Wonder City Stories II #73
Nov. 18th, 2011 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wonder_cityFull of Evil Clowns
I'd finally conquered my headache after drugging myself unconscious for about twenty hours, and I'd rescheduled all my clients for the next two weeks. I felt better -- sore all around the edges, but better -- and I'd been swimming a lot.
Ruth called and I managed to keep the call short. "Have you talked to Nereid and Wire?" I said after the initial greetings and stream of gratitude.
"Yes," Ruth said. "Well, I've talked to Wire. She said the whole thing was Nereid's idea, so I've been trying to get in touch with Pacifica. She hasn't returned my calls yet."
"She's shy," I said, but I frowned and made a mental note to talk to the Equestrian. "And probably exhausted."
"That's what Wire suggested," Ruth said. "Anyway, thank you, Rennie, for everything. I know what you did with those kids wasn't easy at all for you."
"They needed me," I said. "And I wanted to be part of bringing that bastard down. He killed a friend of my family."
"Damn, girl, you didn't tell me that," Ruth said.
"Sorry," I said. "I just... well, you were busy."
She sighed. "All right. Well, I'm glad you could be part of the resolution, at least."
"Me too," I said. "Hey, Ruth, you know I love talking to you but..."
"You're still fried, I know. Take care of yourself, boo," Ruth said. "You're still coming to the party, right?"
Until that moment, I'd completely forgotten about Ruth's upcoming 50th birthday party. "Oh, hell, yes," I said. "I wouldn't miss it."
"I'll tell Sophie," she said. "Love you."
"Love you too," I said, and we hung up.
I was grateful that I'd managed things so well, because I had a chance for a swim before the last episode of Wonderful House.
The speculation on what this final episode would be like had run wild on the Internet. A memorial to Brandon? The other housemates talking in detail about that night, since very little of the real story had come out? Lizzie reconciling with her father? (I vehemently hoped not.) Simon and any of the other housemates confessing their undying love for each other? (The biggest part of the fandom I frequented was pro-Simon/Lizzie, but a not-insubstantial proportion was pro-Simon/Jeshri. There were lesser contingents for all the other combinations, including triads and even all four together, and even smaller groups that 'shipped non-Simon pairings.) (I don't go to the parts of fandom that like Brandon.)
I think that no one, not even me, expected what we got: an hour of retrospective, talking heads analyzing the interactions and relationships, and a lot of voiceover on the scenes of the housemates packing their rooms. Not a single line of current dialog from the housemates. The only time any anger at all was allowed to show was when all of them were sitting in the producer's office, glowering at the PARABI executive who was, reportedly, letting them know that Brandon's death violated the agreement and there would be no payout.
I could almost hear the "OH HELL NO" in all their minds as I watched that scene, even though the voiceover was attempting to spin their glares as anger about Brandon. I wondered what the fan response would be, so when the episode ended, off I went to the forums.
Many people were baffled. "Wait, why isn't anyone being allowed to talk?" More were angry: "The deal was no damage to the house! How does getting killed in a freak accident off the property count as violating the deal?" Others were paranoid: "Brandon was killed by one of his housemates, probably Lizzie! The lawyers have a gag order on everyone!"
The forums exploded for about half an hour, and then the link appeared.
A few of us were half-waiting for it, and pounced on it.
SuperTube's dynamic hit counter started running up while I was waiting for the video clip to load. And then the video started to run.
The usual Wonderful House logo appeared, then "It's" was crossed out and replaced by "It Was Never", and the theme music slowed and morphed into something more sinister.
Simon was sitting in a leather chair by a roaring fireplace, dressed in an impeccably tailored black suit with a red silk pocket square and matching tie. He looked squarely into the camera and said, in a voice more mellow and trained than he'd previously demonstrated (why, yes, he had attended acting classes in college after all, thanks, Parapedia), "After learning what the final episode of 'It's a Wonderful House' was to show, the cast and crew met in secret to discuss what to do. All of us felt that the episode was a copout, cheating the fans who stuck with us all this time. Today, we would like to present you, our fans, with our best gift, the only gift we can give you: the truth."
