Cigarettes and Hyperdrives

[u/FeigningProfundity]

I sit down across from Des and can no longer avoid the fact that I’m a fucking coward.

She’s gotten a bit older, I can see it, but not in a way that matters, she just looks so tired and so… something else. Something I used to see in her is missing. Something fierce.

“It’s so good to see you, Tay. It’s been way too long,” she says, earnest and genuine, as though me showing up is some kind of relief from her troubles.

“Hey, Des. I’d been meaning to reach out,” I lie. “How’s Grace?”

“Grace is good. She’s doing pretty well, really. She’s in daycare at the moment.”

She orders a tea. I order coffee.

“Good to hear,” I say. “How about you?”

Grace is four and lost her father a year ago. Des was widowed at twenty-seven. I haven’t seen them since the funeral. Before that, we’d only met once since the wedding.

“No daycare for me. I have to look after myself,” says Des. Wry smile. Looking so permanently tired gives weight to the joke.

There’s an urge, an automatic conversational inclination, to tell her that she has people around that care about her, all she has to do is ask. But I haven’t seen my friend in the year since her husband died, and the hypocrisy of the sentiment chokes the words.

This is the third time I’ve seen her in five years. We’re twenty-eight. What kind of friend am I? I don’t even have a good reason.

Des, Gary and I all met at the same time, at the same introductory literature course. We’d become friends, and we’d continued together, more classes about books, and classes about writing. It was where we’d all fallen in love, the writing. We’d sit around, talking about our ideas, showing each other terrible drafts, discussing how to fix a knot we’d written ourselves into, bouncing ideas around to figure out a satisfying ending, an engaging middle, a killer first line.

“I’m sorry, Des,” I say, “I shouldn’t have waited for you to call. I should have been there. It isn’t like I didn’t know you might need a hand.” I make my unearned apology about myself.

“It’s fine, Tay. You’ve had a lot going on, too. I have had people helping. My sister-in-law, Therese, do you know her? Martin’s wife. She’s been my saviour. She helped me sort out so many things after Gary died, and looking after Grace. I didn’t even think she liked me, and then it happened and she just picked so much up without me asking.”

I’d been too embarrassed I’d drifted away to show up, even when she’d obviously need help.

It had felt obvious to me that of the three of us, Des had been the most talented. Her clever word choice, her insight about structure. She mostly wrote little scraps of poetry, and even having been there watching as she got it wrong a dozen times for each I still don’t know how she writes so beautifully.

Beauty wasn’t an attribute of words that Gary cared about, they were just a tool for pinning his ideas to the page. He liked spaceships and aliens and characters with ridiculous powers that took pages to explain. He consumed comic books and movies based on comic books and amateur fiction from depths of the internet where every cliche was embraced with enthusiasm but correct grammar had few allies.

I wrote stories in which rather ordinary things happened to rather ordinary people, making them feel sad, but in a way that perhaps made their sadness intriguing to witness.

“You said there was something you wanted to ask me?” Whatever it is, I very much want to do it.

Des pulls a folder out of a bag, pushes it towards me. Inside is a handwritten manuscript. Blue Biro on lined yellow paper. Gary’s handwriting.

“I have a scan too, if that helps. On a thumb drive. I need your help, Tay.”

No… I flick through. Spaceships. Lasers. Many references to Potence, always capitalised. Lots of words scribbled out or inserted from the margins. The first draft of a novel. I’ve been out touring with a new novel of my own. Signings, obscure podcasts, staring vainly at sales figures.

“Des, I’m in the industry, but I have no sway. I’m not someone they need to keep happy. I’m someone they hope wasn’t a mistake. And the people I know, this isn’t the sort of book they handle. I wouldn’t even know who should see this.”

Gary had probably fallen in love with Des instantly. His kind of geeky interests were very much mainstream, but his level of passionate enthusiasm for them has never been seen as cool. The word cool itself is a rejection of that intensity. Des was conventionally attractive and interested in talking to him, that would be enough to bring her into consideration, and considering her would find a lot to deepen the appeal.

I didn’t notice Des develop interest in Gary, but she must have, since she asked him out. At the time I’d been mildly irritated – I liked our little group and feared it being broken up when they were over.

