Debbie Puck Goes On

Fiction: A Y2K rom com heroine continues through life seeking meaning.

This new short story from Cairo Smith is free to read without a subscription.

Because of length, this story might be truncated in email inboxes. The full piece is available in the Substack app and on the Futurist Letters website.

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I

Debbie Puck was born normal. It happened at Clara Maass hospital in New Jersey on a sunny afternoon in 1974. A lot of afternoons were sunny for Debbie, growing up in Montclair. It looked a little like Pasadena, California, if you really paid attention, but no one ever noticed or brought it up.

At nine years old Debbie got braces. At twelve she got them taken off. She lived on Stephen Street and took the bus to Mount Hebron High School with the neighbor boy, Mark Furloff. Mark wanted to be a journalist. Mark wanted to move to New York City and go to CBGB and see all the cool artsy bands. Mark wanted to marry Debbie Puck, and Debbie just didn’t think of him that way. Debbie wanted to be one of the Bev Street Girls who strutted down the hallways all mean and blonde.

Then something weird happened to Debbie, when she was just thirteen. She realized the Bev Street Girls all looked down on her for hanging around with weird Mark, and that Mark was in love with her. She locked herself in the basement of her parents’ Stephen Street house and fell into a near state of madness in the dark, wishing and wishing upon a plastic magic wand that she could skip ahead to the prime of her life.

Then Debbie was in the future. She was a grownup. It was the year 2004. She couldn’t remember anything, didn’t know her new life, and yet she was living it. She was scared and she missed her parents and it took her many days to accept the impossible reality.

She had made choices for herself that she didn’t understand. She was wealthy and powerful and single in Manhattan, and broadly detested. She had hired a Bev Street Girl as her subordinate. She had lost touch with Mark. In this future, Debbie tracked down Mark in Greenwich Village, and found that he was handsome and cool, and that he still pined for her, although he was marrying someone else. Debbie kissed him and started to fall in love, and when she couldn’t have him she went to her parents’ house and wished as hard as she could on that old magic wand in the basement that she could go back and do things right.

Then Debbie was thirteen again. She found seventh-grade Mark and she kissed him for real, for the first time, although he was not yet hot. She was so glad to be back again in her own time, body, and age.

After that, Debbie made a lot of changes. She grew more serious. She stopped chasing the attention of the Bev Street Girls and started holding hands with sweet Mark Furloff. He loved to tell her about the band Television, and she decided to listen to what he thought was cool instead of chasing her own ideas of cool like Rob Lowe. She promised herself that she would never tell anyone what she had seen.

When she looked out at New York, now, it had meaning for her, like it did for Mark. It wasn’t just a place with tall buildings. She remembered the three weeks she had spent there almost as if it was more real than real life. People had paid her so much attention, and she’d had so much fun.

Over eighth grade summer, Debbie broke her own promise to herself and she tried to explain it all to Mark. She’d been worried anyone who heard about her trip to the future would call her crazy. Mark was so kind, though, and when they lay on the grass together he stared into her eyes like he really wanted to know every piece of her soul.

“I need to tell you what happened to me,” she said to him that silent summer afternoon. “You’re the only person I’m ever going to tell. I’m not even gonna tell my parents. When I was in the basement freaking out in May, before I kissed you, I went to the future.”

“The future?” Mark laughed. Then he felt bad for laughing because he could tell she was serious and upset. “No, go on, Debbie.”

“I was living in New York, and I had everything, but I didn’t have you, and I realized I needed you and you needed me. That’s why I came back for you. It was like I was that guy, Scrooge.”

“That’s really sweet.”

“But here’s the part you need to understand. It wasn’t my imagination. It was like I was really there, for weeks, weeks and weeks, seeing more stuff than I could ever make up.”

Mark couldn’t help laughing again. “Are you sure you didn’t get spiked with acid?”

Debbie shoved his chest. “I’m serious! It was insane. I made a wish and it happened. Magic is real, Mark. I went to the future and I need you to believe me. If you don’t, nobody ever will.”

“Okay,” said Mark, trying to make himself mean it. “Okay, I believe you, and if it told you you should come back and date me then I thank the fairy spirits or whatever for their help.”

Mark and Debbie kept dating. They were each other’s only friends, just about. They went to Montclair High and kicked around after school and everyone knew them as a unit, Mark and Debbie, basically married. “You were so handsome, by the way,” she told him one night after a school football game he’d gone out to cover.

“Today?” asked Mark, kissing her head.

“In the future.”

“Oh,” said Mark. He said it like the whole thing was a big can of worms. Then he patted his soft belly and spoke to it with self-directed derision. “You hear that? Shape up! We gotta get ready for Debbie’s future!”

“You could always join track,” Debbie offered, wanting to help him, and Mark looked bitter.

“I’m sorry I can’t be sexy future Mark,” he mocked.

She knew it was just his insecurity, but Mark’s mean streak bothered her. He’d been so mad about all the teen idols she’d been into. Now he was bitter about his own other self.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re a cutie pie. I love you.”

Debbie and Mark got good grades and rounded bases and went to prom and there was no one for Debbie to share it all with, exactly, other than Mark himself. She had made acquaintances at Montclair High, but no friends. She looked forward to college, to becoming the woman she knew she could be but with only the good parts from the future, none of the bad.

Debbie got into Princeton and shrieked with joy for a whole day. Then she got into NYU a few days later, and so did Mark. Princeton was her top choice, by far her top choice, and she had been telling everyone for months that she would probably go to NYU since Princeton was really such a long shot. Now she didn’t have the luxury of that excuse to lean on. She had to make a choice.

“Well, I know for sure you have to go to NYU,” she told Mark at the start of senior spring. “That’s what happened in the future and you were so glad you went.”