The usual opening, sans music, played, and Simon's voiceover said, "We thought we were participating in a perfectly normal, every day reality show. What we didn't know was that the deck had been stacked -- both knowingly and unknowingly -- against us by the powers that be for the show."
"Knowingly," he went on, and the view zoomed in on one of the all-too-common images of Brandon, leerly vaguely and drunkenly at Lizzie and Jeshri in the living room, "because there is now documented evidence--" the view switched to a file folder in Brandon's disaster of a room, opened to a contract clearly branded with the IaWH logo "--that the producers paid Brandon a considerable sum to appear on the show to act as a prod to induce conflict." The key clause of the contract was circled in red, and a clickable link to the document appeared. I let the video continue to play.
We were then treated to a montage of images of Brandon getting shoved aside by one or another housemate, of Tom only just stopping himself from throwing a punch at Brandon's grinning face, of Jeshri electrocuting Brandon (leaving him rolling on the floor, his shorts showing a wet patch in front -- I note that this had never appeared on the show, of course), of Simon going semi-lupine in the face and snapping at Brandon with his flashing teeth, and finally of Lizzie throwing the boiling water on him, hitting him up the backside of the head with a sizzling frying pan, nailing him in the balls with his own baseball bat, and throwing the dishes at him so that he fell backwards down the stairs.
"Unknowingly," Simon said, "because they failed to carry out background checks on any of the crew, though they checked the cast out very thoroughly, even down to checking our credit ratings."
Watson appeared onscreen, with an identifying caption ("Watson Holmes, Consulting Detective"). She was dressed up only slightly, having added a tweed blazer to her usual buttondown shirt. "It took me all of fifteen minutes to run superficial background checks on the entire camera, sound, and light crew, as it would for any professional. I found that there is a member of the sound crew who likes to drive very fast, a member of the light crew who had recently divorced with allegations of abuse on both sides, a member of the production staff with a history of stalking, and a member of the camera crew with a history of domestic violence, sexual assault, and even a rape arrest that did not end in a conviction, due to technicalities rather than a failure to prove guilt."
"We got our first indication that something might be amiss," Simon said, returning to the screen, "when a member of the cast received a tip from a para fan that she had picked up a detail during a live broadcast that suggested we had a murderer in our midst. That cast member shared this information with the rest of the cast, other than Brandon, because we had some indication that Brandon might be violent himself."
We then saw the clip of Brandon bragging about raping the drunk woman from the frat party, and the clip of Brandon talking to his cameraman about Simon and making vague threats. Then there was a scene in the dark of him coming in drunk late one night and wandering into random bedrooms until there was a wild scuffle that ended with Simon walking him up to the third floor, twisting Brandon's arm up behind his back and holding onto a handful of his hair.
"Then someone tried to blackmail Jeshri," Simon said, "by threatening to release personal photos of her to the Internet at large. The condition for not releasing them was meeting the blackmailer at a nearby park in Staybird in the middle of the night."
The camerawork was uninspired, but showed the housemates walking through the park. "Of course, we weren't about to let her go alone," he said in voiceover. They came around a curve and there was Brandon, clearly visible in the streetlight.
They played a bit of film that showed Brandon confessing to being involved in the blackmail, and then events dissolved into the chaos of the fight. The picture froze on Brandon's confused face. "Yes, Brandon was party to the blackmail, and was part of setting up the meeting, but we believe he didn't know about the murderous aspect of his partner in crime. Our best evidence is the casual manner in which the true criminal cast him aside." The video played forward, and even played through the killer hitting his scrambler device, so the bug cams were certainly hardened. We got a slo-mo image of the killer slamming Brandon in the chest, played from several angles.
"This blow, unbeknownst to us, ruptured Brandon's aorta," Simon said, and the picture returned to his cozy parlor. "Several of us went after the killer, while others called the ambulance. Tom rode to the hospital with Brandon, who was declared dead shortly after reaching the emergency room."
The view switched to Tom, who appeared to be sitting in a cafe. "He never woke up," Tom said in an uncharacteristically rough voice. "He said, 'I thought he was my bro,' and passed out and never fucking woke up again. I mean, what kind of fucking epitaph is that? He thought everyone was his bro, even people he insulted. He was like some kind of malevolent golden retriever. But goddammit, he might've gotten better some day."
