“That’s their last name.”
“I thought it was Burroughs.”
“I used to, also. Archon, though. Greek, I suppose. But as I was saying, I couldn’t find your book, so I went for a walk, to buy a new copy. I spent the whole afternoon looking—I must have gone to five bookstores—not a single one of them had it in stock. So when I returned home, I asked Burroughs to have someone locate one for me and, to my surprise, he said he had one of his own: after reading the review of No Please Don’t in the Times, he’d gone out and immediately bought two copies—one for himself, and one for Jonboat. And he told me I was welcome to borrow his copy while he searched for a new one, but that he hoped I wouldn’t read it in front of Jonboat. ‘What a strange thing to say,’ I said to him. That he’d have thought to give a copy of the book to Jonboat, who I couldn’t remember ever reading a novel—that was strange enough to begin with, but that he would suggest I hide that I was reading a novel, any novel, from Jonboat…Well that’s when Burroughs, to my great surprise, explained that you, one of my favorite living authors, had known my husband when the two of you were boys, and, more surprising than that, he told me that Jonboat believed the book was about him—that is, about Jonboat, or, rather, about your obsession with Jonboat. An angry, desperate, creepy obsession with your no longer having access to Jonboat. Burroughs said that what Jonboat found particularly offensive about the book was how Bam Naka, the character he believed you intended to represent him, was—except in Gil’s memory and, of course, that monologue Gil imagines him having toward the end—voiceless.”
“Bam Naka’s not Jonboat,” I said.
“Of course not.”
“And it’s not a character. It’s an action figure. A piece of plastic. Why would it have a voice?”
“In fairness to my husband,” Fondajane said, “Bam Naka is an astronaut action figure, the astronaut action figure of a character from a trilogy of unnamed blockbuster films in which he presumably had a large number of lines, one of which—the only one of which—‘Who’s shaggy-looking?’—is quoted seven separate times by Gil himself.”
“He’s not an astronaut,” I said. “He’s an ‘intergalactic smuggler,’ and that line…Look, the Bam Naka action figure was originally a _____ ______ action figure, the blockbuster movies the _____ _____ character was in were part of the _____ _____ Trilogy, which is the single most successful film franchise in the history of the world, and the line was a slightly modified version of one of _____ _____’s most famous lines, ‘Who’s _____-looking?’ which he speaks to his love interest in a scene where she accuses him, among other things, of being ‘____-looking.’ I had to change the character’s name and the title of the movie and the famous line because the press that published No Please Don’t was small, and my editor feared they’d be sued by ____ ____, the creator of the franchise, who was renowned for his habit of suing well-meaning people for copyright- and trademark-infringement.”
“Of course,” Fondajane said. “Anyone who’s read No Please Don’t, including Jonboat, knows the action figure is supposed to be a ______ ______ action figure, but from Jonboat’s point of view, that didn’t mitigate the fact that you could have chosen an action figure of a different kind, based on a character from a different movie: one that didn’t, for example, have to do with outer space. Not to mention that Jonboat’s deceased and beloved grandpa Hubert ‘All Hell’ Pellmore had, throughout most of Jonboat’s childhood, devoted himself, at no small cost, to the legitimization of the Pellmore name, which All Hell’s own father had made by getting rich via…do you know?”
“He was a bootlegger,” I said.
“A smuggler of Canadian whisky, yes.”
“Fine. Sure. But, that’s so…reaching,” I said. “Do you really think Bam Naka’s supposed to be Jonboat?”
“Not at all,” Fondajane said. “I thought that was clear. Never did I for even a moment think that. But I can understand my husband’s point of view. In how many rooms do you think he’s ever been where he wasn’t the center of attention? And attention isn’t always a good thing. It often isn’t. I imagine that you’re at least somewhat aware of how the press attacked him after he and I started going together. And they really turned on him after Trip’s mother died. Suffering public attacks like that puts a person on guard, can make a person, let’s call it, well, not hypervigilant, but overly vigilant. I think that when Burroughs brought my husband your book, Jonboat looked for himself in it—doesn’t everyone who’s ever known a novelist look for himself in that novelist’s work?—I think he looked for himself in No Please Don’t, and when he found protagonist Gil MacCabby obsessed with Bam Naka, ‘intergalactic smuggler gone missing,’ he thought: ‘This author, like so many other people who knew me in my childhood, used to think of me as a kind of action hero, and, just like all those others, he’s someone I eventually left behind, someone who feels like he lost me, and in the course of writing a book about that loss, he, rather than attempting to understand me as a human being who had to move on with his life, instead turned me into an action figure, a voiceless piece of machine-sculpted plastic, an inanimate object that he no longer owns.’ ”
“Jonboat said all of that?”
“Does that sound to you like Jonboat?” Fondajane said. “I extrapolated.”
“From what?”
“From ‘This weasel thinks he’s sad because of me, because I don’t talk to him anymore, so he got his revenge by writing a book where he turned me into a mute plastic astronaut that ruined his life.’ Or something like that.”
“Weasel?” I said. “Ruined my life?”
“Don’t be sad about it, Belt. This is all in the past. Two years ago, now. Or three. Whatever.”
“I don’t know that I’m sad,” I said. “Maybe I’m insulted. Or sad, but also insulted…”
“Can’t it just be funny, though?” she said. “I think it’s funny. It was funny to me back then, as well, but especially now that I’ve met you. You don’t strike me as someone who holds on to grudges, or even someone who develops grudges to begin with. Not to mention that if you were to seek vengeance for some grudge you were holding against my husband, there’s just no way you would bumble that vengeance, let alone so spectacularly—you’re far too good a writer. I mean, if you had intended Bam Naka to be Jonboat, it would be clear; Jonboat wouldn’t be the only reader who picked up on it.”
“That’s obviously not what Jonboat thinks.”
“Thought. What Jonboat thought. And no, you’re right. It wasn’t what he thought, and there was no way to make the great-novelists-never-screw-up-their-vengeance argument work on him because there wasn’t any way to convince him of your brilliance, since he hadn’t read enough fiction to distinguish great from middling novelists, nor even enough to know that even middling novelists never screw up their vengeance. What did start to convince him that the book wasn’t about him was much simpler. I asked him why, if what you wanted was to hurt him, you would write a novel about a boy who lost an action figure that ‘represented him’—or, for that matter, any novel at all—rather than some kind of memoiristic exposé about his childhood in Wheelatine. Boy Billionaire, say. Suburban Scion. You’d have had no trouble selling such a book, especially not back when No Please Don’t was published, and you’d have certainly made a lot more money than what Darger Editions must have paid you—orders of magnitude more money, I’d think—so why, if you were so angry at him, would you be so indirect about it? What could possibly be your motivation?”