Shuteye for the Timebroker Read online

  And now that day had arrived.

  Tethered securely against the sense-shattering pain that no amount of repetition could diminish, Ingeniero gloated in his triumph over a fate that had sought to rob him of his very reason for existence. Then he unleashed the beneficent wrath of the lens upon his supine form.

  Where was he? He was not fixed in any planetary or solar environment. Instead, his consciousness seemed scattered across vast distances. He did not have any obvious sensory organs or input. Yet he somehow apprehended the universe, and his effect on it.

  His effect? What was that quality?

  Decay, rot, dissolution, extinction.

  Ingeniero had come to inhabit the very soul of entropy. Immortal creature or cosmic principle, objective reality or the enforced subjective conceit of his limited intellect, his host this time was the being responsible for all de-coherence, an omnipresent vector of leveling and nonexistence, the essence of negation.

  No! Ingeniero tried to break free of this hated host. Entropy was the archenemy of all creators, the force he had fought against with every breath. Yet now he was being forced to identify utterly with the principle.

  This had to be the final test of the lens! No mere dumb mechanism, the alien device must intelligently attune itself to the subject beneath it, crafting a program exactly suited to the individual’s reformation.

  Ingeniero suddenly knew that he had to master this last hurdle or be utterly broken, despite all his past progress. He attempted to calm his fears and merge with entropy as it persistently ground down all creation into tedious uniformity.

  But it was no use. His hatred of the universal dissolver, the force that would one day put an end to Ingeniero the living artist and all his creations, was too strong. Ingeniero continued to struggle, although he knew all resistance was doomed.

  Thirty minutes that concealed an eternity trickled by before the florid spew of the transformative lens died out.

  The man on the dais finally opened his eyes, but no intelligence lived there. Ingeniero did not stir, but merely breathed stertorously. With labored movements, his slave Iamo arrived to undo the restraints. When Ingeniero did not immediately arise, Iamo bent over him and extended a small probe to measure the master’s vital signs. Seemingly alarmed by what it discovered, Iamo flowed itself around Ingeniero to act as a life-support cocoon. Using its synthetic muscles to shift the human’s encased limbs, the living suit forced Ingeniero to get up off the platform and walk toward the staircase. Perhaps the servant intended to access the metabolytic lozenges the master had neglected lately. Its motivations were unknown to anyone but itself.

  But these enforced movements had a peculiar visible effect on Ingeniero, engendering a kind of transient resuscitation. For one wild moment a shattered intelligence returned to his features. Madness and despair danced in his gaze. Plainly, continued existence was insupportable. Summoning up all his mental discipline, the sculptor cast his most powerful mental bolt.

  Instantly, all of Iamo’s dwindled substance hardened into its permanent crystalline form. The result of the slave’s transformation was the production of a human-shaped statue, its core an anguished, suffocated man caught in mid-stride, his face cast forever in a rictus of self-loathing and unbearable knowledge, like a fly in amber.

  When the Oriole returned, its crew discovered what had happened and took the fused mass of Iamo and Ingeniero away, back to the worlds of the Diffusion.

  Where the statue that came to be known as The Ultimate Disclosure shattered all auction records, and insured Ingeniero’s reputation for eternity.

  Here’s an instance where the title definitely came first.

  My mate, Deborah Newton, is a longtime yoga practitioner. Preceding each class comes study of the yogic sutras, or texts. But the students who bother with this aspect of the practice are an exclusive lot, and I have often joked that they are studying “secret sutras.” Once I had this phrase, adding a woman’s name was intuitive. (And why do I have this fixation on the name “Sally” for a certain kind of female, as in my story “The Ballad of Sally NutraSweet”?)

  In any case, the title sat unused for some time, until I realized that it applied to a “chick lit” novel. After that, everything fell into place.

  For those readers who’ve enjoyed my humor columns under the rubric “Plumage from Pegasus,” you may consider this one of those columns that simply outgrew its 1,500-word limit.

