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wafflebloggies · 4 months

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the long con - part 1/7

a Don't Feed The Muse crossover story. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

The con was coming to an end.

DIGIVID, the largest annual convention for digital content creators in the Southern United States. Three days of booths, networking, merch, watchathons, speeches, special previews, presentations, weird food, crowded spaces, fun.

Fun in theory, anyway. For Mark Mayhew, it had been three days of a brand new kind of purgatory. Unavoidable, self-inflicted, endless.

“...honestly, we couldn’t choose, so like for our first video we just put all our favourite movies into a picker thing and it turns out Watchmen came out the exact same year as Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and I know, they’re totally different movies, but then we were like, wait, there’s some parallels here...”

Mark was certain by now that the con had been a terrible idea. True, if he’d had the time all over again, there were several big, pressing reasons why he would still have made the same choice, but only a couple of them were fit to explain to anybody else. Even if he’d known how frankly- miserable- it was going to turn out to be, he probably still would have chosen to go, but knowing this didn’t make it feel like any less of a mistake, or change the fact that he would have given almost anything, right now, to not be stuck in the middle of it.

“...and the whole ship metaphor they cut from the movie, and like, Flint’s invention basically has the same thematic purpose as Veidt’s EDBE? We kept saying ‘eeby-deeby,’ it took us like, twenty takes…”

It was almost incredible to him, as he stood in silence, how alone it was possible to feel in such a big crowd. The main convention hall was hot, airless, busy. Even though some people were already packing up, here at the end of the third day, plenty of bodies still shuttled back and forth in clogged little streams whenever they found the space to move, elbow to elbow between the double rows of human backs shutting out the tables, the crowded booths. It was easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer press of people, the talk and the noise. If Mark had only walked in alone, twenty minutes ago, and spent the time silently trying to make his way from one side of the massive space to the other, he would already have been more than a little agitated, ready to leave.

“...and he has all these shell companies, like all these theatres that play alien invasion movies all the time, to subconsciously prepare people? And when you look at Meatballs, you’re actually getting lowkey bombarded with fast-food imagery the whole time right up to when he turns on the machine...”

Mark had been in the hall for hours, and he was done. Currently, he was standing in a small pocket of space in a very nicely put-together booth belonging to a fairly well-known ASMR channel, watching a conversation happen right in front of him that he had about as much share in as an exiled Martian had in a conversation backstage at NASA. Yes, he’d started this conversation, he’d introduced himself, he’d started to steer the topic in a useful direction… and then Anthony had happened. Anthony Williams had turned up with his big, friendly grin and his busted paper carrier bag full of leaflets and merch which had been shedding everywhere since Friday and his completely distracting, distracted self, and now…

“...actually the biggest audio problem we have is my cat, Blaze, when we film at my house she’s got a real thing for the fluffy boom whatever on the mic, she wants to kill that thing on sight, right Mark?”

“Yeah,” said Mark, in the same way a corpse will twitch if you electrocute it. Anthony, who was too into the conversation to notice his friend’s thousand-yard-stare, carried right on going.

“Yeah, so we have to shut her in my parents’ room, but then I feel so bad, and she yells so loud in there it picks up on the video! So we usually record at Mark’s, but with our Parasite video...”

And so on. And on.

Not that the ASMR guys seemed to mind. People always seemed to open up and respond to Anthony quicker and with far more warmth than they did with Mark alone, which added another layer of frustration to the silent, invisible war he was fighting against himself. If Anthony could only have understood, and been focused, if Anthony could have been trying like he had been, these last three days, they might have found a sponsor already.

A sponsor, a partner, a collab, anything, anything to make the whole weekend feel worthwhile, instead of a painful waste of time.

Mark could tell that these guys had lost focus completely. One of them was still chatting quite happily with Anthony about God alone knew what, relaxed and disengaged, and the other was already moving away, eyes on a new bunch of visitors. There was no way Mark could steer this back the right way again now. Even though, at the bottom of his heart, he’d known it was a lost cause before Anthony had joined them, the tide of bitterness ebbed higher as he listened to the conversation wander so far wide of the point.

He must have looked distant enough for a party of people trying to use the booth as a short-cut to mistake him for an unconnected bystander, because as he stood there they pushed gently between him and Anthony, widening the gap as they passed through. On impulse, he went with it, let them nudge him and his whole parcel of garbage feelings to the side, let the general stream of the crowd push him out of the booth.

