are the blood red of vampire flicks, the fantasy sanguine of certain fetishes. The specific color is called My Beating Heart if I'm not mistaken. After footwear I became obsessed with women's lips. I'm wearing some emergency clothes she carries in her trunk when I'm on tour in the event of a midnight escape from some woman's balcony or a half-hearted suicide attempt in a hotel swimming pool. Geraldine is smoking her Gauloises, her mouth performing precise, tight little 'O' kisses around the wet pale tip. She isn't saying anything, just blowing on her coffee. I've laid out the whole sordid history of my past and Geraldine's looking as if I'm a favorite horse that might have to be put down.

"You should be back in the hospital," her perfect smoke ring floating between us. Peritonitis could set in, some internal sutures might have been torn, I could bleed out, exsanguinate right here. Really, I swear. Geraldine reaches into her purse and pulls out a prescription bottle of Percocet. She filters out two shiny pills and slides them across the table, then makes her eyebrow into a question mark, saying: "Or should I just give you the whole bottle?"

I tell her I ran away from a gun-wielding madman.

"Who's your son."

I nod.

"From The Colony, where you had sex with beautiful space hippies."

I nod.

"Where you picked oranges and were taught that woman shall inherit the Earth."

I nod.

Geraldine lights another cigarette off the butt of her current one, sucking in a big, lipstick-wet cumulous of smoke. "You know, this morning I thought you arranged this whole thing as an elaborate suicide farewell."

"And now?"

"Now I think you've got an even better story. This whole 'crazy mom takes young, famous author into a feminist hippie cult'? This is money, no two ways about it." Sublimate. Pimp your childhood.

Geraldine sees me being all contemplative and sighs... "What?"

"I need you to drive me to Southern California."

She calls the waitress for the check. She puts out her Gauloise with a ferocious twist of her white lacquered nails. "I'm supposed to believe this?"

I shrug.

"You're not going to find yourself or anything out there, you know? This isn't a movie or anything."

Of course it is. It's the movie of my life.

Geraldine drives a sensible, yet stylish cobalt blue BMW. It has power and efficiency, both of which I fundamentally lack at this early Sonoma hour. Under this cocktail dawn you want to see poured into a fresh martini glasses, The Colony seems to be all but abandoned. The well ordered groves picked clean and the lodges in disrepair. Peeling paint on old clapboard has gone the universal silver of old wood under the sun. Screen doors squeak in the wind, grass having since reclaimed old paths. Geraldine surveys the landscape from behind her neutral zone of Armani shades and lights another cigarette. "This place is a real dump."

It's not the Edenic Paradise from nearly two decades ago. All the space honeys have beamed up to Charlotte's final frontier, the last crazy away mission in her master plan for the species, gendercide.

I tell her to drive us up to the medical center. She rolls her eyes under those two-hundred dollar frames and flicks out her French cigarette. I watch it skip and spark across my childhood as I get back into the car.

Yellow Ryder moving vans gather in front of the squat medical center, a 60's throwback to Bauhaus. Women are loading boxes. Strong women, beautiful women, older now, but they still radiate that opiate of belief that Charlotte spews. Twenty years ago, one of them may have had a forgettable night with yours truly, letting me dump my code, bringing buggy operations down upon the whole system all these years later.

Two younger girls appear - twins, blonde, tawny and all Doublemint fantasy. Fantasy, until I catch them from another angle as they turn. I see they aren't two at all; they're connected at the waist, moving in strange tandem. Another pair follow behind them, same as the first, same hair, same eyes and the same potato-sack gait.

I look at Charlotte, ticking off a PDA as each box of equipment is hoisted onto a truck. Her hair pulled back in a severe bun and wearing a sea-foam sarong, this whole scene could be recycled from ancient Egypt; Nefertiti supervising a grand public works, if Nefertiti were a middle-aged Chinese-American with Sapphic lover who happened to be your mother. There's Mom, wearing a white Flash Gordon sari, and after Labor Day, no less.

Hi, Mom.

Charlotte sees me first and she's not happy at all. Mom sees me next, her face the accumulation of years between us, her emotional floodgates opening in a way they never quite did for Charlotte.

Mom rushes up to me. Her tears staining the white of her sari, me blinking my own away as the two of us have our own emotional episode right here in front of the middle-aged space honeys, my agent, a gendercidal feminist cult leader, circus side-show Doublmint girls, and Alex. Oh yes, there he is, coming out of the main building, holding that same goddamn gun.

Mom saying, "Oh my God..."

