The Questionable Behavior of Dahlia Moss

by Max Wirestone

  “Cynthia’s fine.”

  “The hell she is,” said Lawrence. “Is she some kind of zombie? Do I need to start coming in here with brains to feed her?”

  “The body wasn’t Cynthia. It was her sister.”

  Lawrence, for once, was silent. He said, after a moment: “I’m going to be in my office.”

  “Staff meeting at ten,” I told him.

  “I’m not staff,” he snapped at me.

  “There’s going to be Bavarian cream,” I told him, but he slammed the door.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Archie Bakis didn’t show up. I spent the next few minutes pretending to work, but mostly I was anticipating his arrival, because I thought I might try asking him a little bit about Vanetta’s alleged pregnancy. Maybe he was the person who had written the widow’s letter, concerned about Vanetta overworking herself while being the mother of his child? I wouldn’t have thought this yesterday, but seeing the difference between rested Vanetta and yesterday’s counterpart made the idea of whistle-blowing on her behalf seem more reasonable.

  But Archie didn’t show up, which was a fact that went noticed by everyone, not just me. As people filed past my desk toward Vanetta’s office, it became a point of discussion.

  “You don’t think Archie was fired, do you?” asked Quintrell, whose first assumption for everything is termination. I would be judgmental about this except that my first assumption for everything now is murder. When I’m in a line at Target that takes too long, I periodically look up to make sure that the cashier has not been murdered whilst I was not looking. So I can’t be too proud.

  “No,” I said. “I think that sounds crazy.”

  “Maybe he’s taking a half day. He could be upset about the murder,” said Quintrell, a man who had been accused of murder, made bail, and come to work anyway. Early.

  “I guess we’ll have to ask Vanetta.”

  We all piled into the room, this time with the benefit of Tyler, who had skipped yesterday’s meeting, and waited to hear the news of the day, which was bound to be plentiful.

  “Am I taking notes for this?” I asked.

  “No,” said Vanetta. “Please stop asking. But where’s Archie?”

  Murdered, I thought, very unhelpfully. You’re probably thinking it, too, because let’s be honest, that’s what happens to people who don’t show up to meetings in stories like this.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “We were going to ask you.”

  “Why would I know where he was?” asked Vanetta.

  Maybe you killed him, I was thinking. Then I decided that this was maybe a little over the top, and so I geared down to a less accusatory question.

  “Maybe he spent the night with you?”

  Delicacy is not my best quality. Anyway, the question did not seem to rattle Vanetta in any particular way. She was neither embarrassed nor angry.

  “Nope,” she said. “I haven’t seen him since yesterday afternoon.”

  “It’s not like Archie to be late,” said Gary.

  “Well,” said Vanetta, “less cake for him.”

  Then the Bavarian cream was dispensed, and the meeting began.

  The first bit of news, which Vanetta had already leaked to me, was that the project was now without a deadline. It was instructive to watch everyone’s reaction to this, especially since I wasn’t digesting it myself. I saw something akin to tears. Not actual tears, but very close in that male, I’m not going to cry, but just let the water pool in my eye way, as if that were somehow less emotional. There was a lot of that.

  “It’s a miracle,” said Gary. “A Christmas miracle.” It was September, by the way. “A goddamned Christmas miracle.”

  “It’s fantastic,” said Vanetta. “Now we have time, which was what this project really needed. I believe that Peppermint Planes can be a fantastic fucking game. All we needed, really, was the time to develop it.”

  “This is unbelievable,” said Quintrell. “This is the best day ever.” Again, lines spoken by someone who started their day in jail. For murder.

  “We can do this,” said Vanetta. “We’re going to do this!”

  “Also: This cake is amazing,” said Gary.

  Perhaps it was natural that Tyler, who had been among the least sleep-deprived of them in the first place, would also be the least swept away now. “So,” said Tyler. “Are you still adding voice work and this fifties-art style to the game? Or has that been tossed to the curb as well?”

