by Gemma Files
—You should have seen me when I was twelve, my dear.
Tim isn’t exactly available anymore, though: Took a header off the interstate two days after and went up in a classic Bruckheimer-movie fireball, along with his driver (some Chinese-British guy hired for the tour) and all his prospective works. Aside from whatever was in his rhetorical bottom drawer, all of which Tom now has V.C. Andrews-style legal access to…
That’s the rumour, anyhow.
“People say he’d just sent ‘The Emperor’s…’ off to the printer,” Veruca continues, rapt and hushed. “Like, he might’ve finished it that same night. People say—”
“People say Pop Rocks and Coke melt your insides, ‘Ruca. ‘The Emperor’s…’ is a myth.”
“I’ve read excerpts.”
“You’ve read fanfiction. Shit you could’ve written—hell, I could’ve written. Any Darbersmere groupie with a keyboard and a modem.”
Veruca’s lower lip pooches out. “You’re wrong, Nim. It’s not just hosted text somewhere, okay? I’ve seen scans, I’ve seen—” She stops, resets herself. “Besides, it’s classic Tim,” she goes on, weakly. “His life, pulled out further—like that thing he wrote about that accident he had, or how his first wife left him stranded in Kiev with no papers, or how he got diagnosed with cancer and thought he had six months to live…”
None of which is anything like provable, Nim wants to counter. None of which stands up to even the slightest real scrutiny. None of which we have anybody’s testimony for but his, in the final analysis—that stuff, right? I.e., fiction ?
“Great, sure, okay. So maybe Tom wrote it,” Nim says, finally. And leaves it at that.
In her crappier moods, Nim now sometimes doubts she ever really liked Tim Darbersmere’s writing at all; never in the same way Veruca does, anyhow. She spends a moment musing over the relative merits of “coolness” for coolness’ sake, as Veruca drones on…how when you’re fifteen or so, something can seem really great simply because it’s really alien, but that’s a reaction you eventually (hopefully, if you’re lucky, or normal) grow out of. It sloughs off relative to your own RL experience: The more you rack up, the less you feel the need to surf through somebody else’s consciousness, especially when all you get out of it is feeling cool by osmosis.
That sick glamour, that Fin du Monde decadence, that faker-than-thou exoticism. It’s the sort of classic Art School push-pull you get from certain Cronenberg movies—like “ewww, gross!” mixed with “show me more, show me more!”…and definitely the exact kind of creepy high you’d have to be riding in order to make reading about pledging your true perfect love in some kid’s still-living flesh a plus, rather than a minus.
(Because yes, Nim’s read the spoilers; she knows damn well what “The Emperor’s…” is supposed to be about, thank you very much, just like everybody else who claims to have seen the thing itself does. or everybody else who’d willingly sell their soul to do so.)
Still: This is yet another thing that she’s never going to get, Nim finds herself thinking. Because to Veruca, her own tiny opinions about irrelevant crap like this are as close to ‘RL experience’ as she’s ever going to come.
Thus this whole trip, potential chance to hit up Tom, Darbersmere 2.0, the exact same way Veruca did his uncle: autograph, anecdote, squee! And when Nim first volunteered (let’s not forget that: you did volunteer) to host her, the over-the-top delirium of gratitude Veruca responded with had been as endearing as it was gratifying—all now, in 20/20 hindsight, nothing but a bright red warning sign.
Why do you even need to meet him, anyhow? she keeps on asking Veruca, even now; idle curiosity turned psychic self-defense, news at eleven. Tom, not Tim, right? Dude...he’s just a guy.
To which Veruca always replies, simply: No. He’s not. The sheer weight of faith behind her words so scary-blind, it drains Nim of any sort of satisfactory response.
Strictly speaking, she can’t deny Thomas Caudwell Darbersmere carries his own cloud of intrigue: Sole executor of the Darbersmere Estate and Trust, he runs the family Import/Export business, even though he’s less a straight-up nephew than a sort of half-cousin once removed—illegitimate son of the dead drug-addict daughter of Tim’s dad, Eustace Darbersmere’s first wife, with her second husband. There’s speculation that since Tom didn’t pop up until after Tim kacked it, maybe he forged his name on the will somehow in order to get hold of the business and/or the books…after all, he does apparently make part of his current dough from a publishing deal allowing him to “complete” any of Tim’s unfinished manuscripts, extant or conveniently hitherto-undiscovered.
