Let that be a lesson to me, although I don't know if it's about not bragging or shutting up until my book is done. Elly was gone by breakfast, and nobody, not even Miss Nedobity, would tell us where she went.
* * * *
Dear Davy, borrow if you have to, I need you. Come back. Love.
* * * *
Nobody in the colony knew about The Thing in The Lake, not even the overbearing housekeeper who herded the colonists like cattle. She harassed them unchecked until the morning that they found the ethereal Wanda Loveland's drenched body on the path that ran downhill from the studios where the chain gang was unhitched every morning and incarcerated separately until she marched them back to the big house every night. Although Miss Finnerty and the other administrators called it suicide by drowning, nobody could dispute the seaweed that shrouded the body and filled the muddy tracks left by whatever dragged poor Wanda's sodden, ravaged body uphill to the spot where she was found.
Okay, Cynnie, don't go there. There isn't any Thing in The Lake at Strickfield and if there was one and I wrote about it, with my luck, it would turn out that's the elimination deal. I want to win this thing! I tried to pump Miss Nedobity, but after Elly left, the Witch of Endor went somewhere inside herself and she won't come out.
* * * *
Dear Davy, I miss you. You're the only man I trust, but you have your work and we're so busy here. . .
* * * *
Plus certain people are getting better lunches. Is that a reward for something I don't know about, or some kind of sign? Mine today was Velveeta spread on Ry Krisp with an apple. To keep me regular? At what? Meanwhile Melanie and Barton Freeman came to dinner belching paté and Alvin Gelb wore a chicken bone in his lapel like a merit badge and of course his second novel (he has a contract) is going like wildfire, and this is only Week Two. I don't like Edwine but I have to admire her. She gave them a sour scowl and said ever so sweetly, loud enough for even flabby, fatuous Leslie Strickler to hear, “Quantity doesn't mean quality, does it?” Then she raked us with that sickly sweet, superior smile.
Gotta love Roger. He and I were both breaking up.
Then after dinner Aline gave a little speech about how lucky we were to be still in the running and things will be harder from here on. I thought at least Miss Nedobity would snort derisively, but she just sat there looking moodily into her hands while Aline went on and on about how proud we were making her and Leslie, who hasn't exactly spoken since that first night. “So far so good,” she finished, “but remember: Success is unpredictable.”
Now, what the hell was that?
Was she, like, foreshadowing the Outside Event?
Then her voice dropped. After way too long, it popped up in a new, perky place. “Work is work but Strickfield is about colleagueship. Which is why Dame Hilda instituted Crit Nights.”
Aline was beaming, but I swear I heard somebody groan. “Now, ask your best friend here to tell you the truth about your work.”
She said, “Tonight,” after which people began to drift away in pairs, at which point I noticed that of the twenty, there weren't twenty of us any more, just enough to pair off neatly, girl-boy, girl-boy, all but Melanie, who went off to her room with a triumphal, above-it-all grin because as a lesbian, she'd won the immunity prize.
Roger made a get it? face. I nodded and we paired off. By that time everybody had found somebody, even Alvin Gelb, despite only being fourteen—but, with Serena?
Serena! So sleek. So intent on meeting Alvin's famous dad.
Well, everybody paired off except some dweeb so lame that I never learned his name and Florence Klamm, who has nice clothes and the sparkle of a hermit crab. They straggled off to their single rooms alone and this morning they were gone. Into obscurity, I suppose, no better than they deserve. Strickfield winners make headlines and the rest? Who cares what happens to the rest?
I checked Florence's room today and—score! She left in such a hurry that she forgot her party dresses which, okay, frankly, they look way better on me.
So, if these confessions we're all making do get aired? Davy, I want you to know nothing went on between Roger and me except some honest literary criticism. I read his chapter and he read an old story I brought along as backup so chill, Davy, we're just good friends.
* * * *
Dear Davy, Crit Night was gruesome. You're my best first-reader and the only one I trust...
What's risky and more terrifying than showing another writer your unborn work?
Finding the right thing to say about theirs.