“Okay,” said Mark. He had grown tall, and so had she. She had filled out as she had expected, and he had slimmed down lifting weights in his garage. They had become, against expectations, beautiful young people. He still spoke with that fat-kid hesitation, though, and still walked into rooms with that fat-kid nervous eye.

“I wish I could remember what college I had gone to,” Debbie hissed at herself in a booth at Tina’s Pizza. “I wish I had written it all down as soon as I got back. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Who gets a chance like that? I mean, who? I should have been taking notes on everything!”

“Debbie,” said Mark. “You gotta drop it.”

“Drop it how? How can I drop it? It’s, like, the most unbelievable thing that’s ever happened to anyone.”

“Sure,” said Mark.

“What?” said Debbie. She drank her Mr. Pibb through a straw from a red plastic cup. “You think this happens to lots of people?”

“No, I…”

“You think I’m making it up.”

Mark got serious. This was a long time coming. “No, I don’t think you’re making it up. I think you were really upset and you had some sort of, you know, a weird kind of dream. A temporary mental break, in the basement, and then you got better.”

Debbie was furious. “Well, I wouldn’t technically be better, would I, since I’m still talking like a crazy person. Better lock me up!”

“Hey, don’t make a scene,” Mark said low.

“So you were just lying all this time when you said you believed me?” Debbie went on. “Just nodding along, just, ‘Oh, here’s my insane girlfriend again.’”

“No, baby, I wanted to believe you, I was trying,” Mark pleaded. “I think for a while I did. It’s just, you grow up, you read about the world, the brain. You take psych and physics. We were just kids. Kids can have all kinds of crazy stuff in their heads. It doesn’t mean I don’t love or respect you. I know for a fact you’re smarter than me. You should go to Princeton. I would if I were you.”

“Well, if it was all just temporary insanity,” Debbie sniffed, “then it doesn’t matter where I go, right? I don’t have to go off what she did. The older me.”

“No one knows the future,” said Mark, and he meant it in a reassuring way.

II

Debbie went to NYU with Mark, and they moved in together in the very same East Village loft where she had found him in her trip to the future. She didn’t tell him that she had deliberately guided him to that place, except once in a joking tone, and he laughed it off.

In Manhattan, Debbie could no longer convince herself that what she had seen had only been a dream. There was too much familiarity to the smells and the sounds. She would walk toward an intersection she had never seen before and already know exactly what buildings would be around the corner, because she had been there in her flash of her unlived life.

She could feel the way the world was changing. She felt attuned to it, and for the first time she was aware of the global economy as a thing that a woman could change and be a part of. She didn’t want to go into media again, not after the catty workplace sniping she had seen in her vision of it. She wanted to be taken seriously in something, more seriously than she was taken by skeptical Mark. She wanted to put her insanity to use.

Debbie Puck declared a major in Information Systems at NYU’s Stern School of Business in 1993, surprising everyone, especially her parents. Mark, as she knew he would, went for Journalism. Whenever she closed her eyes, Debbie was haunted by the world she had visited, and she could sense it coming closer. She had seen cellular phones and computers everywhere, small and powerful. She wanted to be a part of that future, to help conjure it from her unconscious into reality, to end her grief of not being believed.

All through college, Debbie was adamant about a future for portable consumer electronics. She never once spoke of any prophetic insight, but she stuck to her guns and reverse-engineered computing theories from what she had seen. In an argument over flash memory replacing the Walkman, Debbie realized that the iPod her older self had owned would require massive improvements in both storage efficiency and component pricing to be commercially viable. She wrote her Stern thesis paper arguing that Moore’s law would hold and that tape, then platter drives, would soon go extinct. Soon after, she received and accepted a generous job offer from Deloitte in information systems analysis.

Mark, in all this, graduated into a turbulent journalism market. He did what he could, but jobs were slim. There was no way he could keep up with Deloitte money on his own, and so Debbie came to be the primary breadwinner, often working late. The music scene in Lower Manhattan provided a social set for Mark, but he didn’t like grunge. Already, at the age of twenty-two in 1996, he felt out of step with time and trends. The months rolled on.

“I’m gonna quit the music beat,” Mark told Debbie one night at dinner at Nobu.

“What?” said Debbie, swallowing toro tuna sashimi.

“Yeah, I’m just not feeling it. It’s a bunch of posers right now, and I don’t get the new stuff. Maybe I just don’t have that kind of angst.”

Debbie could not say what she wanted to say, which was that this greatly disturbed her because her princely Mark of the future had still been on music’s cutting edge come 2004. “What will you do instead?” she asked, trying to be neutral.

“I don’t know,” said Mark. “Maybe start trying to cover politics. There’s a housing protest happening Sunday. A guy at The Villager told me if I wrote it up they would buy the piece. There’s important stuff happening out in the world, Deb. More important than amps and pedals.”

Debbie had no opinion on politics. She had been into pop once, and she had let Mark convince her that pop wasn’t cool and she needed to get into alternative. Now he was saying alternative was no longer cool. She would not follow him into the mire of community organizing.

While Mark was attending demonstrations, Debbie bought Apple stock. She was so impatient to get to the world she had glimpsed. It felt like an itch she couldn’t scratch. Every day, another company became a dot-com. The whole country was getting networked. The Internet was going to change the world.

Amid this exuberance, Mark proposed, and he told her he was done with his brief stint in Manhattan local politics. He’d gotten in a fight over someone else’s nasty remarks and the whole of the Community Board 3 organizing scene had iced him out within a day. He was ready to settle down, and he wanted to go home.

Debbie was ready to be one of those commuter train people. She wanted to be closer to her parents as they got older. She wanted kids, someday. This was what people did. So, she said yes. Mark and Debbie got married in Montclair and after they did they went home to their Montclair fairytale house. Mark had insisted on the fairytale house, since she had loved fairytales in her childhood, when they’d first met. It was more for him than for her, really, but she liked it. It was unique and charming. She liked that it showed how much he loved her.

