The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss

by Max Wirestone

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I don’t know. You seem like someone who would carry a harp.”

  Although it may detract from the narrative, may I briefly espouse the virtue of everyone’s names floating over their heads all the time? People who have not played MMORPGs may find it disquieting, but I feel that this should be happening all the time. Every party I attend should have this technology. Google Glass, get right on that.

  Meanwhile, Kurt was throwing silly guesswork at me. Was this the same kind of thing as fairydom? When you’re a fairy, everyone wishes you well. When you’re a detective, everyone shares random theories with you.

  He was right, though. I was the kind of woman who carried a harp. Ideally, I’d bring them to the parties with the floating names, and if there was alcohol involved, you’d have your whole evening worked out right there. But I digress.

  “It was hell to get here. You were completely putting me on, right? You thought I would get lost along the way.”

  “I thought you would make it, but just find it very challenging. And I was putting you on a little bit. Welcome to Zoth.”

  It was strange how much faster Kurt could type responses to me than he could speak them. In real life, he was off-puttingly slow. In Zoth, he was Chatty Cathy.

  I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t my first time here, but truthfully RedRadish’s excursions were nothing special. Mostly they consisted of me jamming at buttons ineffectually while Erik yelled things like “Turn off your goddamned bloodlust” at me from another room. Instead I said:

  “So you’re going to introduce me to the rest of the guild?”

  Kurt ignored the question. “Why do Jonah’s parents want the spear?”

  “I’m just a gun for hire, Kurt,” I said, issuing from my mouth the least plausible combination of words I had ever delivered. And yet it just rolled right out. “I don’t grill my clients about their motivations.”

  I couldn’t help but notice the gorgon sitting at the bar drinking wine. Probably she was afk, but something about the black gaze of her dead eyes made me feel that she was eavesdropping on me.

  “Shouldn’t we be whispering?”

  Disfigurement /whispered in response:

  “You know a little about Zoth after all. But are you really that paranoid?”

  I responded in kind:

  “I’m more than that paranoid. I’ve got a lot of money on the line here, and I want to make sure my clients are satisfied. They want the spear, and I don’t want things getting derailed.”

  I’m sure it was the caffeine, but for a moment I could have sworn that Disfigurement winced, for just a second.

  “I’ve met Jonah’s parents. They don’t need a digital weapon. You’re telling me that they’re going to create Zoth accounts, and, what? Run around the hillside battling imps?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. I’ll probably just send it to Jonah’s account through the in-game mail. Whatever they ask for.”

  “He can’t log in! You’d be sending it to oblivion!”

  Even with his ninja face hiding Kurt’s own, it was clear he was pretty testy about the spear. I had pegged early on that he hadn’t taken it, and though it might still have been folly, I was pretty sure I was right. But he cared about it a lot more deeply than he had let on before. Was this just an academic’s interest, the way a geologist gets upset when someone tosses an unusual pebble down the garbage disposal? (I’ve had some odd boyfriends, and this observation comes firsthand.) Or was it something else? I’d come back to it later.

  “It’s really not my problem,” I said. “So can I join your guild? I obviously need to talk to a lot of people.”

  “No. I don’t actually have permission to add new members. Only Oatcake and Clemency do, and they’re not online right now.”

  “Well, I assume you’re all on a vent server or something, I’m sure you won’t mind if I join that.”

  He wasn’t expecting that I would know about that, clearly. A vent server, in case you’re not in the know about these things, is a server where people in a game can get together and speak to one another as they play. I imagine this involves yelling, “Turn off your goddamned bloodlust” a lot, but I have a somewhat limited perspective. The trick about them, however, is that they are never a part of the game you are playing on. This is by design, because if the game crashes, it is still useful to be able to speak to one another. Thus, there is absolutely no reason I shouldn’t be allowed on their vent server.

  Save for Kurt not wanting me to talk to anyone.

  “I don’t want you to talk to anyone.”

  Well, so much for subtext.

  “And why not?”

