Odious Lusting After Finance - an ASOUE Perspective Flip
Sept 26, 2020 21:31:16 GMT -5
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Post by takatoguil on Sept 26, 2020 21:31:16 GMT -5
ODIOUS LUSTING AFTER FINANCE
Chapter 0 – When We are Gone, Will it Still Go On?
9 Tishrei 5781: A year of the rat
A two-eyebrowed woman with a surgical mask over her nose and mouth stood in the center of the ashen remains of a factory. She rotated slowly, the hem of her green dress swaying with her movements, surveying the whole of the damage and scribbling an obscure code in a purple notebook with a silver lock on it. Smoke was everywhere, but not from the remnants of this fire – too many still burned across the country. Most of the walls had fallen, leaving only a vague impression of the maze-like facility that had long ago been constructed to save humankind from its own self-reflexive inhumanity. The contents were black piles of ash and a few twisted stumps of metal – most of the assemblies within had been removed long ago when the factory had closed.
When she had written all she could, the woman untied a ribbon keeping the dark hair out of her eyes and returned to the blue car that was waiting for her. She got into the back seat, for at some point in recent months the driver had taped a clear plastic tarp to hang down and separate the front seat passengers from the rear.
“Thank you,” the woman said, “I do promise to leave a five star review – and a generous tip, of course.”
Her driver, a man who had wrapped a red bandana across his face, simply nodded and started the electric engine. He drove down the broad avenue, likely entirely unaware that in his own lifetime it had once been a quiet, country road. His passenger knew. She closed her eyes and tried to picture it: rolling, green hills unaware of the droughts and wildfires to come; a tiny, poorly paved road that snaked its way past the mansions of recluses; hedges and mazes of unusual shapes. A few of the great houses still stood, but most of the construction was new, the sprawl of civilization threatening to consume every empty acre between Siesta Valley and Mt. Diablo in much the way the wildfires threatened to devour the hinterlands.
“Back to where you started?” the driver asked as they approached the Ygnacio Valley on-ramp.
“Yes please,” the woman said, not looking from the window. How strange it was, the way the traffic was almost back to normal, as if the plague was gone, as if the air was not trying to choke every Californian to death.
The driver turned on the radio. “Any requests?” he asked, but the woman simply shook her head. After a few minutes of searching for something that wasn’t playing commercials or songs in Spanish, the driver gave up and let the car be filled with the tune of a love song neither occupant understood. “Was that your property?” he asked. “It didn’t much look like a house.”
The woman laughed. “No,” she said, “it didn’t, and it wasn’t. Not a house, not my property either. It belonged to…” She paused and reached into her small, rectangular purse, producing a worn and folded up piece of paper. Much of it was illegibly waterlogged, but as she unfurled the undamaged section, the driver caught a glimpse of it through his rear view mirror. It seemed to be an old map of the city, which the driver felt couldn’t have been much use in identifying the owner of a property some ways inland. His suspicions were confirmed when the woman looked up with a shrug. “I’m honestly not sure who it belonged to. It was a factory that processed horseradish. My brother ended up working there after his mentor died. I was looking into it for him; he’s been out of state filming nature videos.”
“Mmm,” the driver said noncommittally. “So what happened? Factory owner want the crew to know he was about to have a son?”
“No, it was just arson,” the woman answered. Her eyes scanned over the faded but still legible parts of the map, her lips mouthing what she read. “It doesn’t really matter who started it,” she said, more to herself than anyone. As she folded the paper back up and slipped it into her black bag, she added, “The far more troubling question is why. The factory closed around the turn of the century. It’s been completely abandoned for over a decade now.”
The driver suggested, “Insurance fraud?” but the woman shook her head.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I can’t rule it out because all of my information is out of date, but I suspect that an enemy of the owner wanted to send a message.”
“And what message would that be?” the man asked.
