That's All

By S. A. Barton

A chance meeting with a star's daughter saves Chad Miklos from giving up on his dreams and launches him into TeleVicarious fame. When she unexpectedly dies, the emotional tracks the camera picks up from him are all off-script. With his reality show in danger of tanking on the cusp of wild success and Chad unwilling to mask his mourning, he'll be lucky to survive the fallout--and his castmates' ire

• Language: English
• Publisher: S. A. Barton
• Release date: Jun 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215682821

S. A. Barton

S.A. Barton knows third person bios look professional, but he doesn't care for them nonetheless.I prefer to be more personal, partly because overcompartmentalization is a former flaw I remain mindful of. As a (recently diagnosed) autistic/ADHD human, I have many reasons to remain mindful and many rewards for doing so. I dislike the label disability but understand it does sometimes apply to me and my work–but enough about that.I live in the Chicagoland exurbs near parentals and my sole sibling and her family, where the city is in reach but the deer are closer. Like many writers I often live in my own head; I prefer to be close to nature and select humans daily so I don't stay there.My children live in Virginia with their mom and her husband. Buy more of my books, please: help finance some in-person visits because thrice-weekly videocalls are good but not the same as IRL hugs.My writing is diverse and reflects all of the above as well as roughly four decades of personal seeking and many jobs beginning with my rural Wisconsin roadside worm stand, begun to finance an RPG habit in 1981 and shut down by the state when my success began luring customers from the local bait shop.You'll find my more polished and mostly self-published fiction here; so far my nonfiction lives with my visual art and select fiction on Patreon.com/sabarton and Twitter.com/sabartonwrites :)

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That's All

By S.A. Barton

Contents:

Chapter 1: Darkness Galore

Chapter 2: ROLLERCOASTER

Chapter 3: The Stars In The Infirmament

Chapter 4: Speed, Action, Combat

Chapter 5: Jim's Camel Back

Chapter 6: Pulling a Garbo

Chapter 7: Angelique Diabolique

Chapter 8: He's Dead, Jim

Chapter 9: Flying Free

Chapter 10: Big Fat Stinkin But

Chapter 11: Fly Through

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Chapter 1

Darkness Galore

It took me ten years to break.

I broke the day after my uncelebrated thirty-sixth birthday. I was scheduled for work; instead I went for an aimless walk, just to walk, just to be doing something I could stand.

I left my phone in the charge zone next to the bed, folded to pocket size, ringer off. No call no show for a job I’d be homeless in a month without, a job it took me a year of couch surfing to find.

The familiar worries whispered to me, but today instead of their usual urgency the worries were far away, helpless but still screaming, trapped and muffled way down behind a foggy wall of meh that had quietly gathered me in as the days of my driven ambition grew into years.

I'd worn away without noticing, found the meltdown under burnout under meltdown under burnout. I'd become a ghost in my own life, a ghost in my own head. Formless and helpless in my own internal eyes.

I had no plan, no direction. After a decade spent craving, fiending for the moment I’d see Chad Miklos in professional-grade screen credits and deposit a pro paycheck, now there was a painful nothingness–the nothingness of the progress I’d made in nearly four thousand soul-killing days of breaking my ass and putting everything about myself behind the needs of a career that never materialized.

I was suddenly exhausted to my bones, worn too thin to strive anymore, too drained of giveafuck to even take a break and promise myself I’d strive tomorrow. Delete the shoot: there’s not going to be a movie after all. Curtains, fin, the end.

I walked, near as I could guess, because I wasn’t quite willing to lie down and die but also didn’t know how to live anymore. Failure had become my defining feature in mirrors, and I hated it when I saw it, and now I hated it fresh between steps, hated everything fiercely. The roles, the auditions, the shit jobs, the waiting and rushing; the eating, sleeping, shitting, all of it: the universe.

I hated the arbitrary ambition that had ruled me for a decade, hated it with passion for the length of one stomping, teethgrinding block.

Then, in the step onto the next curb, the ember of rage died cold and left me slouching and scraping soles down the endless cracked pavement, chilled and goosebumpy in the blazing California sun.

Corporate artisanal (which meant made by human actors irl and not animated or deepfaked) Hollywood stardom was the only goal I could think of to cling to when I left the slumburb of South Milwaukee the day after my twenty-sixth birthday in the middle of a gasping-hot September heatwave, in a creaky autonomous Unterbus that had a Pollock of black and pink mold crusted on the vanes of its wheezing air conditioner.

Once in Los Angeles I survived freehand. I slept in bushes and on what few benches and flat spaces weren’t sabotaged with extra armrests and weird spiky bumps. I napped in libraries and coffeeshops, couch surfed, lived as a roommate in places where a dozen people hotracked floor pallets in two bedrooms, hung out in the community theaters, bummed microtransactions in the street, busked (a flop; I’m a crap singer and don’t play an instrument), waited tables in the few hole-in-the-walls too cheap to use robotic waitstaff (expensive places did too, but they wanted training and references), did temp labor.

