Eleanor

Far Off Unhappy Things – Boys and Girls of the Reflective Age

Chapter 6: Eleanor

By Renko Chazakiël Rodenburg

This life before me
Its blood runs so still
The call of the bird
The song that makes the hours go

– Oscar Wilde

The sea was calm today. An endless expanse of gray beneath an equally gray sky. It was too calm. The waves were wrong, too. In her dreams the sea was gray, but the sky mottled with clouds through which rays of sunlight filtered down onto a dreary world. Eleanor looked around, around, around. The lighthouse was in the right place behind them, the beach looked just right. They were in the right place, but it just wasn’t the day.

“Captain?” She asked, walking into the steering cabin.

“It’s not my ship,” the man steering unhelpfully clarified.

“I think we can pull into port, don’t worry about following that map I drew. I’m good for today.”

“I’m not sure-” he started, but she interrupted him.

“I don’t need any of my money back, don’t worry.”

“Alright,” he said as he turned the ship about.

She collected her sketchbook, her diaries, packed them all into her bag and spent the rest of the trip back to the port in Den Helder leaning on the bulwark, staring out at the North Sea. It enchanted her. Gray and dreary and often taking on an air of grumbling violence, as if it was moody. It stank, too. Salt and dead fish and motor oil and- what was that stuff again that had gotten mixed into the water? She couldn’t quite remember. Magnesium? Cesium? She’d have to look it up when back at home.

But it enchanted her. It was polluted but still full of life. Seals, small whales, dolphins, and the invasive Minches that had flooded into the wider North Sea after their native waters had gotten uninhabitable. A dark surface under which an entire world moved about, a world that could see her but that she could not see in turn.

Her dreams never stopped. She was confident they wouldn’t until the day they prophesied, the day she found herself on the North Sea, the lighthouse of Texel behind her, glancing over at the dunes and glancing back out into the ocean and seeing- it. What she would see the dreams never revealed to her. It filled her with trepidation and sometimes with anxiety but most of all, it filled her with the same overwhelming feeling of love and contentness that the other dreams did, the dreams that had made her a millionaire.

It was a decently long ride back to Den Helder, and when the boat pulled into the harbor her face had built up a small layer of salt from all the spray splashing into her face. Salt and that other stuff, that she vaguely remembered to be carcinogenic. She’d have to shower thoroughly when back home.

“Hey, Miss Looier?” The harbormaster said as she passed through his office on her way out.

“What’s up?”

“The payphone in front of the office has been ringing literally all day. Someone who wants to talk to you. They said they’d call back around three again, which is just about now.”

“Oh,” she said. She wondered who would know to reach her in the harbor of Den Helder. As she walked out, the payphone started to ring again, so she picked it up.

“Hello, this is Eleanor Looier on the, let me check, public payphone number twenty-three in Den Helder. Who am I speaking to?”

“Lena, Lena, I’ve been trying to reach you literally all day,” Wieland Waldrung barked. Her publisher.

“Wieland. Something so urgent you had to track me down into Den Helder to reach me over the public phone?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “It’s just been keeping me up. Messing with me. In all honestly, it probably could’ve waited until the weekend, but it’s just been, you know, fucking with my head all day,” the man said. He sounded like a sheepdog, like a border collie, whenever he was agitated.

“Out with it,” she said. “What’s been keeping you up?”

“I don’t think I can explain this to you. Let me just send it over to you.”

“Huh?” she said, but then the printer in the phone booth sprang to life. Loudly buzzing, it spat out a piece of paper, which she was too slow to grab. As it fell to the ground, the second paper was printed. Then the third, then the fourth.

“What are you doing,” she yelled, clenching the phone between her head and her shoulder as she tried to grab the endless torrent of images now spilling out of the payphone.

The shock of properly parsing what was on the images almost sent her rolling out of the booth. “Christ, Wieland, what the fuck are you-”

It was one of those awful commercials. Pornographic. They were so upsetting that she had stopped watching television entirely. The first time she had caught one she had been unable to look away somehow. That was probably why they aired them, she figured. Paper after paper displaying a grotesque rape scene, frame after frame, kept spilling out of the phone, slowly filling up the booth.

“Wieland, what are you doing? You’re flooding the- the entire booth is filling up with porn. One would’ve been- oh my god. You’ve tried to send me a .gif file over the phone, haven’t you? Wieland, you can’t send people a .gif over the phone, that isn’t how this technology works. That isn’t how any of this works. Christ.”