Then Simon was sitting at that table, wearing casual clothing and looking angry. "I'm told I shouldn't feel bad about not staying to check on him," he said in a subdued voice. "I'm told he was a dead man, sitting there, and there was nothing I could have done. I'm told it was better that I went after the killer to try to keep him from hurting anyone else. But, you know, it's hard to believe that."
Jeshri was looking up at the ceiling and saying, "It pisses me off that every time I think about him, sitting there on the ground trying to breathe, I start tearing up. I don't want to cry for him. I thought he was an asshole and worse. But I can't get it out of my head: that look on his face when he couldn't understand why he couldn't stand up, why he couldn't breathe, why the one person who he thought was his friend had just hurt him so badly, and..." She wiped her face savagely with her sleeve. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."
Lizzie was sitting there now, being filmed from the same angle, and she was slowly tearing a cardboard cup sleeve into thin strips as she spoke. "When I started giving him mouth-to-mouth there in the park," she said, not looking at the camera, "all I could think was that when he woke up, he was never going to let me live that down. There would be all the stupid comments about missing out on kissing me and everything, and I would kick myself every time he said anything. I hated every second of taking that stupid moral high ground of trying to save his life. And then the shit died. And I felt so goddamn guilty about thinking bad stuff about him I could barely breathe. I still feel guilty. I feel guilty for being relieved that I never have to face him again." She crumpled the mass of cardboard in her hands and gritted her teeth, saying, "When someone you love dies, you cry and scream about it. What the hell do you do when someone you hate dies?"
Back in the parlor, Simon stood up gracefully and posed with an elbow on the mantelpiece. "Was this tragedy avoidable? The cast and crew of 'It's a Wonderful House' thinks so. Was this tragedy the fault of the producers? Certainly in part, since the killer was one of their camera crew -- one that a simple background check would have revealed." A clickable link to a file appeared on the screen. "Does a tragedy in which the producers were partly complicit, even by omission, void the contract of the cast? Our lawyer doesn't think so."
A black woman a bit older than me appeared on the screen; her caption said she was Marilyn Henderson, Wonder City attorney. "I have reviewed the contracts of all surviving cast members and I find nothing in it that would suggest that the manner or fact of Mr. deJong's death would void the agreement, as the producers of the show have claimed."
Back to Simon. "The cast and crew have discussed the matter, and, given our own limited resources and the comparatively limitless resources of PARABI and the producers of 'It's a Wonderful House', we feel a lawsuit would be worth less than the energy we would have to put into it. Our fans are the only good thing to come out of this experience, and so we decided that it would be most productive to give this information to you. If we manage to instill a little shame in the producers while we're at it, good." He shrugged and smiled, and Jeshri, Tom, and Lizzie came in from the wings (Tom in a suit, Jeshri in a little black dress, and Lizzie in a white blouse and black slacks). "Thanks for sticking with us. I, for one, will be glad to get back to the coffee shop."
"Me too," Lizzie said.
"I'm looking forward to my own apartment and my own truck," Tom said. "And about a month's worth of sleep."
"I love you guys, but I want my own roommates and my life back," Jeshri said, and they all nodded.
"And maybe some of us will go on to do stuff in the spotlight," Simon said. "Or maybe not."
"I'll still be on Twitter," Lizzie said.
"Me too," Jeshri said. "I've met some awesome people that way."
"I was thinking about writing a book about all this," Tom said thoughtfully.
"You better change my name," Lizzie said, punching him playfully in the arm.
"Mine too," Jeshri said. "And no wild imaginings about our 'alone time'."
The camera pulled back and back, the audio fading into an instrumental song that was nothing like the theme song, the former housemates moving into a group hug as they faded from view.
Credits rolled. At the end of the credits, on a black screen, the words, "In memory of Brandon deJong," appeared, and after a second, under that line, in fake typewriter script, "He was a jerk, but he was our jerk."
I sat back from the screen. "Hoooooo," I exhaled. "I hope they've got Ms. Henderson on retainer."
---
Note from the Author:
Sorry, y'all. I spent all day yesterday in a car, and just didn't have the brain juice left to post anything. I keep hoping things will get back to "normal" again after Thanksgiving, but I just know I'm kidding myself. :)
We've been falling down the list, so please remember to vote for WCS!