Without waiting to see if Anthony had noticed, he started shoving his way towards the main exit at a quicker pace. It was a relief to just move, without Anthony winding along just behind him, getting distracted at an average rate of once every four booths. Through the whole weekend, every time Mark was just trying to get from A to B, every time Anthony spotted something which made him want to stop and take a closer look, he would reach forwards and pat Mark on the back of his right shoulder. By this point, three days in, the feeling was starting to evoke a kind of Pavlovian response in Mark, knowing that every time he felt that light touch he would have to stop and stand and wait, getting hotter and more squashed and more impatient by the second, until Anthony was done, and by now just the feeling of Anthony’s hand on his shoulder had become a button that hiked his blood pressure, his heart, his temper.

By all appearances, Anthony had enjoyed the weekend a great deal. He got on with everyone he met, he was absolutely down for talking with new people on a vast range of subjects (with absolutely no practical application towards growing the channel whatsoever) and with his usual unbounded enthusiasm he seemed happy to keep going for as long as the con lasted.

Which wouldn’t be for that much longer. The hall was crowded now, sure, but already not as bad as it had been on the previous two days. Mark could see stalls and tables beginning to clear as their owners began to pack away. Pressing towards the main door, he had a sharp and ghastly vision of the convention hall as a vast interconnected series of nodes, bright and promising, each shutting down and turning black and dead as he touched them, came into contact, even approached them at all. Each booth, each prospect, each point of hope-

(nobody is going to want to work with you.)

He couldn’t feel normal, he couldn’t relax for a second, when on the one side the enormous thundercloud of dread loomed and on the other… something nobody here could understand, something he barely understood, something that lurked at the bottom of his stomach like a squishy leaden bowling-ball, the part of him that whispered that he really was just torturing himself for no reason, because what he had been granted out of the blue was, could be, his miracle. That it had been pointless coming here at all, that he was wasting time, wasting precious time not just ditching any other blighted and unreliable possibility and reaching for it with grateful hands-

“Mark!”

Unaware up until that moment that he’d stopped dead in the heaving crowd, Mark started and looked back as Anthony shouldered through the general stream of people, a small, willowy splotch of red flannel and concern. He felt Anthony’s hand on his shoulder again, guiding, steering him forwards and sharply left into a faster-moving stream of people that quickly swallowed them both and spat them out on the other side of the main doors. He wasn’t even aware of how much he’d just wanted the fresher air outside the hall until they were out in the gigantic hub of a lobby, the atmosphere so much lighter and cooler just from the fewer bodies and the bigger space, the vaulted metal-and-glass ceiling lined with great sheets of striped tarpaulins like a vast circus tent, shaded against the fading July sun.

He gulped several big breaths, realised his eyes were watering from the heat in them, the blur of colours and the crazy nimbus around each far-distant light, and angrily dragged his glasses from his face, looking down to clean them on his T-shirt as Anthony arrived by his side.

“Hey, you just dis- are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” said Mark, putting on his usual wry, flat, deadpan tone with difficulty, like a familiar sweater that suddenly felt too small. “You sure you’re done? You didn’t have any more hilarious cat stories to tell them? ‘Cause you all seemed to be getting on great.”

“Uh… yeah? They seemed like cool guys.” Anthony never usually minded Mark’s sarcasm, but finding the sharp end of it directed so pointedly towards himself clearly threw him. He shrugged, uncomfortably.

Good, thought Mark. Be uncomfortable. The thought wormed sharp and slimy through the back of his head, and it left him feeling ashamed. He didn’t want Anthony to be miserable just because he was, as if making Anthony feel awkward or hurt could make him feel any better about himself. He wasn’t that shitty a friend.

At least, he didn’t want to be.

Anthony looked down, shuffling through his bulging paper bag full of garbage, the thing he’d been stuffing every sheet, pamphlet, sticker and card he’d collected the whole weekend into as if it was as big as a lending library. He pulled out a couple of stickers from the top. “Here, they gave us a couple of these.”

Mark took the stickers. They were the window-clinger kind, for cars. He didn’t want to put any stickers on his car. They would be a pain in the ass to peel off, if-

(when)

-he had to sell it.

“Thanks, Anthony. Using my car to advertise someone else’s YouTube channel instead of our own, that’s a really proactive move there. Real four-D chess strats.”

“I, um… I just thought they’d look neat.”

“Yeah,” sighed Mark. “I know. Come on, let’s go find somewhere to sit.”

Even though it was getting towards evening, there weren’t too many people in the food court seating area, and half of the kiosks still had their metal hatches pulled down. At a long, near-empty table, sticky and spotted from a day of crumbs and wipe-downs, Mark dropped into a chair across from Anthony, always easy to spot in his bright red-check flannel, who was already halfway down a container of loaded chilli wedges.