  “We still have to do the proposal,” said Vanetta. “Archie will need to put together a sort of lookbook and some dialogue for this thing. But for now we’re going to forge onward—our focus should be gameplay and working out bugs, anyway.”

  “Maybe we could accomplish most of what they want with interstitial videos,” said Quintrell.

  “Ooh, that’s a good thought,” said Vanetta. “I’ll have Archie mention that in the proposal.”

  “The whole proposal business is very strange,” said Tyler.

  “It’s been strange days over here,” said Vanetta.

  “Yes,” said Tyler. “It’s also very strange that there’s not any kind of deadline. Like, that’s not good, in my experience.”

  “Not good how?” asked Quintrell.

  “DE likes deadlines.”

  “I don’t want to be indelicate,” said Vanetta. “But I think that the combination of the whistle-blower and the murder has meant that the ordinary rules don’t apply here. DE probably wants us to lie very low for a while. As it happens, this works to our advantage.”

  “I get their motivation,” said Tyler. “But I’d be wary of the complete lack of a deadline. I hate being the voice of doom here, but they could be preparing to end the project.”

  “That’s crazy,” said Gary. “After all this work has been put into it, that would be insanely myopic. There are bugs, but we’ll work them out.”

  “Try to get a deadline on a calendar somewhere. A publicly posted one.”

  Vanetta appeared more rattled by this than the Archie business, but even then she wasn’t shaken.

  “I appreciate your honesty, Tyler. But I will see this project to completion if I have to do the damned artwork myself.”

  “I hear you,” said Tyler, who was now toying, a little nervously, with his wisp of green hair. Had he heard something? He gave the impression of someone sitting on more bad news than he could dispense.

  “So that was the good news,” said Vanetta.

  “Oh lord,” said nearly everyone at once, and Vanetta smiled.

  “Have any of you fellas seen the front page of Reddit?” asked Vanetta.

  “Cat memes?” asked Quintrell.

  “No,” said Vanetta. “Well, probably yes, but also us. We are on the front page of Reddit.”

  “The whistle-blowing?” asked Gary. “Or the murder?”

  “Yes,” said Vanetta. “We have two spots.”

  “There’s no such thing as Bad Publicity,” said Gary, shifting into song.

  “Do not speak to anyone in the press about this,” said Vanetta.

  “About what?” asked Quintrell.

  “About anything. If you see a member of the press, I want you to close up your face as if you are trying to swallow it.”

  “And they know just what we do,” sang Gary. “That we toss and turn at night. They’re waiting to make their moves.”

  “Please don’t sing so ominously,” said Vanetta.

  “At least he’s off Nickelback,” said Tyler.

  “And here’s an ironic segue for you,” said Vanetta. “Given that we were just discussing that DE probably would like us to lay very low over the next few weeks, allow me to remind you that we are giving a tour of the place tomorrow.”

  “What do you mean, a tour?” Gary asked.

  “I mean a tour. Ignacio Granger will be doing a profile of me that should come out next week sometime, and DE still wants this to happen.”

  “That seems very inappropriate right after a murder,”
said Quintrell.

  “Isn’t he going to ask about the murder?” asked Gary, alarmed enough from this that he didn’t allow himself to finish the song.

  “I am assured by his bosses that he will not,” said Vanetta. “The interview was arranged ages ago, and apparently the powers that be trust him. Besides, DE wants this place to look as normal and as unchanged as possible.”

  “That’s … good?” asked Quintrell.

  “I don’t even know anymore,” said Vanetta. “But we need something to show him that doesn’t fall apart. Do we have a working build of the game? Any kind of demo?”

  “The most stable one is from last week,” said Quintrell. “It’s pretty solid if you don’t let him get to the rock candy stage.”

  “Then spend the day buffing that up as much as you can,” said Vanetta. “I know it’s backtracking, but we want this place to seem stable. Now one final thing—now that we’re all rested and happy—did anyone make any discoveries regarding the whistle-blower’s letter?”

  The group was completely silent.

  “Regarding their families?” continued Vanetta.