We enter the treacherous land of envy and unbidden admiration that we're too choked by anxiety and ambition to express, compounded by the fear that what we read will be so awful that accidental truths will pop out of our rivals’ mouths. That resentment will smolder, building until it ignites. Outbursts surface like flash fires, leading to threats and slashed tires, depending on how much we've had to drink; camaraderie can morph into hurt feelings, irremediable rifts, but in the seconds before the flare-up, we were so close!
Last night started well but it ended with Roger and me on the outs: awful, I only had one friend here and now I don't.
It's easier to say something nice about even a close friend's work than to hear him say anything that pleases you.
I want to go home.
* * * *
Oh, your crit sessions are a great idea. When this show airs, I want the audience to know how useful they are, although of course we'll spare them the gories, like, I'll sign the confidentiality agreement when I win. This is going to air, right? I figured it out! We're shooting the pilot for Strickfield, the greatest-ever reality show, um, aren't we? If not, why am I confessing here?
Really. I just wish Roger hadn't gotten so mad at me before I showed him the new opening of my novel. I'm sorry it was only a half-page but there are way too many distractions to get anything done. I wish I'd had time to rewrite it, but—oh, never mind.
I just wish we could write our own futures, but even that's out of our hands and . . . about the attic. I only saw that door open once, when Miss Nedobity took Fred Fisher's bedding upstairs the day Esquire blew the whistle on him. Plagiarism. One phone call and he was gone. It makes me feel bad. And anxious. And bad.
Part of me wants to go down to Roger's room and throw myself on his mercy and beg him to like me again so I'll have at least one friend. I need him to sit by the attic stairs while I try to find out what's going on up there, and come up after me if something gets me and I don't come down. It's the least he could do after what he said about my work, but Roger's so pissed off about my crit that he probably wouldn't notice if I packed up and left right now, sobbing my heart out in the night.
Is that moaning I hear? Is it the wind or is it remorse blowing around inside my empty head? Okay, Roger. I'm sorry I said your chapter needed work. I am!
* * * *
In the woods Martha trails Dennis like a shadow of herself. Dying leaves rustle like old women wringing their hands, whether in grief or anticipation, she cannot say. “Dennis.” Before last night they were as one but that changed; she can't find the reason they are here. What if she loses him? What if he abandons her? The thought sours in her mouth. “Wait up!"
"It's this way.” Dennis hurries as though he doesn't care whether she follows or not.
In the room, my desires come and go weeping, because they do not know
"Oh, Dennis.” She begins but when he turns, can't find a way to finish the sentence.
"Be patient,” he tells her with a look like a perfunctory farewell kiss.
I've come too far to give up now, she thinks and in the next second regret blows into her like a cyclone through an unfinished house.
I shouldn't have come.
. . . weeping, because they'll never know what might have been on other days
Excitement quickens her steps. Hopes send her pelting after her lover like a schoolgirl after a soccer ball as the last line comes to her whole.
Unless sh
e stays.
* * * *
That's it! Wow, talk about your coup de foudre.
Unless she stays. I don't need Davy. I know what I'm doing now! All I have to do is get it done, and if Roger and I both could win . . .
You bet I feel better, and I have this to say to your peeps before I go down to yet another horrible breakfast where everybody is either too sleepy or too depressed or too hung over to talk.
I don't have enough on paper to make Roger smile at me like he did before terrible Crit Night, but by the end of the week I will.
I think.
Was it so bad that I said his prose was too big for the story? I was only trying to help him. And as for me?
I've scuttled projects X, Y, and Z for this exciting new idea I got in the night. I'm channeling smug, pimply Alvin Gelb, and my novel is just pouring out!
Last week Roger found out that the wonder kid is writing a book about Strickfield and all of us. The nerve! Alvin's hero is, like, gushing out his puerile thoughts day by day as the summer unwinds. Roger pulled a printout out of the kid's trash while Alvin was outside his studio getting loaded in the woods—so much for rules—and gave it to me, but of course that was before we had Crit Night and Roger stopped speaking to me.
It was still on my desk when I choked down toast and dragged my grieving, wounded self downhill to the shack—excuse me—studio, where we're supposed to write. Alvin's first chapter was lying there like a gift. I won't bore you by quoting Alvin's ostensible book, it's stupid and callow and mean, but for me? One look and . . . Wow!
