Merlot would do anything for fame—even crossdressing and borrowing the name Robert Galbraith. He was real, damn it, not a literary phantom conjured from thin air like J.T. LeRoy. His middle name, Cabernet, was not a tipsy whim plucked from a wine list—although he couldn't remember who'd given it to him, or why it felt both foreign and inevitable on his tongue, like bad wine that soured his taste buds.
He stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, the overhead bulb flickering, casting his face in alternating bands of shadow and light. The voice inside his head grated on his nerves, like fingernails on a chalkboard. How dare it question his dominion over The Sangria War? His book, his world—a tangled web of secrets and betrayals, blood blooming on a battlefield.
Yet, the narrative slipped from his grasp, tugged by unseen strings. He pressed his palms to the cool porcelain sink, knuckles whitening. The voice had haunted him for years, entwined with his longing to wear women's clothing, a desire the world forced him to bury beneath a man's ill-fitting armour. He dreamed of surgery to tighten his vocal cords, to silence her forever—but feared what silence might reveal about the source of his thoughts.
Her words sliced through his thoughts, clinical and detached: Your book's a rip-off, Merlot. Playing transgender for attention? Pathetic. Your whole life reads like someone workshopping a sympathy card. Every motivation I gave you is so transparent.
I gave you. The phrase made his skin crawl, though he couldn't say why.
He tried to ignore it, the voice a persistent hum beneath the scrape of his razor. Cold foam bloomed across his face in the bathroom mirror, stinging not just his skin but some raw nerve in his memory—or was it memory? Sometimes he felt like he'd stepped into his life mid-scene, with no clear recollection of Act I. The razor's edge hovered, reflecting the tremor in his hand. Her words, sharper than any steel.
"Shut up," he whispered, dragging the razor across his jaw. The sting couldn't drown her out. Why waste ink on this garbage?
He spat into the sink, the metallic tang mirroring the bitterness in his gut. Grabbing the threadbare towel, he scrubbed his face raw. Leaving the bathroom behind, he walked into the living room, where the latest rejection letter lay splayed on his chipped wooden table, a bureaucratic death certificate for his dreams.
"Dear Mr. Cabernet," it began, mocking his middle name with bureaucratic precision. But had he ever told them his middle name? The detail felt familiar and strange. He read it aloud, voice flat: "Your manuscript reads like someone trying to escape their own fiction." He grinned and tore it into pieces that drifted into the trash like snow.
Microsoft Copilot was his only refuge, smoothing bruised prose while his blue eyes ached behind the screen's glow. The grandfather's typewriter remained a heartbeat in the chaos—steady, stubborn. Still, she sneered: "Why waste ink?" The thought was not his, yet it echoed beneath his skin. He strode into his bedroom, opened his dresser drawer.
He pulled on a high-collared shirt and a dark brown coat that cloaked James Evergreen, his character. His plan was never to unsettle them; he had to appear as a ghost. That's why he'd written Lolita as an alcoholic. Sober, she might see him for what he was: an author whose reality was slipping away.
Lolita loved Sangria. The suffering in Intermarium was the least of her problems. She siphoned her father's money—without his knowing—to feed her addiction to red wine. To James, Lolita could do no wrong. But Merlot knew better. He could see past her pearly smile and glimpse the rot inside, fermented by Sangria. Her backstory as a survivor of sexual abuse gave her sympathy, but Merlot knew readers wouldn't overlook her cruelty.
Intermarium—a country that never came to be—was a sanctuary for a name scorched into literary infamy by Nabokov. To Merlot, Lolita wasn't a nymphet. She was a lighthouse, a shard of his soul. He could relate to her struggle with alcoholism. After his deployment from the army, he'd been an alcoholic for ten years before admitting himself into rehab. It wasn't cheap. He'd gone into debt.
When he walked through a dark tunnel, she was the beacon guiding him to hope. Hope that if literature could burn a name into ashes, it could also birth it anew—a phoenix rising from its own ruin.
His ultimate goal was to be published. Whether he'd ever reach it, he couldn't say. The critics were tougher than nails, and he knew it.
He carried this thought back to his rickety executive desk, like heavy luggage, the laptop screen casting a pale glow.
The voice seeped in again, insidious and knowing: Your book's American in its rhythms. Why pepper it with Canadianisms? Check your non-existent birth certificate, Merlot – what year were you fabricated? You can't remember because you were never born. You were written. He clenched his jaw, the muscle ticking.
"My mother's Canadian," he hissed to the silence. "She edited my soul into every word."
Merlot cradled a chipped ceramic mug, the bitter tang of stale coffee a meagre anchor in a reality that felt like it was constantly fraying at the edges. But the voice offered no respite: You're not an author, Merlot. You're just another character waiting for the final edit, the deletion.
The mug slipped. His numb fingers offered no resistance. It shattered against the worn linoleum, the sharp crack echoing in the confined space.
Kneeling, he gathered the pieces, careful not to cut himself. The Sangria War wasn't just a story—it was bleeding through the pages, staining his very being. He wondered if he was the author or merely the story, fragile as the world around him.