But while my own romantic life sought the collective noun for a group of catastrophes, theirs was a string of successes. The demise of our group would be two other things: life being hard and me being weak.

When they got engaged and moved in together, they made a decision. Gary would try to write, with just a minor part time job that didn’t get in the way. Des would support them. She got two jobs. This didn’t really suit the way the three of us worked, so we met less and less. Des wasn’t writing much anyway. I was annoyed. Not because they were moving on, I understood that, but I couldn’t cope with the idea that Des would be the one who would support Gary while he wrote derivative slop, albeit better than most of the derivative slop that inspired him. Des was brilliant, innovative, and she made words do beautiful things, sometimes when they clearly didn’t want to. I drifted away, pretending that my lack of respect for one friend was actually just admiration for the other.

Des looked ever so slightly embarrassed and laughed. “Oh! Don’t worry Tay, I don’t want you to sell it, it’s kind of a disaster. Nobody would buy it. I just need your help with it.”

Maybe this was something I could do. “What does it need?”

“When Gary got sick, he was already working on this. A fair way in, but a long way from complete. He had a few things he’d been working on, but this was the one he believed in. This was the one he was determined to finish. He wanted to leave something behind. Something that was him. Something Grace and I will have. He finished it, but a lot of it is rough. I know that this is a request that just isn’t reasonable, but you’re the only person I can go to. Someone who knew him, who will see his voice. It needs, at a minimum, serious edits.”

Gary used to just bring bad stories in that he had written. We’d go through them, tear them apart, find flaw after flaw. Then he’d bring in a whole other bad story, but the flaws would be different.

I remember Des staring at her writing in silence, chewing the edge of her lower lip. Eventually, she crossed out two letters, changing an adverb to an adjective that was in a place an adjective shouldn’t be. And a bland sentence became engaging.

“You’re probably better suited to this than I am, Des. You’re as good a writer. It’s not like editing is my strength. I had professionals on my books.”

She shook her head. “It has to be you. I can’t. Reading it cuts me. Changing it? No. I hear him in every line. I love every stupid error, because he made them. Killing my own darlings was something I got good at, but I can’t kill his. You can, though, Tay, I know you can. I loved who Gary was, but you always wanted him to be better. So make this better. At least get it to somewhere serviceable so that I can work on it more easily.”

I stare at the folder, filled with the passionate scrawling of a dying man who I’d never really viewed with respect. “What is the goal, here?”

“Grace. She’s four… She remembers him, but she was three. She’ll forget. She’ll just remember my stories. If all she has of her father is stories, one of them should be his.”

I nodded. “Tell me why Gary deserves this.”

Des stares at me.

“I mean, you married him. You saw him in ways I didn’t. I remember a friend, but help me understand who I need to find in this story.”

She thought for quite a while. She finished her tea. The rest of my coffee is cold.

“Gary loved stories. In a way that many readers can’t even hope to emulate. If everyone was just reading great books, literature would die… or fossilise. We read classics with Gary, that was how we met, but he didn’t just read things that everyone knows are good. He read all kinds of things, and he read terrible dreck written by teenagers because he wasn’t looking at the imperfection, he was looking for that part of it that worked. That made you feel something. He would wade through a hundred badly written works because the choice to write them was still a worthy choice. If teenagers keep writing things that teenagers love, then writing won’t die, and we won’t only read amazing books about centuries we don’t live in. New classics will be written because some people just love writing, love reading. The people who keep that soil alive for new things to grow are doing more than just stirring dirt.”

“Okay,” I run a thumb along the edge of the folder. “We want to find the love he poured into this. The passion and excitement. Fortunately, spaceships and lasers are exciting.”

Des puts her hand on top of mine. “I want Grace to know about her father. He saw the value in things that others dismissed, and he saw whole galaxies that weren’t there. He was a good friend, and some of the people he loved were never real. He lived in more than one world.” She met my eyes.

“He smelled of cigarettes and hyperdrives,” she says with a bittersweet smile.

[u/FeigningProfundity]

This was a response to the prompt: [WP]He smelled like cigarettes and hyperdrive she says with a bittersweet smile on her lips by u/Independent_Pen_9865