  “No one actually knows that Jonah’s been killed yet.”

  It was my turn to type /surprise.

  “You didn’t tell them?”

  “Oddly, I haven’t been playing much lately, after having lost my job and home.”

  “You’re here now,” I told him.

  “It’s difficult to bring up.”

  “Haven’t they been asking about him?”

  “A few people asked where he was, and I said I wasn’t sure. Philosophically speaking, that’s technically true.”

  “Let me speak to them,” I typed.

  “No,” said the old ninja, who was fading from Kurt’s voice in my mind, back to my stock sensei. “You’ll just make everyone feel weird. I’ll spread the news and let them know that you plan to ask them questions.”

  “You brought me all the way out here for nothing.”

  “Not for nothing.” The old man smiled. “Have a drink.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I went to bed sleepy and dissatisfied. Things were going my way financially, but everything else felt wrong. I don’t know what I had expected from Kurt, but his sending me home with digital liquor wasn’t it. I kept thinking about Detective Maddocks’s impatience with me. It’s one thing to be a failure; it’s another to be a fraud.

  At two thirty in the morning I was awakened from my troubled sleeping by Charice, who either hadn’t bothered knocking on my door or had taken my nonresponse as implicit instructions to enter and kneel by the side of my bed. In other circumstances, a thin, wispy woman whispering, “Dahlia, Dahlia,” in half darkness at your bedside would be horror-movie material. Maybe it still was.

  The best I could manage was light chagrin. This was not the first time that Charice had awakened me in the middle of the night. And of course, sudden influx of money or no, she was still paying the rent. So I could put up with her eccentricities.

  “Dahlia,” she whispered again. And “whisper” isn’t really quite the right word. “Death gasp” is really more descriptive. It was an inflection designed to produce troubled dreams.

  “We don’t want any,” I told her in a pretend sleepy voice. Better to put her through the paces a little.

  “I need your advice,” said Charice.

  This is a fantastically un-Charice comment to make, as Charice usually rejects advice as though it were pitched outside of the normal of range of human hearing.

  “What kind of advice?” I asked.

  “It’s curtains for you, Dahlia Moss.”

  I got out of bed and followed her into the common room. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t that there would be absolutely no curtains anywhere in the apartment. At least I had a decent pair of pj’s, because I was visible to the greater half of Saint Louis.

  “What’s happened in here?”

  It was obvious what was happening, however. There were enormous Rubbermaid containers all over the floor and the apartment smelled like Rit dye.

  “I’m doing a little redecorating,” said Charice. “I’m just a tad worried I’ve left these in for too long.”

  “That’s what you got up from sleep for?”

  Charice was very skilled at not responding to this sort of question and just lifted what had previously been a white curtain out of the Rubbermaid contain
er.

  Dear God.

  “Are these too yellow?” asked Charice.

  Chernobyl had never been this yellow. If I closed my eyes, I could still see yellow curtains. If Charice hung these in the apartment, we would never need coffee again.

  “They are a little vivid,” I told her, which was putting a good face on it.

  “Maybe I should throw some pink dye in there,” said Charice. “We could soften it with an ombre effect.”

  Two thoughts. One was that the last thing these curtains needed was more dye. Any more color and they might supernova and destroy us all. The other thought was that I needed another task, quick, because when Charice starts using the word “we,” watch out.

  “Yes,” I said. “Soften it. By all means. Charice,” I said, trying to make a casual transition, “as much I’d love to help with this important curtain dye situation, I was thinking of going through the trash you had gotten so expertly from Kurt’s car.”

  This was a good transition, because it also had the benefit of being true. Not only had I been thinking about it, I had been dreaming about it, which was like thinking, but with Jungian symbolism and a little sex.

  “I threw that out,” Charice told me. “It was making my room smell like egg salad.”

