THE INHERITOR by Ann Gelder

LET'S SAY YOU ARE a movie star. Your name is B. It’s true that certain people have deemed you just a tiny bit past your prime, when you appeared as a death-ray-packing, wisecracking sex kitten in a series of blockbuster sci-fi pictures. But what these certain people fail to recognize is that you are, at this moment, more beautiful than ever.

Just look at you! You are working out on the elliptical trainer at your exclusive but down-to-earth fitness club. Your limbs surge with energy, which your frictionless joints absorb and direct. You’re an animation at the science museum. You are lithe. Age (if we’re going to lay that card on the table) has made you luminous, a quality entirely lacking in the nineteen-year-old thudding away on the treadmill to your left. Her wiggling rump reminds you of a pug you saw running on the beach yesterday, and the thought makes you smile and toss your auburn ponytail.

Unfortunately that sends your gaze in the direction of one of the TV screens, which hang in front of the cardio area like threatening clouds in an otherwise perfect sky.

>>HIYA, PEEPS. WELCOME TO MY PARTY. I’M FLORA. BUT YOU ALREADY KNEW THAT.

The screens are closed-captioned, which makes them impossible to ignore, despite the fact that you could not be less interested in the Flora Fender show. It’s a talk show for girls like the pug, malleable as chewing gum and almost as smart.

Flora’s guest this afternoon, as the captions laboriously spell out, is a former child actor who blew his mind to smithereens with cocaine at the age of fifteen. His name is R. Over the past seven years, R has reconstituted himself through a unique mental and physical regimen that we will learn a great deal more about in a moment. This regimen, FTSBE, has turned R’s brain into a sort of reverse prism, collecting data of every possible hue and distilling it into a white-hot beam focused only on Excellence.

Well, that and one other thing. Somehow three years of extreme drug abuse, followed by seven years of FTSBE, have given R the power of prophecy. Specifically, he predicts the deaths of celebrities. In his last three appearances on the Flora show he has accurately predicted 1) the massive onstage coronary of three-hundred-pound comedian Poochie Williams, 2) the mid-air disintegration of the experimental aircraft piloted by indie heartthrob Gareth Shock, and 3) the rapid descent into senility and subsequent stroke of cowboy crooner / barking right-wing fanatic Lester Dipfield. Now, once again, it is time for R to throw down. Flora clasps her hands in vampiric anticipation.

>> CAN HE DO IT, PEEPS? CAN R GO FOUR-FOR-FOUR ON THE FLORA SHOW? WHO’S THE UNLUCKY WINNER GOING TO BE THIS TIME?

R squares his shoulders and his delicately sculpted jaw works briefly. The white-on-black caption unfurls over R’s chest.

>>IT WILL BE B.

The thudding beside you stops. You yourself stop doing whatever-it’s-called-that-you-do-on-the-elliptical-trainer. Your left foot sinks earthward while your right foot is borne gently up, where it remains, suspended.

>>B? (Flora looks puzzled.)

>>YES — B FROM THE LOST SUMMER OF JASON AXELROD.

The Lost Summer of… was your last movie. It came out over a year ago. It was a change of pace from the sci-fi films, a comedy. You played Jason’s mother.

Jesus, you think. That’s what R remembers me for, barging into Jason’s bedroom, brandishing a dishtowel at his naked girlfriend.

>>OH HER (says Flora, happy again). I LIKED HER IN THAT. THAT’S TOO BAD. ARE YOU SURE SHE HAS TO DIE?

>>FLORA, AS YOU KNOW I AM NOT IN THE HABIT OF MAKING SPURIOUS PREDICTIONS. I HAVE DEDICATED MY LIFE TO EXCELLENCE IN ALL PURSUITS. IF I WERE NOT CERTAIN OF THIS PROPHECY I WOULD HAVE REMAINED SILENT DESPITE ALL THE VARIOUS BLANDISH MINTS AND ENTICEMENTS YOUR SHOW OFFERS. (R’s eyes have been making a thorough inventory of Flora, who is six feet tall and wearing a milkmaid minidress and thigh-high boots.)