Does bear a scary resemblance to Young Tim, though, from what Nim can make out by comparing recent ‘Net-snaps of Tom-and-his-wife (Alicia, social-climbing American former nobody turned instant somebody, the Speed’s real ringmaster) with those awful 1970s photos Veruca dug up. For an otherwise sleek Christian Bale clone, the dude had some seriously funky polyester fetish, and unfortunately, bad fashion sense seems to have not skipped Tom’s generation.
But like most digital snapshots taken by overexcited amateur paparazzi, the majority of Tom’s pics tend to be caught in mid-motion, too smeary to make much out, his face flashbulb-haloed, back-lit, blurred equally often by laughter or the smoke from Alicia’s ever-present cigarette. It’s possible that in person Tom may look disquietingly unlike his revered uncle, and be nothing like him in personality, either.
“Y’know, V,” Nim says now, all casual, “I was thinking, just for tonight, we—”
(meaning you)
“—should maybe go easy on the Tim stuff.”
Veruca blinks, mid-sip; puts her cup down. “How do you mean, ‘go easy’?”
“Well…the club, the launch, this whole night, I mean—” She hesitates. “Given who’s running the show, it might be kind of, I don’t know—rude.”
Nim lets a heartbeat tick by, bracing herself. But Veruca, surprisingly enough, nods.
“Listen,” she starts, so quietly Nim has to strain to hear, “I get that. I just need to…figure something out, and I think if I could only see Tom, hear his voice, it might all come clear for me. Plus—I might have something for him.”
“Like what?”
“…Something,” she replies, mysterious to the Nth degree. And it makes Nim want to—
(laugh, cry, puke, punch her in the mouth, hard)
Sitting there with half a muffin in hand, rehearsing comebacks she’ll never quite have the balls to make, Nim huffs out, angry at her own cowardice, then tries to cover the sound with a cough. Then looks up, reflexively, to find Veruca staring right at her.
“You okay?” Veruca asks, the very pitch of it enough to make Nim snap:
“Do I seem not okay?”
Veruca flushes. “Uh…well…”
(get to it, get to it, get to it)
“…you seem really pissed off, actually. Is something wrong? Are you…not gonna take me there, tonight, or something?”
Yeah: ‘Cause that’s the deal-breaker, right there. Isn’t it?
“Of course I’ll still take you,” Nim snarls, eventually. “Jesus fucking Christ! Couldn’t get there on your own, that’s for sure. Besides which, I already goddamn said I would, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you did.” A beat, then: “Why?”
(Why indeed?)
“Because I didn’t know you, back then,” Nim says. And gets up to pay their tab, back stiff, turned flat one-eighty to Veruca. Like she’s shutting a door in her face.
—
From Scarwid and Ffolkes’ Overview of Millennial Fantasists (Cold-water Flat Press, 2000)—
FFOLKES: I’ll begin with a few of your late uncle’s more noteworthy reviews, if I may…
TOM DARBERSMERE: Oh yes, please.
FFOLKES: “The bloody meat of Tim Darbersmere’s stories is always the exact opposite of the soothing, reasonable tone in which he communicates it.” “Never has such beautiful and clever prose been suborned to the service o
f such decadent and puerile ideas.” “Solipsistic to the point of sociopathy. Darbersmere is the sole protagonist of every story he’s ever written…the hero, the villain, and (most certainly) the love interest.” As you begin your own writing career, does the potential after-effect of these remarks disturb you?
DARBERSMERE: Not at all. I aspire, one day, to a similar critical impact.
FFOLKES: And “Ellis Iseland,” what about her? Why has she become central to your fiction, too—carried over from your late uncle’s work, for continuity’s sake? or does she represent some more personal archetype, perhaps?
DARBERSMERE: Ellis who? oh, you mean the chainsmoking war profiteer femme fatale from that last story Uncle Tim’s supposed to have written, the one no one’s ever reliably found a copy of?
