The Water Keeper(24)
Her face flushed. “In every story, they come so close. I finish each book and I’m like, ‘Bishop, you’re killing me. Just kiss the girl. God won’t mind!’
“And here’s the crazy part: the character writes the novels. That’s right. Bishop writes his own stories. Everything is first person. Like a real autobiography. But it’s not. David Bishop is the author’s name on the cover and he’s the character’s name inside, but nobody knows the identity of the real writer. Even the description on the jacket is fiction. Meaning the mystery guy, or girl, or whatever, has sold tens of millions of books all around the world and nobody but his editor has ever talked to him. The press offered to pay him a lot of money, but he’s not talking. The news networks have offered the writer a lot of money to appear on TV, but he or she won’t.”
She raised a finger. “Which is why I agree with the prison theory.”
“Prison theory?”
“Either the writer is in an actual prison and can’t get out, or he’s in a physical prison—I think the author is a guy—like a disease or something. Or he was in a horrible wreck or fire or something that changed his appearance, and so he’s badly deformed like the hunchback. He knows if he shows his face, it’ll kill the mystery. And kill book sales. Forever.”
This entire chain of thought was incredible. As was her fascination with it. To think she’d spent so much time thinking about something and someone who only exists in the imagination. “How do you know all this?”
She continued, “There are internet forums devoted to research and theories and conversations and possible sightings and . . . Listen to this: the writer—which, mind you, no one has ever seen or has any idea if it’s a man, woman, child, Neanderthal, eighty-year-old grandma, six-hundred-pound pervert, or serial killer serving forty life sentences—has his or her own social media pages and sites that readers and fans have created. Dozens of them claiming to be the real author. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of followers. Which means the fictional writer who writes fiction has given rise to even more fiction! It’s bigger than the search for Sasquatch or Elvis.” She trailed off.
“Anyway, whoever it is can write because the stories are exciting, fast-paced, take-your-breath-away thrillers-slash-love stories, and everybody—me included—is reading just to know when is he ever going to just get it over with and kiss the girl? I mean, enough already!” She slapped her thigh and raised a finger. “A woman’s body will only make babies for so long.” She pointed her fork at me. “There’s a major rumor floating around the web right now that something big is going to happen in his next book.”
I had her rolling. Might as well keep it up. I was enjoying seeing her so animated. “Like?”
“Most everyone agrees it’s one of two things: either she leaves God and they marry, only to reveal her secret, which everyone thinks is that given her promiscuous past, she can’t get pregnant, leaving them childless, or . . . he asks her to marry him, but someone out of his past catches up with him and kidnaps him, and while they torture him for information, she’s stranded at the altar thinking he doesn’t love her, so she goes back to the convent and takes a vow of silence. When he escapes, he can’t find her ’cause she’s not talking. Either way it could kill the series—which is both genius and crazy at the same time.”
“You’ve really thought this through.”
“These people are like family.”
“Of course . . .” I was playing with her now. “There is a third possibility.”
Her expression changed. “What?”
“He could just kill ’em off.”
She shook her head. “Never happen.”
I laughed. “How are you so certain?”
She was still shaking her head. Unwilling to entertain the possibility. “Marriage for sure, followed by a rollicking honeymoon where they don’t see the light of day for three weeks. Nine months later she gives birth to the next Jason Bourne. Fast-forward and the spinoff series continues indefinitely. Although . . .” She raised her fork. “Their son does his time in the military so he can learn how to kill people with a rubber ducky, and then the church comes to his dad and tells him they need the son, so he—the son, whose name is something cool like Dagger or Spear or Bolt—fast-tracks through the priesthood only to be brought to Rome where he is special assistant to”—she snapped her fingers—“Bam! The pope. But in reality he’s the pope’s bodyguard. And you can run that story forever. Somebody’s always trying to kill the pope, and then there’s all that money . . .”
I was laughing. “You’re really into this.”
She nodded but continued, “The publisher is making money hand over fist. It’s a cash cow. These things are in more than eighty countries and just as many languages. You think they’re going to kill off that guy?” She raised a finger. “Listen to this: his—”
I interrupted her. “You’re still assuming it’s a him?”
“Yes, but it’s pretty well accepted that no woman could ever write about his longing for her the way he does. Not to mention that the linguistics departments at five different universities have done some sort of analysis on the words of all the books—the way phrases are put together and word choice and combinations of words—and when they run all that through the computer, every time it’s solidly in the eighty-five-plus percent chance it’s a man. So for the sake of argument—”