The Fictional Man Read Free Page A

ego-stroking, at least. Most of my clients aren’t like you. They’re real fans of the show – they can quote every line. They don’t want treatment, they just come here to re-enact old scenes, or make out we’re friends. Very occasionally” – a look of disgust crossed his face – “one makes an appointment just to tell me they’re in love with me.”
    Niles was shocked. “Wait, they say this to your face?”
    “What can I say?” Ralph shrugged. “Some people are freaks.”
     
     
    T HERE WAS NOTHING particularly sick or wrong or unpleasant about a human becoming attached to a fictional character. That had been something for writers to aim for since literature began.
    No, it was simply a question of degree.
    People could fill blogs and tumblrs with adoring gifs of a particular character, a cartoon or comic-book icon – there was nothing strange about that. Nobody saw much difference between a tumblr devoted to Thor or Loki and one devoted to James Dean or Brad Pitt.
    Some, admittedly, took it a little further. They might start sleeping with a body pillow or a ‘real doll’ of their favourite character, touching and stroking it in the night. Or they might photoshop a cartoon horse into their arms or their bed and put the resulting pictures up on Facebook. That might make the general public feel a little queasy.
    As it was generally understood, real people could love each other. Real people could have affection for fictional characters. But if a real person loved a fictional character – well, then something had gone very, very wrong with them. There was a necessary distance between the real and the imaginary.
    And when the imaginary was walking around in the world of the real, it made things even more complicated. Those queasy feelings – pity, revulsion, an overriding sense of creepiness – didn’t go away just because the fictional character in question had been translated into a clone body instead of onto a pillow. Fictionals were still imaginary beings. If anything, those feelings of disgust became even more pronounced. The idea of a human being and a Fictional having sex produced an almost phobic reaction in many people, including Niles.
    There were, occasionally, human beings who slept with Fictionals, even fell in love with them. On the rare occasions when human/Fictional couplings had been admitted to – only twice since the first Fictional was translated, once in 1991 and once in 2000 – it had been professional and social suicide for both parties. The gutter press had had a field day, subjecting the couples in question to as much muck as they could hurl without fear of litigation, and the public had been happy to lap up every salacious detail. No studio would take a chance on casting a Fictional who’d been subjected to that kind of public gaze, and their human partners tended to be ‘let go’ for vague and spurious reasons, such as ‘bringing the company into disrepute.’ Eventually, they’d been forced to leave Hollywood altogether. It was a taboo that had a frightening amount of power to ruin lives.
    Fictionals paired off with each other occasionally, although rarely. The ratio of male to female Fictionals – mostly Fictionals were male, white and straight, thanks to the prejudices of the Hollywood system – meant such couplings were few and far between. When they did happen, the press found such ‘slash pairings’ utterly adorable, like a wedding between two of the cutest little puppies in the world.
    Other Fictionals usually didn’t comment.
    But Fictional sex – no matter who with – was a very rare thing. In the main, Fictionals were carefully designed to sublimate their sexual desires into their roles – there was nothing unusual in a Fictional falling deeply in love with an actor’s portrayal of a character, and then treating the actor his-or-herself as a completely different person, a fellow professional doing a job. For a Fictional to fall in love with a human being