“Oh god,” Wieland muttered on the other side of the line. “I’m so sorry. I’m old, I don’t understand how phones work.”

“This is Fleur,” Eleanor said. “This is Fleur in one of those horrible commercials. Why- what?”

“It’s blatant copyright infringement,” Wieland said. “Or, well. That’s what I thought.”

“You need to sue these people yesterday. Is the other character a homestuck? Who owns that? Notify them of this madness as well. We need to sue these people into the- Jesus Wieland, the- I have to go. The phone booth is completely filling up, I’ll call you back when I’m at home, alright?”

Without waiting for his answer, she hung up and hoped this would stop the booth from printing out frame after frame of her beloved Princess Fleur being violated to sell god-knows-what. It didn’t. They kept coming, page after page. She backed out of the booth, stumbling over backwards and spilling out onto the street together with a wheelbarrowload of horrible, horrible porn. An old man who happened to pass her by picked up one of the pages, and looked at her with disgust dripping from his face. Children who had been sitting near the phone booth picked them up and laughed at her. She turned red as a beet and ran off, hurried to her car under an avalanche of laughter and scorn.

Her house, an older house on the dike near Van Ewijcksluis, was barely fifteen minutes by car. She did it in ten, no doubt collecting at least one speeding ticket along the way. The lake in front of her house- once the South Sea, before the Dutch closed it off from her Northern half- lay flat like a mirror. The entire area took on a ghastly, eerie nature in these rare moments when the almost perpetual wind ceased.

“Calm before the storm,” she told her garden gnome as she checked her mailbox and went inside. “Fuck!” she screamed the moment she closed her front door behind her. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

A copyright lawsuit against one of those awful advertisement companies for sullying one of her beautiful characters would barely make up for how demeaning this all was. It was violating, in a way.

“Pick up pick up pick up you were in SUCH a hurry to-” she said while dialing her publisher.

“Hello?” The old publisher barked.

“This is Eleanor speaking-”

“Lena! I was just talking to you on the phone. How are you doing?”

“I- what? I know. I- nevermind. Lawsuit. Today. Lawsuit. I want whoever did this sued and sued again until they’re homeless.”

“I was going to talk to you about that fifteen minutes ago before you suddenly broke the connection. It turns out that it isn’t that simple.”

“What?”

“It’s a matter of specific rights, you see. You own the rights to your character and her likeness, but that is a likeness as rendered in text. You’ve never published any visual media, and hear this: That girl in the ad isn’t in costume. She actually looks like this.”

“You’re not making any sense, Wieland.”

“So I have spent all day trying to figure out how this could have possibly happened. I talked to the director of that, hm, distasteful ad, Jacques Montasomething. He told me: I’m not responsible for what my actresses look like, take it up with her.”

“What? You’re saying his actress, on her own volition, painted her hair blue and wore elf ears to set that day?”

“Well, sort of? I was on the phone with her earlier today and she claims her hair is naturally blue. The ears are a plastic surgery she got done years ago.”

“My first thought seeing that horrible clip was ‘that’s Fleur,’ Wieland. This is damaging to my brand, wouldn’t that be an angle we can run on.”

“So hear this: that’s actually her name. She’s called Fleur Scarborough. She’s originally from the UK, and as far as I have been able to find out, and trust me- I’ve made a lot of phone calls today- she’s not lying. Her hair is naturally blue. There was an article about it in playboy a year ago. Her UK birth certificate checks out. Fleur Scarborough, born to Petra Sanderson and Julien Cohen-Scarborough.”

“You’re fucking with me,” Eleonora said. “She’s fucking with you. There’s no way that’s true. Natural blue hair? Her father is named after another one of my characters, for Christ’s sake.”

“It all checks out, Lena. It’s a bizarre avalanche of coincidences. And even if it isn’t, her documents check out. If she argues she’s never even heard of your novels in court the lawsuit is dead. And Mr Jacques is indeed most likely to be held ‘not responsible’ for his actress bearing an uncanny similarity to your Fleur if we take this to court.”

“There’s- there is no way. There’s just no way. None of this makes sense. I don’t want this. How many people have seen that horrible video?”

“It aired on Channel Five on primetime, so basically everyone in the country.”