Charlotte smiling at me, one eyebrow arched just so.

Charlotte Wang, knowing how to tie up all loose ends.

Then Alex, coming down the stairs, the space honeys watching him; but do any have that twinge of maternal attachment? The conjoined twins watching him, Charlotte, and Mom, watching him.

There's Mom with tears in her eyes, looking from Alex to me. Alex, close up in the sun, suddenly not looking like Alex, looking exactly like Alex. The two of us don't look like father and son. Alex and I look like unevenly-aged identical twins. Alex approaches Mom, standing in front of her protectively, and points the gun at me. Like I could be more shocked here, Alex?

Charlotte Wang, really knowing everything. Alex pulling back the hammer on the gun, pleading, "Mom, you said I was special, Mom? But you lied."

All those nights in Charlotte's lab, those blood tests. Of course he looks just like Alex. Of course he looks just like me. Franchise yourself. Make enough copies and the original doesn't have to hurt so much. His eyes, my eyes, are full again with tears, clearly he cannot grasp what's really going on. He's probably got the memory of a goldfish in there. Degraded like an MP3 passed round too many times, he just can't work it out. Mom tries to console him, but he shakes his head, tears flying off like a wet dog trying to dry itself. Then his eyes click back on me.

And bang.

Down I go.

What you'd see if you were Geraldine, or Charlotte, if you weren't right in front, is the bullet go right through me and a micro-Hiroshima of blood burst out my back. Then you'd see me just stand there for a second, dumbfounded. My feet collapse, then the knees, then rest of me, the accordion let down as the whole existential scaffolding just gives up.

This pen, out of ink.

This program, crashing.

Right before I pass out, right before Alex is going to finish me off, I see Mom screaming, the big cavern of her yell from three decades past suddenly resurrected. Charlotte's realizing she lost Mom, right here in the frozen pause of that replayed scream as Geraldine reaches into her purse and Maces Alex, full load. The entire chemical right in his face, before I can tell her, really, don't bother, please, not on my account.

The rest you saw. Or read. Or heard. Like any story, like any good virus, it's everywhere now.

On the internet.

In the movie.

In the book.

In the opening monologue.

Wherever.

The crazy matriarchal cult that shot that writer, the writer who wrote those kid's books. It's franchised everywhere. It's copied into everyone's head. It's everybody's story, which maybe means it doesn't have to be mine.

You know how Mom had to leave Charlotte, to help me recover from the gunshot, how Charlotte just disappeared along with all the space honeys. If you saw the movie, Mom was Frances McDormand, Charlotte was Joan Chen. They're both too young.

You were aware of all the hype, Alex being arrested, but the government being more interested in his genetic history than his predilection for shooting writers. Then the whole thing sort of went away. Certain biotech firms made a bunch of patents, stocks shot up, maybe you made a bunch of money.

Then you heard about all the girl babies.

It didn't seem like anything at first, an anomaly, but pretty soon doctors started to figure out there were just too many female babies being born. The odds were astronomical. There were investigations as more little girls were being born and more little boys were not. Then you heard about the virus, the modified STD, the one that was piggybacking on all those Y chromosomes, getting them drunk, filling their heads with distractions and booze right before the big game. You know, right before it's time to come out and perform, to make a man, all those Y chromosomes laying down on the job, just not bothering to make boys.

Then it got worse. You watched as more girls and fewer and fewer boys were born. By that time, Mom, Alex and I were already gone. At some point, you probably said to yourself, damn, damn that Charlotte Wang. We try and keep low these days, but it's hard. I've enough money in royalties and license fees from Geraldine, shuttled to accounts that I can afford to keep us in this quiet, out of the way spot. A sliver of beach, a square of tropical sky, and the rest of my life a tangle with my soul-mate Alex, my self. Call it the Cain and Abel of the 21st century. Too bad he's a little poorly coded in the DNA department.

Mom says Charlotte worked out a way to make girl babies from two eggs, no sperm need apply. My kind is reaching the end of its product life cycle; there's been a planet wide recall on the series, courtesy of Charlotte Wang. That's OK, it wasn't like they were doing anything new with the brand. It was long overdue.

At night, in a hot tropical room, Mom and Alex out along the shore, I sit in the sweat of beach evenings and picture orange groves, fields of bright crops growing over a planet under an endless string of blue days. In the orchards, flitting between the trees, I can hear the lilting voices of girls, followed by the flitting glimpses of their perfect, naked little forms, right before they smile at me and wave goodbye.

© Chris Lites 2008 All Rights Reserved