Daniel Price - Slick

[pr_demon] I did read something about this.

[mrvl_girl] Damn. I thought I was impressing you.

[pr_demon] You are. You know a hell of a lot about TV for a woman who doesn’t watch any.

[mrvl_girl] I just know a lot about Neil’s job. Yours, however, remains a mystery to me.

[pr_demon] You might say I also work with hidden messages.

[mrvl_girl] You mean like VOTE FOR FRED or BUY THIS PRODUCT?

[pr_demon] Buy this product. Buy this person. Buy this story.

[mrvl_girl] So what are you peddling now? Product, person or story?

[pr_demon] Actually I seem to be making a product out of a person’s story.

[mrvl_girl] Wow. That’s vaguely ominous.

[pr_demon] Hey, I’m a candy striper compared to the VOTE FOR FRED people.

[mrvl_girl] See, this is why I keep my nose buried in comic books and fantasy novels. Every time I look up at reality, I get depressed. Or repulsed. Or just plain pissed. I don’t even like fiction that takes place on Earth. Earth sucks.

[pr_demon] How do you know?

[mrvl_girl] Because I’ve lived here all my life.

[pr_demon] It’s just that the people who complain about the state of the world typically base their opinion on what they see in the news. That’s a big mistake.

[mrvl_girl] I’m not one of those people, but I’ll bite. Why is it a mistake?

[pr_demon] Because the news is all emotion-based propaganda. It’s all about showing you the worst of humanity. Not the common worst, the SHOCKING worst. And then they spin the shocking worst to make it look like it’s common. School shootings! Rap assaults! It could happen to YOUR child! It could happen to YOU!

[mrvl_girl] You’re talking about the tabloids.

[pr_demon] I’m talking about all the news.

[mrvl_girl] They can’t ALL do that.

[pr_demon] Now who’s being naŨve?

[mrvl_girl] God, I am so far removed from this. For good reason, it seems.

[pr_demon] It’s all just part of the business.

[mrvl_girl] Yes, and apparently so are you.

[pr_demon] I never denied it. And I never said I was above it.

[mrvl_girl] So you like what you do.

[pr_demon] I love it.

[mrvl_girl] You love planting hidden inflammatory messages in the news.

[pr_demon] Yup. I think I’m good at it, too.

[mrvl_girl] And I think you’re trying to get an inflammatory reaction out of me. That’s what I think.

[pr_demon] Yeah, I probably am. And I should probably stop. I don’t want you pulling my assistant out of her job.

[mrvl_girl] No. God, no. That’d be like pulling her heart out of her chest.

[pr_demon] Good, because I’ve come to rely on her. The girl’s got talent.

[mrvl_girl] For planting subtext?

[pr_demon] For digging it up.

[mrvl_girl] Think she has potential to plant it?

[pr_demon] Like a mad farmer.

[mrvl_girl] See, that’s the part that makes me cringe.

[pr_demon] Don’t worry. You’re particularly safe from our evil mojo.

[mrvl_girl] Me? Why me?

[pr_demon] Because we mostly work with noise, and you’re immune to noise.

The cursor blinked twelve times before she responded.

[mrvl_girl] You’re very interesting.

[pr_demon] Ha ha ha.

[mrvl_girl] What?

[pr_demon] You did this once before. You took a really long time to give me just a little bit of text. I sit here expecting twelve paragraphs and then I get three or four measly words.

[mrvl_girl] I was censoring myself.

[pr_demon] Don’t worry. I can take an insult.

[mrvl_girl] Actually, it was a compliment.

[pr_demon] You censor your compliments?

[mrvl_girl] I censored this one. It was pretty harsh.

[pr_demon] I have no idea what to make of that.

[mrvl_girl] Look, it was a good decision. I don’t make them very often. Let’s just skip it and move on.

We moved on. When I finally finished my chat with her at 4:30 a.m. (if seven straight hours of dialogue could be considered a “chat”), her censored compliment lingered in the back of my tired mind. As much as I hated to be teased, something told me that a compliment from Jean, even a harsh one, would be a uniquely gratifying experience.

Before I fell asleep, I spent another half hour playing back our exchange. In my thoughts, she spoke with the sharp, quirky panache of an actress in a 1940s comedy. Maybe the lead from a Preston Sturges film. Veronica Lake in Sullivan’s Travels . Or better yet, Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve. Her character was also named Jean. She was a card sharp: a sexy, quick-witted flimflam girl who ran circles around poor, hapless Henry Fonda.

Jean, my Jean, seemed too much of a pleasant wreck to be a hustler. But she was still a dangerous woman to let inside of me, much more dangerous than Madison or Harmony. Even now I could hear her in that damn Stanwyck voice, teasing me about being a typical man, pegging me as a guy who’d rather surround himself with fawning, admiring young women than take on someone his own age and cranial capacity.

All right, Jean. Maybe I will take you on, just to spite you. Maybe I’ll let you in, despite my own better judgment. Over the moat, through the gate, and past the sentries. Welcome to my neurotic high esteem. I may be sorry, but at least I won’t be typical.

On Saturday morning, Maxina drew Harmony a nice poster-sized illustration of my shortcomings.

Their rap session began at 9 a.m., while I was still in deep, recuperative slumber. Once again Harmony bemoaned her increasing feelings of isolation, but this time she complained to the right person. Maxina immediately demanded, in that definitive but tender way of hers, that Harmony call her long-lost roommates and invite them up for a visit.

Naturally, Harmony was stunned. To her it was like learning the shortcut out of Oz. Wait, you mean all I had to do was tap my damn slippers three times? I can do that?

It wasn’t hard to imagine her real questions. “Why didn’t Scott tell me? Why did he make me think it was so dangerous to talk to them?”

No doubt Maxina, artful as she was, merely shrugged and kept her mouth shut, but she knew the answer as well as I did: it was dangerous. I didn’t trust Harmony to keep her friends out of the loop and I didn’t trust them in the loop, especially when the news rags were offering cash for dirt to anyone even remotely connected to the story. Hell, by Friday no fewer than six of Hunta’s former contemporaries had sold him out for a four-figure payoff. It’d be careless to assume that Harmony’s friends would be any different.

Yet apparently, they were. As of Saturday not a single one of them had grabbed the tabloid carrot, even the Enquirer ’s twenty-thousand dollar carrot. That was pretty damn impressive considering the amount of conflicting testimony they could have already offered.

Okay, so I had underestimated their integrity. My real mistake was not realizing how little it mattered. By Friday, Harmony was so bulletproof that even if one of her roommates ran to the scandal sheets with tales of false claims and shady dealings, it would have barely put a dent in her credibility. If anything, it would have given me the foreshadowing that Alonso was all too unwilling to provide.

By the time I woke up, at a quarter after eleven, the reunion was well under way. I could hear them all partying in the background, blasting rap music. Harmony had to shout to be heard.

“What?”

“I said I’m sorry for not suggesting it myself!”

“That’s okay!” she yelled back. “Even you can’t think of everything!”

“So you’re not mad?”

“I ain’t mad at all! I’m too glad to be mad!”