The woman’s eyebrows furrowed. She fixed her gaze firmly on the rear view mirror, her gray-green eyes cold. “One theory I have,” she said, her voice a little uneven, her hand on the seat belt release even though the vehicle was in motion, “is that it might be the answer to an unfathomable question Richard Wright asked in his best-known novel.”
“What?” The driver’s own eyes lit up with excitement. “I love Pink Floyd! I didn’t know they wrote books too!”
“No, a different Richard Wright,” the woman said. Her voice was smooth again and she folded her hands in her lap. “He wrote about the plight of African Americans. In his novel, Native Son, he asked-”
The driver rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry, but can we not talk about politics? It’s bad enough having to deal with all these protests. I don’t need to hear about the past’s problems too.”
“Mmm,” the woman said disapprovingly. She pulled a cell phone out of her purse and turned her attention to it, knowing that pointing out that a more universal understanding of the past would be a salve to modern problems would be futile. They took the rest of the ride in silence, the driver finding a station that played inoffensive popular music in English, which he clearly preferred. More familiar love songs, all with the same basic chords, serenaded them on their long trip down multiple highways that accrued a sizable fare. In simpler times, cash would have sufficed, but in the allegedly enlightened modern era people understood that money was a symbol not of value but of debt, and so paid in credit through electronics rather than physically redistributing their bondage. She kept her promise too, five stars for the patience he had shown even though she felt he otherwise deserved no more than four. Making sure she had left nothing in the car seat, the woman exited, but paused just as she was about to close the door.
The radio had switched back to commercials, and a manic voice was urging all listeners to throw caution to the wind and stuff themselves like sardines into some public site. “-shut down for decades for being TOO INTENSE, we’re finally back, folks! The Caligari Carnival is on the road again and we’ll THROW YOU TO THE LIONS if you can’t keep up! Come with us and we just might show you your future! THREE DAYS ONLY – September 25th, 26th, and 27th – but we’re GETTING FREAKY in Dublin all night long, just north up Doughtery Road from 580’s exit 45! We’ll be on the road again after that folks, and with every city in America begging for us, WHO KNOWS if we’ll ever come back?”
The driver looked back at the woman, scoffing at the ad. “They sure picked a hell of a time to try and get people to show up, huh?” he asked. “No one’s going to want to be out with all this smoke. Speaking of…” The driver gave her a pointed glance, and the woman felt her cheeks flush under her mask as she closed the car door at last.
Her destination, an unremarkable house in a pleasant suburb, seemed to flow into its tightly packed neighbors under the smoke. A little sign under the house number read, “Jones”, the name her brother had taken when he had wed. His wife (and how weird it was to think of her that way – the woman had thought of the pair as her second siblings for years, though as the pair were of no real relation it turned out they’d viewed themselves quite differently) had taken the name too, as neither had much cared to be known by their own name. The woman had a shiny brass key to let herself in with and did so in lieu of knocking, for though neither her real nor false name was on the deed, the home belonged to her as much as it did the others.
“Auntie’s here! Auntie’s here!” A pair of young children, seven and four, collided with her before she’d had a chance to kick off her shoes. They were similar in their tan complexion and curly, dark hair, but only the woman’s nephew had inherited the family unibrow. She knelt down to hug them both tightly, ripping off her mask as she descended to show her broad smile. They huddled together for a long moment, and then parted.
“Are your parents back yet?” the woman asked.
Her tiny niece nodded. “They’re making dinner!”
The woman smiled and followed her niblings as they rushed down the entry hall and through the living room, all decorated with simple furniture and newspaper photos of people dead or missing, to the kitchen.
“-tubing’s alright of course, but I miss film! I miss real theater! It’s not real acting if you can’t play off of anyone – it’s just reciting!” A man, perhaps forty, was stirring a large pot of red sauce on a stainless steel oven. He was tall and dark, still handsome despite (or because of?) the two large scars on his face that cut almost from his right eye to just below his lips.
