The Dickens Mirror by Ilsa J. Bick Read Free Book Online

fog to find you
.
    It hits him then:
the first time
.
    But the first time … 
when
?
2
    BEIRUT HAPPENED IN October. So did Grenada. He knows that it’s the week before Christmas,
buuut
 …
    Shit
. His heart flutters against the cage of his ribs. He reaches for his comic, the movements as slo-mo as a dream. Being generally sucky at art, he doesn’t know squat about perspective, but he thinks the view in the first color panel is foreshortened, the scene set as if you’re looking up from the bottom of a foxhole to a soldier with a weapon balanced on his lap and the bright coin of a moon hanging in a purple, starless sky. His gaze skims the panel’slast line, when Hacker thinks that maybe he and his men have been in this desert …
    “Forever,” he says, and wonders just who he’s talking about here. Look at it a certain way, and isn’t Hacker, stuck on six flimsy pages sandwiched between glossy covers, a guy in a box, too? Hacker’s only
alive
when Tony’s there to read him, right?
Yeah, but what really happens inside the comic book when I’m not looking?
Does Hacker go off and do something else? Maybe characters from other stories decide,
Hey, let’s go visit those guys on page 20; that’s waaay more interesting than here
. Or when Tony decides to start Hacker’s story on page 13 instead of 10 … doesn’t
that
become Hacker’s present, his
now
, as opposed to
then
?
    And what if
he
—Tony, a real live boy—what if
he’s
the same way? What if
he’s
like Hacker, and the only reason he’s standing at his sink, brushing his teeth, getting ready for school, listening to his mother die … is because he’s
not
a real boy but only a character in a book that someone just happens to be reading?
    “What?” he says to his reflection. “What are you doing? Stop thinking this way.” But he can’t stop this, and isn’t entirely sure he wants to. His brain is feverish, a steaming, belching runaway train, his thoughts whirring over the tracks
clickityclack-clickity-clack
. Because … here’s the thing, the flip side, the whole
other
part of it all.
    What happens to
him
when there’s no one there, outside, looking at him and putting him together letter by letter, word by word?
    Jesus. If this moment, this day, is only a couple three, four pages in a book … what about when the book is closed? When there’s no one out there to read him? Or when they’ve skipped his chapter, started in a different place? What if he—his character—never shows up again? Does that mean he doesn’t exist?
    If there is no one to read him … 
is
there any him—a
Tony
—at all?
    “Stop it,
stop
it!” Of course he’s real; he knows about Michael Jackson and Einstein and Jack Nicholson! But wait wait wait—he’s starting to hyperventilate, his breaths coming short and sharp—don’t writers put pieces of real life into books all the time to make the
characters
seem more like people?
    Damn. That’s right.
Pop-cultural references
is what his English teacher said:
Writers do this to ground characters in their particular time periods or add a layer of verisimilitude to the narrative
. The references didn’t have to be books either, or movies, but slang, food, songs, even people who’d actually existed. Like a writer could slot in Einstein or Charles Dickens or Arthur Conan Doyle, use one of
them
as a character to make the book seem closer to reality. God, and if you
did
that, even if you changed them all around or did one of those alternative-universe things, made them into the people they
might
have become … would they
know
they were characters?
    “Shit.” His forehead’s slick with perspiration.
“Shit.”
What if
he
only knows about Michael Jackson or Crest toothpaste or
The Wizard of Oz
because some writer—some crazy lady, hunched over a typewriter and stuck in a room somewhere—is playing God, sprinkling cutesy pop-cultural references to make some point, and she’s thinking,
Oh, that Tony,