FINAL BOY

Thing is, I've been trying to find a moment to write down what happened to Bennett and me for a while now, but the demands of my audience rarely abate.

- SAM LIPSYTE

Soon as I post a fresh installment of “Charles: Final Boy,” readers clamor for more. I've hardly time to jot down a grocery list, let alone compose a personal chronicle. Bennett says I'm practically the Charles (as in Dickens) of scribblers devoted to mining the rich vein of a certain underappreciated sitcom of the nineteen-eighties, but I will leave that for history to judge. Besides, what does Bennett know?

He's practically dead.

Just before he got that way, I was in Amok Mocha, where I like to sip cold brew and do my “C: FB” conjuring, and I struck up a conversation with a young woman who confessed to being a creative-writing student. She told me that in her workshop they talk about the “occasion” of the story. Why is the narrator telling this tale now? What pressures or conditions have coalesced to move a person to speak?

I feigned ignorance of the concept, though I'd heard it often in my own writing classes long ago. Instead, I told her that, if the installment I was presently crafting flowed from any occasion, it was this: Charles is anxious about the imminent disintegration of the universe via the ever-increasing tug of dark matter. Moreover, he’s ticked off that his best buddy, Buddy, doesn't seem perturbed by the prospect.

“How imminent?” the woman said, and sipped her Balkan, a new offering at Amok.

“Three or four billion years?” I said.

“And who is Charles?”

When I informed her that he was the titular hero of “Charles in Charge,” the most criminally uncelebrated television program of the Reagan era, the woman pursed her lips.

“Oh,” she said. “You write fan fiction.”

“We all write fan fiction,” I told her. “Some of us are just more honest about it.”

The young woman gathered up her belongings, moved to another table.

Did she think I was being facetious?