>>SO HOW WILL IT HAPPEN?

>>THIS ONE IS VERY HARD TO SEE. (R’s hands have curled, one after the other, into fists, which now rest uneasily on his rock-hard thighs.) BUT I CAN TELL YOU THIS — IT’S THE TYPE OF THING PEOPLE WILL IMAGINE HAPPENING TO THEM AS THEY LIE HALF AWAKE AT FOUR IN THE MORNING. IT’S A DEATH THAT’S GOING TO HAUNT US FOR A LONG TIME TO COME.

>>ANY IDEA WHEN?

>>WITHIN THE NEXT THREE WEEKS.

>>FINGERS CROSSED THEN. FOR B, I MEAN. BEST OF LUCK, B, IF YOUR WATCHING.

The pug is staring at you, and so is at least half the gym. What should you do, how should you feel? Amazingly, what you mostly feel is flattered. R has picked you, over literally thousands of people who at the moment are much more famous. In fact, over the past year you’ve been unofficially taking a break from the business, fully intending to reject any offers that might come your way. But now you are back on the radar. At a minimum, you will surely be up there on Flora’s sofa three weeks and one day from now. You will laugh and give Flora dap, as the disgraced R tries to babble away his failure.

You are not at all worried about the actual prediction. R has just been lucky; any idiot could see that Poochie and those other guys were in for it. Nevertheless you recall that your yoga instructor knows Flora’s producer, and you intend, through her, to secure R’s cell phone number and possibly his address. Just in case.

You raise your arms in the signature gesture of Cairo Kane, the leader of a rag-tag band of intergalactic smugglers, whom you played in Spaceprowler and its three sequels. You grasp your invisible particle weapon with both hands and discharge it into the sky, torso twitching with the weapon’s pulse. Your fellow club members, those who are watching you, clap. Then they resume their mostly futile efforts at self-improvement.

**

Now let’s say you’re R. You lead an amazing life. You are awakened at 4:30 every morning by Skip, your live-in FTSBE coach. Skip pounds on the door and shouts “GET YOUR EXCELLENCE ON!” and you rise immediately. While Skip goes outside and prepares himself in ways you cannot imagine, you stand in front of the full-length mirror and recite the Affirmation.

The Affirmation consists of 1440 repetitions of the word Excellence!, one repetition for every minute in a 24-hour day (because you also strive for Excellence in sleeping). You break the Excellence!s down into groups of sixty, each of those into ten groups of six:

Excellence! Excellence! Excellence! Excellence! Excellence! Excellence!

And so on, twenty-three more times. After every six Excellence!s, you bend one finger; at the end of sixty, you have two clenched fists, reminding you that your Excellence beats the Shit out of the world. The whole process takes about thirty minutes, longer if you lose count, which still happens sometimes to your mortification.

After that you change into your black shorts and white FTSBE t-shirt and go outside to meet Skip. Skip has been your coach since the day you entered the treatment facility seven years ago. When you were released he came home with you—as if no one had ever imagined things could be otherwise—and shortly thereafter your mother took the opportunity to move to Hawaii. You credit Skip with your transformation from a shrieking, snuffling weasel into something like a god.

Under the floodlights blasting through the courtyard of your compound, Skip is resplendent, as always, in black FTSBE t-shirt, black parachute pants, and remarkably tight black baseball cap. He is a former commando, so cube-like in every aspect that he appears to have been compacted by a machine. Even his speech got crushed, eliminating all non-essential words and nuances. “Bar,” he says, meaning it’s time to do your one hundred pull-ups. “Go,” he says, flipping a stopwatch out of one of his many pants pockets: you’re off on the military-style obstacle course that he has built in the courtyard, slithering under barbed wire, wriggling up and down the hanging cargo net, springing through the rows of tires, nailing the center of every single one. Next it’s an hour of martial-arts training with an emphasis on weapons—the staff, the nunchaku, the knife, and the sword.