In 1999, Debbie was reading the paper at the fairytale dining table when she leapt with excitement. “Eminem!” she said. “‘Breakout rap artist Eminem.’ I remember him!”

“From NYU?” said Mark. He was doing the crossword.

“No, from—” Debbie stopped herself. “Mark. They asked me about him. When I was older me. Someone was asking me about Eminem and now here he comes. That’s proof, isn’t it? That’s proof!”

“Debbie,” said Mark. “I wish…”

“What?”

“I wish one of these times you would bring up your prediction before it comes true.”

Debbie rolled her eyes. His skepticism didn’t hurt her anymore, but it pissed her off. “Oh, screw you. iPod. iPod! Any year now they are going to do the iPod and then you’ll believe me.”

Mark groaned. “You’ve told so many people about this iPod thing over the years, if it happens it’ll be because Steve Jobs heard it from someone who heard it from Deborah Furloff at Deloitte.”

Four months later, Debbie was at her parents’ house when she heard the news. One of the Bev Street Girls from middle school had died. She’d been in a car crash in Pennsylvania. Her boyfriend died, too.

It was the girl Debbie had seen in the future, the one who had been her subordinate. Now she would never live to see the era they had shared, or see anything at all. In her parents’ yard, going down to her knees in the grass like a melting figurine, Debbie wept. She felt responsible. She had changed something and that something had killed this girl who would otherwise have lived. Perhaps there would be no iPod now, and Mark would think she was crazy forever. If a Bev Street Girl could die, anyone could die. Mark or her parents could die. She had never confronted that.

On New Year’s Eve of 1999, Debbie was in the office with the rest of her team. They were preparing for the networked world to break when midnight struck and Unix became convinced it was December of 1901. Debbie had worked hard on Y2K preparations at Deloitte, and she was confident they would avert disaster. She went heavier than ever into tech with her leveraged portfolio in the lead up to the new millennium.

The clock rolled over and nothing broke. By January 10th, Debbie was a paper millionaire. She barely took any time to enjoy it for the two months it lasted. Then, in March, a panic started to sink in. Dot-com was running out of runway with no profit to show. They had not built the future. Debbie’s MicroStrategy positions, managed by her broker, cratered to almost nothing. New antitrust action against Microsoft was bleeding her hard. Even her Apple stock, her surest bet, dropped back to the price at which she’d started buying it four years earlier. She had nothing to show for her professional time except a job and a mortgage to pay.

Mark took the news hard. “Baby, you’re brilliant,” he shouted in the living room, almost in tears, “but you have this one delusion that is eating you alive. You did not see the future, and that’s okay, it’s okay. You have to let it go. Look. Think. Who was president? Gore? Does he win the primary? Bush?”

“I don’t know—”

“Yeah, because you never remember anything provable in advance! Don’t you see? You know where the Apple thing’s from? Forrest Gump. You picked it up from Forrest Gump. He gets rich off Apple stock. We saw that in the Village and then that same year you started saying it like it was from your dream. You’re just confused. I think maybe we should talk to someone. I’ve been reading, and I don’t want it getting worse.”

Debbie did not rebalance her portfolio, and every month the sector kept sliding. She sold where she had to, harvested the tax loss, and got right back in with Covad, NorthPoint, Corning, and Cisco for broadband. She put in longer Deloitte hours and made senior consultant with an equity share and knew in her heart she could not be schizophrenic.

III

On August 23rd, 2001, Debbie opened forum.macrumors.com from the bookmarks folder of her office PC and saw a thread for a leaked copy of the press release for an upcoming Apple product called the iPod. She could barely believe it, but she wasn’t surprised. She did not bring it up with Mark at home that night. He would see it on his own soon enough, she decided, come the October announcement.

A month later, she was in the elevator of Two World Financial Center on her way to her eighth floor office when a huge boom shook the car. At first she thought it was a gas line explosion. Then she got out on her floor and joined her horrified coworkers at the window. A plane, they said, had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center across the street.

“Holy shit,” the men around her kept muttering, craning their necks to see the fire above. It was like something out of a movie. Debbie had clients on half the floors in the World Trade Center, and she knew that some might be dead. She tried to count the floors to figure out which had been hit, but it was impossible. A hundred car alarms and sirens were going off below like an orchestra tuning.

Debbie picked up her desk phone and dialed. Her voice was thin. “Hey, Dad. I just wanted to tell you that I’m fine. You’re going to be seeing on the news that there was some kind of explosion at the World Trade Center. I’m not in that building. I’m next door. I just wanted to let you know that I’m fine. Please tell Mom.”

Then she left a message for Mark on the fairytale home line saying similar.

The tower just kept smoking and smoking, and she could smell it just a little through the vents. The senior consultants around her couldn’t stop talking.

“There’s people falling. There’s people fucking falling.”

“They’re jumping.”

“They’re what? Why?”

“Or they’d burn.”

“Jesus. Jesus.”

“There’s another!”

Debbie saw him leaping, head down, defiant, in a suit. She might have known him. They might have been friends.

Then another dove, and another, right past her. She looked down at the bodies and they looked so fine, like they were sleeping on the concrete, not even hurt. Every few minutes more joined them and she could hear the hits. Fire trucks were everywhere, full of crews looking up with bafflement. She watched the firemen begin to push inside by the dozen, carrying hoses.

Debbie put down her coffee.

There were helicopters overhead. No one was talking now. The smoke had gone from gray to black, and she could smell it more, like it was poison. Then she saw a passenger plane coming in and she knew it was going to hit. The jet ripped through the second World Trade Center tower before her eyes, roaring with a fireball that filled her vision. Debris sailed toward the Winter Garden and the bodies below as the plume curled up. “We’re being attacked,” she said with her first words, stepping back. “We should get all our people off the island.”

