Mighty Unclean

by Cody Goodfellow

  To which I nodded my head, briefly, in what probably looked – from her angle – like acceptance. And replied:

  “Oh, but not too soon, I hope. Princess.”

  ««—»»

  Took half a second for the rift to pop open again, behind her, and the other half to close once she’d stepped back through. Then I was all by my lonesome in the dark, dark woods once more, a state of affairs which sure did seem to call for immediate relocation – so I started out walking, whistling softly; an old holler tune my Momma always used to sing me, back in the day, on empty nights like these…

  Don’t the moon look pretty, shining down through the trees…

  Said don’t the shining moon look pretty, Lord,

  shining down through the trees…

  Oh, I can see my baby, Lord Lord Lord…but he can’t see me…

  I went looking around for a highway, found one. Started walking. And after a while—

  —well, that’s when you picked me up. Didn’t ya?

  Turn in here, darlin’.

  The Speed of Pain

  By Gemma Files

  ive o’clock A.M., and all’s DEFINITELY not well.

  That’s the thought to which Nimue Ewalt wakes, more or less, as she pulls herself headlong from the shreds of her latest Valerian-influenced nightmare. She reaches for her nightstand sketch-pad before the connect-the-dots “narrative” behind that cold hand in her sternum can dissolve into complete uselessness, shivers plucking up and down her arms as she scrabbles for a pen in the half-open drawer, while Veruca Luz snores asthmatically on the futon couch across the room…

  …and shit, what was it, now? A hazy wash of images overlaid like bad Flash on an overburdened browser, shucking files Trash-bound right and left and spiralling headlong downwards towards the final Big Freeze…

  Out on a deserted beach at night, maybe Cherry, maybe not; the Island’s polluted shore spread out behind her in a blur of garbage, rocks cold against her naked back, black lake-water lapping at her toes. No stars above. And this sensation of being watched by something hidden, maybe from above, maybe below. Of laying herself open – physically, psychically – to wait for an unseen enemy, already settling down upon her like a cloud: Entering by the mouth, leaving by the sex. Splitting her from stem to stern entire, in a sudden spray of heat and blood and waste.

  Then being buried in the beach’s wet sand, spade-full by hideously slow spade-full – broken, paralyzed, yet somehow still alive, a turtle’s egg stewed fast in its own leathery shell. A chrysalis, waiting to hatch.

  But with that, Nim abruptly finds herself shaking all over, so hard she can’t hold the pen straight enough for legible notes anymore. So she lets it go instead, pulls the covers close around her, while Veruca sleeps on. Keeps her unspectacled eyes front, focus lost against the far wall’s blurry stucco veneer, and waits for morning.

  ««—»»

  There’s an early frost in Toronto this August; no big deal, a few black tomatoes here and there, but try telling that to somebody who’s used to running on California time-slash-weather. So Veruca wraps herself up like Im-Ho-Tep every time they set foot outdoors, complaining endlessly about how the cold could affect her septal piercing, how if it goes below a certain temperature it could set off one of her migraines. How since of course she left her medicine at home, or maybe lost it in transit someplace, that leaves her prospectively SOL when the hypothermic muscle tension comes a-callin’…

  So: “Just take the fucking thing out, then,” Nim snaps back at her, finally – not exactly wanting to be too much of a bitch on wheels, but not willing to seem too sympathetic, either; this is Veruca we’re talking about, after all. And with Veruca, there’s always one more thing.

  She feels bad about it almost immediately afterward, though, especially when Veruca looks down and sniffs, bolt swinging. Saying, quietly:

  “Dude, you don’t have to be like that. I mean…I’ll be fine, totally, I’m sure. For tonight, I mean. I’m just, y’know…”

  (Just what? But for the love of God, please please please don’t say)

  “…just…sayin’.”

  And here endeth the lesson, Nim finds herself thinking, for neither the first time or (probably) the last: File under Truism ‘cause it’s true, and never again let yourself think that because you like somebody online, you’ll like ‘em in person. Or, say—

  (at ALL)

  Because virtual friendships should stay just that: Virtual. Or risk spawning prospective justified manslaughter charges, on BOTH sides of the equation.

  Nim takes another sidelong glance at Veruca, bundled well beyond the tenth power, with the very roots of her bleached-blonde skater grrrl-cum-faux chola cornrows visible where her hoodie meets her hairline; eyes with a semi-epicanthic droop peek out from under boxy black-rimmed glasses, half-squinted against any light brighter than that of a screen set on PowerSave. Doesn’t help that Veruca seems to revel in the same chin-to-chest geekslump Nim’s spent hours trying to yoga away, either, or that her voice constantly ricochets back and forth between whine (when upset) and monotone (when anything else), like she’s never even taken the time to consider how she might sound to other humans.