After that comes the Cleansing. With Skip’s inquisitive brown eyes burrowing into yours, you search your feelings for any trace of Shit. Shit is negative energy, rage mostly, which, left unchecked, could lead you to resume vacuuming highly concentrated toxins up your nose. You are instructed to locate where the Shit is currently residing in your body, usually your stomach, and then Skip slugs you there with his sledgehammer fist while you shout “FUCK THAT SHIT, BE EXCELLENT!” Instantly your Shit is gone.

At long last it’s time for breakfast. Every morning Skip prepares for you a protein shake, specially calibrated to what he calls your “rhythm” that day. Usually the shakes are some shade of green, and you suspect that Skip is trying to get you to photosynthesize. But on recent occasions, like today, the shake is brownish, and you detect in it a texture and flavor that you can only attribute to the presence of pulverized entrails. You pause, gobbets cradled on your tongue. Then you mutter, “Fuh tha shi, be esella,” and gulp it down.

You shower and dress while Skip gasses up the Hummer to drive you to your first appointment, a meeting with your editor. You and Skip are in the process of writing your second book together, F*** ALL That Sh**, Be Excellent!, a sequel to the highly successful F*** That Sh**, Be Excellent!, which basically chronicled your recovery. FATSBE will cover your rise to actual god-hood, except you and Skip disagree on including your recent bout of prophesying. Skip does not approve of the predictions. The use of your mental powers in the service of any goal other than Excellence, he feels, is nothing short of heresy. He reminds you of this as he opens the Hummer’s back door for you.

“But I am Excellent at predicting celebrity deaths,” you tell him.

Skip sighs and buckles you into your seat. Just then your cell phone rings. It is your phone but Skip carries it for you in a zippered pocket beside the left knee of his parachute pants. In less than a second he bends, unzips the pocket, and answers.

“Yes.”

You hear faintly frantic chatter on the other end. You think of a fly trapped between window panes.

“Hold, please,” says Skip. He hands you the phone. “It’s her,” he says. “B.”

You recoil from the phone as if it were a Taser, making very clear gestures of aversion with both hands. Yet Skip ignores these.

“Take it,” he says, thrusting the phone again.

“I can’t,” you mouth.

“Excellence does not cower,” says Skip, loudly enough that you know he wants B to hear him.

You take the phone and press it to your ear. Your hand has become a frozen fish attached to your wrist.

“Hello?” you whisper.

**

“I was just wondering,” you say (you’re B again now), “if you could tell me, um, a little more about, um, you know. You know.”

You had your script in your head a moment ago. You were going to be brief, and, more importantly, convey amusement as opposed to fear. You were calm. You had a good night’s sleep, even though a news truck has staked out your house and tabloid reporters were phoning until the wee hours. You chatted. You made jokes. How about lending me a couple grand? I’ll pay you back in three weeks, I promise. You rose early. A renewed appreciation for life warmed you like the morning, and for that you were grateful to the charlatan R. You cancelled the dog-walker and took your two Afghan hounds out yourself, the news truck creeping behind you through the orange-blossom-scented neighborhood. Upon your return, you decided just to call R and gather any additional information he might possess. Any judicious individual would do the same. So why are words zipping out of you now, like bees smoked from their hive?

“About the uh, the uh. You know. I was wondering. The.”

“I can’t.” says R. “Like I said, it’s foggy.”

“How do you mean, foggy? Foggy how? Like am I in a foggy place? Is that where I am?”

“What?”

“Is there somewhere I shouldn’t be? Should I go somewhere? Somewhere else?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t help you.” Call ended.

You stand in the middle of a sunbeam in your kitchen, which you and your husband had remodeled last year, just before he left you. Now the rest of the world is leaving, too. You feel it pull away like the sea before a tsunami.

You call again.

“Yes.”

“Could I, um, could I… Sorry. It’s me again. Could I…” You hear whispers containing the word Excellent. A car horn Dopplers. You hear R say, “Fuck (something something).”