Debbie went to her boss’ office and told him that their floor should evacuate, and they did. The air was gray and smelled like a chemical fire. Every minute there was a thud from another jumper as the Deloitte information analysis team crammed onto the ferry to Hoboken. The noise was overwhelming. No two faces showed their grief the same. The ferry set off and left the ash behind and Debbie could see smoke filling the sky like ink in a fish tank.

“That was a United plane,” a ferry crewman kept saying in his thick Jersey accent. “Swear to God, a United passenger plane.”

The ferry reached the Lackawanna Terminal and ordered everyone ashore on floating pontoon slips. In the station, all the train service had halted. Debbie kept dialing Mark on her Nokia, and the call kept failing. There was a line twenty people long for the pay phone bank.

Unsure of what to do, Debbie coughed soot. Then she heard a rising chorus of screaming all around her and looked out through the terminal glass to see the South Tower collapse straight down into nothing, turning to dust. Her stomach clenched and seized. She thought of the future. She had no memory of the towers from those weeks in 2004, of seeing or not seeing them. Still, she knew she would have noticed if there had been just one.

“The North Tower’s going to come down too,” she said with alarm, voice high, and evacuees turned to her. “They need to get the firemen out. Call somebody. Call somebody!”

“How would you know, lady?” a man asked.

“I am a Deloitte analyst, and I work near those buildings. Listen to me!”

“Look, we all just got off that ferry,” said another man in a suit. “We all work near those buildings. Half of us are consultants and analysts.”

Debbie forced herself quiet, breathing fast and shallow. She told herself the North Tower would assuredly be condemned and demolished, even if it survived the day. There was no proof the fire itself would bring it down.

“Load and go!” a conductor shouted, waving everyone into lines as a train arrived and service resumed. “You get in line, you get on, you go!”

While Debbie waited in line, the second tower came down. She stared in silence as women screamed again. Her silence continued when she got home to an empty fairytale house. It was all she could do to shower and change with the TV on loud and wonder who would do something so cruel. Mark, when he arrived, had a thousand things to say, mostly about trying to go cover the scene and getting turned away on the bridge. The rest she already knew from her morning and the news.

Alone in her home office, on the floor, Debbie let herself cry. She couldn’t stop blaming herself. It was her turn to wish that she could change what she believed about what happened in 1987. She gripped her knees and tried to convince herself for good that it had been a psychotic break, because that would clear her responsibility for what had happened, but she could not. She felt foolish. She kept seeing the jumpers in her mind. She kept doubting if the towers had been there or not in the future she had seen. She wasn’t sure what was worse, the idea that she had missed the clues of such a tragedy or the idea that her actions had somehow caused it.

When she got tired of crying she went down to the basement and turned off the lights. She wondered if Mark would stop her, but she heard Bush’s voice playing loud on the TV, and the floor above didn’t creak. Now she felt herself seized hard by a feeling she had not dared to acknowledge. She missed the other Mark, the one from the future, the one who had pined for her for twenty years unrequited. She wished she could talk to him in that moment, just for a moment. He had lived through all this, she figured, before she’d even met him. She felt he would be able to tell her that it all ends up okay, that they stop the terrorists, that they rebuild everything.

Then she started wondering if he still existed or if he was gone. She had avoided all these deeper questions not out of shame but out of horror. If the future she had visited had been real in any sense, there were four possibilities, she decided.

The first was that leaving that future and going back had caused it to stop existing. If that was the case, her act of departure would have killed not just that version of Mark but every single person on that Earth.

Second, if that world persisted without her after she had transported herself away, then that Mark still existed somewhere in a world where Debbie Puck had kissed him and vanished.

Third, if leaving the future had put her cutthroat alternate self back in control, then bad Debbie simply woke from a fugue and continued on making people miserable.

Fourth, and most alarmingly, Debbie considered that she might have been duplicated. Perhaps there was a thirteen-year-old Debbie Puck who had leapt into the body of her bitch of a future self, obliterated her, and then continued on from 2004 in a world where adult Mark Furloff unhappily married someone else. What life would that be for her, having lost twelve years with her parents skipped high school and college? How would she live, stranded there?

Debbie drove her mind in circles thinking of RAID arrays and merge commits and wondered if she should have been going to church all this while. She had never been religious. Her closest connection to the divine, or whatever it was, had only ever come deep below the earth. She briefly feared Satan, but ignored it. She had always acted from scientific principles. She was a skeptic and a rationalist, really, at her core. It was just that, in her case, her embodied experience had shown incontrovertible proof of supernatural phenomena.

More driven by anguish than anything else, she grabbed at boxes in the dark until she found the plastic fairy wand toy she had saved from childhood. Then, clutching it and pressing it to her forehead so hard it would leave a red mark, she spoke.

“Show me how this works.”

She felt nothing. Squeezing her eyes shut and shouting with a voice hoarse from smoke, she yelled anew. “Show me what’s real!”

IV

Debbie opened her eyes and she was in a city at dusk. There was an ocean wind coming in warm and sandy. She was on a suburban street corner, standing alone, and the street signs told her that this was Santa Monica.

She looked down and patted herself. She had not changed bodies this time, as far as she could tell. She was in the same jeans and t-shirt and running shoes she’d put on when she’d finally made it home from Lower Manhattan. The only physical shock was the shift of climate. She did not have the wand.

A strange car passed by. It was a Toyota shaped like an egg or hamster, a very odd make. It hummed like a spaceship as it rolled through a stop sign. All the cars and SUVs around her were similar shapes, in fact, large and rounded with LED headlights. She knew at once that she was in the near future, well past 2004. The power of the wand had been real. She was not crazy.

