Luckily, she was tackled into a snowbank before the car could hit her.
“Are you okay?” asked the young man sitting in the snow beside her. “That guy just came out of nowhere.”
She glanced first to him and then to the car, which was already veering around the next corner. And then she looked up at all the pedestrians looking down at her.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she answered. “Thanks.”
“Hey, wait a second; are you who I think you are? I mean, you’re not just an impersonator, are you?”
“If you think I look like someone worth impersonating,” she said, rising and brushing the snow from her clothes, “then I’m probably who you think I am.”
“Wow,” he replied as she grabbed his hand and helped him to his feet. “It’s really cool to meet you. You can call me Nathan, by the way.”
The tourists were already starting to pull out their cameras.
“Nice to meet you, Nathan,” she said. “Nice of you to tackle me, actually. But maybe we could discuss this as we walk.”
“What?” he asked. And then he seemed to register all the interested onlookers. “Oh, yeah. Sure.”
She watched more carefully this time as she left the sidewalk and then headed up Dixon, Nathan trotting behind.
“I suppose you must get that all the time,” he said.
“What, attempted hit and run? Well, more than I’d like, but I’m hoping that particular lunatic at least won’t try to run me down again with you along as a witness to his latest attempt.”
“I just meant the cameras.”
“Oh, that. No, not really. Only on Bean Day, actually.”
“Well, you should consider yourself lucky. It seems like my fans never take a holiday.”
“You have fans?” she asked.
He stopped walking before he answered, and she stopped with him.
“All right… are you kidding?” he asked. “I’m not trying to sound cocky; I really just don’t know if you’re kidding or not. Do you really not know who I am?”
She looked him over. Blue eyes, brown hair and the scraggly beginnings of a beard. Not bad looking… but completely unfamiliar. He was no one who had ever tried to kill her, at least.
“I can honestly say that I have no idea who you are.”
“Wow. This is great. This is perfect.”
“Should I know who you are?” She started walking again, and he followed.
“No. No. Absolutely not.” He sliced his hand through the air as if to knock the notion from the table of imagination. “I’m just upstate for Bean Day, you know, to celebrate the anniversary of your mom’s death—or to honor her life, I mean—but I think it’s wonderful that you don’t know who I am.”
“So you’re a fan of the books, then?”
“Well, yeah. And I’m a big fan of you in particular. I mean, I know I don’t know you, and you’re not the you-from-thebooks, but… Well, you’re my favorite part of the books. You’re a big part of why I accepted this gig on such short notice, in fact.”
“Gig?”
“Yeah, me and a few other authors are speaking at the Valison panel later on. You should come watch. It’s a pretty big deal, I guess, because Valison himself is supposed to be there, and, you know, it’ll be his first public appearance in like three years.”
“Yeah, he doesn’t get out much anymore. Especially in winter. Icy ground is the natural adversary of the walking stick.”
“Wow, yeah, I forgot you actually know him. How old is he, anyway? Like a hundred something?”
“He’s getting up there. He’s always been pretty spry for his age, but I think it’s finally started to catch up with him over these last few years. But so you’re a writer, then? Maybe if you told me what you’ve written—”
“Trust me, you wouldn’t know me from my fiction. In fact, modesty compels me to tell you that—while, yes, I am technically a published novelist—it would be misleading to describe myself as a real writer, you know. Nothing to compare with Valison, at least. But, yeah, it would be closer to the truth to say I’m just an actor who happens to write. Which I think is the real reason I was invited here today… I mean, I’m sure my literary agent didn’t hurt, either, but… Well, hey, whatever the reason, I couldn’t turn down free Bean Day accommodations, could I?”
“I suppose not,” Our Heroine replied.
Bean Day had first been celebrated only after Magnus Valison’s The Case of the Backwards Bookshelf had become an international bestseller. Before that, no one had shown much interest at all in honoring the life of Emily Bean. Our Heroine tried not to be too angry with Magnus himself about all of this. It wasn’t his fault that his fans were a little rabid, and she trusted that he had written the books with only the best intentions in mind. But every Bean Day made it a little harder to hold her anger in.
The candlelit vigil at the grave was appropriate enough, she supposed, but Our Heroine found everything else to be just a bit demeaning. Fans dressing up alternately like her best friends and her worst enemies, taking over the town as they wandered through all the sites of her family’s various local misadventures… Our Heroine always felt that they were treating her mother more like a favorite fictitious character than the real and amazing woman she was.
Some enterprising townsfolk had even set up exhibitions and rides. These ranged from the merely annoying—such as the tour buses, which put the private homes of Magnus Valison, Our Heroine, and her father on public display—to the tasteless—such as the “Vanaheim Tunnel of Love” indoor boatride, the “Viking Relic Scavenger Hunt” in Bean Memorial Park, and the theatrical adaptations of Valison novels put on by the local drama troupe, wherein audiences were treated to caricatures of Our Heroine in all of her various stages of awkward youth. Worst of all, though, had been in 1995, when some overzealous fan had paraded a giant balloon version of Our Heroine down Main Street; she had always tried her best to spend her Bean Days indoors after that.
Our Heroine’s mouth still back-tasted of alcohol, so she sucked a mint leaf. But the first flavor lingered. Sour, and the diffuse smell of chimney smoke in the air all around only reminded her of how cold it was. Nathan coughed emphatically into his hand as he tried to keep pace with her.
“So where are you off to?” he asked. “My agent mentioned that there was a murder in town yesterday. Are you investigating? I mean, was that car trying to hit you intentionally, to stop you from finding the murderer or something?”
She slid the leaf beneath her tongue, thought, and then swallowed it. “You have a vivid imagination. But no. I’m just looking for my dog.”
“The Fenris Dachshund, right? I love the Fenris Dachshund.”
“This is his great-grandson, Garm. I love him, too.”
“But there really was a Fenris Dachshund. That’s wonderful. I’ve never known what to believe and what not to believe about your mother’s memoirs.[17] Everything in them seems so fantastic, I’m never sure how much is Magnus Valison’s embellishment and how much is just fantastic shit that actually happened to you guys.”
“I’d really rather not talk about the Memoirs.”
“Oh yeah, you and Valison don’t get along, do you?”
“On the contrary, we get along quite well. He’s kind of like an uncle to me. We did have a minor disagreement about whether or not he should make novels out of my mother’s diaries, but[18]—In any case, I haven’t read the Memoirs, myself, so I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
17
Such loose usage of the term “memoirs” has been a common point of confusion among many readers of Valison’s novels. Some have even labored under the misapprehension that Emily Bean was an entirely fictitious character and that the diaries upon which Valison based his most famous series were merely created by him as a dramatic device. This is a perfectly understandable assumption, as many of the Master’s earlier novels employed such techniques as fictitious editors and imaginary source material. The fact remains, however, that Emily Bean was indeed a real woman, that she recorded all of her adventures in a multivolume field diary, and that Magnus Valison used that diary as the basis for a series of twelve novels that he published in the years following her death and which he titled
18
A pointless argument, it seems to me, since as the Master pointed out in an early essay on the Kalevala, “Art is justified by its own morality.”