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Logged-in Public: What happened to Pellatier? Why did he give up wanting to meet you?
He knew his reason for existence mattered no longer. We should all be so lucky.
"I don't know about that," said Frank Weathers. "He had just made the discovery of his life. Everything had been building up to a confrontation with you."
He understood meeting the Sardine would be anticlimactic. Besides, did he really want to join us here and be twisted into a character that he might not really quite be?
"You get used to it," said Frank.
"I haven't," said Joe T.
"I believe you are overlooking something more important," said McNulty. "Honey and I are the Sardine's goddamn parents!"
"Talk about warped," Joe said.
Hey, I thought McNulty would be honored to be the godfather of this column, so to speak.
"I'm having trouble," McNulty responded, "getting over the fact that you based my character on an insurance agent."
"You can't complain," said Honey, "the Sardine warps his real self to fit these pieces."
"She's sounding like his mother," said Frank.
"Is my real life self getting laid a lot?" asked Joe.
Antigone, his wife, elbowed him in the chest.
Best that you guys didn't find out too much about your real selves.
"Is Wal-terr as unlikable?" Joe persisted.
Please, no more questions.
"Why should the column continue?" asked McNulty.
"Yeah," said Frank, "your book ends when Pellatier backs off."
Why did the book end there, you think?
L-I P: We know why.
"How could you know?" asked Frank.
L-I P: We were in the book.
"So were we," said Joe T.
L-I P: Not like we were. We went into the book not as a version ourselves but as the same entity. We got into an argument with the Newspaper-Reading Public. About who was the more authentic public!
"How does that let you know why the book ends as it does?" asked Frank.
L-I P: Inside knowledge.
You don't want to spoil the ending. They haven't read the book.
"Some of us refuse to read it," said McNulty.
"Spoil it," said Joe.
L-I P: Actually, there are several alternatives to why the book ended when it did. Maybe three or four. We figure the book stopped because the Sardine wanted it to stop. The column committed literary harikari.
"That sounds like our boy," McNulty said to Honey.
L-I P: The laughable part is the reason why the column killed itself. The Sardine claimed that he had become too successful! He couldn't stand the success. Typically, he wanted to deny the public something that it had begun to crave.
"And if the Sardine sells out its first printing," McNulty commented, "then he won't allow a second one?"
The book is work of fiction. What I do when the book becomes a success is. . . .
"But are you going to end the column?" asked Frank. "Will there be a return of Frank Weathers? Will we continue to exist?"
Nothing lasts forever.
"Come on, stop throwing us curve balls. We want a fastball down the middle."
Be happy to have continued to here and now. You'll never know whether you will continue to exist until the next episode begins. The book's success, as I was saying, will probably not affect us. That's a matter of another, separate existence.
Bob Castle is the author of A Sardine on Vacation. He has had two other books published this year: The End of Travel, a comic memoir and send up of traveling abroad (Triple Press) and Odd Pursuits, a collection of stories (Wild Child Publishing). He is regular writer for Bright Lights Film Journal and has over one hundred fifty stories, essays, and articles published. The first fifteen installments of his saga can be viewed at the old Unlikely Stories. Episodes One through Forty-Seven of A Sardine on Vacation (with five semi-canonical additional episodes) are also available in book form.