He shrugged his backpack into the darkness under his feet and back-kicked it under his chair, and set his styrofoam carton on the table. Following the trend of the whole weekend, he hadn’t had as much luck with the food options as Anthony, whose potato wedges looked pretty good, apart from the whole ‘drenched in meat’ thing. His vegetarian lasagna looked like a slab of undercooked doormat in half an inch of thin red soup.

There were no real quiet places anywhere in the hall, but the food court was at least a little quieter, only a couple of other people at this table, eating alone. Mark tried to let himself relax, as much as he could, forcing himself to untense joint by joint as if his skeleton was an IKEA diagram strictly controlled by his mind, but only got about as far as his elbows before giving up.

Anthony grinned at him. Mark attempted to smile back, didn’t point out that he had a speck of chilli cheese on the tip of his nose, and ate a couple of bites of lasagna. The best that could be said about it was that it held no surprises- it tasted exactly how it looked. His phone buzzed, and he checked it hurriedly, trying to look preoccupied enough to dodge any conversation, to at least catch ten minutes worth of peace and silence while they ate.

He got maybe two minutes, because by then Anthony had wolfed down enough chilli to have taken the edge off his appetite, and wanted to talk.

“What happened back there, anyway? I just looked round and you were gone.”

Mark shrugged. “They weren’t going to give us anything,” he said. “Before you came over, I managed to give them our card, but really, I could just kind of tell they weren’t going to bite, so, like…”

With some trouble, he could make himself see that what had just happened wasn’t Anthony’s fault. He had known those guys weren’t interested, just like all the others. He’d known it in his gut before Anthony had even shown up, and with just a little distance he could see that clearly and admit it, and know that it wasn’t fair for him to put the blame on Anthony at all-

“Wait, that’s why you were talking to them?”

-for almost five seconds.

“Yes,” said Mark, trying to keep his voice, down, for all that it mattered. “Yes, Anthony, that is why I was trying to talk to them, before you-”

“But they’re nothing to do with our channel!” Anthony looked genuinely confused. “They do 3D print projects, they do that ASMR printing thing-”

“I know, what they do, Anthony,” said Mark, barbing every comma as if it was a physical thing, something pointy he could flick against Anthony’s forehead. “It doesn’t matter, they get two hundred K views per video, we could do something-”

“Come on, Mark,” Anthony drooped back in his chair, rubbing his face, obliterating the chilli cheese with his palm and pushing his curly mop of hair out of the way. His legs slid forwards on the tiles and his heels bumped into Mark’s toes. Mark pulled back and tucked his legs under his chair like a curling bug, hooking both feet tightly around its front legs. “You’ve been doing this the whole weekend, the mobile game people, the wallet people, the deodorant people, the freaking- weird pillow things people-”

“You think we can just wait for someone to come to us? That’s not how it works-”

“This isn’t how it works, Mark,” said Anthony. Now he leaned forwards, pushing his chilli to the side, all earnestness, his freckly face an open book urging Mark to hear him. “I’m just being realistic. We’re a really small channel, we don’t need sponsorships, it’s okay if none of these guys want to work with us yet. Maybe if we get bigger it’ll happen, fine, but you can’t force it, you’re just making-”

“When are we going to get bigger, Anthony? When? How long? When is our first sponsor going to come along and ask us? Another six months?”

“Maybe-”

“A year? Two years? I don’t have-”

“Maybe not at all!”

“-I don’t have that kind of time!”

Mark had almost yelled over his friend, but he’d heard him perfectly well. Although he knew exactly what Anthony meant, although it was only echoing his own thoughts, the words still stopped him dead.

“Maybe never,” said Anthony, quieter. “Look, you know I love our stuff, I love the channel, I’d love it if it got as big as those ASMR guys one day, are you kidding? But I’d be fine if we never got any more subscribers than we already have, I’d do it if we got like three views a video. It’s just supposed to be for fun, Mark! Remember the first time we uploaded and we got like, twenty views? We got pizza to celebrate!”

“That’s… that was different.” Mark did remember, and the memory made his throat tighten and his eyes prickle. It didn’t feel like a long time ago. The summer they started the channel, leapt into making videos as soon as term ended. That summer, back when his dad was only normal-crazy, back when Theo’s acceptance letter was stuck right on the front of the fridge all month, back when the thing that sucked the most in the world was the prospect of having to miss the second half of summer for some stupid family cruise.

That summer. Before everything went to shit.