  Despite living with Charice for a number of months now, she continually found new ways to irritate me. Whenever I recalibrated to her insane whims, she would compensate to keep me equally exasperated. It was a cycle. Ours was not a Betty/Veronica relationship but Bert/Ernie. Still, this was an impressive bit of maneuvering on her part. To recap: She had broken into a car, gathered clues, professed at great length as to the power and importance of those clues, and then, when I wasn’t looking, threw them out.

  “Why would you do that, Charice?” I asked.

  “You said it was a dumb idea.”

  Technically, this is true. But I say that ideas are dumb with a lot of frequency. I began making this point to Charice, but it proved to be one of those statements that sounds unhelpful the moment it begins to form in your mouth.

  “Did you throw it out recently?” I asked.

  “Very,” said Charice. “I’m sure that its on the very top of the Dumpster out back, if you wanted to look.”

  “And are you going to tell me what you discovered from your late-night tailing of the police?”

  Charice feigned confusion.

  “I know you’ve been dying for me to ask you about it. Remember? You were chasing after police detectives with a novelty-shop microphone?”

  “Nothing came of that. It’s very hard to run down stairs faster than our elevator. And I got a late start on them.”

  I could tell that Charice wanted me to ask her where she had been all that time instead, and so I specifically avoided the question. When she saw that I wasn’t going to take this particular bait, she told me:

  “Top of the Dumpster, black bags, purple tie.”

  It wasn’t on top. It wasn’t even close to being on top, but in fact rather firmly in the middle. And the ties were blue, but let us not dwell on petty details.

  Oh hell, let’s dwell a little, because it was a nightmare. This was not one of those sitations where Nancy Drew twitched her nose and bumped into a wall of clues. It was a Dumpster, in the dark. And to make matters worse, I ran into our neighbor Mr. Tei.

  Mr. Tei is an elderly Chinese gentleman who seems perfectly nice but whom I dislike because I only seem to run into him when I am drunk or otherwise in a terrible way. This is partially bad luck and partially because he keeps very strange hours. I ran into Mr. Tei the night Erik broke up with me. I was drunk and crying, and he did what he always did, which was give me A Look.

  I’m completely projecting, but every time I see Mr. Tei I feel like he’s thinking, What is wrong with the youth of America? Like I’m not just a tragedy in and of myself but emblematic of a greater systemic problem. I’m dragging down the reputation of millennials, is what I’m saying. I realize this isn’t rational, but it’s what I think when I see him, every time.

  “Did you lose something important?” asked Mr. Tei.

  It was the first time he’d ever actually said anything to me. I’d imagined that he’d speak with an accent, because he spoke Chinese to his dog, but no. Another wrong deduction from Dahlia Moss.

  And I had lost a lot of important things, actually. I could have delivered them to him a cascade, but this might have left me sobbing, and I was really trying to make a better impression on Mr. Tei than my usual interaction, which was tough enough given that I was talking to him from inside a Dumpster. I was sober this time—that had to count for something.

  “I think maybe there are some clues in here.”

  “Clues for what?”

  I had no idea what kind of clues. Maybe something that implicated Kurt in the spear theft, or murder. This seemed positively insane to say aloud.

  When I didn’t answer, Mr. Tei asked, “You’re not going through my trash, are you?”

  “No,” I said. “Just some things I threw out earlier.”

  This pleased Mr. Tei, who said, “Good. Your roommate wonders if I am a spy for the Chinese government.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “She asked me if I was a spy for the Chinese government.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I told Mr. Tei.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Tei, who put a bag of trash carefully next to me and then went inside. I’d say it was a net wash for American millennials.

  Sorting through bags of trash is slow and disgusting, but I found myself deeply pleased by the work of it. Part of it was that Kurt had been kind of a dick to me, and I figured that even if there weren’t any clues, there was surely something in the mix that he would be embarrassed by. An unflattering photograph or a receipt for some sort of weird pornography. I wasn’t planning on throwing any of it in his face, but it could at least give me a tiny moment of superiority. Or hell, maybe there really would be a clue in there. I was starting to believe my own hype about being a geek detective.

