Experimental fiction explores the strange spaces between reality, identity, and imagination. Goodbye, Jack is an experimental fiction story filled with dark comedy, surreal encounters, and unexpected twists.
“And in that moment, I realized that finding My True Love, finding my true body, none of this even matters. I may never see my true body again, but I can still find a new love in this one.”
“It doesn’t matter what you look like,” Chris agrees, chalking up for the finishing stroke. “It’s how you feel inside.”
“Don’t matter what you look like,” Don affirms, nodding his head. “What matter is you happy inside.”
The cue ball clacks an eight-ball into the corner pocket. “That’s game,” says Chris the Brit, smiling in victory. “That’s 14-15 now. We’re almost tied.”
Don, the happily stoned waiter, takes his defeat with a smile, folds his hands in grace.
We’re hanging out in a guesthouse called Green Gardens. There’s a bar and lounge with a billiards table. The windows are open and it’s early afternoon. The sounds of a volleyball game echo from outside, and a kung-fu movie plays silently on a screen. Don goes off to take care of something in the kitchen. “Have a game?” Chris asks.
“Feels so weird knowing that I’m leaving,” I say, taking a cue and chalking up.
“Back to America, eh? You’ll have plenty to tell them when you get back.”
“They might keep me locked up for a while.”
Chris laughs amiably.
“I know what you mean. I’m headed back to the UK in a few weeks. Going back to uni. It’s going to be strange to wake up soon and be back in my mum’s house and feeling like it was all a dream,” Chris says, bugging his eyes, laughing. “I mean, how do you explain this?”
“We become ambassadors and tell them to see for themselves.”
“Right,” he grins, and sets up the eight ball for a quick takedown. “Maybe next time they’ll give us better accommodations.”
We play in silence. The cue ball kisses the eight ball for the win.
“That’s game, mate,” Chris says, smiling and shaking my hand. “I’ve got to be off. If I don’t see you, have a safe trip back.”
We shake hands and Chris disappears downstairs. Don comes out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel. “Go home?”
“Not yet,” I hear myself say.
Suddenly, there’s a blast of theme music, some strip club hip-hop comes booming from unknown speakers, fog appearing from out of nowhere. Two girls in black, one petite wearing a black one-piece, the taller one with short hair wearing a suit jacket and miniskirt, come walking into the room. The way they set their bags down and get Don to rush over with their drinks makes it clear that this is their bar.
I avert my eyes and busy myself with racking up the table. I take a cue and break.
“Looks like you’re solids. Mind if I play?” the girl with the short hair says, picking up a cue. She has features of a doll-like symmetry, but there’s something soft and eerily emotionless about her — a toxic smile.
“Sure, why not?” I say and chalk up my stick.
She gives me a smirk of contempt and racks the balls with the movements of a black widow. The balls go scattering around the table and she lands two stripes in. I watch as she moves around the table with a decisive smoothness, enjoying the thought of humiliating me, showing me the rise of her miniskirt as she sits on the table or leans over to shoot, which I oblige by noticing. But there’s something about her that’s so diabolical I feel nothing but a cold disquiet being next to her. I try to finish the game without much fuss, her shots timed with that look of sweet venom on her lips, biting and shooting it in. There’s something in her voice that almost feels familiar.
Finally, she misses. I knuckle down on the felt and run the table. I start setting up for the eight when the sound of a ringtone breaks my concentration. I look back and see Don setting down a steaming plate and utensils on the table and see the long-haired girl speaking in accented English. “Hello baby!. . . What? Today? No, I can’t today. I’m busy. . . Yes, I know. . . You want me love you long time? You know I love you long time, baby. . . ”
The tall girl with short hair rounds the table, brushing against my side as she passes, bending over her miniskirt in front of me and jabbing her stick in my stomach. “What’s wrong?” she asks, looking over her shoulder, smirking at me in that soft emotionless voice. “You look like someone broke your heart.”
I look at the old kung-fu movie and hear the sounds of the volleyball game outside, the children in the street, echoes of traffic in the distance, the thunder starting to roll in over the ancient city ruins.
“She was never real,” I say, and watch as the tall girl arches her back before coming down on the cue with her fangs raised, finishing me off with a bite to the head.
“I win,” she says, and smirks wickedly.
“You sure did. Good game,” I say, ready to hang it up.
“You need to buy me a drink,” she says.
“Those weren’t the stakes, sweetheart,” I reply, doing my best Humphrey Bogart.
“You lost,” she says, blocking my way with her hip. “Buy me a drink.”
“Sorry, I have a flight to catch.”
“What’s the matter?” she asks as I walk past her. “Never found your Hollywood ending?”
“My what?” I say laughing, my body suddenly turning to ice. “Wait a second! It can’t be!”
“Surprised?” she smiles icily now, flipping back her hair and posing like a model.
“Jack!”
A violent shiver runs through my body.
“You son of a bitch! I looked at your ass!”
“Hey now, watch the gender pronouns,” Jack says coolly as she circles around me like a shark about to tear into its prey. “Guess you’re wondering where I got this smoking hot body?”
“I don’t want the details,” I say, shaking my head, looking pale.
“So how about that drink?”
What can I do? If I say no, I’ll be blackballed and marked for life. I can already see Don breaking down under interrogation, his support for me crumbling in the opening of his testimony.