I begged and fought for parts on the stage, mostly unpaid. Struggling toward my destination, never growing nearer. Tantalus on the Pacific. But unlike Tantalus, I had an escape: defeat. I could walk away. Walking, wandering through the hours as the sun crept through the sky over the palms, staring into the cracked concrete flowing backward under the endless river of my feet, eyes down and away from the faces of the pedestrians and the passengers of passing cars. Walking from nothing to nowhere.

I avoided their eyes but still felt their stares on me like the pressure of unwanted fingers: poking, prying. Looking out from successful lives and air conditioned limos and fat wallets, evaluating, judging, chuckling. Look at that piece of shit. He thought he was somebody. I could feel them thinking it at me, whether they truly were or not. And they almost certainly were not; they had no way to know who I was or care–which felt even worse held up in harsh light against my broken dream.

The last sliver of the sun dissolved into the skyline and left a dying red-purple skidmark behind. I found myself in the park I slept in ten years ago on my first night off the bus. I pushed my way into a broad clot of bushes that looked familiar through a decade of small changes, and there was a skinny woman sitting in the little clearing in the middle, a woman maybe my age or a bit younger. She was sitting folded in that tall-lanky way that’s all knees and elbows, wearing layers of soft leather and shredded denim. One hand cupped a black plastic L, the timelessly practical shape of an inhaler. The ampule was closed, user-inaccessible. Disposable.

Who the hell are you? she said, looking up from her seat on a makeshift blanket–an old grubby winter parka with the arms slashed open and bleeding gray fractalfoam insulation. I threw my wallet down at her feet.

I don't do that, she said, her free hand disappearing behind her to the small of her back. Go find what you want out on the street.

I ignored the threat of her motion but came no closer; I sat down crosslegged in front of her dead jacket, in the carpet of dead leaves and sticks, and laid my hands palm-up on my knees. For a moment I was ten, squatting in the threadbare lawn of the Basic Housing block, using my fifteen minute activity break from virtual class to sit motionless, looking as close to the sun as I dared. Wishing I could be there instead of here. Wishing to be anywhere.

I don't care, I heard myself say. I expected my voice to be dull, flat, colorless. But it wasn't. It was angry. I sounded like a child to myself, like the peachlipped sixteen year old who called his mother a loser and blamed her for not finding a man who wouldn't beat the shit out of us both.

Let me hit that. That's all I want. I pointed at the inhaler.

She arched an eyebrow at me, the right one. Unlike the natural left it had been plucked out, follicles replaced with fiberoptic microbraid hairs that cycled through greens to yellows to reds in long semirandom patterns. Subtle; a prestige job from an experienced body artist. Definitely not gaudy DIY you order online or buy from a wandering kioskbot in the shitty part of town.

The hand came out from behind her back, empty. She kept her eyes on mine as she picked up the wallet, opened it with a twitch of the wrist.

A hit, she said.

Yeah.

She set the huffer on her lap, picked the bills out of my wallet, fanned them.

You could buy three huffers with this. Four.

Then go buy four inhalers. Come back here and share them with me.

And later I owe you for my two, and there's only one way to pay. I don't think so. She stood up, leaving the wallet and the cash on the dirty parka.

I leaned over, picked up the wallet, leaving the cash. I put the empty wallet in my jacket pocket, remained sitting.

Then go buy them and meet me on the sidewalk in front of the park where people can see, I said. You'll be safe that way, or you tell me how and I’ll do it your way, no argument. I don't know who to buy this shit from. I've never bought drugs that weren’t over the counter. You give me two and keep two, and we go our separate ways.

You never did drugs, and you want to start out huffing High-Low? This shit is to the 2080s what crack was to the 1980s. And you're going to trust a huffer with your money?

Yeah. Keep it. Or come back. Do the cops still keep hands off the park unless you make noise?

You gotta stay out of sight, too, or else walk around like a tourist. But yeah. Fine, fuckit. Stay and watch my blanket, she said, and she crawled out through the other side of the bushes with my money.

She was gone for an hour or so. I sat on the shredded parka, shifting every couple of minutes. I had nothing to do; my device was still bedside. I couldn't get comfortable. I didn't want to sit still long enough to think. This was crazy. But what was this? Looking for oblivion in drugs, or spending ten years thinking I was going to hit it big any minute? What a fool I’ve been, I thought, as I filled with the misery of self-hate.

But it's not like nobody ever hit it. The stars were all around the city to be seen. I could feel the success all around me. I just couldn't touch any of it.

If I couldn't hit it big, I felt, it was time to give it all up–never worry about any of it again. I couldn't force myself through the crucial instant to give up with a gun or a knife, so I was going to do it with a drug instead. So I said to myself.

Not that one hit would kill me unless I was unlucky-lucky. The scenario unrolled in my imagination like classic film: I’d