Leaning against an equally stainless fridge was his wife, a woman only a hint older than him whose dyed blonde locks had to be straightened every day just in case. “I understand, Harold,” she said, though of course his name wasn’t Harold any more than hers was Maude. “But it’s just until the vaccine. Things’ll go back to normal then, for both of us. It’s not like it’s a picnic for me either. Half the people I try to interview think that the whole thing’s a fraud and refu-” She stopped, noticing her sister-in-law. All anger disappeared from her face, her broad smile threatening to wrap around to the back of her head. “Gwen!” she said, and ‘Harold’ stopped what he was doing so that everyone could ecstatically greet each other and exchange hugs. “Where have you been all day? We thought-”
“O. O. burned down,” the woman whose name was not Guinevere said, and all the smiles disappeared again.
“Liam, Emily, why don’t you go play your Nintendo up in your room?” Harold said. The children (who had no idea that everyone in the family, themselves included, went by fake names) started to protest, not wanting to be excluded, but Maude cleared her throat firmly. There was no arguing with their mother – she hadn’t lost an argument since boarding school – so the children left, faces downcast. Harold straightened his fake glasses, stirred the pot again, and said, voice no different from a frightened child’s, “I thought it was all over. I thought they all were dead or in hiding.”
Maude said, “The problem with relying on people being in hiding is that you can’t hide forever.”
Harold shook his head. “We’ve done well enough,” he said.
“We never lit fires,” Maude answered. “Some of those in hiding did. It’s no surprise they’re up to their old tricks again, especially with everything that’s happening. You’d think they’d be ready to operate in broad daylight, considering the president.” Maude was firmly of the opinion that the east coast businessman who currently held office had to be a volunteer of some sort, though as far as Harold and Gwen could tell their organization no longer held any sway east of the Rockies.
“They are operating in broad daylight, or at least under heavy smoke,” Gwen said with a sigh. She pulled out her phone, typed a search query into it, and then held it up. A video version of the radio ad began to play, highlighting a menagerie of caged predators, dangerous rides, and a race of drag queens whose make-up and outfits made them seem almost inhuman – the only “freaks” the twenty-first century would accept being those who were proudly abnormal by choice. “I’m going tonight,” Gwen said when it concluded. “I want to see who’s back on the scene, and it’s our last chance.”
Maude didn’t look up from the screen, even though all there was to see was a curved arrow pointing back at itself. “Caligari Carnival,” she whispered. “I remember watching that fire…” With a heavy sigh, she turned and retrieved an unopened bottle of wine from one cabinet and three glasses from another. “You can’t go. It’s one of their biggest sites.”
“That’s why I have to go,” Gwen said. “You two should stay this time,” she added, holding up a hand to shush the pair, both of whom had been about to volunteer. “We haven’t done anything like this since before Liam was born.” Taking a deep breath, Gwen added, “I’ll have my cell phone with me the whole time. I’ll call you when I get there and leave it on in my purse, so you can listen in. I’m just going to see if I can recognize anyone and make sure…” Gwen hesitated, both things she wanted to make sure of rising in her throat at once, each so sure of its importance it would not let the other be spoken first. Finally, she managed something that described both in equal measure: “-make sure that my family isn’t there.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t go back,” Harold said, at the same time that Maude said, “I’m sure they’re somewhere safer than that.”
Gwen sighed. “I hope you’re both right,” she said, “but I have to be sure.”
Yom Kippur 5781
She stayed for dinner, spaghetti with sauce made from ingredients Maude had grown herself, though halfway through her bowl she excused herself to the bathroom to pluck her brow and change her contacts to electric blue. Then she summoned another driver, staring out the living room window in wait while her niblings fought virtual mascot battles on the TV. Harold sat on the sofa beside her, mostly trying to keep his children in line while Maude excused herself to her room. They both knew that Maude was curled up in a ball in the furthest corner of her walk-in closet, trying to cry without the children knowing, and that going to comfort her would just make things worse.