I'd finally conquered my headache after drugging myself unconscious for about twenty hours, and I'd rescheduled all my clients for the next two weeks. I felt better -- sore all around the edges, but better -- and I'd been swimming a lot.
Ruth called and I managed to keep the call short. "Have you talked to Nereid and Wire?" I said after the initial greetings and stream of gratitude.
"Yes," Ruth said. "Well, I've talked to Wire. She said the whole thing was Nereid's idea, so I've been trying to get in touch with Pacifica. She hasn't returned my calls yet."
"She's shy," I said, but I frowned and made a mental note to talk to the Equestrian. "And probably exhausted."
"That's what Wire suggested," Ruth said. "Anyway, thank you, Rennie, for everything. I know what you did with those kids wasn't easy at all for you."
"They needed me," I said. "And I wanted to be part of bringing that bastard down. He killed a friend of my family."
"Damn, girl, you didn't tell me that," Ruth said.
"Sorry," I said. "I just... well, you were busy."
She sighed. "All right. Well, I'm glad you could be part of the resolution, at least."
"Me too," I said. "Hey, Ruth, you know I love talking to you but..."
"You're still fried, I know. Take care of yourself, boo," Ruth said. "You're still coming to the party, right?"
Until that moment, I'd completely forgotten about Ruth's upcoming 50th birthday party. "Oh, hell, yes," I said. "I wouldn't miss it."
"I'll tell Sophie," she said. "Love you."
"Love you too," I said, and we hung up.
I was grateful that I'd managed things so well, because I had a chance for a swim before the last episode of Wonderful House.
The speculation on what this final episode would be like had run wild on the Internet. A memorial to Brandon? The other housemates talking in detail about that night, since very little of the real story had come out? Lizzie reconciling with her father? (I vehemently hoped not.) Simon and any of the other housemates confessing their undying love for each other? (The biggest part of the fandom I frequented was pro-Simon/Lizzie, but a not-insubstantial proportion was pro-Simon/Jeshri. There were lesser contingents for all the other combinations, including triads and even all four together, and even smaller groups that 'shipped non-Simon pairings.) (I don't go to the parts of fandom that like Brandon.)
I think that no one, not even me, expected what we got: an hour of retrospective, talking heads analyzing the interactions and relationships, and a lot of voiceover on the scenes of the housemates packing their rooms. Not a single line of current dialog from the housemates. The only time any anger at all was allowed to show was when all of them were sitting in the producer's office, glowering at the PARABI executive who was, reportedly, letting them know that Brandon's death violated the agreement and there would be no payout.
I could almost hear the "OH HELL NO" in all their minds as I watched that scene, even though the voiceover was attempting to spin their glares as anger about Brandon. I wondered what the fan response would be, so when the episode ended, off I went to the forums.
Many people were baffled. "Wait, why isn't anyone being allowed to talk?" More were angry: "The deal was no damage to the house! How does getting killed in a freak accident off the property count as violating the deal?" Others were paranoid: "Brandon was killed by one of his housemates, probably Lizzie! The lawyers have a gag order on everyone!"
The forums exploded for about half an hour, and then the link appeared.
A few of us were half-waiting for it, and pounced on it.
SuperTube's dynamic hit counter started running up while I was waiting for the video clip to load. And then the video started to run.
The usual Wonderful House logo appeared, then "It's" was crossed out and replaced by "It Was Never", and the theme music slowed and morphed into something more sinister.
Simon was sitting in a leather chair by a roaring fireplace, dressed in an impeccably tailored black suit with a red silk pocket square and matching tie. He looked squarely into the camera and said, in a voice more mellow and trained than he'd previously demonstrated (why, yes, he had attended acting classes in college after all, thanks, Parapedia), "After learning what the final episode of 'It's a Wonderful House' was to show, the cast and crew met in secret to discuss what to do. All of us felt that the episode was a copout, cheating the fans who stuck with us all this time. Today, we would like to present you, our fans, with our best gift, the only gift we can give you: the truth."
The usual opening, sans music, played, and Simon's voiceover said, "We thought we were participating in a perfectly normal, every day reality show. What we didn't know was that the deck had been stacked -- both knowingly and unknowingly -- against us by the powers that be for the show."