It was the moment when they zap the corpse with the paddles and the patient comes back to life.
* * * *
A writers’ colony is like a foreign country. Not the right place for paranoid, inner-directed people—introverted, most of us, with careers built on failed efforts to bring order out of the chaos inside our heads. We do what we do in hopes of . . . In hopes. In territory like this we are all xenophobes: touchy, paranoid. Every little thing said or done by the others sinks into sensitive ground, takes root and grows. Like foreigners, we assess the others. Are we the only outsider and they're all native to this place? We're uneasy. Aliens, feeling our way, timidly trying to master the language and to make sense of the currency, calculating everything we do, trying it this way, that, in hopes nobody will find out how foreign we are, rehearsing our lines in perpetual fear of saying something wrong.
* * * *
Dear Davy, I'm sorry I haven't written. It's been busy here. . .
* * * *
You bet I am a smug little bastard, I, Alphonse Frankenstein, son of the most notable critic in the whole fucking country, head and shoulders above every single writer in this entire fucking place which they sent me into like a babe unto the wilderness because Dad said my head was getting too big for my body and I was out of control. Well, fuck that, one look and I know I write better than every single one of these half-baked old writer wannabes in this fucking colony, oh not you, Thalia Fineheart, for you are my best friend in this weird, weird place where Dad planted me like a fucking guidon, like a Crusader in one of his old black-and-white movies that he looks at 24/7, you know, “In the name of God I claim this land for France."
* * * *
I've found my voice! I came to dinner last night with two thousand words under my belt, and I loved it. Everybody changed color when I told them, which makes me think all those suppertime scorecards flashed by certain people are a lie.
I could win this. I could!
Two writers were eliminated during the campfire sing and six more were gone after the staged readings of Serena's astonishing play. Four more lost on wardrobe, deportment, last week's foxtrot contest, which was, if you ask me, totally unfair. Leslie Strickler announced it and Miss Nedobity made us practice at cocktail time every night. I wore Florence's handkerchief point dress and everybody thought I'd flown it in from Bergdorf's or Nieman's; I got points for my look, so, cool, but the contest was a put-up job. Leslie's been taking lessons and puffy as he is, turns out to be quite the twinkler in his patent leather loafers. He danced everybody into the ground except Serena, Alvin, Roger, Melanie and me.
There are so few of us left that I'm getting scared. So far everything's been—well, unpredictable but not unexpected, but we're all strung tight over the Outside Event. Will it be dangerous? Targeted? Specific to each player, which is, face it, what we are, or something bigger and worse?
I should bond with whoever's left because by God it is strange out, and getting stranger. Even the dreadnaught in the diamond dog collar is getting strange. I caught Miss Nedobity on her knees in front of the portrait of the late Ralph Strickler, and the monster of the manor was in tears! Upset much? I couldn't help it, I freaked. And the worst part is, now that Roger isn't speaking to me, I don't have anybody to tell. I need somebody I can sit with at these dinners so we can talk and laugh—you know, like friends. I need a friend!
* * * *
Dear Davy, I need you. Drop everything. Come!
* * * *
All any of us wants is to belong. We try, but we're always a little off. Hypersensitive. Judgmental. Jumping to conclusions inside our heads: occupational hazard, right? Every little thing we say comes out wrong, or it's taken wrong. Even small gestures are misconstrued and although we try to hide it, at every turn we are assessing: Are you a winner? Am I?
As if the worst thing that can happen is losing. Unless it's taking sides and finding out that we chose wrong. Is that why I'm here? Because fiction is the only work I know how to do, but all I really want is to belong?
* * * *
It's getting weird here. Dinners are weird, just us five and the staff, everybody at the same table, everybody but Roger on edge, no bragging, just nervous blablabla like rain dropping into the hush. We toasted Ralph Strickler's birthday, and everything got even weirder. How could I sleep? I'm in the Confessional at—what is it? Dawn? If I don't win this thing and get on TV, somebody needs to know.