  More silence. The vast empty reaches of space were louder than these guys.

  “Gary?” asked Vanetta.

  “Why do you always pick on me about this?”

  “Because you’re the only person here who has anyone who cares about them,” said Vanetta, which was putting a fine enough point on it that it actually made Quintrell squirm.

  “My wife doesn’t care. And she couldn’t have done it, anyway.”

  “If you say so,” said Vanetta suspiciously. “Although I wonder—”

  I really have no idea how Vanetta might have finished this sentence, but for the sake of poetry, let us say that she was going for “where the hell Archie is” because it is the most interesting. And ironic, assuming we use the word in an Alanis Morrissette-y way.

  Because it became very clear where Archie Bakis was. All too clear. There was music—loud music, coming from outside.

  For music to be so loud that it bothers people on the second floor of an office building, it must be very loud indeed. And it was. It seemed possible that we were under attack. Possibly by ’80s pop stars. Because the music that was coming at us was the 1986 Chris de Burgh hit “The Lady in Red.”

  “Oh gods,” said Vanetta, who put together what was happening before the rest of us, not even needing to make it to the window.

  I, however, did need to go to the window, because I enjoy watching train wrecks. Down below us, in the parking lot, was Archie Bakis, dressed rather snazzily in a suit and tie, although it was a bolo tie, and the suit was velour. Still, he looked sharp. He was kneeling, on one knee, between two large speakers, beneath a banner that read: WILL YOU MARRY ME VANETTA?

  It was, I observed, maybe for the best that the journalist was coming tomorrow and not today.

  “Does he have a banner?” asked Vanetta, who refused to even go near the window, as if we were playing Resident Evil, and the window was just a trap for zombie dogs to jump through.

  “He does have a banner, yes,” I answered, although only after all the men refused to speak at all.

  “Does it say: ‘Take Me Back, Vanetta’ on it?” asked Vanetta, which, again, seemed reasonable.

  “It does not,” I told her.

  “Oh no,” said Vanetta.

  “Oh yes,” I told her.

  “Tell me it’s not a wedding proposal,” she said.

  “I guess I better get to work on that build,” said Quintrell, speaking loudly to make sure he was heard over the music.

  “I’m afraid it’s a marriage proposal,” I told her.

  “Dahlia,” said Vanetta. “Go down there and deal with that.”

  “Isn’t that kind of a personal matter between the two of you?”

  “I order you to deal with him,” said Vanetta, closing the curtains. The same curtains that had been draped over Archie’s nether regions just this time yesterday. “I command it,” said Vanetta. This sounded as ridiculous as you’re probably imagining it.

  “Wait, is this meeting over?” asked Tyler. “Shouldn’t we be talking about the murder? Or you know, Quintrell being out on bail.”

  “I cannot deal with anyone while that music is playing,” said Vanetta. “And believe me, you don’t want to hear the next track.”

  The meeting dispersed, although Tyler was right. We needed to discuss the murder. But this was how Cahaba Apps worked; something was always on fire, and you had to ignore some of the problems just to stay alive.

  I went downstairs to deal with Archie.

  As I mentioned before, below us was a dog-washing business. I can’t imagine what they must have thought about us as neighbors. Murder, police, thrown chairs, and now this. A woman with hair that was not quite a beehive but was significantly more than a bun leaned against the front doors of the dog-washing shop, smoking a cigarette. Her orange T-shirt indicated that she was involved with the business.

  “Are you Vanetta?” she asked me, glancing toward the banner.

  “No,” I said.

  “Vanetta wasn’t the name of the murdered lady, was it? That’d be an ugly scene.”

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t.”

  The woman took a long drag off her cigarette and said: “Where’s Vanetta, then? She just gonna leave this guy down here to rot?”

  “Vanetta is staying upstairs.”

  “It’s like that, is it? Well, you’re gonna have to get him to turn off that music, then. We got two Pomeranians in there, and they don’t like it.”

  Vanetta doesn’t like it either, I thought, and walked over to the banner.

