One year earlier
This was at a point in Gilbert’s life when his mind had been cleansed of apathy, after a period of reconsidering goals he had set for himself and Blair. The job at the bookstore, where Blair worked as well, was great support, keeping them afloat while they set forth on their endeavors. A mistake Gilbert had made months earlier had spiritually jolted him away out of his marijuana haze, not that his time with the wonders of nature’s medicinal herb debilitated his potential, but the fact it played a major role in distracting him from writing had been a major problem. Plus it was part of the big mistake he had made, an accident that traumatized his emotions so much only the act of writing could help him cope. So whenever he had the free time, he sat at a cheap card table up against a wall in his room, sitting in a used, sort of rusted fold out chair that hurt his butt if he sat in it too long, typing a story that may or may not become a novel on an almost obsolete laptop computer.
“How’s the book coming along?” Blair asked from behind Gilbert. “You’ve spent most of the day typing, typing, typing.”
“To be honest,” Gilbert began to say, finishing a paragraph, “this could just end up being a short story.”
He turned around in the chair to see Blair standing in the doorway to the bedroom, holding a camcorder with both her hands, her eyes on its LCD screen.
“How long have you been recording me writing?” Gilbert asked.
“For about a minute before I said anything,” Blair replied.
“And where’d you get the camera?” he inquired, pointing a finger at it. “You know we’re low on money. I need the internet, and most important of all, healthy food.”
“Don’t you worry that imaginative head of yours,” Blair said, stepping into the room, zooming the camera lens closer on Gilbert’s face. “I bought it with my credit card. It was under two hundred bucks.”
Gilbert sighed, then said, “Okay, fine, but please hold off on anything else, at least for a few months.”
“You got it, hon. So what’s the story you’re working on? What’s it about?”
“Well, um,” Gilbert said, rubbing his chin, glancing at the laptop’s screen, “it’s about family heartbreak. Two siblings disown each other.”
“So it’s a non-fiction piece,” Blair assumed.
“No, it’s fiction.” He scanned through what he had just written.
“Seems like you’re hitting close to home though, Mr. Vergo.”
“As they say in writing fiction one-oh-one: write what you know,” Gilbert said, shaking his head, almost seeming disappointed. He then looked back up at Blair. He said, “You know, a writer’s process is private. Maybe you should film me while I drink beer, then ask me questions. That would be more interesting.”
“No,” Blair said. “It must be in the moment when you’re writing, to capture the things you say in an attempt to get inside your mind. What inspired the story? Who inspired it?”
On the card table, beside the laptop, Gilbert’s cellphone vibrated. He picked it up to see who was calling. He then looked directly into the camcorder’s lens.
He said, “Speak of the Devil’s bitch mother, it’s my sister. Keep filming. Hopefully it’s a reconciliation moment between us siblings.” He pressed the answer button, then greeted, “Hello, my dear sister, it’s great you’re calling me.”
Veronica screamed into Gilbert’s ear, “It’s not fucking great, you dumbshit, it’s complete opposite!” Her words trailed off into sobbing, weeping, and gasping breaths. She was obviously suffering.
Gilbert jumped up from the chair, and asked, “What’s wrong, Veronica? What happened?”
When Veronica found enough strength to say the words, she said, “They’re dead.”
“Who’s dead?” Gilbert asked.
For a moment Veronica couldn’t say, she just wept, unable to communicate the tragedy she already knew, finding it hard to accept.
“No worries, Veronica,” Gilbert said. “Take your time. Just breathe slowly. I’m not going anywhere. If you want me to, I’ll go right over to-.”
“Mom and Dad are dead,” Veronica said. “Last night.” She began gasping in horror, almost uncontrollably before continuing. “It was a head-on collision. A fucking meth-head having a psychosis.”
For a fleeting moment Gilbert’s body nearly ceased to function: his breathing stopped; his face was unable to form an expression; mouth agape, unable to make words; he could not swallow, nor thing.
“What happened, Gilbert?” Blair asked.
In that moment of paralysis, he did not hear her voice.
When the numbness was over, he managed to clear his throat. Half of his family was gone, the ones who held no grudge after he had made that big mistake which tore his sister from him in one big swoop.
“Oh, shit,” was all he could say at that point. The pain of what his sister had said made his face wince, closing his eyes, and run his fingers through his hair. There were no tears coming out of his eyes, not yet.
Eyes still closed, he said, “Okay. I’ll head over to your house right away.”
Veronica had seemed to get ahold of herself, her weeping ceased. She said, “No.”
“Alright,” Gilbert said, clearing his throat again. “Wherever you’re at I’ll be there soon. It’s good we be toge-.”
“I meant no as in I don’t want to see you,” Veronica cut in. “Like at all. Ever. This is merely a curtesy call.”
“Wha…What are you talking about?” Gilbert said, confused.