FFOLKES: “The Emperor’s old Bones,” yes.
DARBERSMERE: Wherein we find out the secret key to eternal life and renewed youth is making a meal of filleted ghetto child? Well, that’s a bit like quizzing me on a viral Internet meme, one of those things that seep into the creative community’s groundwater without anyone noticing how, and wondering why you don’t get more of a distinct response.
FFOLKES: But she turns up here too, doesn’t she, in Tim’s own “Echidna Comes Rising”—he calls her Lisha Illen, granted, but each version is described using much the same language. or here, from your novella “Copshawholme Fair”: Elfis Isham. Essa HigHman in A Dull Wind Blows from the North, Ester Smallwaterhame in Safe in Their Alabaster Hives…
DARBERSMERE: Does she? I suppose she must. How extraordinary! You know, I never read my own stuff once I’m finished with it, no more than I re-read his. I really must start.
FFOLKES: Everyone’s got a type, I suppose.
DARBERSMERE: Oh, certainly. Every woman I write is my wife, to one degree or another.
—
The package is waiting for them when they get back to Nim’s. As Veruca trudges past, still sunk in the same kicked-puppy misery haze that made their silent walk back so excruciating, Nim unlocks her mailbox and frowns at the result: a flat rectangle wrapped in subtly-striped brown paper with a registered-mail barcode in one corner, poking up out of the rest of Friday’s bills. The return is a name she doesn’t recognize, in Australia; scrawled across the front in letters two inches tall, meanwhile, is—
ATTN VERUCA LUZ C/O NIMUE EWALT
“Veruca!” Nim’s a little startled by, but not really sorry for, her own shout’s volume; Veruca skitters back down, eyes wide, as she holds up the parcel. “What the hell? You gave my mailing address out to some guy, without even asking me? You—”
But Veruca throws herself headlong to rip it from Nim’s hand, tearing at the paper, all the while emitting such a fast high-pitched squeak it takes Nim a second to decipher it: “Ooh, owemjee owemjee owemjee owemjee owem jeeee!”
Owemjee, equalling OMG as in Oh My God, in ‘Net-compacted typespeak for terminally lazy hunt-and-peckers. As in—
Let’s get this straight…you can’t be bothered to fill in four extra letters, like you were actually saying something out loud? Like a genuine fucking adult?
“What is it?” Nim makes herself ask, at last. And Veruca turns it towards her with a The Prestige-y flick of the wrist, showman-like, conspiratorial: Ricepaper cardstock cover, deep Chinese red, embossed carp design. Pretty classy, actually, for some cheap little one-story printing…
“Read the title,” she says. So Nim does.
(Oh.)
For a moment, she’s back on that blackwater beach, under that starless sky. It sort of hurts to breathe. The letters swim in front of her, drunken and dripping, pixilated in some almost tidal way—twenty characters if you count the apostrophe, letters slightly raised, DomCasual BT script at 22-point font. The Late’s name underneath, silver-stamped; his real signature or a very good imitation, probably traced from a treasured memento, by somebody like Veruca.
Because: There it is, the thing itself, its lacquered cover slick like skin under her increasingly sweaty fingers. And she can’t take her eyes off it.
While Veruca watches, her own green gaze reflective, serene. Almost sad.
“You see why I had to come, now?” she asks, gently. To which Nim can only nod, once. And then—
—
Flash-cut to later, as Nim logs on to CreepTracker.org while Veruca cat-naps, getting herself good and charged for the full-frontal assault on Darbersmere Central. CreepTracker’s Nim’s favorite chat-hangout of choice, not to mention run by another “friend” she’s yet to meet in the non-virtual flesh (and man, is she starting to think that may never seem like a good idea again, no matter how calm and reasonable Ross Puget may seem when he’s just text on a screen, plus a blurred icon that’s all crested prematurely-grey hair and wide, crooked smile…)
Word on the ‘Net, and it’s not like he denies this, is Ross used to co-run a three-way hazmat cleaning service—Glouwer-Cirrocco-Puget, currently defunct due to one of the founding members being kind of dead, the other kind of nuts—that was either a total scam or less about asbestos removal than scouring sites of “psychic fragments.”