“Why is that allowed?” Eleanor cried. “Why? Why can they show pornos during dinnertime as part of advertising?”

“Don’t complain to me,” Wieland said. “I voted Green Party. At least things are moving in the right direction. They’re no longer allowed to show semen on screen I think, and they’re not allowed to show somnophilia and hypnosis-based porn anymore either.”

“Do you hear yourself talk? They don’t show sleeping girls being raped on tv anymore? They’re awake now? And sometimes they’ll look like your self-insert from your best-selling novel, damaging your self worth and your multi-million guilder brand at the same time?”

“I’m sorry, Lena,” Wieland said. “There’s obviously still legal steps we can take, like moving to file for more trademarks. But I don’t think we can take that video down.”

“Christ. Jesus Christ. I’m going to be sick.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry.”

“What do I do now?”

“I’ll look into our next steps, and then I’ll contact you again. Else we see each other for lunch on the weekend.”

“Yeah. Thank you, Wieland.”

“No problem,” the gruff old man barked. Then hung up the phone.

Eleanor was reeling. Dizzy. She stumbled around her house looking for anything, anything at all that could help her hold on to sanity, and settled on pouring a half a bottle of rum into one of her beer steins, stone mugs from Germany that could hold half a liter. She slumped down on her couch and thought. A porn actress from the UK, now living in the Netherlands, had the exact same name as one of the protagonists from her long-running, and most importantly, best-selling fantasy novel series ‘Far Off Unhappy Things.’

Like her fascination with the sea, Far Off Unhappy Things had started with dreams. Awe-inspiring dreams. There had been years- back when her life had been going downhill- where the dreams were all that had kept her from killing herself. And they hadn’t inspired just her. When she’d put them down on paper, they had turned into best sellers. Millions around the world followed the adventures of the young Horned Prince, a boy who was born with deer antlers because of a family curse. He was the chosen one, the destined hero to overthrow a stagnant world where time had stopped moving and it was always summer. Princess Fleur was his main love interest. The moon princess who used her cursed katana to fight side-by-side with the young prince.

And now this! She didn’t know what to make of it. As she drank herself silly, she wondered if Fleur was on facebook. Her computer was an old model, with a crank, and she immediately regretted drinking half a liter of rum in one go. Keeping the computer spinning with the crank with her left hand, she navigated to facebook with her right. The effort was making her dizzy, but her mind was dead set on finding this Fleur on facebook. Typing with one hand, she punched in ‘Fleur Scarborough.’ One result.

The woman’s entire facebook page was styled as an official ‘Far Off Unhappy Things’ account. Eleanor’s dizziness increased tenfold as she got so angry she could barely see straight. A public phone number was attached to the page. Repeating the number to herself she ran to her landline and dialed the number. Almost immediately, her phone upstairs started ringing. Confused, she stumbled up the stairs to pick up.

“You are speaking to Eleanor Looier,” she said. No response. “Hello?” The other side of the line stayed quiet. “Hello? Is anyone there?” she tried again before hanging up the phone. The room started to spin, and she had to do her utmost best to not stumble and fall down the stairs on her way back down to try and call Fleur again. The dizziness and mental fatigue rocketed up and up and the world turned into a hazy grayscale. She cursed as she arrived at the computer. Because she’d stopped cranking the computer for longer than fifteen seconds it had crashed, rendering her unable to immediately find the number. Working the crank again, now with furious drunken anger, she got the computer running again and went back to facebook. Once again mumbling the number to herself she went back to the phone, and again the phone on the second floor rang. Fleur was fucking with her, she realized as she called Wieland instead.

“Wieland you have to help me here,” she said.

“Lena? You sound drunk. Are- actually, it’s only been thirty minutes since we last spoke. Are you okay?”

“I found Fleur on facebook but she’s giving herself out as an official Far Off Unhappy Things page. But she put my own phone number as her phone number so when I try to call her my own phone rings and my head hurts and she’s doing this to fuck with me. Don’t you see? It’s all orche-”

“Lena.”

“Orchestrated. Don’t interrupt me. It’s got to be some bizarre form of cyberbullying.”

“Lena, are you looking at your own Facebook account?”

“What?”

“You made a Far Off Unhappy Things page a while ago, but you never launched it after I pointed out that with fifteen million fans, your phone would never stop ringing if you put it up with your own phone number attached to it.”