  The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet

  Riley Small’s agent actually called Riley personally with the good tidings. Even gruff, self-important, and generally uncommunicative agents tend to be more forthcoming and pleasant when an author stands to earn the agent hundreds of thousands of dollars above and beyond all the other bales of cash he or she has already brought in.

  “Riley, good news,” said Harvard Morgaine, his speech partly occluded by the ever-present dead cigar in his mouth, the foul smell of which Riley could vividly conjure up even across the width of Manhattan. “Miramax is nearly one hundred percent on board. Weinstein is practically pissing his pants with sheer joy and greed. Know what he said to me? ‘Strumpet’s going to be bigger than Bridget Jones’s ass.’ How’s that make you feel?”

  Riley winced. The comparison between his book and Zellweger’s method-acting butt was not one he would have chosen himself. “Uh, swell—I guess.”

  “Super! OK now, there’s just one problem. We’ve milked the mysterious-author angle just about as long as we can. When Hollywood sticks its dick in the soup, there’s no escaping public appearances by the author. Entertainment Tonight, Leno, Letterman, the whole circuit. So Sally Strumpet is going to have to finally show her face.”

  A sick feeling instantly pervaded Riley’s gut. He’d known this day was coming ever since he had inked the contract for his book, The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet, some two years ago. But the inevitability of the fateful moment had not lessened the dread associated with the exposure of his hoax.

  “Well, um, Harv, what do you suggest we do?”

  “As I suss it, kid, there’re only two angles to this dilemma. Either we reveal Sally’s real identity—tell the world that their beloved nubile twenty-five-year-old sexual adventuress Sally Strumpet is really a deceitful thirty-five-year-old schlub named Riley Small—or else we continue the charade by providing a living substitute for a vital person who inconveniently doesn’t exist. Now, each tactic has its pluses and minuses. The upside to coming clean about your authorship of the book is that it’s a simple, honest solution with no chance of blowing up in our faces, and you personally get to bask in the limelight.”

  “And the downside?”

  “The downside is that you, me, your book, and any chance of signing the Miramax deal will go down the toilet faster than Drano. In this case, the limelight will be like napalm from above. You remember that ruckus when the supposed Native American author of The Education of Little Tree was revealed to be a white supremacist?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, that little flap will look like a party at Elaine’s compared with the shitstorm that us admitting the truth will bring down on our heads.”

  “I see …” Riley experienced a small hopeful memory of a similar literary scandal that had ended well. “Hey, what about that time in the science fiction world, when that writer everyone thought was a guy—Tipitina?—turned out to be a woman?”

  “That Tiptree joker, you mean? Doesn’t apply here. Women masquerading as men is cool. People cut them slack because they’re perceived as the underdogs trying to make it in a man’s world. But a guy shoehorning his way into a field reserved for women—you may as well put your balls into a noose.”

  Riley winced as Morgaine continued his pitch.

  “Now, as far as ramping up the masquerade goes, we’re compounding your original sin by orders of magnitude, opening us up to even worse public ridicule and hatred if we’re ever exposed. Which, of course, God willing, we won’t be. But the commensurate upside is that we bot
h get a shot to ride this baby all the way to a villa in Tuscany and a little grass shack in Maui for each of us. So, what’s it going to be?”

  Riley could hear Morgaine ferociously chewing his cigar. The silence between author and agent seemed to stretch out forever. Riley considered his future under both scenarios. More importantly, he considered his past, the impulses and circumstances that had led him to write The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet in the first place. The memories of those despairing days were ultimately what determined his answer.

  “Do I get to interview the women we’ll be considering to play Sally?”

  “Kid, I got a desk full of head shots for you to start looking at right now.”

  * * *

  At age thirty-three, Riley Small had felt crucified on the cross of his own ambitions.