Veronica spoke from then on with a slight hint of relief, as if what she was telling her brother was helping her cope with the tragic loss of their parents.
Her sobs suddenly gone, she said, “What I’m saying to you is that when this phone conversation is done, you and I are done. I don’t want to hear your voice again, and I don’t want you in my presence again. You are not to attend the funeral. And you will get nothing from the estate. If there’s a will, bequeathing you anything, I’m going to challenge it in court, and you won’t get a fucking thing. Don’t even dare to think you can attempt to fight for any inheritance, because of what you did to Joshua, you will fucking lose, bitch.”
Based on what he just listened to, Gilbert’s sibling love was drained from his heart, and his sorrow as well, turning into straight up rage, but he still managed to quell any exertion of it, deciding instead to convince Veronica to come to her senses.
“Wait, wait, wait,” he said, nearly fumbling his words. “First off, let us keep what’s in the past in the past. Though what happened to Joshua was partially my fault -.” Gilbert stopped himself, making a correction in an attempt to prevent Veronica from possibly exploding. “Okay, fine, it was all my fault, but it was not a fucking travesty. It was just a sprain.”
“You were stoned driving him to the emergency room,” Veronica snapped in his ear. “What if you fell asleep at the wheel?”
“I didn’t,” Gilbert informed, desperately wanting to change the conversation to the matter at hand. “Look, our parents are dead. They were taken from us by some asshole tweaker, and I know in your mind you see it comparable to my mistake that led to Joshua’s accident, but I must tell you that your perception is miscued based on your emotional state. Now I’m here for you. We must be together to get through this. We must be there for each other, as a family.”
“You must want the goddamn money,” Veronica assumed, scoffing.
“No, Veronica, you can have it all. I don’t want any of it. I simply want -.”
Veronica interrupted, saying, “No, no, no, enough with that bullshit. You plan on swooning me with brotherly love, causing me to let you keep your half of the inheritance. Well, it ain’t gonna happen, shithead.”
That was it, Gilbert could not take his sister’s verbal abuse any longer. The ticking time bomb inside him was exploded, and the words erupted out of him like a volcano that had been dormant for five hundred thousand years. While he yelled into the phone, he paced throughout the entire apartment. Unbeknownst to him, Blair followed him, the camcorder still recording.
“You cold, heartless, soulless, devil’s bitch, money-fucking WHORE!” Gilbert basically screaming at the top of his vocal abilities. “You can take the house, the car, and everything else Mom and Dad possessed, and shove it up your fat, bubbly ass. How fucking dare you do this to me in this time of tragedy. I’ve never done anything bad to you, other than the little, insignificant incident with your child, my nephew. I feel bad about it. But you know what’s worse, you fuck, you’re raising him, and he’ll most likely end up being a fucking prick just like you. Goodbye, and FUCKA’ YOU!”
Gilbert hung up. If he did not need to be cautious with his expenses, he would have thrown his cellphone at the wall. He stood still, taking a deep breath, then exhaled, growling as the air left his lungs. Blair saw his red face matted with sweat.
“Your parents really dead?” she asked.
She realized the camera still recording, stopped it, then closed the LSD screen.
Hearing the clicking sound of the screen closing in place on the camcorder in the moment of silence, Gilbert finally noticed his girlfriend standing there.
He asked, “Were you recording the entire time?”
“I’m sorry,” Blair said, her head bowing, staring at the camera in her hands, “You said to keep -.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Gilbert interrupted, swatting his hand in her direction. “It’s no big deal.”
Blair went up to him, eyes immediately welling with tears, about to hug her boyfriend when all of a sudden he put an arm up to prevent her from doing so.
“No,” Gilbert said, “not now. That conniving cunt could be lying to me. She’s the type that’d go to any length to completely extricate me from the family. I’ll call my mom.”
He called his mother’s cellphone. Straight to voice mail. He then called his father. Like with his mother, straight to voice mail. As a final resort, he called their home. Someone answered, an adult male voice.
“Hello,” the male voice greeted.
“Dad,” Gilbert said, “is that you?” A look of hope, and a thousand answered prayers were upon his face.
“No, Gilbert,” the male voice answered. “This is Larry.”
Gilbert’s eyes closed as he asked, “Is it true what Veronica said about my parents?”
“Yes,” Larry said with a sigh. “I’m sorry. I can not speak with you any further.”
Blair saw Gilbert bare his teeth like a guard dog about to attack an intruder.
“I’d say I’d cut your fucking balls off, but it sounds like my sister already did,” Gilbert said before hanging up.
“He spent the rest of that day drinking a whole bottle of whiskey by himself,” Blair said to Jerry after the footage of Gilbert yelling at his sister on the phone was over.