  “Archie,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  I nearly said how’s it hanging, but I decided that this was too informal. There’s really no road map for a conversation like this.

  “Where is Vanetta?” asked Archie. “Why are you down here and not her?”

  Archie, for his own part, was no dummy, which made this simultaneously easier and more difficult.

  “I think that Vanetta, you know with the murder and Quintrell being arrested and all”—a detail I threw in solely to throw Archie off his track—“that she’s just not ready to discuss marriage right now.”

  “So is that a no?”

  Jesus Christ if I knew.

  “I think it’s more of an ask again later?”

  “I don’t think that’s what it is,” said Archie, who didn’t exactly sound deflated. Although, he turned off the music, so thank God. He sounded a little relieved. “I suppose this is what I should have expected.”

  I suppose I was a little relieved as well, come to think of it. This was the second marriage proposal I’d experienced (secondhand) in a week. I didn’t really care for them—and it was more than just worry that everyone I knew was going to start families and I would die alone. There’s something embarrassing about them, even without a dopey sound track.

  “I didn’t even realize you guys were dating,” I said.

  “We weren’t dating,” said Archie. “Anyway, I tried. You wanna help put these things in my trunk?” he said, indicating his speakers and banner. The banner I could manage, but the speakers would require a dolly.

  “I can try,” I said. “You really went all out here,” I said.

  “Someone loaned me the speakers, and I got the banner from a buddy who works at Office Depot. So, free banners. I guess I just thought I should make a go of it.”

  I decided to play dumb here, which is something that I’m embarrassingly natural at.

  “So if you guys weren’t dating,” I said, “why the wedding proposal?”

  “Well,” said Archie, “we weren’t in a romantic relationship, like, you know, with fancy dinners. But you saw me yesterday on the floor in her office.”

  “So what was your relationship?” I asked. I told you I was playing dumb.

  “I am her stress ball.”

  “Just hers? I got the impression you played a
round a bit,” I said.

  “I do play around a bit.” Archie grinned. “Vanetta’s not my only pastime. But—well—I shouldn’t be telling you this, but she’s pregnant.”

  “No!” I said, perhaps laying it on too thickly.

  “Yeah,” said Archie. “I guess we got a little careless. It scares the shit out of me, really.”

  “Is Vanetta keeping the baby?” I asked.

  “The fuck if I know,” said Archie. “She won’t even talk to me about it. She didn’t want to mention being pregnant to me. I heard through the grapevine. The fucking grapevine.”

  The Cynthia Shaffer Grapevine. I trod delicately, pouring on an extra helping of airhead.

  “Maybe she just wanted to make sure the pregnancy stuck, you know? My friend Charlene got pregnant and was super excited about it, and then like three days later, she wasn’t. I mean, how early in the process are we talking?”

  I don’t even know anyone named Charlene, by the way. It just felt like the right touch.

  “She didn’t want to talk about it with me until the game was finished.”

  “That was supposed to be in a week or two?”

  “Yeah, except that deadline has been blown hundreds of times at this point. Hundreds of thousands of times. This baby’s gonna graduate college before the game is finished.”

  Archie stopped moving speakers and sat down suddenly. He wasn’t crying, or even letting manly bits of water pool in his eye, but he looked emotionally exhausted. Like he had been attacked by several emotions at once, and they were getting a flanking bonus on him.

  “It just makes me feel like such a jerk, you know? Just even getting someone pregnant. It’s like: I’m the dick. I’m the bad guy. I literally have fucked things up. Literally, Dahlia.”

  “Yeah, I got it.”

  Clearly, my role in this conversation was to tell Archie that he wasn’t being a dick—I mean, that’s how Fate had apparently cast the roles, but I was dubious. I mean, certainly, Vanetta wasn’t clothing herself in glory, but I didn’t really know the details of what his behavior had been. Admittedly, that’s true a lot of the time when you’re cast into this role, but it wasn’t like Archie was an old friend I was going to defend at all costs. I barely knew the guy, eggplant pecs or not.