“Are you sure?” Harold asked when they saw red brake lights through the smoke. “The world is quiet in here.”
Gwen nodded. “When I get back, we’ll know what to do. Perhaps it’s time to take another vacation?”
“It might end up a permanent one,” Harold said. The children asked what they meant, but neither adult paid them attention. “Depending on who you see, of course.”
Standing and making sure she had everything in her little black purse, Gwen said, “I’ll call your burner soon. Lock the doors and check the laundry once I’m gone.” She bent down to hug Emily and rustle Liam’s hair, still ignoring their confused questions. “If we’re lucky…” She stopped, knowing full well what a stupid conditional that was to rely upon, and simply went to the front door.
Harold followed her, but instead of closing the door behind Gwen like she’d thought he would, he caught her sleeve. She wasn’t sure if it was his hand trembling, or her arm, or perhaps both. “Let’s just go,” he said. “We’ll tell the kids we’re going camping. We can hide in the mountains. Maude will be happy and I’ll-”
Gwen turned back to see Harold was crying too. “If that’s what you have to do,” she said, “if you think there’s any risk of them getting through the tunnel under the washer we blocked, or coming here and lighting fires anyway, pack up and leave now. I don’t want Klaus and Violet to be orphans like we were.”
Harold shook his head. “We have no inheritance,” he said, “and whoever’s running the place probably has no idea who any of us are. You’re the one they’d know to look for, not me and Maude.”
“And I don’t look anything like I should,” Gwen said, her blue eyes defiantly shiny. “Goodbye, Harold. I hope to see you soon.”
He nodded, and wiped his eyes clean so the children would not know. “Soon,” he agreed, closing the door. Gwen did not step away until she heard the bolt click, then she hurried to an impatient driver whose car was, appropriately enough, yellow. The driver took her recklessly but wrecklessly to the BART, and from there Gwen rode to Dublin, arranging another driver to take her the rest of the way.
Almost a quarter after 9 o’clock, Gwen finally arrived. She made the call to Harold’s burner, slipping her phone into a safe pocket on her purse and muting its output. The carnival dominated an empty field that was ordinarily a training area for the armed forces, the glittering neon lights of its Ferris wheel and roller coasters proudly broadcasting even through smoke the social clout the carnival’s proprietors commanded. But almost no one was there, for the smoke itself could be not fully defied. Whether Gwen walked down a line of games like ring toss or past a line of rides, she saw no one outdoors. High-pitched, anxious music followed her everywhere and the smell of imitation butter mixed with the smoke to give everything the scent of burnt popcorn, though what was being sold was clearly well-popped. The food vendors were the only people Gwen saw at all, all of them behind windows they only opened to exchange cash for food, and all of them too young to be who she sought after.
Gwen did not know exactly what she was looking for, but she knew it when she saw it. Between a centrifugal ride and a child’s coaster sat a tent that she recognized at once though she had never seen it before – could not have seen it before. Just like her, it represented a new generation, its predecessor destroyed in fire but now flawlessly imitated. Painted on the red canvas was a black insignia made of three hidden letters in the shape of an eye. The tent flaps were open, letting all of the wild smoke in, and Gwen could not see what was inside beyond the impression of two distant lights in the far corners. Eyes watering enough to make her regret the shocking blue contacts, she stepped in.
“Hello?” she said, peering forward.
Gwen could just make out a dark mass in front of her, the shape and size of a terrible, bulky cyclops on many ungainly legs. It spoke with a smoky human voice, though the accent belonged to no human tribe. “The visitor will be closing the door behind her, please. Madam Lulu only offers private sessions. She does not like the toms with their peepers.”