They were in their bedroom at Frida’s house. Blair sat crosslegged on the bed, staring down at her laptop, the still image of Gilbert when he exhaled the long breath after hanging up the cellphone remained on the LCD screen. Jerry was laying on his stomach next to her, his chin propped on her right thigh.
“He sat in his room just mindlessly watching youtube videos,” she continued, “as he drank straight from the bottle. It wasn’t even eight o’clock at night when he passed out, and fell out of the chair.”
“Did he go to the funeral?” Jerry asked, looking at the image of Gilbert, thinking of the image capturing the moment of a man right after being mentally pummeled by one’s own family, and there was nothing but despair ahead of him.
“No,” Blair said, her eyes lowering from the laptop’s screen. “He did go to the cemetery six months later to visit their gravestones.”
“Did you go too?” Jerry pushed himself off his stomach, sitting up on his knees. He began stroking Blair’s back, between the shoulder blades, warming the surface of the dark gray hoodie sweatshirt she was wearing. She seemed not to take notice of his touch.
“He wanted to be alone,” she replied. “I went on another day by myself. They were good people. If I had won the Powerball, I would’ve gave them two million dollars. Anyways, after this phone call with his sister, Gilbert basically isolated himself from almost everything and everyone. The person I had fallen in love with was gone. Sometimes for days he wasn’t even at the apartment.”
“Wow,” Jerry muttered.
“Well, on those days he’d at least show up to work at the bookstore, and I’d go up to him and ask him, ‘Where have you been the last three days? Why haven’t you answered your phone?’ He said he was over his friend Stephen’s condo playing video games, drinking beer, and eating pizza. I said, ‘How about you invite Stephen over to our place?’ Because I had never met this guy Stephen before. Gilbert told me Stephen wasn’t able to, because he had this disorder that kept him from leaving his place. I don’t know what it’s called.”
“Agoraphobia,” Jerry told her.
“Yeah, okay,” Blair said. “So I suggested I hangout with them at Stephen’s condo, because I just wanted to be around my boyfriend for fuck sake. Gilbert said to me Stephen couldn’t handle people in his home he didn’t really know. I said, ‘Fuck, man, how is he going to get to know me if he won’t hangout with me?’”
Blair’s hand went to her forehead, almost slapping herself due to the feeling of frustration those memories of that time period brought back to her.
“It was the beginning of the end of our relationship,” Blair said, removing her hand from her forehead, then pointing at the laptop’s screen. “Because of what Veronica, his own sister, did to him. It basically sent him on an emotional downward spiral, even effecting me. He became so goddamn detached from me, I just had to get out of there. I couldn’t bare to be alone while he was still in my life. How could that bitch do that to me, to us?”
Consoling his girlfriend, Jerry said, “Sudden, horrific tragedy effects each us differently. I don’t think anyone would blame either Veronica, or Gilbert for what happened during that phone call between them.”
“There are better ways to mourn,” Blair said, shaking her head. “I’m going to delete this footage.” Her hand went to the laptop’s mousepad, moving the cursor to select deleting the file she had kept for nearly a year. A window appeared in the middle of the screen, asking if she was sure she wanted the deletion complete.
“Hold on,” Jerry said, removing his hand from Blair’s back. “Talk to Ray about it first. He might want to include it in the documentary.”
Blair abruptly craned her neck, staring at Jerry with her brow furrowed. She snapped out, “Why?”
“Just hear me out,” Jerry began to say, getting off the bed, moving around it to face her. “This footage will inspire sympathy among the audience, gain him more support, no matter the outcome of the trial.”
“No, Jerry. What it will inspire in the media is assumptions, fantastical accusations, appalling misjudging of facts that will lead the ‘audience’ into thinking, ‘Yeah, maybe what he’s accused of is true. He knew what Ultra-tripleX was going to do, and let it happen. Hell, Link2Jay, a.k.a. Gilbert Vergo, wanted it to happen, because some tweaker killed his parents, his own sister disowned him after said tragedy, causing within him a hatred that led to the desire for complete strangers to die. He wanted to be the puppet master of the tragedy at Shaker Krista.’ Fuck that bullshit, Jerry. I’m not going to do such a thing to Gilbert. He’s been through enough Hell already.”
Clicking the mousepad, Blair deleted the footage, then cleared the laptop’s trash bin file.
“And you will not mention to Ray what you just watched,” Blair said, looking up at Jerry right in the eyes, pointing a stiff index finger at his face. “If you do, I’ll smash this laptop into pieces, losing up to - what - half of the documentary’s footage. Do you want to do that to Ray?”
“Damn, girl,” Jerry said, putting his hands up, gesturing his submission to Blair’s command, “you got it. My lips are sealed. Backstory footage sucks in a documentary anyways.”
“Damn, girl,” Jerry said, putting his hands up, gesturing his submission to Blair’s command, “you got it. My lips are sealed. Backstory footage sucks in a documentary anyways.”