“W- huh? If I didn’t- no, that makes no sense. I found the page after typing in Fleur Scarborough on-”

“Lena, breathe. She doesn’t have a facebook account. I already looked, earlier today. If you didn’t launch your page, you can still see it as long as you’re logged in on the account that made the page. You’re looking at your own facebook page. Are you okay? You sound incredibly confused.”

“I don’t know! I don’t know, okay! The entire situation has been messing with me and I drank half a bottle of rum and my head is spinning and I haven’t been able to see colour ever since I got back from the second floor. I want to die Wieland, I want to die and I want to never think about that awful woman and her horrible porn again.”

“You can’t see what anymore? Lena, you sound like you’re not well. You drank half a bottle of rum?”

She didn’t feel like dealing with this anymore. She hung up the phone and went back to her computer. All colour had faded from her world, and what little sun managed to make it through the clouds and then her windows burned in her retina like a nuclear flare. Groaning with anger and stress, she cranked the computer until it booted up again and went to youtube.

“Fleur Scarborough Porn” she punched in with her right hand, using enough force to make her keyboard jump up from the table.

Thousands of hits. Advertisements. Edits of advertisements. She clicked on a random one. Fleur the princess, tied to a bed as a troll came in through the window. He raped her. It cut to an advertisement for painkillers. Next video. Fleur the politician who can’t stop sneezing unless she has sex. Another politicans fucks her on a table in parliament. An advertisement for a pill that stops sneezing. Next video. Fleur the elf is tied to a tree. A man in a mask rapes her.

She stumbled back from her computer and threw up.

Endless lights. Flickering lights in infinite rows. Masked men who hover over her. Visions of the sun expanding and the world melting. Disjointed imagery of her Horned Prince having sex with Fleur. Screaming, she tried to get closer to them. More masked men. Giant mice-men haunting the ruins of a molten Amsterdam, the sun still growing larger in the sky.

She woke up screaming. She hadn’t realized she’d been sleeping until she had been screaming for more than a minute. Someone grabbed her hand.

“Lena, it’s okay. You’re in the hospital. You’re safe.”

“Wieland?” she asked.

She was in a hospital bed, wearing a hospital gown. An IV tube was hooked up to her wrist. The world felt calm, tranquil. As if the horrific imagery just now had only been a dream. They must’ve been, she realized.

“You’re okay, Lena,” Wieland said again. “Do you remember anything?”

“I was at home. I was working that cursed computer- oh. God, that whole business with the advertisements. I was in a sort of haze. I must’ve been awfully worked up.”

“You suddenly hung up the phone, so I drove to your place to see if you were okay. Count yourself lucky that I did, because you were out cold on the floor in a pool of your own vomit. I called an ambulance and the next day I heard you were being treated for a combination of alcohol and radiation poisoning.”

“Radiation?” She was confused now.

“You’ve been going out to sea far too often. If the alcohol poisoning hadn’t knocked you out, they might never have noticed until it was too late. The sea is full of radioactive potassium isotopes these days. If you spend too much time on the ocean, it builds up in your system.”

“I could’ve died,” she muttered. “How long was I out for?”

“Only a night, Lena. You passed out yesterday. You’re already recovering. They want to keep you under observation for a bit, but said you should expect to be able to go home as soon as you’ve stabilized.”

“Oh my god,” she said. “I could’ve died. I didn’t understand what was going on at all. It was a haze, like a nightmare.”

“Well, you’re okay now. There’ll be a nurse later to talk to you and give you some information. And if you think you’re up for it, there’s someone here to cheer you up.”

“Huh?”

“Only if you think you can handle it. I know you don’t always like surprises.”

“After everything that happened yesterday I’m pretty sure I can handle anything.”

“Well, maybe except Rob.”

“It’s- why the fuck would you get Rob to visit me in the hospital?”

“No, no, I mean- No. It’s not Rob. Why would I get Rob to- I’m not trying to mess with you. It was a stupid remark, forget it, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Eleanor said, laughing. “Hit me. Who have you got?”

Wieland got up, and said some things while in the hallway outside her room. She couldn’t hear what.

“Tada!” He said as he walked back into the room and held the door open for her mystery guest.

Blue hair, with ears like knives jutting out from underneath it. Black jeans and a blue t-shirt. Fleur Scarborough walked into the room holding a bouquet of flowers, mumbling a confused ‘hey’ as she did so.