  Since college, Riley had been convinced that he would someday be a famous writer. Some fairly significant talent on his part had been adduced by encouraging teachers and friends, convincing Riley that he had the chops to write a great book or three, thus gaining admission into the ranks of the masters he loved. But upon graduation, his dreams began to deflate faster than a parachute sucked into a jet engine. The manuscripts of his first two novels kept coming back from publishers with pleasant but firm brush-offs. The New Yorker and the Paris Review declined to add Rileys name to their table of contents pages. Virtually every big-name and not-so-big-name agent listed in the Writer’s Digest guides had very politely failed to respond to his every solicitation for representation of his masterpieces-to-be.

  Despite setbacks that would have sent a lesser soul into a screaming retreat, Riley persisted with his dreams. To keep body firmly united with soul, Riley held a number of mediocre jobs on the edges of the publishing industry. By age thirty-three, he had ascended to the unremarkable position of assistant editor at a third-tier “lad” magazine, a publication titled Royale. (“Hey—get Royale!” was the magazines advertising tagline. The staffers, however, referred to their employer as “Roy’s Ale,” for the six-pack mentality of its average subscriber.) At the magazine, Riley proofed articles on South American aphrodisiacs and the sexual kinks of celebrities, all the while plotting his next assault on the Fortress of Literature.

  In parallel with his many defeats on the literary front, Riley had also sustained over the sad years more than his share of grievous damage on the romantic battlefield. His unswerving focus on making it as a writer tended to cause him to be less than attentive to such female-appreciated matters as compliments, punctuality, and the kind of social minutiae that insured that any book using Jane Austen as a template would vault to the ranks of best-sellerdom.

  But in Riley’s defense, he felt, there were other factors behind his dismal string of romantic failures than mere masculine inattention. Young single urban women today seemed incapable of sustaining any relationship that did not conform to an unreal mass-media template. Tutored by television, movies, and books to expect the perfect boyfriend to be rich, handsome, romantic, witty, faithful, and adoring, while at the same time encouraged to be demanding, capricious, oversensitive, boisterous, and egocentric, the women Riley met and fell in love with invariably undermined any potentially long-term relationship. Not by being horrible bitches by any means. No, their hearts were generally good. But they were all just confused about how to reconcile their factitious needs with the realities of the male character.

  Raised on a diet of pink and aqua dreams of having perfectly glossy hair, perfectly rewarding careers, a perfect set of female friends, and perfectly attentive lovers, the women Riley found himself dating were perfectly impossible.

  So a succession of live-in affairs had each eventually degenerated into a tense disentangling of formerly shared possessions and the curt exchange of forwarding addresses. At thirty-three, Riley was living alone—miserably, but at least quietly.

  It was at this downhearted juncture in his failed life that Riley was struck by his purest moment of literary inspiration.

  Browsing the fiction shelves at the Union Square branch of Barnes and Noble one Saturday, Riley had been overwhelmed by the number of chick-lit books, and the lofty positions they occupied on various best-seller lists. He had taken a stack of these novels to a chair and begun to read. At the end of four hours, he knew several things:

  1. The psyches of these heroines matched those of Riley’s ex-girlfriends almost exactly.

  2. At the core of each book was a desire to be accepted despite one’s imperfections.

  3. On a practical level, nothing would screw up a working girl’s day worse than a laddering tear in her pantyhose. Unless it was a wild, cocaine-fueled orgy in the company’s coed john.

  4. And Riley fervently understood that he could write one of these books.

  It took Riley six white-hot months to write The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet. Into this book he poured the powerful twin streams of both his romantic and artistic frustrations. He found that by combining all the endearingly ditzy and annoyingly winsome qualities of his numerous past lovers into one figure, while minimizing their foibles (all in the interests of readerly self-identification), he had distilled a kind of Ur-heroine who possessed enormous capabilities, charms, and appetites while remaining fascinatingly flawed. Sally Strumpet practically leaped off the page, an adventurous Every woman evoking readerly empathy, summoned from deep within Riley’s anima.