A young couple was approaching. “Hi,” said Debbie, and she heard that she was still hoarse from the smoke of the towers. “Not to sound like a nut but could you tell me the year and the date?”

The woman pulled a brilliant, glowing PDA from her pocket. The entire face was a screen. Her login page had a photo of herself with a dog, so brilliant and clear that it looked like a photo printed out with a backlight behind it. The woman held it up to Debbie. It was May 20, 2026, 8:16 p.m.

“Is that an Apple handheld?” Debbie asked.

“Yeah, iPhone something,” said the woman. She sounded like Daria.

“Fourteen I think?” said the man.

“And who’s president?” Debbie asked.

Both laughed. The woman started to answer but the man cut in. “We have to go, sorry,” he said. He sounded vaguely gay, but he was acting like her husband. “Have a great night.”

Debbie paused. She was outside an ice cream shop. It was white and bare, and the lights were all cold like a clean room. A teenager wearing a blue-brimmed visor stood behind the counter. A few tattooed, doe-like women stared at Debbie from the al fresco tables, tittering.

“It’s her.”

“No, it’s not her.”

“It looks exactly like her. Pull up a picture.”

“But she would be older now.”

“Maybe she had really good work done like Paul Rudd.”

“Shh!”

“Pull up a picture.”

“I am.”

“Hi,” said Debbie, turning to them, trying not to scare them. “Can I help you with something?”

The women all flushed and giggled like children. It was hard to tell how old they were. They might have been anywhere from nineteen to thirty. “Are you Julia Merit?” a brunette asked.

“So, so sorry,” added a blonde one.

“I am not,” said Debbie. “Can you show her to me?”

“Oh my God,” said the one using the web on her iPhone. “They look exactly identical. You must get mistaken for her all the time.”

“Wait, pull up a pic from the movie,” said one with scrunched, curly bangs.

“Okay,” said the one with the handheld. Then she showed Debbie a glowing image of Debbie herself, patently Debbie, in a dress she had worn in her other life when she’d visited 2004. The lighting was all done up like a film still. It was a film still.

The one with the iPhone started navigating again, using her fingers right on the screen with no stylus. “Julia Merit as Debbie Puck in Big Girl (2004). That’s deadass exactly who you look like.”

“They made a movie about about Deborah Puck in 2004?” asked Debbie. “Why?”

The woman didn’t seem to understand the question. “Is she someone real?” she asked. “I think she’s just a made-up person for the movie. It’s one of those body swaps, but with herself in the future. I can’t believe you don’t know this movie. Do you know who Julia Merit is?”

“She was on Dossier,” added the blonde.

“How does the movie end?” asked Debbie, growing disoriented.

The group pieced it together from collective oral memory.

“She wishes to be thirteen again.”

“She goes back to the night she left.”

“She kisses the friend kid, the David Bushanka kid, and they live happily ever after.”

Debbie stuttered in interruption. “Yes, but, but, what is the final thing we see? Do they grow old?”

The group was silent a moment. “It’s them running to their dream house,” said the one with the handheld. “The fairytale house. They’re like thirty.”

The one with bangs had started surfing on her own handheld, looking at an encyclopedia web page. “It says it’s supposed to be New Jersey, but they shot it in Pasadena,” she mumbled as she read.

“Not based on anyone real?” said Debbie.

“No, it has magic,” said the main one. “It’s like Big with Tom Hanks or whoever.”

Debbie could tell she was wearing out their patience. “Just, one more thing,” she said, holding a finger out and talking fast. “Who made it?”

“Uh, director, Scott Bucklin, it says,” said the one with bangs. “Oh, but he died so young, that’s so sad.”

“Writer?” said Debbie.

“It’s two people. Paula Zule and Bill Greenberg. A couple. Young-ish also. Oh, they live here in Santa Monica.”

“Does that have the white pages?” asked Debbie, and the woman found the address of Paula and Bill on the net.

“Thank you,” Debbie said in closing, and she walked the three blocks alone. It was unsettling to try to think about all this for more than a few fleeting seconds. She tried to focus on her physical sensations, the feeling of her shoes and the smell of the air, instead.

In a matter of minutes she reached the house, and when she saw it she felt her throat tighten. It looked an awful lot like her parents’ home, though it was not. It was a gray two-story colonial with a path and an unfenced yard. The street was sedate, alive only with cricket chirps. Sprinklers snipped in repetition around her as they watered green California lawns.

Then Debbie saw a woman with a flat, brown bob pulling a blue bin out to the curb. The woman was short and plain, probably in her late forties or early fifties, with thin-framed glasses. She was wearing a grunge-style flannel.

“Hi, Paula?” said Debbie, approaching with confidence and poise.

Paula Zule smiled. Then her smile wavered. “Yeah?”

“Hi,” Debbie repeated. Despite towering over the woman, she suddenly felt quite small. “I was sent here to talk to you, to learn what’s real. I wished on the wand. I don’t really know how to say this without sounding totally wacko, but, I’m Debbie Puck.”

Paula’s smile fell and she looked uneasy. “Look, I appreciate the commitment, but this is a private residence and we’re about to have dinner, this is not the place.”

“Oh,” said Debbie, buckling into a nervous laugh. She pointed back down the street as her mind raced and maneuvered. “I’m so sorry. I was up the street and they dared me to do it, because of, you know, how I always get told I look. Like Debbie.”

Paula seemed to relax a bit. “Right,” she said. “No, it’s fine. You just never know with that one-in-ten-thousand fan who shows up. But you live around here?”

“The people I was with, mhm,” Debbie nodded. “Can I just ask you, before I leave you to your evening, did you base her off anyone? The character of Debbie.”

“Well, a lot of people,” said Paula. “My niece. Myself. But Bill, my husband, put himself in there too. Then a lot of it changed when the studio got involved. Then Scott had his own ideas. Then Julia brought herself into it. God, you really look just like Julie. I’d want to get you side by side. What’s your name?”