It was four a.m. when it started up overhead—shuffling, moaning, I guess—but instead of fading, it intensified. Grief outgrew the attic and poured downstairs. I heard it in the hall, so I had to look, and, OMG. There was a great, quivering blob crouched at the bottom of the attic stairs, OMG, I mean really, it was Miss Nedobity in her diamond choker! Slipcovered like a Strickfield sofa in her white canvas nightie. She had her hands over her face and she was crying so hard that I was scared to touch her.
She was sobbing, and I was like: Is this the Outside Event?
I said, “Are you all right?”
“I'm so tired. I'm just so tired.” I can't afford to get on her bad side so I patted her shoulder. She spread her fingers and peeked through them. “Oh, it's you.” Then she wailed, “I wasn't always this big!” and cried so hard that I was afraid the others would hear and come out into the hall and, what? Get in on this? “It wasn't always this way.”
I kept pat-patting and shushing until she nodded and swallowed hard. Her whole body was heaving but she managed, “I'm sorry, it's his birthday. Again, and I have to make sure he has enough . . . Agh!”
Score. That's her in the attic every night. Grieving, like every day is Ralph Strickler's birthday to her.
For a minute I wondered if this show of weakness put me ahead in the run for the finish line, but reason kicked in. Her freaking was in no way organized. Patting and there-there-ing, I rethought.
No, this is not the Outside Event.
I tried to go but she grabbed my wrist and sobbed out her story, which, wow. I need sleep to win this, but I showed solidarity and heard her out. Good thing I did. Her first line was a zinger.
“Ralph and I were in love.” By the time she finished I knew more than I wanted to know, and exactly what I needed to know. If I want to get home in one piece, I have to win!
At the end she deflated and went comatose. I tucked in her feet and the tail of her canvas nightshirt and shut the attic door. If somebody else wins this, if I don't m
ake it, I want the world to know what happened to Ralph Strickler was her fault! It bound her to Strickfield with hoops of steel, and now that Dame Hilda's dead, she's the one keeping him under control.
It isn't just the guilt.
They were in love, and she still isn't over it. In fact, she . . . okay, long story short, Miss Nedobity was having sex with Ralph in the elevator; at the bottom the doors opened and he tumbled partway into the hall. She was so scared of Dame Hilda firing her that she pushed the wrong button and the doors slammed shut on the heir of Strickfield's bare neck, blood started gushing out and then . . . What happened to Ralph happened on her watch, but that isn't the worst thing. The worst thing is what she did about it, and what things are like here as a result. She said it was terrible, but if you want to know the truth, it was disgusting, what she swore, to keep from losing him . . .
I'll never tell; if I want to win I can't tell you. No! I have to win or I . . .
I have to go. Really. See, Miss Nedobity confided that two heads will roll today, unfortunate metaphor, right? I have to hang in until I win. Or Else and no, I won't tell you about the Or Else, it's my big advantage, but I can say this much. It's a matter of life and death. Right now I'm the only player who knows the Or Else and I will damn well win.
* * * *
DAVY: IGNORE FIRST TELEGRAM. LETTER FOLLOWS.
* * * *
Melanie went this morning. Aline was poisonously sweet about it. Before breakfast she read Dame Edna on “attitude” straight out of her will. What she really meant was Melanie's sharp, she's stylish and a great writer, but way too feisty to win Miss Popularity which, OMG, is one of the things they're judging us on! Plus, her sexual persuasion is not popular with rich fuddy duddies on the Strickfield board. Which leaves just four of us, Roger and Alvin and Serena with her fantastic wardrobe and her surefire blockbuster. And me.
Gorgeous Serena's a definite threat, especially if they're scoring our videos. If it wasn't for that business between her and Alvin on Crit Night, I'd be a lot more worried than I am. The affair's still going on and it will bring them down, leaving only Roger and me. They'll get expelled for moral terps. I mean, if the judges freaked over Melanie, no way will they have a winner who gets brought up on charges. It's illegal to have sex with a minor in this state. Now, Alvin's big for his age, but, hey. He's fourteen!
Asimov's SF, October-November 2011 Page 14
