Spectral Evidence

“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…”