Excerpt: Archer's Velvet

I have lived as a phantom for fourteen years, thriving in the shadows cast by other people’s spotlights. Like any successful ghostwriter, I have a specialty; industry insiders know me as “The Finisher.” I wouldn’t expect you to know my name, and that’s the whole idea. You probably think the brand sounds macabre, and you wouldn’t be wrong when you consider that my job demands that I speak for the dead. When an author’s life ends before his or her Magnum Opus—and it happens more often than you might think—it is my duty to answer the calls of frantic agents or family members looking for someone who can sew up the gaping literary holes their recently departed meal tickets left behind. Sadly, my most recent commission has opened a wide precipice in my own life, courtesy of bestselling author Cam Harper’s death and the burden of finishing the final volume in his wildly popular Archer Broadleaf series. Following Cam’s suicide, I waited a week for the inevitable phone call from Aminah Bremerton, his agent in New York. Broadleaf had been Cam’s baby, and he would entrust it to none other than his best friend, or as he had once liked to call me with an ironic wink, his “Work Wife.”
Cam hadn’t trusted me with the knowledge of his impending date with the Golden Gate Bridge and the stormy San Francisco Bay below. His lover, Webster Proul, had brought that bit of information to me instead, along with news that Cam had recently received an AIDS diagnosis. Webster was a bland but very sweet man—as far as corporate attorneys go anyway—and I felt for his loss. Although he claimed he hadn’t known of Cam’s intentions, his constantly averted eyes betrayed him. Even if he hadn’t had explicit knowledge, he was the only one other than me who had spent years battling Cam’s personal demons. That and he had read Cam’s books. Webster deftly executed Cam’s estate and made all of the other arrangements, despite the obvious pain it caused him and my offer to help in any way I could. The two had lived discreetly in spite of all the attention Cam garnered from his millions of adoring fans. Though talk of his homosexuality dogged him from the day the first Archer Broadleaf novel hit shelves, it was never cruel and it didn’t take away from the series’ success. Writers seem to get a bigger pass than most for their unique or even eccentric behaviors. In fact, I believe people almost come to expect it and are even disappointed in the mundane.
Suicide had always been a romantic notion for Cam. A central theme of the Archer Broadleaf books, it had garnered him much controversy. The story’s protagonist, who bears the series’ name, follows a demise almost identical Cam’s own. Only after he plummets the two hundred feet into the icy water, he enters a treacherous trans-dimensional universe where he is forced to re-live different versions of his life, unaware of his previous ones. Cam carefully wove each story into the ones before it so that the reader got a sense of continuity between Archer’s previous lives and his ultimate destiny. Each plot presents Archer with myriad choices in varying historical periods, all of which lead to the same self-destructive fate. Even though it is the result of different choices, Archer’s suicide is a constant thread throughout all of the novels, and each death opens the gateway into the proceeding adventure. Readers know about his impending death, but the circumstances leading to each outcome are different, and each story holds the promise that Archer’s unfortunate cycle of life and death will end. The first book was a smash hit, and each one that followed capitalized on that success. It was all proof of a story concept Cam had envisioned one night as we sat on my back porch with our respective drinks in hand—vodka tonic for me and straight up Red Bull for him—that readers can still enjoy a good story even if they know how exactly how it’s going to end. “People put too much stock into surprises,” he had told me. “There is nothing more boring than a beautiful painting covered with a piece of linen. I bet if you uncovered it, you’d find even more surprises exploring the textures and brush strokes. Finding the theme and uncovering the underlying meanings within the imagery is where you get your suspense.”
I smiled and nodded, letting Cam think aloud without interruption, as he often preferred to do when he was hot on the trail of a new idea. At this stage of the game, I was always the passive wall off which he’d bounce his ideas like tennis balls. He’d then turn to look at me with his wicked grin and ask me how I was coming along with my own work in progress. If it had been anyone else, I would have felt annoyed, but with Cam, it was easy enough to throw a punch into his shoulder and tell the truth: “No First Reader of yours has time for a writing career.” Indeed, I still had aspirations of my own, and occasionally the envy of Cam’s success would hit me when I thought about my four unfinished manuscripts sitting dormant on my laptop, but when I reminded myself that I had been key to his success and that he knew this very well, the green pigment would fade from my skin.
There were six books in the Archer Broadleaf cannon, with Cam’s intent to finish with the seventh. No one but his inner-circle knew this, but Cam not only thought it was a good number to end on, but he also was aching to start something new. His readers were voracious, and they devoted entire internet communities to discuss whether Broadleaf would choose to either live at the end or die for good, what the consequences of either outcome would be, and whether it all boiled down to fate or choice in the end. The debates were lively. Spiritual and non-spiritual readers alike from every corner of the planet lauded the series, in spite of its taboo subject matter. Was the suicidal Archer Broadleaf a hero or a coward? That central question had helped shoot Cam Harper into superstardom, notoriety, and a television series based on the book still in development with Fox.
When Winston called me with the news of Cam’s death, it seemed to me that anyone who was familiar with Cam’s books and privy to his recent medical misfortune would have been waiting at the Golden Gate Bridge for Cam to show up before he even thought of it himself. After all, it was the site of Archer Broadleaf’s very first suicide in Archer Falls, and the bridge had always been a strong motif in Cam’s work. Nevertheless, Winston Proul had merely respected his lover’s art, and it would have been a stretch to call him a fan. Perhaps he just didn’t see between the lines the same way I and millions of his fans did. If he had known, it may have prevented the tragedies that followed Cam’s death. As of this writing, there have been at least four reported copycat suicide attempts of bereaved fans, one of which was successful. As I write this, police are patrolling the bridge while the state works to pass funding for the Gate’s long-needed suicide barrier. I think it’s that ghastly domino effect that haunts Winston Proul, more so than the suicide of his troubled lover and my dearest friend.