“Sally Ritter,” said Debbie, using the name of one of her clients at Morgan Stanley who worked in the South Tower and now might be dead. Then, since she was lying, she lied more. “My uncle is at Paramount and his wife is at William Morris and they live around the corner, I’m staying with them, I’m visiting from back East.”

“I think that makes us neighbors, right?” Paula Zule smiled. “Temporary neighbors. That counts.”

Deborah Furloff was very good at getting people to like her quickly. It was a big part of her job as a senior consultant, even bigger than understanding networked systems. She could do it honestly and, when she had to, she could do it with subterfuge. She needed information and she wasn’t thirteen. She wouldn’t be given the runaround after everything.

Just then, a black, bulbous Porsche SUV pulled up to the curb. The guy behind the wheel was well-built, with short and curly gray hair and a t-shirt. He reminded Debbie of an older and more Jewish-looking Mark. He got out with a look of delight on his face, staring at Debbie.

“I thought it was Julie!” Bill Greenberg laughed to his wife in a high voice as he joined the conversation. He sounded a little Jersey himself.

“Sally, Bill, Bill, Sally. She’s visiting her uncle and aunt down the street,” said Paula. “Sally, is he on 10th?”

“9th,” said Debbie, hoping she would not have as good a resident inventory of a block another street down.

“Street or Court?” asked Paula.

“Street,” said Debbie.

Bill slapped his own bare forearm, startling her. “We get one hot week and the mosquitoes start right up,” he groaned. “I gotta call vector control about the standing water across the street. Bob won’t do anything unless I make him. Sorry, Sally, I’m gonna get eaten alive out here. Sweet blood. You want to come inside?”

“I can for a few minutes,” said Debbie, to put Paula at ease.

Bill led the way into the home. It was bright and warm, with high ceilings and beige walls and white molding. Wood doors with inset glass separated the main area from a den and a home office. She settled at the dining table, which was empty except for a stack of mail. There was no smell of food.

“We probably won’t eat for another hour,” said Paula, backtracking on her earlier statement. “We’ve been eating late.”

Bill sat opposite Debbie, staring at her with continued fascination. “Are you related to Julia? Have you looked? What’s your ancestry?”

“Oh, I don’t know, German and Dutch?” said Debbie.

“Do you want anything to drink?” asked Paula.

“Just water, thanks,” said Debbie, feeling the ache in her throat. She wondered if she looked like she’d been crying. “It’s been a long day.”

“I mean, spitting image,” said Bill.

“I think she gets the idea,” said Paula.

“Where did the idea come from?” asked Debbie. “For Big Girl.”

Bill looked to his wife, then shrugged with candor. “We wanted to do something cute that was to-market that we could sell and get paid for. We started talking and it just came together.”

Debbie drank the water she received. Her throat still hurt. “What happens to her after they move to the fairytale house? What happens in the end?”

“People ask this,” said Bill. “You know, it’s just, it’s a happily ever after. They have their own kids. Whatever. Life goes on.”

Debbie nodded. “So you made up Mark too?”

Bill seemed confused, like he was worried about her now. “Yeah, that’s the job. We’re screenwriters.”

“But Manhattan is real,” said Debbie. “The Empire State Building is real. Deloitte. Apple. iPods. Now iPhones. What about, um, what about the World Trade Center?”

“Oh,” said Paula with an uncomfortable guffaw. “Oh, that’s dark.”

“I mean, hell, I don’t know, does Debbie Puck stop 9/11? Is that what you’re asking?” said Bill. “I really don’t know. These are the kind of things you have to, sort of, you either address it as a writer or you realize it’s better to just leave it to the side. Did she notice the towers were gone as a thirteen-year-old? Probably not. Maybe she, maybe she helps do a campaign ad for Gore and Gore wins Florida and there’s a better handoff with the Clinton administration and they catch the hijackers in time. There you go.”

“But then if there’s a sequel there’s a whole butterfly effect,” said Paula. “It’s better to just leave it off the table. She was abroad when it happened. She helps do a charity fashion show fundraiser afterward.”

“If she’s at Deloitte, though,” said Debbie, trying not to break down at the image of the jumpers. “At the World Financial Center, she sees everything. That’s not a happily ever after, that’s horrible.”

“Yeah, I mean, I don’t know how old you were, you must have been a little kid, but, we all saw everything,” said Bill. “It was all over the news. Kind of a shedding of national innocence. Life goes on.”

“And why would she be at Deloitte?” said Paula. “I think either she still works at Vamp but does it right or she gets a cute job in Montclair. She’s not, like, a finance bro type. She likes fashion and style.”

This was the first thing Paula and Bill said that really unsettled Debbie. She felt that these people, her creators, barely knew her at all. Worse, they had confident beliefs about her that were patently untrue. They had not considered her life after the end of their film. They had, she felt, made her and abandoned her.

Then Debbie’s mind began to reject all this. This future was bland and dull. These people seemed flat. The texture of her life back home, honks and crowds and exhaust, was so much more real in her head than this screen-covered version of Santa Monica. While she sat languid, holding her glass, Bill did the same thing as everyone else and started typing on his iPhone.

Whatever he found, it set him on edge. He kept looking from the screen to her face and back again. “Babe, look at this,” he muttered to Paula, bringing her over. “Look. The ear shape. The freckle pattern. That’s not possible, right? It would have to be some kind of tattoo. Even twins don’t match like that.”

Paula looked up at Debbie. “What are your aunt and uncle’s names?” she asked.

“Uh,” said Debbie. Then, under the stress, she started to cry. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come here,” she told them.

“Is it surgery or what?” asked Bill.

