Spectral Evidence

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 Arnold Vosloo 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 nor (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 mono-tone (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 settle 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-song-ing 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—”