As it was only a tent flap that would prove no real impediment, Gwen turned and pulled them back down. She did not ask the person in the tent their real name, not wanting them to know that she knew full well who Madam Lulu represented. She had read The Carnivorous Carnival years ago, though few people had. Perhaps if there had a movie, people would have paid attention or cared about the plight of the Baudelaire orphans, but Snicket’s associates Handler and Sheedey had spent their last years of republishing the tomes on the run, well outside of Hollywood’s sphere of influence. Shortly after only run of The End was distributed to stores, both had allegedly died. Gwen still wasn’t sure: the main source was The Daily Punctilio’s almost excited report to the world about the freak electrical shortage that had destroyed the entirety of Harper-Collins.
“Come closer, please,” Lulu said in the darkness. “The crystal ball, please, wants to see you.”
Gwen inched towards the shape in the smoke. The dim lights provided little context for its shape until she was only a foot away, when it snapped into focus. The legs of the beast were nothing more than table and chair legs, plus Lulu’s own legs in the center. The bulky middle was a rounded table, a crystal ball all but dim in the center. The cyclops’s eye was a red gem in a turban Lulu wore, hiding her most of her black hair. Her face was entirely hidden under a gas mask and she had thick fingers like sausages that she waved vaguely over the crystal ball.
“Yes, please,” Lulu said, looking Gwen over as thoroughly as Gwen had examined her. “You’re a pretty one. The crystal ball, it wonders: are looks deceiving? But pay it no mind, please! It is a saucy troublemaker!” Lulu gave it a playful tap, as if telling it to be silent. The crystal ball did nothing in response. “Welcome to Madam Lulu’s tent of fortunes, please. I can part the veil of the future for you, if you desire.” Her finger waggling became more excited.
Gwen only felt calmer, disinterested in the overly affected routine. She kept her breathing steady through her own mask. “I’m looking for the owner,” she said. “I’m something of a reporter and was hoping to hear the story of how-”
“Ah ah ah!” Lulu said, wagging a finger. “Please, there can be no, how do you say… prevarications. The crystal ball disapproves, please. If you wish for me to be clear in my answers, you must be clear in your questions.”
Gwen frowned. “I don’t understand. I wasn’t-”
“Please, are you a reporter or no? Many occupations are something of reporters. Even Lulu is something of one: she reports the future, please. But Lulu is not a reporter, not for many years.”
Sighing, Gwen said, “I’m not a reporter.”
Madam Lulu nodded her head. “Honesty, good. Please, ask your question that honesty can be rewarded.”
“I just said I was, because I was hoping to ask about how this carnival got started again.”
Madam Lulu chuckled. “Madam Lulu, she is buying the trademarks and filing the permits. She is hiring the workers and renting the attractions. Sometimes she even is cleaning up all the messes!”
Gwen leaned forward. “So you’re the owner?”
“Indeed! Some say I am even the old Madam Lulu come again, please.” Madam Lulu threw back her head and laughed at this. “This is nonsense. The old Madam Lulu was eaten. Please, do you want the crystal ball to show you?” The woman leaned forward and the crystal ball began to shine, but Gwen shook her head quickly.
“No!” she said.
Madam Lulu curled her hand into a fist and slammed it onto the table. The ball went dark again. “It is good you are not a bloodthirster, please. The crystal ball approves: it likes things quiet. It says to me, please Madam Lulu, ask the young lady: has she been good to her mother?”
Gwen went pale. “I never knew my mother,” she said firmly, not wanting to know what Madam Lulu would say if she offered the correct passphrase. “You must have me mistaken with somebody else.”
Madam Lulu nodded, saying, “Please, the crystal ball is bad with faces. Make-up is confusion for it. But Lulu is distracting you! The crystal ball says I am being most unhelpful! You wanted to know about the carnival? Ask your questions, please. Three will do, I think.”
Gwen laughed despite herself. “Right,” she said. “Why Caligari Carnival? If you wanted to be a fortuneteller, there’s plenty of other places to go.”