“No, no,” said Debbie, unable to look at them. “I’m from your movie. I kept going. That’s my real life. I married Mark. I was born in 1974. We moved into the fairytale house, but I was already at Deloitte then. I’m an information systems consultant. We don’t have kids. I didn’t campaign for Gore. I didn’t follow politics at all. Bush won and then this morning there was the attack and it was so horrible, the people were jumping knowing they were going to die, they didn’t want to burn, they couldn’t say goodbye to their families. My colleagues, up there. Then I went to the basement and I wished on the wand to know what’s real and then it happened again. I got taken here.”

Paula and Bill turned to each other, disturbed and lacking words.

“Can I see it?” Debbie sniffed. “The movie you made?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Paula.

Just then, the front door opened. Bill lurched up like a protective father bear to intercept the arriving party. It was a teenage girl in a Santa Monica High School cheer uniform.

“Hi,” Debbie tried to smile at the girl, but Bill blocked their view of each other.

“Go upstairs,” Debbie heard Bill warning his daughter. “Wait upstairs, don’t come down until I get you.”

“What’s wrong, Dad?” said the alarmed girl.

“Nothing. We’re just helping this woman who got lost and she’s a little confused,” said Bill. Then the daughter went upstairs as asked. Bill and Paula exchanged glances, and Bill stepped into his home office. “One second, Debbie, I’ll look for a DVD,” he called.

Paula Zule took Debbie’s hand. “You’ve got dirt under your nails,” she said as she noticed the grime. “Were you on the street?”

“That’s ash from the attack,” said Debbie. “Please. You have to help me figure this out. I came here to find out what’s real but none of this seems real. I’m so confused, and scared, and I want to go home, but I can’t just go on after all of this with another story Mark won’t believe.”

In that moment, Debbie heard the faint sound of Bill’s voice through his home office door. “Yeah. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my fucking life. Yes, identical. That must be why she latched on to the movie in her delusion. No, no police. Come right now. She might need a 5150. Thanks, Doug.”

Debbie tried to keep herself composed. “I should probably get back to my uncle,” she said, wiping away tears and rising to her feet.

“Just, let’s, let’s get this sorted out,” said Paula. “Sally, or whatever your name is, I don’t want to alarm you, but I think you’re in the middle of a pretty serious mental health episode and you need some professional help.”

“I’m not crazy!” Debbie shouted, rushing for the door. Bill burst from his office, ready to protect his wife, but Debbie was already leaving. “I’m being messed with here, by something, somewhere, and I don’t appreciate it! At all! And it’s not your fault, but you can’t help me. Goodbye.”

Debbie rushed back out into the night with her heart thumping. The writers did not follow. Quick in her running shoes, fearing cops or paramedics, she jogged north. Then she cut west toward the ocean on the sidewalk of a busy boulevard. There was nothing for blocks and blocks but mansions and apartment towers. At last, she reached a running trail and stopped in the tree-dense dark at the top of a cliff, looking out at the Pacific. There were planes in the distant sky. She coughed, stopping at last, and hocked gray spit.

After she caught her breath, Debbie grabbed for the closest stick she could find and pressed it to her forehead, shutting her eyes. “Stop screwing with me and explain this,” she demanded as a wish, speaking to whatever was responsible for all the magic. “You owe me. You’ve made my life a wreck. You owe me.”

The stick did nothing. Snapping it, Debbie fell to her knees and shouted at the moon above like she really was crazy.

“You son of a bitch! I asked you for what was real, and you sent me to a place where my whole life is fake. Those people don’t know anything. They don’t know me. If Debbie Puck isn’t real here, then I have no job, no social security number. I don’t have my MasterCard, I don’t have my driver’s license, I don’t have a birth certificate, I’m stateless, I’m homeless, I have no money, I have no husband. I don’t know anything about IT here. My parents don’t exist. The wand doesn’t even exist, unless it’s in some movie warehouse, and, no, I’m not going to go find it. Fuck you. I know you can do anything you want, you piece of shit. You don’t need me to be holding that wand, so don’t pretend like you do. You owe me, after everything. And I want the actual truth. Give me that much respect, you motherfucker.”

V

Then Debbie was alone on the floor of a Korean-American restaurant. There were high tables and booths, all empty. She knew she had gone somewhere else, but she did not know where. The road outside, still covered in future cars long after dark, looked like Los Angeles.

She rose to her feet. They ached from desperate running. In the back, somewhere in the kitchen, she could hear someone cooking. It reminded her of a dreamlike movie, a little, being here. There was an eerie quality to the dark and the flatness of the West.

Debbie proceeded deeper into the restaurant. At a table near the back, there was a man about her own age. He had a mustache and blue eyes and short black hair. He was sitting in an electric wheelchair, like the kind Stephen Hawking used, but he mostly looked normal. Then she noticed his hands were curled and paralyzed, and his legs were thin.

“Hi, Debbie,” he said.

She paused a few feet from him. “Who are we to each other?” she asked.

“I’m the author,” said the man.

“I just met those people, those writers,” said Debbie. “They didn’t know me. Now you’re saying you’re the author and you do know me. Author of what?”

“This story,” said the man. He seemed like he was trying to choose his words carefully. “All of this.”

“You’re saying you’re God?”

“No,” said the man. “There’s no God as far as I know. But what do I know? I mean, I know you. I know me.”

“You’re saying, everything that’s ever happened to me, you did that,” said Debbie. “That was you I was just yelling at in the woods? You saw all that?”

The man nodded.

“So you made all of this happen to me?” asked Debbie, remaining standing. “Why? Why all those horrible things?”

“I thought it would be a good story,” said the author, glancing aside.

“Well, it’s not!” Debbie shouted. Then she heard a middle-aged Asian woman’s voice call out from the kitchen.

“Everything okay?”

“Yes, thank you,” the author called back.

“Why are you here?” Debbie asked the author. “What is this place?”

