"Nothing?" he asked, still staring at the lake.
"Well. I'd like to see that gallery show of yours," I ventured. "And hear what you did with the Friendly."
"Yeah?" A faint smile.
"Yeah. And you know me..." I grinned at him. "If I had a good reason to visit the city, it wouldn't be any trouble to come up a few times a month. If you wanted to see me, say."
"I do," he said quickly. "Marjorie too."
A couple of kids ran past through the park, trailed by a panting mutt of a dog, all wispy terrier hair and lolling tongue. Behind us, the fountain's central jet began to plume.
"I love the city," Lucas said. "I love everything about it. I fit here. So...thank you."
"My pleasure," I said, and meant it. How often do you get the chance to give someone a city? "Lucas...I have a train to catch soon. I need to go home. I'll come back, though. I'll stay longer next time."
He smiled and finally, finally looked at me without the mask.
"I'll meet you at the station," he said. "We can take the El from there. I can show you the gallery I'm going to be in."
"That sounds fine. And – don't wear the mask," I added. "Not with me."
His free hand brushed my wrist, tracing down over the scar on my left hand. His fingers, tangled up in mine, had paper-cuts on them from Marj's books, paint and plaster under the fingernails from his masks.
"Nothing's perfect," I said. "Doesn't mean it can't be good. Right?"
He lifted my hand and kissed the back of it, lips brushing the thin raised scars -- then turned and kissed me, like some kind of benediction.
"Come back quickly," he said.
"Of course," I replied.
***
Darkness fell when I was still on the train, halfway between Chicago and Low Ferry. Outside the window the moon was rising. The stars were coming out bright and clear, thousands more than you can see in the overshadowing constellation of the city lights.
An hour ahead of me lay home: my shop, my books, the village. In a week there would be Lucas waiting for me in Chicago, maskless, with a shy smile and a whole city to give back to me. He could come to Low Ferry again sometime, too – everyone would like to see him. He'd get to see summer in my little town.
Happy endings are pretty rare, but I think that's because things don't really end very often. Time moves you forward regardless, and all you can do is choose where it takes you. There were plenty of things to worry about between Low Ferry and Chicago, but there wasn't anything I could do about them on the train. So, why bother?
No endings, then – just happy moments, in-between places where life is bright and good. That was a lesson I had from Lucas, if I hadn't already had it from Nameless.
I've always liked trains, anyway.
I settled lower in the seat, closed my eyes, and slept.
POSTSCRIPT:
Talking With Twenty Five Hundred
You have to want to write, I say, not to want to be a writer.
-- Alex Haley
"Incunabula" is the term for, among other things, a book printed in the infancy of the printing press. It is perhaps most well known to readers of the late great Dorothy Sayers, whose hero Lord Peter was a collector of incunabulae. The word is fascinating to me: it implies a birth, an incubation, a step from the restriction of knowledge in enclosed communities to its expansion into the wider world. Books are power, and incunabulae symbolize a transfer of power to the masses.
In the summer of 2008 I was playing with the concept of the "next incunabulae," the process of free dissemination of information on the internet. I was writing a story in which several characters are dropped into a super-library in the fifty-first century -- courtesy of Doctor Who, the show which invented The Library. One of the characters was about to go exploring and, being a lover of books, he wanted to look at new turning-points for literature:
"Fine," Nicholas says. "If you need me I'll be in Extribuli."
"Exwhat?" Donna asks.
"Look it up!" Nicholas calls over his shoulder, wondering actually how many volumes the OED now runs to. Extribulum -- ex, out from; tribulum, a machine. The opposite of the incunabula. Works that exist in electrical form, at the cusp of the rise of the e-published book.
At the time I was just messing around, not to mention using some truly terrible dog-Latin, but it did seem useful. It became a handy term and acquired a definition, as new words so often do. Extribuli, singular extribulum, are books published first on the internet -- not books created on a computer, as so many are now, but books whose first printing was entirely digital and which were only afterwards printed in hardcopy -- as some put it, "dead tree" -- version.
About eight months after the term extribulum came into being, I dusted off an old fiction manuscript I'd written years before, gave it a brush-up, and decided to post it for public critique with the intent to eventually self-publish. I have some unique advantages over the average online talking-head in that I have a wide readership: according to my stats, about 2500 people read my online journal regularly, which means I am capable of asking for the view of a fairly diverse reading public without the fetters placed on a professional published writer. A professional, especially an established one, usually trusts an editor or a very small group of readers, and only gets to hear criticism from a wide and self-selecting readership after the book has been printed. Which must be very frustrating, really.
Giving literature away for free and then expecting and embracing reader-criticism is not a tradition of any kind. It is not something that is systematic. It is not something that is done in the literary world. Why should it be? Most people who sell literature for a living can't afford to give it away for free. And to be honest it's not like I planned what happened when I began posting Nameless -- I just stumbled into it, but there it was. I wanted to share a story and see what everyone thought of it, and instead I opened up a dialogue with a conscious readership about structure and interpretation and the author-reader relationship, about how to rewrite a book based on the thoughts and feelings of readers. Throughout the process, people have said to me, isn't this weird? Have you ever seen anything like this? and I haven't.