Nim’s fingers fly over the keyboard, 60-words-a-minute speedy, more sure than she’s felt since she first touched “The Emperor’s…” fabled frontispiece. Asking—
GirlInTree:
GirlInTree:
KirlianPhotog:
Her server sings its “you have mail!” song, and she keys the link Ross just sent her: more like link salad, actually—different sites, different names, different angles. But the key-words stay the same: BODY FOUND…C.O.D. NOT APPARENT…NO CHARGES…WITNESS TESTIMONY LATER DISCOUNTED…INTOXICATED…UNDER INFLUENCE OF DRUGS…EXTREME COLD…BRIGHT WHITE LIGHT…
KirlianPhotog:
GirlInTree:
Seven people over three years in two separate clubs—one in New York, one in San Francisco. Owner Alicia Darbersmere had no comment…
KirlianPhotog:
GirlInTree:
A pause: Know what, exactly? Then—
KirlianPhotog:
GirlInTree:
KirlianPhotog:
And then there’s another chime—another email. Man, Ross codes almost faster than Nim can read…
(but not quite)
GirlInTree:
KirlianPhotog:
KirlianPhotog:
GirlInTree:
“Saying” it ultra-cool, a throw-away snark-snap, old-school Buffy-style. But feeling the hairs on the back of her neck go up nonetheless, oblivious to cliché, as her stomach clenches and flips: The disgusting gastronomic concept from which Tim’s notorious “memoir” takes its title playing itself out behind her eye-sockets, utterly unwanted, bad enough when done to a damn fish. Let alone a child…
Except, he didn’t. No one did. It’s a frigging story , Nimue.
GirlInTree:
KirlianPhotog:
GirlInTree: <2 stay safe>
A long pause, this time. Long enough for Nim to remember the last time they “spoke,” when she spilled on Ross about Veruca’s RL nutsiness. only to get a similarly wry line in r
eturn:
And thinking: Yeah, granted. Which may well be why she and Ross keep it strictly between the lines—why they’ve never thought to hook up for real, even though they live in the same city. Like they’re afraid to meet each other in the flesh, for fear of being disappointed that their “soulmate” might come attached to tics they can’t stand: Veruca, all over again. Thinking…
Shit, am I that easy? That hard?
But all things must come to an end, even this. And so the pause breaks at last, with Ross’s final post—
KirlianPhotog:
—
Hours later, meanwhile…
…they’re already through the door, inside the Speed of Pain, where the bass is loud enough to blow your hair back, bottom-heavy enough to sound like an abyssal snake coiling and uncoiling in some parallel dimension. Up on stage, two women gyrate in a black-lit go-go cage, each using a hand-held buzzsaw to strike sparks off the crotch of the other’s metal bikini. Posters are plastered everywhere, blurring together in the changing light; there’s a livid yellow flyer on the floor at Nim’s feet, one of many, piled in clumps so high they brush the ankles. It reads:
TONIGHT, GRAND OPENING, AFTER MIDNIGHT. NO COVER. DEEJAY CEMETERY OX 'TIL DAWN. FEATURED BAND—FUDGETONGUE, DUST-GOWNED, PLUS RANCIDULCET (THE SOFT SOUND OF ROT).
Nim looks around, throat already raw with stray pot smoke and heat, vaguely recalling what it used to be like, back when this was still something else. But now it looks somehow darker and bigger, offputtingly so—a huge overhanging ceiling strung with lightbulb stars, a dance-floor inset intermittently with stained glass and lit from beneath, to weirdly patterned effect. Everything swims, hypnagogic, dream-sick.
And it’s at this point, naturally enough—when she’s already off-centre, and the noise conspires to render her all but unintelligible—that Nim sees Veruca’s face assume an awful look of slack hunger as somebody she can only assume is Tom Darbersmere appears in the middle distance, near one end of the room-long bar: that man-shaped thing with the laughing white null for a face, arm wound around the shoulders of a woman (Alicia?) whose long brown hair hangs heavy, interrupted only by a rising dragon’s tongue of smoke.