Anthony pushed a finger against the smeary tabletop, drawing a big invisible circle, tapping a small dot next to it. “We have to think of it like, there’s hundreds and thousands of people here who have a channel, and you know it’s only a tiny, tiny percent of a percent that ever get big enough to get sponsorships and stuff. You know that. We were never doing this for sponsorships. I mean, I’m not, and- we’re on the same page, right? This is like when you wanted to do that video reading negative comments-”

“Okay, that? That stuff works. People love hate-comment videos. We’d easily get twice as many views as our last video, and we wouldn’t even have to write a script-”

“We don’t even get hate-comments- we’ve had like, one! Even if we did get a bunch for some reason, why would we even want to focus on that shit?” That’s just going to make it seem like we don’t care about the people leaving us good comments, and then we’d just look like assholes!”

“We don’t have to wait for real ones.I could make some fake accounts, or- or something. Who cares what we look like-”

“I do,” said Anthony. “And so do you, Mark.”

He sat back, as if he’d made a really good point, and gave Mark his best knowing look, which made him look about as sly and full of deep psychological understanding as a first-grader’s spelling primer.

“I know you, and I know the channel means way too much to you, for you to really want to screw it up like that just for a bunch of views.”

(It’s not about what I WANT!!)

In the real world, where screaming at the top of one’s lungs is unacceptable mealtime behaviour, Mark swallowed and looked down at his lasagna.

“It’s not like that’s why we’re here,” said Anthony. “This was just supposed to be fun. I mean… it was supposed to be.”

His tone of voice made Mark look up, quickly. Anthony was still watching him, and he looked worried. Not just worried, but uncertain, sympathetic. Mark felt his stomach lurch. He knew that look, because he’d found himself on the receiving end of it a lot lately, from a lot of different people, all for mostly the same reason. He hated it. He hated the pity, the pointlessness of it, the unwanted obligation of knowing someone felt bad for him when he never asked them to, wouldn’t ask them to, because they couldn’t do a single thing to help. Seeing it in Anthony’s guileless hazel eyes was worse than seeing it in the face of a stranger, because-

(he could help he just doesn’t want to)

-it cut deeper, somehow. Mark shut his eyes hard for a second. Hard white light, clean surfaces, the pervasive smell of disinfectants and sickness and waiting, and the voice, thin and drowsy and blurry with sleep and painkillers, but the same, the same well-loved voice-

(It sounds great, honey. You two go have a good time. You’ll have fun.)

“Sure,” said Mark, to his lasagna. “Fun.”

There was a short silence. Anthony clearly wanted to say more, probably to the same purpose, but he knew Mark well enough to recognize when he was being shut down. He shifted uncertainly in his seat, picking at a bit of cracked decal on the front of his t-shirt. Mark picked up his spork again.

“You know,” he said, casually, drawing small deliberate lines across the top layer of his gross lasagna, just like someone might do when they were absolutely unbothered and totally not trying to force the issue, absolutely not so wound up to the point that their usual sharp, smooth-running voice was fracturing into bits and pieces of sentences like grammatical shrapnel, “if you ever felt like- you were kind of done with this whole thing, with the- the channel, I’d completely understand. It’s been a... stressful weekend, right? It hasn’t really worked out like we wanted it to, and I can tell you’re not really into it, I... I wouldn’t be mad.”

He coughed, poking holes in the lasagna like he was trying to seed a miniature lawn. He hadn’t even eaten three bites, but it felt like it was stuck in a big ball in his throat.

“If- if you were feeling like, ‘You know what, I’m over this stupid YouTube thing, but I don’t want to disappoint Mark!’ I’d get it. Really, you wouldn’t be disappointing me, or- letting anybody down, I’d be- I’d be fine with just- running it on my own.”

He looked up, barely daring to hope. “If that’s how you were feeling... you could hundred-percent just tell me.”

Anthony leaned across the table, putting a hand on Mark’s arm, stopping the nervous movement of the spork mid-jab. His face was encouraging, wholly sincere.

“Mark,” he said, with serious emphasis, “I love our channel. I’m never going to be ‘done.’ I’ve got you, buddy. You don’t have to worry about me- I am never gonna just leave you to do it on your own. Okay?”

Mark looked at him, helplessly. Anthony smiled, his beautiful Anthony smile, nothing but sunshine and freckles, a smudge of chilli cheese and a total absence of doubt. He squeezed Mark’s arm, gently.

“We’ve had a long day,” he said. “I’m gonna go back to the room, get some packing done. Take your time, okay?”

And with that, and another quick, reassuring grin, he grabbed his raggedy paper bag and the rest of his chilli, and was gone.

Mark sat there for a little while as if he’d been hit with something heavy around the back of the head, looking at the place where Anthony had been. After a moment or two, he screwed his eyes very tightly shut, jabbed his spork into his lasagna so it stuck there like an upright little sail, put his face down in his hands and made a noise like a high, muffled nearly-silent scream.

#dftm #don't feed the muse #muse arg #alex bale #mark mayhew #anthony williams #my writing #happy christmas eve c:

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