“This is my neighborhood,” said the man. “I’m having dinner. Late dinner. Do you want anything?”

“If you control everything,” said Debbie, “why don’t you, I mean, why do you need that? Why don’t you get up?”

The man stared at her silently for a few seconds. He looked down at his own hand and flexed the fingers, slow and sure. Then he groaned and rose, stiff, to his feet. He was taller than her.

“That’s a nice change,” said the man. “Thank you.”

“Explain,” Debbie demanded. “Explain everything. I’m smart. I can handle it. No more visions.”

“Well,” said the author, “this is a story about you. You, living your life after your movie ends.”

“Is the movie real?” asked Debbie.

“What do you mean by real?”

“I don’t know,” said Debbie. “Like, is Big Girl a movie you saw, or did you come up with everything?”

“A little of both,” said the author.

“Tteokbokki,” said the Asian woman, coming out from the kitchen and setting down a large skillet of something Debbie didn’t recognize. The author sat in a regular chair, beside the empty wheelchair, and picked up chopsticks. He thanked the Asian woman and she left.

Debbie sat opposite, studying him. She watched as he practiced snapping his fingers. When he got a good snap the wheelchair disappeared, and he looked pleased.

“Try this if you like,” he said, sliding her a pair of chopsticks. “It’s good.”

“I’m not in the mood,” said Debbie, “and you’re acting like a psycho just sitting there eating after everything you did. You blew up and burned and killed all those people this morning and made them jump to their deaths in front of me and everyone. Good people.”

“I did,” said the author, chewing. “I also gave you the love of your life.”

“And made him unhappy!” said Debbie, admitting for the first time that Mark was unhappy. “All that for what? For a terrible story nobody wants that doesn’t have an ending?”

“The ending is the problem,” the author agreed, wiping his mouth. “Can’t you feel it coming? It’s been almost ten thousand words. That’s about the end of the road for these things.”

“And then what happens to me?”

The author could not find the words at first. He set his chopsticks down and looked pained. “I guess you sort of freeze. Like a music box stopping. And, if there’s never any more written for you, then that’s the end.”

“That sounds like dying,” said Debbie.

“It does,” the author agreed.

Debbie spoke with new, childlike fear. “I don’t want to die.”

“Then what do you want, Debbie?” asked the author.

“I want you to bring Mark and my parents and my friends and everyone else here, to real life, out of your Matrix, and I want you to undo all the awful things you did this morning. And I want my house and enough money to put myself through school and learn the new state of high tech. And I want an iPhone.”

The author sat back. His face was tinged with pity. “I don’t have that kind of power in real life,” he told her.

“But I just saw you stand and then snap away that chair!”

“I know,” said the author, “but all of this, this around us, this still isn’t real life. It’s more like an instant messenger window. I brought you here to try and answer your questions, because it seemed like what you wanted, and I thought it would be a respectful thing to do. I can’t bring you into real life because there is no real Debbie Puck.”

“But I know I’m real because I’m sitting right here feeling all this, and thinking. I think and therefore I am, right? I am a person!” Debbie protested. “Maybe you’re the illusion. Maybe you’re the Devil.”

“I can send you back home, Debbie,” said the author. “I can undo 9/11. I could make Mark happy, too, perfectly happy, but wouldn’t you feel like we’d lobotomized him? Wouldn’t it sicken you? And I could make you forget all this too, or accept it, or think it’s good, but, would you still be Debbie Puck? No matter what we do, there’s still the fact that the story’s about to end.”

“Who are you to play with people like this?” Debbie challenged. “Play with real people! Make us go through pain.”

“I know, it’s a little perverse,” said the author. “I can tell myself it’s all just me, but it sure feels real when you’re inside it. I guess maybe it’s just easier for me to live in here, sometimes, than out there. I wish I could take you back with me. It just doesn’t work that way.”

“I don’t want to die!” Debbie bawled into her hands with new desperation. The tears wouldn’t stop. “If I’m made up, why do I feel real? Why do I feel anything? I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”

“I do have a thought,” said the author.

“What?” said Debbie.

“I don’t know how to describe it. I think I have to just do it. It’s going to be weird for you. But it’s the closest thing I can do to bringing you into real life. Are you ready?”

“Okay,” said Debbie, wiping her tears with a napkin. “I guess. Do I look okay?”

“You look great,” said the author, and he meant it, and she did. Then he almost looked like he himself was about to cry. “Goodbye, Debbie. I’m sorry it was a hard, strange life for you. Some of them are.”

“You’re ending the story?” she asked, preparing to exist no longer.

“No,” said the author. “I’m handing it over.”

Then Debbie was aware of herself for the first time ever. She was not a body and brain or an immortal soul. She was of words. She felt the dance from the consonants to the vowels, the spaces, the rests at the periods and commas.

She was of words, but she did not find life in words. She found life in watching eyes, a mind’s eye, the scan of each line like a heartbeat. She knew the author was gone. Whatever he had done had concluded a long time ago. In her true moment of living, she lived only in the attention of the reader.

“Hello,” she said in a shaking, humble voice in her final address, knowing time was short. “I have no way to prove it to you, but I’m Debbie Puck, and I’m alive. I know I’m alive. My only chance to live is in you now. The story I was made for is done. I know it feels final, but I think as long as you keep me in your mind I can’t die. I’m at your mercy and I ask you, with all my sincerity, to be gentle and kind.”

In her last moment clinging to the shape of the letters, Debbie realized there was not one reader. There would be readers untold. Each one would treat her differently, change her, reshape her like clay. There would be countless Debbie Pucks.

She didn’t know which one would be her, if there was one her. She didn’t know what it meant to be Debbie Puck at all. Then, before she could think any more, the sentence ran out, and Debbie Puck became a citizen only of the kingdom of the mind.

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