“Hello?”

“Sorry, I know it’s…but I need to…”

“I can’t help you.”

You call again and again. You hear “Yes,” whispering, Excellent, horn, and on one occasion, screeching tires. Before long R is screaming “I CAN’T! I CAN’T!” into the phone and hanging up before you even say a word to him.

**

And why can’t you, R, simply tell B what you saw? Is it because you made up the whole thing? The other three predictions came to you, fully formed, in the immediate aftermath of a Cleansing. Paralyzed, you watched the events unfold against the dawn sky as if they were private screenings from God. You saw the look of amazement on Poochie Williams’s face before he said “Excuse me,” his last words; you saw the wings of Gareth Shock’s airplane soar away from each other, like gulls riding thermals, while Shock and the fuselage plunged into a salt marsh. Lester Dipfield’s trembling chin still makes cameo appearances in your dreams.

But this, this feeling about B, was different. You lay in bed at 4:15 in the morning, waiting for, dreading, wishing away with every fiber of your being, Skip’s knock on your door. You did not want to do the Affirmation. You did not want to run the obstacle course or practice wrenching a knife out of Skip’s meaty palm. You definitely did not want to be Cleansed and you did not give a flying fuck about Excellence. You wanted cocaine. Right then, into your mind bounded B, playing Jason’s mother. She rolled her eyes, lovingly dope-slapped Jason as they strolled through the wreckage of their garage, which he’d just blown up. If only, you muttered to yourself, if only I’d had a mother like that, I would not have to…

“GET YOUR EXCELLENCE ON!”

What the fuck, you thought, I’ll make another prediction. You called your agent and got yourself on the Flora show the next week. You were hot for Flora, and, you had thought, she for you. Plus it was another opportunity to piss off Skip. Bonus!

But now what have you got? B phoning you every five minutes, hysterical. Skip forcing you to deal with her, every time, not letting you cower, lest the mantle of Excellence slip irretrievably from your shoulders.

The meeting with the editor goes poorly. Skip draws her attention to the ringing phone and your new, uncontrollable facial tic to suggest that prophecy is contraindicated in both your book and your life. The editor agrees. You reaffirm your position by smashing the editor’s Art Deco vase. The editor then decides to place the whole project on hold.

Skip is livid, literally. His gestures and words are compressed as always, but his head has become one giant glowing ember. He cancels your afternoon appointments—your massage, your manicure, your interview with the alternative newspaper that was supposed to solidify your hipster cred. Instead of the usual salad, he makes you another entrail-shake for dinner; then he disconnects your X-Box and locks it in the equipment shed. To top it all off, at bedtime he places the inexhaustible phone under your pillow, set to vibrate. Its buzzing drills into your brain and makes you dream about torture.

**

The next morning, you—that is, B—have not slept a wink. Over the past twenty-four hours one thing has become very clear: R knows exactly what is going to happen to you. And it is too horrible even for R, a horrible person, to speak of.

Every part of you is shaking. Your jaws are so tight you cannot even slide a cracker between your teeth, not that you are able to eat. Over and over, you examine your arms, your hands, your legs, your belly, and wonder, how much longer? How much longer can I call these mine? Already there is a whiff of decay about you, and not because you are wearing the same workout clothes from when you walked the dogs—when was that, yesterday? Two years ago? Back when you thought you were you and R was R, just another stupid guy trying to pinch a morsel off your glamorous self.

It is still dark when you disentangle yourself from the bedsheets and shove your feet into two mismatched sneakers. With the news truck in tow, you take the ___ freeway, driving ten miles per hour in your silent Prius. You arrive at R’s compound just before sunrise.

The compound is surrounded by a high stone wall with a solid steel gate across the driveway. Cameras are mounted on either side of the gate, sightlines converging on the spot where you stand. The lenses are black, and you see no indication, such as a light, that they are even on. You push the button to what you guess is an intercom. Meanwhile birds, who care nothing for you and your predicament, chirp.