A lot has happened in the week since Cam’s bloated, partially eaten (by fish?) body washed up on Angel Island, making him the most famous Golden Gate jumper of all time. Aminah Bremerton sent me a thick parcel containing the notebooks and other miscellany on what Cam had tentatively entitled Archer’s Velvet. I decided to begin keeping a chronicle not only as a way to track of developments as they come, but also to anchor myself to this existential riverbed, where a current of strange events seems determined to sweep me off my feet and carry me to a place not even a literary chameleon like me can imagine.
As a finisher, every project requires me to give up a little bit of myself and to slip into someone’s recently abandoned skin, the way a hermit crab takes over a the shell once inhabited by a long-departed conch. I usually spend the first couple of weeks just researching the writer. This is easier if the person in question hasn’t passed away yet. I am often commissioned by authors suffering from long-term illnesses, who lack family with the writer’s gene, and who have time to get all of the affairs of their stories in order so that when they die, they know their work is in capable hands. My research ensures that I am able to do more than just mimic their ways with words; I can become them for the duration of the time it takes to complete their life’s final masterpiece. I eat the way they do. I sleep the way they do. I write during their most productive hours—some are night owls and others are up and writing with the coming dawn. I think that perhaps this lifestyle has rendered my own career stagnant. I don’t know whether I am writing as myself or some fantasy scribbler long in his grave.
Having known Cam almost better than I know myself, I assumed this task would be easy. I had been performing first edits on his stories since the days when he was floating adrift in countless rejection slips and I, like him, had notions of becoming a successful author under my given name. I took him under my wing and helped cure him of his bad habits and helped reinforce the good ones. I helped ensure that his work contained an emotional core rather than simply an elaborate plot. In turn, he also evaluated my work and helped sharpen my fuzzy, nebulous visions into piercing lines of action, and together we made quite the team. We even briefly co-edited our own literary journal, The Spinning Compass, until our burgeoning careers took us in different directions. I got married and I started my own freelancing company, and he had finally landed his first agent and book deal for his first novel, Carefully Chosen Words. Through it all, we were in constant contact, acting as one another’s muses, although secretly I think there was a bit of competition beneath the surface that kept us motivated as well. I suspect that Cam felt relieved when my career began to segue into ghostwriting. He always did crave more of the spotlight, and no one can say they worked harder than he did to get it. It was because of this that I never resented him.
Carefully Chosen Words received decent to middling reviews from mid-level papers and blogs, but his agent failed to get paperback rights, and the book never made him a dime beyond his paltry advance, which he had to supplement with teaching work just to eat and afford his partying lifestyle. Cam had unconventional views regarding relationships and flitted regularly between partners and exploits, something that made his diagnosis of AIDS less than shocking. The book went briefly back into print following his break out success with Archer Falls, but he never liked to speak about it. I remember his final words on the topic of Carefully Chosen Words being, “Burn every copy of it you find. I have.” He never was the retrospective kind.
So it was with twenty years of experience with my dear friend’s talents and neuroses in mind that I dove into the task of finishing Archer’s Velvet, of which—according to his agent—he had only written one-third. I started by going over his supplemental material, which filled two thumb drives and more than a dozen spiral notebooks and folders. All of it was carefully organized and labeled up through the materials on Archer’s Velvet, and then it all fell apart. Although Cam didn’t care for plotting his stories ahead of time, he kept very detailed character lists and biographies. Instead of outlines, he maintained historical timelines containing bullet summaries of important plot points along the entire Archer Broadleaf universe as well as careful and thorough research on exotic locales featured in the series, many of which he traveled to himself. For book five, Archer’s Box, where Broadleaf actually lived and died as a 14th century Welsh noblewoman, he spent over a month in the Wales countryside sleeping in drafty old castles. He caught ill over there and nearly died of food poisoning from eating poorly cooked mutton. When he came home, he was missing thirty pounds on his already slim frame, and I could barely stand the sight of him.
There was no such research for Archer’s Velvet. The detailed character bios and setting information is missing entirely. There is no electronic data at all on the novel except the one-hundred fifty pages of rough draft manuscript that I have yet to read and am in fact afraid to. To call the supplemental material on this novel “notes” would be a stretch for even the most free-form writer. Instead of words, there are curious glyphs and symbols scattered haphazardly across the pages and in the margins. On several pages are diagrams with squiggly lines and mountains that almost resemble a map, but with no other discernible markings. Another notebook consists entirely of sketches and designs for what look like ballistic weapons and flying machines that remind me somewhat the engineering schematics of Leonardo Di Vinci.
Amid this plethora of nearly schizophrenic records, I have discovered patterns in the chaos that point to a very troubled mind, one that make me doubt this so-called AIDS diagnosis. A check into his medical records will bear that out, but my heart already tells me that it wasn’t fear of an AIDS-related death that sent Cam spiraling plummeting into the San Francisco Bay on a cold October morning.
The most puzzling clue is something that points to a pattern in the chaos. It is a name aof a person—Asa Mars—whom Cam seems to have referred to as his muse for not only this story, but for the entire Archer Broadleaf series. I do not know who Asa Mars is, but I intend to find out. Only he can help me understand Cam’s apparent madness, and perhaps even help abate my own.