  Strictly to formula, the book, despite various narrative detours, was a quest for love. Sally had to work her way through a series of losers before meeting Mr. Right. Sally’s stereotypically disappointing paramours all shared the various flaws that Riley had heard himself accused of. Riley constructed Sally’s ultimate dream beau—a supernaturally handsome Tierra del Fuegan sheepherder named Esteban Badura—by blending elements of Enrique Iglesias, Antonio Banderas, and Dr. Phil.

  And by rigorously excluding everything he knew about great literature, he was able to fashion a thin yet stickily enticing prose style eminently suited to best-sellerdom—the literary equivalent of flypaper.

  Riley cast the book as a partially disguised fictionalization of the actual exploits of the pseudonym-concealed “Sally Strumpet.” A cleverly worded disclaimer up front insured that the reader could not think otherwise. Judiciously salted with references to barely veiled real persons, places, and events, the narrative slyly borrowed most of its plot from such classics as Tom Jones, Fanny Hill, Candy, and Fear of Flying. (The latter novel used despite Jong’s insistence that none of what she wrote qualified as chick lit.) Of course, plenty of modern touches— heartfelt cell phone and e-mail exchanges; massive shopping expeditions; numerous movie references—concealed these borrowings. Riley even managed to salve his conscience by modeling the big climax on certain scenes from Ulysses. Just to ice the cake, Riley layered in some borrowed mysticism from a dozen New Age philosophies, thus justifying the whimsical title.

  Once the book was finished, Riley knew he had written a masterpiece—of its type. He began marketing it with a dedication he had never expended on his serious work. He concentrated solely on attracting an agent, since he wanted an intermediary between him and any publisher, to preserve the facade of female authorship. He met Harvard Morgaine at a party sponsored by Royale, and managed to convince the dapper, silver-haired agent to read the manuscript. Morgaine swiftly recognized the virtues of the book and agreed to rep it.

  The contract Morgaine secured from Aleatory House was for a moderate seventy-five-thousand-dollar advance. The first printing was set at fifty thousand copies.

  Those copies sold out in five weeks.

  Now, nearly a year after publication, Riley’s book remained in every top ten list, fluctuating in sales according to various bouts of publicity but never dropping below the number-ten spot on any national list. Once the announcement of an impending movie was made, sales would doubtlessly soar even higher.

  Riley now had more money than he had ever imagined having.

  But none of the other joys of authorship.


  Those belonged to Sally Strumpet.

  Who had, despite her endearing ways, proved to be a treacherous bitch.

  * * *

  “OK, Riley,” said Morgaine, “I’ve winnowed down our possibles to twenty candidates, based on their physical resemblance to Sally, the way she describes herself in the book.”

  “Harv, I wrote the book, remember? Not Sally. Sally doesn’t exist.”

  Morgaine extracted his soggy cigar and waved it dismissively. “Of course, of course. Just a manner of speaking. You did such a convincing job bringing her to life, it’s only natural to talk about her like she really exists. Which she soon will. After a limited fashion. Anyhow, all I need you to do now is give me your opinion about which gal has that special Strumpet strut. We really need to pick someone who can convince the world that she wrote Secret Sutras.”

  Riley leaned back wearily in one of the leather chairs in Morgaine’s office. The two men were alone. Riley’s gaze traveled the shelves lined with the books written by Morgaine’s clients. His eyes jerked away from the multiple copies of Secret Sutras in their saccharine pastel covers. Next to those abominations stood last year’s winner of the National Book Award, contributed by another client of Morgaine’s. By all rights, a Riley Small novel should have rested there. But instead Riley’s only legacy, totally anonymous, was a book that felt like it had been ghostwritten for some selfish, larger-than-life celebrity.

  Knuckling his eyes, Riley said, “OK, Harv, I’ll try. Let’s hope the perfect Sally Strumpet is waiting for us out there.”

  Morgaine re-socketed his cigar and slapped Riley’s knee. “Excellent! Let’s get the girls onto the catwalk. And remember—none of these babes know what they’re really interviewing for. The last thing we need is for word to get out that we’re searching for a Strumpet look-alike.”