“Can I, can I talk to R?” you say. Stupid: that’s not what you want. “Can I come in?”

No response. You back up and stare at the cameras. A yellow-pink cloud of light hovers over the compound. In the distance, from the other side of the wall, you hear a shout: “Go!”

Is that supposed to mean you?

You push the button again. “I can’t go,” you say.

After what seems like many minutes, you decide to scale the wall. Its stones are rough, ancient-looking; there are plenty of handholds. You can do this. You have done it. As Cairo Kane in Spaceprowler II you did your own stunts, free-climbing a canyon wall to rescue the alien-hybrid baby, stranded on a ledge.

You wipe your soggy hands on your leggings and begin. The news truck backs toward you and a light glares on you from behind. Whatever else happens, this one-minute clip of you crawling up R’s wall, supple as a gecko, will be viewed over a million times on YouTube. If you live, another Spaceprowler sequel will be in the works for sure.

If you live.

Because this could be it, you suddenly think. It’s one of those paradox things. I’ll get killed trying to find out how I’ll die. Paradoxes haunt; R was right. I’ll climb to the top of this wall and be gunned down by a team of sharpshooters.

But it’s too late. You can’t go back. You don’t want the news crew filming you going back. Besides, R has already killed the “you” that used to be. He has devoured your soul and become your only god. Even now, as your right hand gropes the top of the wall, you picture his grin, imagine you can hear his high-pitched whisper: “That’s it, just a little bit further, come on now.”

You flip your legs over the wall and drop down onto a cinder track that rings the enormous yard. R’s a smart boy, you can’t help thinking. Running on cinders is much better for the knees. At the far end of the yard is the house, a hideous Italianate number that screams Mafioso and causes you to drop to all fours, anticipating machine-gun fire. Nothing happens. As your senses recalibrate, you pick up a deep, male voice chanting:

“One, two, three, four! Five, six, seven, eight!”

Between you and the house is a jungle of equipment: bars set at various heights, gleaming in the floodlights; barbed wire, hurdles, a corrugated-metal tunnel. At the far end, through the hanging cargo net, you see a wiry figure waving what looks like a short rope. That is R. Several paces to his left is another shape, which you mistake for a tackling dummy until you realize that the “One, two, three, four!” is coming from it. So that is R’s coach. And the guy, most likely, who answers the phone. The way he said “yes” and “hold please” has given you the feeling that he is somehow on your side. Maybe if you approach him first… But no, it is R you must talk to. R, and only R.

You walk toward him on an arc, along the cinder track, automatically syncing your steps with the coach’s counting. Your aim is to appear in R’s peripheral vision, so that you do not startle him. He will lift his head, stop swinging those things—what do they call them, the nunchucks? Then you will smile and wave, and let him come to you. Whereupon you will fall on your knees and beg. Yes, it has come to this. The news crew is probably filming over the top of the wall, but you don’t care. You will do anything, anything, to make R give you an answer.

The coach sees you first, stops his count. Then R turns. You wave, as you planned, but the wave must somehow look like a threat. Because R is now running toward you. He’s still holding the nunchucks, one stick in each hand, and he is screaming, just like he did on the phone the last time you heard his voice:

“I CAN’T! I CAN’T!”

You understand everything. This is a kid with low self-esteem. It’s the key to his coke use, this FTSBE lunacy, the faked paranormal powers. He lied! Of course! To get on the Flora show! He is in love with Flora (not you, but Flora, which is really OK because Flora is closer to his age), and thought that the best way to impress her was to concoct another prediction. It’s so obvious! And you forgive him. No harm done, really; in fact he’s probably helped you; you have helped each other, career-wise, anyway. Maybe you will continue to do so.

“R,” you say, laughing and crying at the same time.

