Chapter 101
Davian
The Woman on the Bridge
Hard Talk
Alibi Music
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and a very warm welcome to all of you here in the studio and watching at home! Once again, it’s time for the Happy Late Night Show!
And as you can see, we finally have the man of the hour with us tonight.
The author whose latest publication has taken the national bestseller charts by storm!
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Davian Rydell!
The mysterious writer who, for years, concealed himself behind the pseudonym Atrianima! ”
The host with the blonde corkscrew curls beamed at me with her radiant smile, while the studio erupted in cheers and applause.
I smiled, just as I had practiced doing over the past few months.
Until the day I had finished the last chapter of the second part of Batteries of Ink, I hadn’t believed I would ever be able to smile genuinely again. Then, one night, it had simply slipped from my lips. The very moment I had written the last line.
At first, I had felt bad about it, resenting myself for feeling even a little joy after everything that had happened. As if I were dragging Quill’s memory through the mud.
But then I had realized who I had been smiling for. That I had done it because the broken, hungry part of me had sensed that she was proud of me. That she would have wanted it that way.
“Your second book was published less than two weeks ago and is already breaking records on countless bestseller lists worldwide. Did you expect that? Especially as the author of a book containing erotic content?”
For a moment, my fingers, searching for something to hold onto, strayed toward the lapel microphone on my suit jacket. As if a microphone could hold me. After all that…
Pillow Talk / Beck Writes
Blake Neely
“I wrote this book without any expectations. Just like the first one. I was never concerned with numbers, money, or success…”
The fact that the sequel to Batteries of Ink was advertised on every street corner and in every storefront would have sent the old Davian into a panic.
I didn’t know when exactly Quill had buried that coward, but I thanked her for burying him far away and freeing Atrianima from his prison.
“What was it about, then? What was your motivation?”
“To live. Through every word.”
The host smiled before turning to the audience.
“We’re dealing with a passionate artist here.”
I snorted softly, smiling, and in the audience a few people cheered while others laughed mildly amused.
I wonder what Quill would say if she were here?
How I would love to see her in one of these live interviews. Hearing her talk about her books. About writing. She was so much better at it than me...
You’d rock these interviews, Feather.
“The whole world knows by now that you were a full-time law professor for a long time. Is that why you hid behind your pseudonym?”
I clasped my hands together to keep them steady.
“Imagine if your boss found out you write smutty literature.”
The audience laughed, along with the host, and I mimicked her smile.
“But no. That wasn’t the reason.”
It grew quiet around me again, and I leaned back into the couch.
“I had to separate my everyday self from my author self so I wouldn’t get lost in it, shutting the writer in me down whenever the creative madness crept too close.”
“It sounds as if you were afraid of the writer inside you.”
I gave a quiet chuckle.
“For a long time, I was, yes. He consumed me, wouldn’t let me stop, while I forgot everything else around me.”
Just like the last six months…
“Locking him away under the name Atrianima, where no one but me could find him, felt safe.”
And yet she had found him. As if Atrianima had been created for her. Hers. Forever.
“Is that why it took you years to announce when the second part would be released?”
Even though the questions from the hosts and reporters would never reach the intimate level at which I had communicated with Quill, they were questions I would never have answered if I hadn’t been holding Quill’s golden typewriter in my hand during all those interviews, in the desperate belief that she was watching me and that with every word I put out into the world through my writing, she was speaking through me.
How could one live more for a person who was no longer there than one had done when that person had still existed?
It was like chasing after memories and trying to keep them alive, knowing that they were only a fragment of the truth. Only a part of what had really happened. And therefore not reality.
I now understood why Quill had dreamed of a wonderland. Because that was the only place where every perception, every sensation, was more real than in that place people called reality.
Because there she could be who she was, without anyone being able to take that away from her.
Or maybe I was just losing my mind…
“To be honest…” I ran my fingers through my hair, tugging at the strands at the back of my head. “I had given up. There wouldn’t be a second part if…”
“If?”
The host looked at me curiously, and I smiled bashfully.
“If I hadn’t found my muse.”
The host looked around in surprise as an emotional murmur rippled through the studio, and I felt heat explode in my cheeks.
Overwhelmed by feeling so much in that moment, I let the heat wash over my face, followed by another smile.
“Are we talking about a lover here?”
So much more than that…
Recalling the smile of an ink angel, I allowed the butterflies in my stomach to miss her.
“She opened my eyes, showed me that no price in the world is worth letting go of my dreams just to function in a system that would never function for me.” The host nodded admiringly at the audience. “She was an author…”
“Was?”
“She is no longer with us.”
The butterflies in my stomach remembered that they were drowning. For 283 days now.
The audience let out sounds of sympathy, and the host looked at me with pity.
“My condolences, Mr. Rydell.”
I just nodded, pursing my lips.
“I don’t mean to pry, but weren’t you also recently involved in court cases where one of your students took her own life?”
With my emotions drifting away, I nodded, staring, trying to hold on to the pain, for it was the only thing that was still familiar to me.
“Her name was Quillon Veritas.”
My Feather.
My Blue.
“She didn’t take her own life. The system did.”
Silence.
“I wrote this book for her.”
A surprised murmur rippled through the audience.
I looked up.
“Because I love her.”
Sunsetz
Cigarettes After Sex
I stopped in front of the gravestone and smiled from the bottom of my heart. Or at least from the memories I had of my heart.
The paparazzi had followed me from the talk show building in New York all the way to the airport, and already, twenty-four hours later, headlines were spreading about the Maplecrest Scandal Professor.
Who would have thought that I would ever care in the slightest about what people thought of me?
“They’ll never understand us, Feather.”
I crouched down and laid the bouquet of ink tulips on the ground in front of her new stone.
Quillon Veritas
née Schildhauer
Now in Wonderland
A large butterfly fluttering away was engraved into the black granite in the same silver as the inscription, with a small butterfly flying after it, as if the little one were following the big one.
Tony would never have agreed to let Lara change the gravestone inscription if she hadn’t shown him the letter.
He still wasn’t speaking to me. And I had made my peace with that.
“Joseph got what he deserved. I hope you can close your eyes now.”
They had found him in his cell. Nineteen deep cuts covering his entire body. Razor blade cuts.
I had not wanted to know more than that.
The trials against Arnold Fitzek had begun this week, and for the past three months, investigators had been uncovering all sorts of murders he had apparently been involved in over the decades. Murders that Joseph had covered up for him and pinned on other, wrongfully convicted people.
If only she knew that she had succeeded.
Arnold remained silent in court, didn’t even defend himself, and no one could get him to explain why his hands were missing.
Monica was running Maplecrest since the beginning of the semester, and ever since Quill’s story had made the rounds across the States with a bittersweet note, countless women had applied to the law program.
Monica had been crying more ever since.
And Lara?
I hoped she was doing better where she was now. She had moved to Washington, to a small town called Grimm, where she would continue studying journalism, far away from all that horror.
In two days, I, too, would move to the West Coast and leave all this suffering behind.
Today was the last day I would see her gravestone. The gravestone of the woman who had lived six months longer. For me.
What a gift.
I no longer wanted to know what would have happened if I hadn’t stopped the woman on the bridge that evening. As a thank you, she had given me the most beautiful six months of my entire life. Half a year that I would hold deep in my soul and never let go of again.
Chasing Shadows
Alex Warren
CHRISTMAS
Artists might feel like they don't belong
into a place as dark as this world.
But that's the place where
they burn the brightest.
That’s what you told me.
And now I’m burning for you.
And I’m burning blue.
– Leaking Batteries Diary