Created By (33 page)

Maybe most things everyone did reflected their insides.

He suspected it. Didn’t know anymore.

He was tired. The Creature had several beers and tried to start an argument and demanded Alan fight back.
He didn’t want to but knew it was best. Tonight he even raised his voice and threw a magazine and it made the Creature smile.

He was making strides, absurdly civil as they were.

He asked the Creature about where he’d been and the Creature indirectly allowed Alan to give him some advice about a woman the Creature was seeing; having sex with. He told the Creature to be more patient and it told him to get fucked and laughed at him.

But Alan could tell it had heard what he said.

Another stride. So small. So ridiculously subtle. But small steps, enough of them, over time, could turn things around. It was the reason he’d chosen to do it this way: live with the other part of himself, try to coexist with his other half; learn to live with it. Maybe it was working. He couldn’t tell for sure; didn’t trust his judgment anymore.

Still, as he acknowledged the Creature more, his color and vitals were slowly returning. But it seemed insane, living side by side with this vicious hemisphere of himself. Staying under the same roof. Having to listen to it say ugly, despising things. Watch the brutish behavior, every day, as it drank beer and reacted with impatient rage to the slightest thing. As it threw things and broke things and screamed.

It was a six-foot-two newborn. Demanding; unable to grasp not getting exactly what it wanted. Throwing horrendous tantrums, just as a baby “makes” its mother and others pick it up by screaming. By planting thoughts; like soft, pink grappling hooks. The Creature did the same thing; a conceptual infant. A beginning. A radio station playing one song: “ME.”

Most of the time, Alan couldn’t stand it.

He thought he should’ve just burned all the negatives that night, in his office. Saved none. Just destroyed this vile half man who belched and laughed at stupid things and went out every night on his motorcycle to get his rocks off. Sometimes Alan was even amused to see it doing the things he’d always felt the impulse to do. Drinking. Being sexual and bringing home whores, now and then. All the things Alan had been ashamed of.

Other times, it simply irritated him.

The Creature never seemed to totally comprehend what had happened. It understood they were connected and at times called Alan its best friend. But beyond that simplicity, Alan knew the Creature was too primitive to discern more.

When Alan had burned the later episodes, which gave the character greater intellect, it had reduced its mental ability. The Creature was now functioning on limited, primary reasoning.

Alan thought, again, about rewriting the character, as he had when he’d tried to alter Barek’s behavior with rewrites. Make him nice; gentle. But if he was going to learn to live with himself, he wanted to do it purely. Directly. However infuriating. He even knew an angry reaction was proof things were changing. That he was getting better.

Sometimes he thought that. Most of the time, he was just scared.

Late at night, when Alan was too tired to read or watch TV, he would go to his bedroom. He would lie there and hear the Creature in the living room, drinking and watching porno movies, sitting by itself. At times, it would
even call out. Ask if Alan needed anything. It was a huge step in sensitivity.

Then, he would hear it, again. Being crude, like something in a cave. But Alan was comforted by the familiar things it did; things he always felt the impulse to do but stopped himself from. He wanted so much to escape from barred thoughts. Alcatrazed impulses. To free inhibitions; let it out.

Perhaps in time.

Alan hoped eventually, one night, the Creature would awaken him by coming into the room and pulling back the covers. That it would get into bed, beside him, and the two would lie in darkness, side by side, and slowly move closer. Slowly, tentatively touch. Make soft, infant sounds of comfort and recognition. Warmly begin to embrace and in the womblike blackness of his own father’s bedroom, as if in some embryonic stillness, melt into each other, a new life, made up of two selves.

A man. Created by himself, upon himself. A whole man who could finally, on levels impossible to estimate or seize, forgive himself.

Tonight, as he lay in bed, with the Creature asleep on the couch, the night took a big breath. Slowly, silently, Alan floated into his imaginary five-year-old body, the boy he once was, and told himself things.

He saw the room he grew up in. The pennants and hot-rod posters, exactly like those in Corea’s room.

His dead sister, Ellen, was there in the next room, playing, singing. His mother was downstairs, baking. Laughing at a show on TV. Burt was listening to Mahler, in his study. It was
real.

The little boy was under sheets, alone in the dark room, scared; crying. Alan sat on the bed beside him and whispered to him, like a gentle hand taking his.

He told him, softly, it was okay to imagine strange things in life without thinking they’d come true. He told him it was okay to ask questions if things scared him.

He told him he wasn’t responsible for his sister’s getting sick or dying. That he wasn’t responsible for his parents not being closer. Or for his mother’s happiness. Or her death.

He told him that he was just a little boy and that it was okay to be a little boy. There would be plenty of time to be a grown-up.

Then, he imagined holding himself and saying to the scared little boy that he would always be there to make it safe. To take care of everything. And that he loved him. The little boy smiled, in Alan’s arms, and closed his eyes. And as Alan rocked the smaller version of himself, he too began to relax.

Soon, all three were asleep.

“Nothing changes until it becomes what it is.”

Fritz Perls

R
ICHARD
C
HRISTIAN
M
ATHESON
is a movie and TV screenwriter and producer. He lives in Malibu and is at work on a new novel.