Free Any Resemblance to Actual Persons by Kevin Allardice Page B

[I’ve seen the kind of pulps you print—all those italics , all that emotive punctuation!—you must be a very demonstrative bunch], but that is good because it allows me to loosen up the narrative voice that your literary brothers so praised in their gentle rejections: I am no longer hiding behind the terse telegraphese that I picked up in writer school: I am angry. But does all that suggest that selfish ulterior motives are eclipsing the real objective of this letter—i.e., to thoroughly debunk my sister’s claim that our father was responsible for the death of Betty Short before her book goes to press, while there is still time for you to pull it from publication? I don’t think so. I believe my fundamental intentions here are pure, but I must admit biases where they crop up—even at the sentence level—in order to let the case for my father’s good name stay untainted. But I must move on, as I see that I have already wasted fifteen minutes and one page on this issue, which I probablyshould have relegated to a footnote so it wouldn’t stand in the way of the case for my father.) (In theory, I prefer footnotes to parentheticals. Philosophically, I agree with footnotes, the way they allow thoughts to branch off in their own direction, without the terminus that a parenthesis necessitates. Thoughts should not be terminal—they are not matryoshka dolls, neatly fitting into each other, nooked cozily into the larger narrative. Thoughts, ideas, revelations, are endlessly subdividing tributaries that should be given enough water to allow them to rival the river from whence they came. But it’s just not practical. Composing footnotes on a typewriter, paradoxically, requires a kind of forethought that goes against the very anti-terminus, free-branching ethos of footnotes, simply because you have to plan ahead, know exactly how long a given footnote will be, so you can format your page accordingly. I really should get a computer. But, as it is, I’m trapped in a terminus.)
    On with my case.
    Oliver finally got back to me. I was at home, in the garage, going through the box of final research papers marked Fall 1993 , trying to jog my memory for a small, shy, bespectacled brunette, when I heard the phone ring. I went into the kitchen and answered.
    â€œPaul,” Oliver said. “What’s up? Hey, I’m going to be out there in L.A. this weekend. We’ll have lunch on Sunday, okay? Better yet, you want to come do the Universal Studios tour with me? I’m bringing my niece. Do you know her? She’s eight. She really wants to do the Back to the Future ride, and the birthday gift I’m giving my sister this year is taking the little ankle-biter off her hands for a week. My sister named this girl Yuna. You believe that? I hate my sister sometimes. I’ll be honest, Yuna creeps me out a little. It’s like she has no affect, just thatblank stare you see in movies about kids who’ll kill you in your sleep. Anyway, I’ll be out there with her, and I’m taking her on the Universal tour because she wants to do the Back to the Future ride, so maybe you can meet us there, tell her neat things about Hollywood or something. Great, it’s settled then. Sunday it is. I look forward to it.”
    I’m pretty sure I must have said something in all of this, but all I remember now is Oliver’s block of monologue. We didn’t actually end up meeting at Universal Studios. He called me the morning of and said Yuna had woken up early and so they were already there, about to hop on the tour bus, so I spent the afternoon at Pinz, playing a few guttery frames, and then met up with them at Mel’s Diner on Sunset after they’d finished with Universal. When I walked in, I saw Oliver waiting beside the hostess stand, an oversize T-shirt, Hollywood emblazoned across the front, awkwardly fit over a blue button-up. He was holding a Universal Studios tote in