“This is true, but Lulu does not feel safe in them. She has been looking for a safe place for a very long time. Please, when nowhere is safe for you, why not remake the last safe place you knew? Madam Lulu is not selfish, though! Her refuge is for all who need it, even mysterious questioners who come and try to misrepresent themselves to Lulu out of misguided fear.”
Much as Lulu’s showmanship had calmed Gwen, her reassurances only made her more nervous. Gwen asked, “So if someone came here to make the world less safe… you wouldn’t help them?”
“Lulu sees no need to volunteer for destruction,” the fortune teller said. “She’s lived that life long enough. Please, the crystal ball says that the futures it shows are for second chances. The carnival only mattered to such malingerers when it contained information, but Lulu keeps no secrets of use. Look under the table, please? Does the orphan woman see a box of secret knowledge? A trapdoor to a penthouse apartment?”
Gwen could not see a box, but in the low light she was unsure about the door. She bent down, her fingers reaching out for the floor. She felt only bare dirt, even when she tried to find some secret hinge. “I suppose not,” she conceded as she straightened. “But then why are you open on a night like tonight? On military property?”
“Madam Lulu has just enough connections to make some things possible, please – and inheritance to spare. She held carnival here first to water test, please. If carnival does not burn down, then she has nothing to fear!”
“So then who are you really?” Gwen asked, the extra question slipping from her lips before she could stop it.
The other woman said, “Madam Lulu thinks she could ask the same. She thinks you will not know her name at all, please. Further, she suspects she would know yours if you gave it truly, but the crystal ball has ordered me not to ask, please. It says it would make me a poor host.”
“If I won’t know your name, what’s the harm in telling me? Wouldn’t it be on the licensing you mentioned?”
“Yes, Lulu is thinking it would be, if Madam Lulu was a fool. But she isn’t, as sure as her name isn’t Patience Dinkyrn, whatever the paperwork says.”
Gwen shut her eyes for half a second, focusing on her special talent, and then said, “I bet Dinkyrn has a ‘y’ in it.”
Madam Lulu didn’t respond at first, then shrugged. “What of it, please? Visitor knows how to spell her fake name?”
“I don’t,” Gwen said truthfully. “Not sure where the ‘y’ goes. But it’s there all the same, because it belongs in your real name, which is Kennedy. Kennedy Pitcairn.”
Again Madam Lulu began to laugh uncontrollably. She threw her head back so hard that she rocked in her seat, and one of her thick hands knocked the crystal ball off of its round pedestal. It bounced on the ground instead of shattering, but the fortune teller didn’t care. Gwen had just decided it was time to leave when the other woman recovered, clutching her chest and wheezing through her mask.
“Sorry,” she said, her voice much deeper. “I just…” She started to laugh again, though her lungs had little to work with and she soon stopped. “I just thought you were Sunny Baudelaire. But you aren’t, are you? Not quite.”
Gwen shook her head, backing up. “No,” she said. “I told you: you have me mistake-”
“It’s alright, Beatrice,” Kennedy said, reaching up and beginning to undo the turban. “We need have no secrets here. My days of villainy are behind me. You have nothing to fear here.” The turban fell away, and next Kennedy removed her mask, revealing two surprises at once: she was incredibly wrinkled (Beatrice suspected her dark hair must have been dyed), and her face was not female but male. She wore lipstick and gaudy blue eye shadow all the same and Beatrice was too well-mannered to stop thinking of her as a woman just because of the likely contents of her underwear or the shape of her face and hands, but she was too aware of VFD’s history to feel safe in the company of a former villain who blurred gender lines.
Beatrice pulled her water-damaged map out of her purse, pointing to the streets of Potrero Hill. Kennedy could just barely see a familiar hand’s scrawl written on top of the map. “If I have nothing to fear, why are you listed in this coded portfolio as one of Olaf’s associates?”
Kennedy returned her mask to its place before she answered, not wanting to breathe the smoke any longer than necessary. “You remind me of my old employer,” she said.