"Knowingly," he went on, and the view zoomed in on one of the all-too-common images of Brandon, leerly vaguely and drunkenly at Lizzie and Jeshri in the living room, "because there is now documented evidence--" the view switched to a file folder in Brandon's disaster of a room, opened to a contract clearly branded with the IaWH logo "--that the producers paid Brandon a considerable sum to appear on the show to act as a prod to induce conflict." The key clause of the contract was circled in red, and a clickable link to the document appeared. I let the video continue to play.
We were then treated to a montage of images of Brandon getting shoved aside by one or another housemate, of Tom only just stopping himself from throwing a punch at Brandon's grinning face, of Jeshri electrocuting Brandon (leaving him rolling on the floor, his shorts showing a wet patch in front -- I note that this had never appeared on the show, of course), of Simon going semi-lupine in the face and snapping at Brandon with his flashing teeth, and finally of Lizzie throwing the boiling water on him, hitting him up the backside of the head with a sizzling frying pan, nailing him in the balls with his own baseball bat, and throwing the dishes at him so that he fell backwards down the stairs.
"Unknowingly," Simon said, "because they failed to carry out background checks on any of the crew, though they checked the cast out very thoroughly, even down to checking our credit ratings."
Watson appeared onscreen, with an identifying caption ("Watson Holmes, Consulting Detective"). She was dressed up only slightly, having added a tweed blazer to her usual buttondown shirt. "It took me all of fifteen minutes to run superficial background checks on the entire camera, sound, and light crew, as it would for any professional. I found that there is a member of the sound crew who likes to drive very fast, a member of the light crew who had recently divorced with allegations of abuse on both sides, a member of the production staff with a history of stalking, and a member of the camera crew with a history of domestic violence, sexual assault, and even a rape arrest that did not end in a conviction, due to technicalities rather than a failure to prove guilt."
"We got our first indication that something might be amiss," Simon said, returning to the screen, "when a member of the cast received a tip from a para fan that she had picked up a detail during a live broadcast that suggested we had a murderer in our midst. That cast member shared this information with the rest of the cast, other than Brandon, because we had some indication that Brandon might be violent himself."
We then saw the clip of Brandon bragging about raping the drunk woman from the frat party, and the clip of Brandon talking to his cameraman about Simon and making vague threats. Then there was a scene in the dark of him coming in drunk late one night and wandering into random bedrooms until there was a wild scuffle that ended with Simon walking him up to the third floor, twisting Brandon's arm up behind his back and holding onto a handful of his hair.
"Then someone tried to blackmail Jeshri," Simon said, "by threatening to release personal photos of her to the Internet at large. The condition for not releasing them was meeting the blackmailer at a nearby park in Staybird in the middle of the night."
The camerawork was uninspired, but showed the housemates walking through the park. "Of course, we weren't about to let her go alone," he said in voiceover. They came around a curve and there was Brandon, clearly visible in the streetlight.
They played a bit of film that showed Brandon confessing to being involved in the blackmail, and then events dissolved into the chaos of the fight. The picture froze on Brandon's confused face. "Yes, Brandon was party to the blackmail, and was part of setting up the meeting, but we believe he didn't know about the murderous aspect of his partner in crime. Our best evidence is the casual manner in which the true criminal cast him aside." The video played forward, and even played through the killer hitting his scrambler device, so the bug cams were certainly hardened. We got a slo-mo image of the killer slamming Brandon in the chest, played from several angles.
"This blow, unbeknownst to us, ruptured Brandon's aorta," Simon said, and the picture returned to his cozy parlor. "Several of us went after the killer, while others called the ambulance. Tom rode to the hospital with Brandon, who was declared dead shortly after reaching the emergency room."
The view switched to Tom, who appeared to be sitting in a cafe. "He never woke up," Tom said in an uncharacteristically rough voice. "He said, 'I thought he was my bro,' and passed out and never fucking woke up again. I mean, what kind of fucking epitaph is that? He thought everyone was his bro, even people he insulted. He was like some kind of malevolent golden retriever. But goddammit, he might've gotten better some day."