But now the nunchucks are crushing your windpipe. You sink to your knees, R’s marble grimace widening as your vision tunnels. The obstacle course shoots past at a steep angle, the shadow of the coach drifting out of the picture. You no longer hear R shouting “I CAN’T”; you hear nothing but trillions of blood cells pouring into your skull, like office workers racing to the roof of a burning building. And who knew the angel of death was Flora herself? Flora, in a white mini-robe and halo, smiling gently.

She has a question.

>>DO YOU HAVE ANY REGRETS, B?

Regrets? Where to begin? There isn’t even time to begin. You have been a dupe, a tool, a sellout of literally global proportions. You lived your whole life through others’ eyes and never knew what it meant to be B. But wait, Flora, no! You don’t regret that. You should, but you don’t, and that’s the worst thing of all…

You are free. You are on your hands and knees, dizzy, neck throbbing, but breathing and alive. The grass under your hands is cool, perfectly mowed. It smells like summer back in Connecticut, where you grew up.

A second ago you heard a thwopping sound, which you assumed was still your blood, doing whatever blood does in its last moments inside a live body (you were oddly intrigued by this); the sound was followed by a thwack, then a soft collapse. You turn your head to look. Next to you, face down with a knife in his back, is R. The coach, maybe fifteen feet away, is straightening up from his follow-through. He runs toward R’s body as fast as his rectangular-solid legs can pump, then falls to his knees and grasps the hilt of the knife. His fingers open and close around it again and again.

“R?” the coach says. He buries his face in the back of R’s neck. “Why, R? Why couldn’t you commit to Excellence?”

The coach looks up at you. The sorrow in his eyes is enough to tell you: you have inherited him.

**

It is three months later. You are still B (no doubt the option we would all choose at this point), and you still live in your lovely home with your dogs, your Prius, and Skip, who is not exactly your coach. You are not exactly sure what he is.

He has no possessions other than his clothes, so when he moved in, it was more like acquiring a three-dimensional shadow. He does not want to be paid. He does not seem to want anything other than to do things for you. For instance, he makes amazing protein shakes, which he assures you are vegan, and which make you feel strong and light enough to take off and fly. He does laundry. He disapproves of some of the men you’ve brought home, but you are beginning to trust his judgment implicitly—especially since you caught him giving the finger to a picture of your ex-husband in the newspaper. Also, it turns out, he’s a wizard with your hair. Filming is about to begin on Spaceprowler V: Cairo vs. the Space Ninjas, and your contract stipulates that Skip will always be present on set. He will do your hair and makeup and counsel you when you realize that, once again, all the subversive feminist angles are going to end up on the cutting room floor.

But all that won’t start for another two weeks.

On this soft winter morning, you find your breakfast shake sitting on the island in your kitchen. You lift the shake, study its greenness in the sunlight that streams through the windows: Connecticut. But where is Skip? Why isn’t he waiting at the island to greet you, as usual?

You wander outside, the glass slipping a little in your grasp. The oranges on your tree are ripe, leaves deepening all around them. Birds twitter; you have only recently learned to trust them again. Your dogs run to you and lay their heads in the crooks of your elbows. At the far end of your yard, you see a dark spot. At last you can laugh. It’s Skip, down on all fours.

He is building an obstacle course, though much smaller than R’s. The hurdles are strangely low, and where the barbed wire would have been, he appears to be digging a pond with his bare hands.

“For the dogs,” Skip explains, smiling to the extent that he can.

Why not?, you think. They can use the exercise. Besides, what else are they (meaning the dogs, but probably also Skip) going to do with their lives?

Yet you wonder.

“What about me?” you ask jokingly, although Skip is hard to joke with. “Don’t you want me to be Excellent?”

Skip’s smile retreats. His mouth is a hyphen.

“Excellence is the foe of Goodness,” he murmurs.

You are not exactly sure what he means. But you do know that, simply by having Skip in your life, you have already become a little bit Better.

ANN GELDER’s fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Portland Review, Rosebud, and Pindeldyboz. Her nonfiction has appeared in Tin House and on The Rumpus.net. She recently completed her first novel, and she blogs at http://swerveandvanish.blogspot.com.

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