“Count Olaf?” Beatrice asked, her hands reaching behind her for a hint of the tent flaps. After what felt like far too many steps back, she found them.
Nodding, Kennedy said, “I can’t say I’m proud of my past. I have even less of an excuse than so many of those your uncle wrote about: my parents survived my childhood, and if I had wanted an ill-gotten fortune so badly I could simply have been the son they wanted instead of committing all of those terrible crimes. But I’ve suffered too.” She leaned back in her seat and reached for its sides – only then did Beatrice notice the wheels. “I haven’t been able to walk in nearly two and a half decades,” she said, working her way slowly around the table to the crystal ball. “The fire at the hospital didn’t kill me, but it did irreparable damage all the same.”
Kennedy leaned over the side of her chair awkwardly, retrieving her prop. “And of course, then came your uncle’s defamation.” She laughed bitterly, waving her other hand up and down while gesturing at herself. “Truly, I am a dumb beast, fit for nothing but carrying infant orphans around in my mouth.”
Beatrice looked down at the ground. “All the Baudelaires told me that he got a lot of details wrong.”
For the third and final time that night, Kennedy threw back her head as she cackled. “A lot? It’s a miracle there’s any truth in those stories at all! Your uncle wrote those books so quickly that he finished them before he began – and I’m not the only one he misrepresented. There isn’t a single person in those books he captured accurately, and often because of deliberate lies!”
Feeling her face flush again, Beatrice said, “I know my uncle wasn’t a very good person. He confessed to murder a few years ago, you know. A murder he committed when he was barely thirteen! If you just want to rant to me about how wicked he was, you don’t need to bother. One of the reasons I came here was to make sure he wasn’t starting all of this up again.”
“That’s very noble of you,” Kennedy said, “to come into the lion’s den to protect the world from your legacy.”
“Thank you,” Beatrice said, for Kennedy’s tone convinced her of the false Lulu’s sincerity.
“May I ask why else you came?” Kennedy asked. “I’m happy to provide what you need.” Not wanting to say the other main reason, Beatrice explained the fire on Lousy Lane, but Kennedy knew nothing of it. “It has been a bad year and that building’s been empty a long time. Are you sure it wasn’t insurance fraud?”
Beatrice snapped, “Of course it wasn’t!”, her nostrils flaring and eyes so wide they seemed ready to pop out of her skull. “It never is with VFD! The organization’s been in chaos for years but it keeps lighting fires! I half-suspect the gender reveal party was sabotaged by fire starters!”
Kennedy held up her arms in surrender. “All right,” she said. “I’m sure you know better than I do. But I promise, I did not light that fire.” There was an awkward pause, and then Kennedy hazarded, “Is there anything else I can reassure you about?”
Beatrice’s face fell. “I came to find them too, just in case they were alive but in danger. But they aren’t here. You said earlier that you thought I was Sunny…”
The wheelchair scooted across the uneven ground until it was even with Beatrice, and Kennedy put a surprisingly gentle hand on her arm. “No. They’re not here,” she said. “I’m sorry, honey.”
Beatrice nodded, but she started to sob, even though it was stupid to. It was stupid to have hoped at all, to think she could ever get lucky when her life was just the latest chapter in a long series of unfortunate events-
“Shhh!” Beatrice stopped. She hadn’t even realized she’d started speaking at all. She opened her eyes, blinking repeatedly to clear them. Kennedy had embraced her from the side, though she’d contorted in her chair so that both hands were patting her back gently. “Don’t say such things, dear. You have had good luck, coming here tonight.”
Beatrice gulped. “I have?”
“I have a long story to tell you,” Kennedy said, nodding toward the tent flap. “I can’t say it’ll be any less unbiased than your uncle’s, but I think when I’m done that your life will make more sense, and you’ll feel safer.”
The younger woman frowned. “The Baudelaires already told me about what happened to them,” she said.