Then Simon was sitting at that table, wearing casual clothing and looking angry. "I'm told I shouldn't feel bad about not staying to check on him," he said in a subdued voice. "I'm told he was a dead man, sitting there, and there was nothing I could have done. I'm told it was better that I went after the killer to try to keep him from hurting anyone else. But, you know, it's hard to believe that."
Jeshri was looking up at the ceiling and saying, "It pisses me off that every time I think about him, sitting there on the ground trying to breathe, I start tearing up. I don't want to cry for him. I thought he was an asshole and worse. But I can't get it out of my head: that look on his face when he couldn't understand why he couldn't stand up, why he couldn't breathe, why the one person who he thought was his friend had just hurt him so badly, and..." She wiped her face savagely with her sleeve. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."
Lizzie was sitting there now, being filmed from the same angle, and she was slowly tearing a cardboard cup sleeve into thin strips as she spoke. "When I started giving him mouth-to-mouth there in the park," she said, not looking at the camera, "all I could think was that when he woke up, he was never going to let me live that down. There would be all the stupid comments about missing out on kissing me and everything, and I would kick myself every time he said anything. I hated every second of taking that stupid moral high ground of trying to save his life. And then the shit died. And I felt so goddamn guilty about thinking bad stuff about him I could barely breathe. I still feel guilty. I feel guilty for being relieved that I never have to face him again." She crumpled the mass of cardboard in her hands and gritted her teeth, saying, "When someone you love dies, you cry and scream about it. What the hell do you do when someone you hate dies?"
Back in the parlor, Simon stood up gracefully and posed with an elbow on the mantelpiece. "Was this tragedy avoidable? The cast and crew of 'It's a Wonderful House' thinks so. Was this tragedy the fault of the producers? Certainly in part, since the killer was one of their camera crew -- one that a simple background check would have revealed." A clickable link to a file appeared on the screen. "Does a tragedy in which the producers were partly complicit, even by omission, void the contract of the cast? Our lawyer doesn't think so."
A black woman a bit older than me appeared on the screen; her caption said she was Marilyn Henderson, Wonder City attorney. "I have reviewed the contracts of all surviving cast members and I find nothing in it that would suggest that the manner or fact of Mr. deJong's death would void the agreement, as the producers of the show have claimed."
Back to Simon. "The cast and crew have discussed the matter, and, given our own limited resources and the comparatively limitless resources of PARABI and the producers of 'It's a Wonderful House', we feel a lawsuit would be worth less than the energy we would have to put into it. Our fans are the only good thing to come out of this experience, and so we decided that it would be most productive to give this information to you. If we manage to instill a little shame in the producers while we're at it, good." He shrugged and smiled, and Jeshri, Tom, and Lizzie came in from the wings (Tom in a suit, Jeshri in a little black dress, and Lizzie in a white blouse and black slacks). "Thanks for sticking with us. I, for one, will be glad to get back to the coffee shop."
"Me too," Lizzie said.
"I'm looking forward to my own apartment and my own truck," Tom said. "And about a month's worth of sleep."
"I love you guys, but I want my own roommates and my life back," Jeshri said, and they all nodded.
"And maybe some of us will go on to do stuff in the spotlight," Simon said. "Or maybe not."
"I'll still be on Twitter," Lizzie said.
"Me too," Jeshri said. "I've met some awesome people that way."
"I was thinking about writing a book about all this," Tom said thoughtfully.
"You better change my name," Lizzie said, punching him playfully in the arm.
"Mine too," Jeshri said. "And no wild imaginings about our 'alone time'."
The camera pulled back and back, the audio fading into an instrumental song that was nothing like the theme song, the former housemates moving into a group hug as they faded from view.
Credits rolled. At the end of the credits, on a black screen, the words, "In memory of Brandon deJong," appeared, and after a second, under that line, in fake typewriter script, "He was a jerk, but he was our jerk."
I sat back from the screen. "Hoooooo," I exhaled. "I hope they've got Ms. Henderson on retainer."
---
Note from the Author:
Sorry, y'all. I spent all day yesterday in a car, and just didn't have the brain juice left to post anything. I keep hoping things will get back to "normal" again after Thanksgiving, but I just know I'm kidding myself. :)
We've been falling down the list, so please remember to vote for WCS!