  It all makes being near her familiar and dreadful in teeth-grittingly equal measure, cringe-worthy the same way flipping through your Mom’s hidden stash of high-school snapshots is – Veruca’s everything Nim used to be, back before Nim wised up, grew up. Back before she knew, or cared about knowing, any better.

  The funny thing being…in e-correspondence or chat-rooms, on ICQ or her blog, Veruca’s one seriously impressive cyber-chick: She can actually spell, for one thing, which helps sort the wheat from the chaff straight off; got a strong grasp on punctuation and sentence structure, can debate without degenerating into FlameWar territory, always backs up even her oddest points with quotes or links, or both. A delight to “hang” with, no matter the URL occupied, and somebody Nim’s always considered one of the closest non-RL friends on her friendslist.

  But in person, Christ Almighty, in person—

  – in person, Veruca is shy, awkward, adenoidal to the point of incoherence, scarily opinionated, possibly hypochondriac. Inside Nim’s apartment, she’s barely communicative; outside, she exhibits all the fine interpersonal skills of Kaspar Hauser.

  She’s also so obsessed with each and every facet of (say it with me now, in unison) The Late Timothy Darbersmere’s life and work as to literally talk of very little else, no matter the context or circumstances…a fact, Nim is forced to admit, that she A) certainly can’t say she hadn’t already known, given the two of them first hooked up when Google directed her to Veruca’s Darbersmere fanlisting (A Man of Wealth and Taste, for those who like their Stones references so old as to be practically crunchy) and B) once considered far more a plus than a minus, way back when. I.e., in those halcyon days before she’d actually met her, or been forced to squire her around in public, where they might occasionally collide with those few people whose good opinion Nim truly cares about keeping.

  Still. After tonight, after the Speed of Pain opens its doors and Veruca walks through them – eyes darting ‘round like she’s on crack, continually peeled for any brief glimpse of The Late Tim’s mysterious heir/nephew Tom, The Speed’s new co-owner – Nim’s probably (hopefully) never going to have to see, talk to or think about her again. She’ll have served her purpose, gross as that sounds. And if, a second past the Speed’s midnight, she tells Veruca to lose her number – along with her addy, her ICQ handle, and any other bloody thing Veruca can remember about her – well, to be frank, Veruca will have only herself to blame.

  But that prospective relief, either cutting contact with Veruca for good or finding an environment where she’s once more bearable, is still hours off. If pain really has a speed, then right now Nim would have to call it pure glacier: Heavy, cold, creeping. Going out only seemed like a good idea in comparison to remaining trapped in Nim’s tiny no-bedroom; she’s since been forced to settl
e for the Second Cup three blocks away instead of the Starbucks two doors down, because Veruca (surprise, surprise) considers the funky green mermaid logo Ground Zero for the Evil Empire of Globalization, and refuses on principle to contribute Dime One to it.

  So here Nim is, making do with the second-class blends Second Cup specializes in, while Veruca’s green tea cools untouched on the table in front of her – unable to compete for even a second, in terms of interest, with Veruca’s latest Darbersmere monologue.

  “You see the same threads running through every story,” Veruca rambles. “Like, if you look at the first couple of stories Tom came out with, it’s pretty obvious he’s picked up where Tim left off: Human relationships are based on deception, people adapt to crisis by cannibalizing their own minds for parts, run rampant ‘til sooner or later, God cuts ‘em down. His word choices, his phraseology, all lifted straight from Tim’s.” She leans forward. “Know what happens if you take the profanity out of Tom’s story ‘Starfucker’, though? I did that – transcribed the whole thing, dropped all the swears and translated all the automatic street cred shit back into, like, ‘proper English.’ And guess how it comes out?”

  “Two thousand words shorter?” Nim’s dry response fails to adequately cover the profoundly nonplussed, almost frightened, bemusement she feels.

  “Sounding exactly like Tim.”

  “And you know ‘exactly’ how he sounds because…?”

  “He spoke to me.” For a minute Nim thinks Veruca’s being metaphorical, but no. “On his last tour, for The Bodiless and Embodied. I might’ve been the last person to see him alive.”

  Oh, riiight.

  Because now Nim remembers this story…she’s only heard it half a million times before, after all. How Veruca sold her first motherboard to get down to St. Louis in 1999, so she could get her ‘79 first-printing copy of Jaguar Cactus Fruit (a Novel in Slices) signed in person, and tell the Late what “a babe” he was as he did it. To which stalkerish infringement of personal space he apparently smiled, and said – Veruca’s treasured imitation sliding quickly into Withnail & I territory here, every vowel a languorous string of same, sing-songing happily like she doesn’t even get how pedophile-creepy its actual content is—

  —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 an internet connection.”

  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 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 is 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’s 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 kicked 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, t
he 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 (Coldwater Flat Press, 2000)—