“What are you having?” Jack says, leaning against the bar all smug.
“Old-fashioned,” I tell Don, now manning the bar.
“Make mine a Jack and Coke,” she says, and smiles at me with the obvious punchline. “I’m Jack, and he’s Coke.”
I want to punch her in the face, but now in public, I don’t know. . .
“So, this is you now?” I say, receiving my drink, but not drinking it.
“A little gift from the Chinese,” Jack says, stirring the little plastic straw. “After that car plowed into me back in Lijiang, my body was destroyed, paralyzed. The Chinese government made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
“A new life as a post-op transsexual double agent?”
“It’d be a metaphor if it wasn’t so ironic.”
“Well, I guess it doesn’t really matter what gender or sexual orientation you are as long as you get the job done. But wait — what’d you do with your — our — my body?”
“Oh, that old thing?” Jack smirks. “I donated it to science. By the way, your dick is floating in a jar of formaldehyde in a cavern deep in Vietnam. Secret laboratory. Getting pickled like a cucumber.”
“Can’t say I care,” I say, shrugging. “I’ve found inner peace. I don’t need a dick anymore.”
“Oh, Sam. How many times do we have to go through this? It’s meant to be. The next adventure somewhere in the underground of Vietnam, digging up government cover-ups from the 60s, all while trying to recover your true body and reattach your lost penis? Come on! Get with the program, Sam! If that doesn’t fill the seats, I don’t know what will.”
“Who’s the Barbie doll? Does she know?” I say, nodding towards the one with long hair, still on her phone.
“Of course not. She’s just a working girl. You’d be shocked how easy it is for an escort to gain government clearance.”
“Not really. I’m pretty jaded.”
“Not to mention paranoid. Very clever the way you shook our trail this whole time. I have to give it to you, Sam. You’re smarter than you look, or luckier, or protected from above. Either way, I think it’s nice that we’re here now and can have this last drink. You can die knowing that you’ve led me straight to the Dalai Lama, who is soon to be reincarnated into a dummy we have waiting in the wings.”
“So it’s ‘we’ now, is it?” I say with disgust. “What happened to taking destiny into your own hands?”
“Destiny’s in my hands,” Jack replies coolly, pulling a gun from inside her suit jacket. “See you later, alligator.”
Without thinking, I splash my drink in her face before she can fire.
The effect is instantaneous. Jack, in her new form, turns out to be nothing more than a femme-bot. She falls to the floor and begins convulsing, spazzing in an epileptic fit. A bright light shoots out of her eyes and silently screaming mouth, and electric waves fry her now badly singed outfit. Finally, she lies still.
Agent Sour: Terminated.
“Guess no one’s ever turned her down for a drink before,” I say aloud, voicing the pun no one asked for.
“Oh my god! What happen?” the short girl with long hair cries, bouncing over in her stilettos, now joined by Don, all of us staring at Jack’s short-circuited femme-bot form. Smoke continues to rise while sparks of electricity crackle at random.
“We have to get out of here. There’s no telling what form Jack’s consciousness might embody next,” I say grimly.
“Still alive?!” they cry in unison.
“I’m not sure. It’s possible Jack was nothing but a program all along. Which means,” I say gravely looking into their eyes, tapping the side of my head, “I’m the final chip.”
“What we do with her?” Don says in a manner almost casual, nudging Jack’s stiletto with his foot.
“Find Candidate Dim and dump the body in his hotel room. That’ll send the boys in Washington the message. We’ll have to scour Interpol to find any more agents working for the Chinese. Leave the rest to me.”
“What about me?” the short girl with long hair says fearfully. “You kill me?”
“No. You have a different mission. Come with me!”
I grab her hand, and we run into the busy market streets until we rest beside a French colonial bridge and catch our breath. I take her shoulders into my hands and face her towards me.
“Your mission, if you choose to accept it—”
“Who are you? Why she try kill you?”
I take a dramatic pause, eyes smoldering.
“Because. . . of this.”
Without breaking eye contact, I reach down in my underwear and wrestle around, and finally with the sound of tearing cloth, resurface with a flash drive in the tips of my fingers.
“What that?” she asks, squinting at the microchip.
“This is the full undisclosed report. If anything should happen to me, I need you to get this into the hands of someone at Interpol. Just hold onto this until the time comes. Someone will come to get it from you. You won’t know who, and you won’t know when. But keep this hidden in your bra until then. This is very important! You have to keep it hidden in your bra so that when finally you are approached at that unknown moment, hopefully it’ll be raining, and hopefully, it’ll be very sexy.”
“I don’t understand. Why they want your vacation photo? Why it need to be sexy? Who are you?”
“Remember, hidden in your bra,” I say, placing the flash drive in her hands. “If I should die or be captured, they’ll know what to do.”
“The government?” she asks.
“No, the internet.”
I take her dramatically into my arms and hold her in an embrace that almost feels like love. Water flows tranquilly beside us, leaves falling onto the water’s surface, the lily pads and the soft pink lotus flowers stirring gently in the reverberating circles of the fall. We stand in green shade, the flashing colors of motorbikes passing by on the dusty street beyond. A crisp breeze swirls around our silhouetted bodies as autumn leaves begin to fall.