“Better now?” she asked.
“I’m more physically comfortable but psychologically? I’m a wreck.”
“I’d imagine you into being a little more accepting of the whole thing, but I know you too well for that.”
“Imagine me? Is that where we are?” I pointed to the mirrors, the strange dark hall, the gas streetlight that came from nowhere and might to nowhere return.
“That’s right,” she said. “My imagination. I’m fantasizing this whole conversation. This is where you live until I put you on paper. Which is why I can do anything I want here.”
“So you can imagine me tiny or ten feet tall, and you can know what number I’m thinking of because…we are literally inside your brain.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “This is the nice neighborhood in my brain.”
“Is there a bad neighborhood?”
She pointed to a black door with smoke billowing out from under it. I stood and went to the door and peeked inside. Behind it lurked monsters—anger, doubt, guilt, regret, and a weird erotic fascination with the late actor Christopher Plummer.
“Yikes,” I said and slammed the door shut.
“Warned you,” Maxine replied.
“I hope you’re in therapy for some of that.”
“Too late now,” she said with a shrug. “Have a seat.”
I returned to the armchair. “Is this my real body or an imagined version of me?”
“You don’t have a body. You have no physical reality.”
That was a gut punch to my nonexistent gut. “And Koshka? And Duke?”
“They aren’t real in the physical sense either. You are all figments of my imagination that I put onto paper and turned into books.”
I sat back in the chair. “All this time, I thought I was real, and Duke was fictional. Wait, if we’re both fictional, we can be together. Can you put us together? You can do anything in a book. We could get married on the moon if you wrote it.”
“Wish I could, Rainy,” she said. “But…ah, we’ll get to that. You want to know where you come from, yes?”
“You know I do,” I said. “I do because you’re pulling my strings. Playing God with me.”
“No strings. And no playing God. Just…playing,” she said with real tenderness in her voice. “You and I have known each other a long, long time. Any writer will tell you that their characters, especially ones they’ve written for decades, will take on a life of their own. Yes, you’re in my mind, but even I can’t imagine you burning books and kicking puppies.”
“That’s some comfort, I guess. All right. Tell me everything.”
“Good. Well…Let’s be old-fashioned and begin at the beginning. You were born on January twenty-first, 1975, the day your first book was released.”
“Hold on,” I said. “It’s 2025 so…I’m fifty? Are you serious?”
She calmly nodded. I glanced at the nearest mirror on the wall.
“I am agingverywell,” I said. “Not a single gray hair.”
“You’re welcome. Shall I continue?”
“Please.”
“Back then,” she continued, “I was a secretary at a gravel supply company. Most boring job in the history of the world, but I had access to a typewriter and a boss who was never in the office. I’d get all my work done in two hours and spend the rest of the day pretending to work while I wrote.”
“What were you trying to write?”