“That’s part of the story,” Kennedy admitted, “but this is a much longer story. The Baudelaire story starts just a few months after you were conceived, but the story I want to tell you starts more than sixty years ago.”
“Your story?” Beatrice asked.
Kennedy tilted her head in a way that suggested without the gas mask she would be giving Beatrice quite the condescending look. “No, honey. This is Count Olaf’s story. It’s the story of how he met your mother and uncles, and why he wanted to steal fortunes so badly, and how he recruited me, Fernald, Boris and all us other actors who gave up morality in the face of adversity. It's the story of the women he loved and the son he never knew and the coded map he created that was never quite complete because of said. It’s the story of this very carnival’s forbidden but perennial secrets, crimes that were distorted by the Punctilio and ancient grudges that fractured a noble society. And yes, in a roundabout way, it is the story of the Baudelaire orphans all over again, although certainly your uncle Lemony reported things accurately enough that I’ll mostly fill in the gaps he couldn’t know. I was there for most of it, after all, and Esmé Squalor told me about everything I missed shortly before she died, and when I reconciled with my parents they told me the very last details, because Lemony defamed them too in a way.” The older woman hesitated. “And if I tell you all of that, so truthful that your little coded map won’t have any choice but to back it all up, and everything that happened to me after the hospital… Will you catch me up on your own past?” She sighed, turning to the side and staring off at something no one could see. “Everyone who could relate to my experiences is long dead now, I’m afraid. It’s left me lonely.”
Beatrice frowned. “We’ll see,” she said at last. “It will depend on…” She hesitated, trying to find a polite way to say it.
“On whether or not you feel like running away as fast as you can and calling the police to let them know a notorious criminal is on the loose?” Kennedy simply nodded when Beatrice’s mouth hung open in the awkwardness of the truth. “That’s more than fair, honey. I keep telling you: you have nothing to fear. I was fond of both of your parents, you know. I wouldn’t hurt their daughter, not for all the fortunes on the west coast.”
Beatrice took several deep breaths, thinking of the phone in her purse, still listening in. She wondered briefly what ‘Harold’ and ‘Maude’ would be thinking of what happened. Had they already fled town as soon as they heard her real name? Were they on the way to help her, despite the risk to their children? “I’ll listen to your story,” she said at last, “but not here. Let’s meet when the smoke clears at a public park. Somewhere visible, where I can be watched.”
“Wonderful!” Kennedy said, her voice almost cracking in relief.
The rest of the conversation proceeded apace, with Kennedy supplying a phone number to reach her once the smoke was gone. Beatrice left the carnival before unmuting her phone and checking in with ‘Maude’ (her husband had fallen asleep), who was shaky but relieved to hear that Beatrice was alright. The couple had not left home, but Beatrice did not return to them, instead choosing a hotel in case she was pursued by any of Kennedy’s associates.
The next morning, when she woke up alive, she concluded that she probably hadn’t been followed. The smoke had cleared, so Beatrice made a quick pair of calls: one to home and one to Kennedy, then started her journey to Golden Gate Park. Kennedy had already arrived when Beatrice got there, face bare but for a mask and the rest of her clad in an attractive pink pantsuit, and after a brief exchange of pleasantries, the old woman began her story…
This story, though obviously not this chapter which is rather timely, has been taking up space in my head for years. The sudden realization of how to make this story something communicable in-universe is what leads me to publish it almost three years after I expect anyone would have cared, but that's alright. While in-universe Kennedy is relating this story in more or less chronological order, I will be presenting it in two roughly alternating threads: Olaf's pre-TBB backstory and Olaf's experiences during the series proper. For the most part this story will align with the book canon, though obviously I will take liberties whenever it makes for a better story or at least removes the same sorts of problematic concepts that it's clear Handler no longer approves of. Besides those though, the goal is to create a story that feels like it could be the truth behind Olaf's experiences. Anyway, hope you enjoyed the beginning, let me know what detracted from your experience if you didn't, and good luck out there in this crazy world.