  And maybe finding a clue wasn’t the point anyway. Maybe the point was that I was trying.

  I put everything into four quadrants: “Toss,” “Save,” “Interesting, Save for Emily,” and “Oh My God, Kill It with Fire.”

  To be perfectly honest, most of the stuff belonged in the “Kill It with Fire” category. Foodstuffs! So many rotting foodstuffs. Old crumbling peanuts, gummy bears encased in multiple layers of dirt, partially empty Greek yogurt containers soured to a point close to madness, a half-eaten burger, grocery store sushi that had hardened into something sinister and diamond-like, and all these disturbingly indefinable bits, some of which were sloshy, some of which were sharp. Kurt’s car must have looked and smelled like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Probably it had a similar relationship with women.

  The “Toss” category was mostly foodstuffs too, just ones that weren’t completely disgusting. Lots of cherry cola bottles and detritus of food consumption that hadn’t become totally gross yet: empty bags that had contained potato chips, old sandwich bags, and some Zebra Cakes that looked as fresh as the day he had bought them. Probably in the aughts. I’d kind of expected the sandwich Baggies to smell like weed, but honestly they smelled like sandwich. It was equally disgusting and disappointing.

  Lots of clothes in the “Toss” pile too—some abandoned winter wear: a black glove, a scarf, a St. Louis Blues toboggan cap. There was a pair of jeans that had been stained with what I hoped was Greek yogurt, and the first embarrassing bit: a pair of pink Jockey shorts. Or rather, a pair of white Jockey shorts that inattentive washing had turned pink and that had been left in Kurt’s car to die.

  I describe all this to you not just so you get a sense of what a slob Kurt was but also to reiterate that I didn’t just suddenly stumble my way into a big clue. I sifted through trash. I earned these clues.

  In the “Interesting” pile: a cardboard box with the word TOPICO printed on the side in a fake-stenciled font. The box
was empty except for a very interesting note printed in a computer serif. It read:

  “Embroidery in childhood was a luxury, but sometimes you need luxury. Love, Tambras”

  Well now, this was interesting. Tambras had gotten Kurt a present. A love present. Maybe it was the pink underwear, but my first thought was that Kurt must have been having a secret gay relationship with the troubadour, the stupidity of which was apparent as I turned over the box and saw the return address. Someone named Ophelia Odom of Boston, MA. So, not a gay relationship, because Tambras was a lady. I felt knuckleheaded for even assuming otherwise. I really should have known better—assuming she was a dude just because her avatar was one. So what? My avatar had been a dude. He was also an elf. And he had great hair. I had nothing in common with him at all. People’s Zoth avatars are not themselves. Sometimes they might give you insights into their characters—healers tend to be supportive, wizards like to be the center of attention, rogues are assholes—but sometimes not even that.

  So, Kurt and Ophelia.

  What was the present? The box certainly held something aside from the note. I googled “Topico,” which apparently made clothing. Something embroidered, I guessed from the message. But there was no packing slip, so I couldn’t know for sure.

  Still, I found myself wondering about Ophelia. Kurt had cooed at dinner that he had been texting with a girl, and here was a woman who had gotten him a present. Was this the person who had been sending hilarious texts throughout dinner?

  If her name had been Elizabeth Jones, I would have stopped there, but with a name as particular as Ophelia Odom, web searching is too fruitful to resist. A few keystrokes revealed that there have been only two Ophelia Odoms in the recorded history of mankind—and thus she was either born in 1865 or a music teacher who occasionally played viola in the Boston Pops. I was tending toward the latter.

  I even got a picture of her—from an article in the Boston Globe that featured a shot of the violists. Assuming that the attribution of names was in the right order, and that she really was the third from the left, well, she was a stately-looking gal, African American, with a short Afro and very dark skin. Not what I would have immediately guessed for Kurt’s girlfriend, and certainly not from what Tambras looked like. She was frowning in the photo, and it seemed hard to reconcile the frowning, stately violist with the sheer nerdiness of Zoth. But we all have secret depths.