He kept trying to write about The Story, kept failing. It wouldn't
come. But Sammy -- he knew what he wanted to say about Sammy. He typed
until they sedated him, and then typed some more when he woke up. He
had old emails to refer to. He pasted them in.
After three days of doing this, the lawyer came back. Tom Levine was
dressed in a stern suit with narrow lapels and a tie pierced with some
kind of frat pin. He wasn't much older than Death, but he made Death
feel like a little kid.
"I need to talk to you about your Internet activity," he said, sitting
down beside him. He'd brought along a salt-water taffy assortment
bought from the roadside, cut into double-helix molecules and other
odd biological forms -- an amoeba, a skeleton.
"OK?" Death said. They'd switched him to something new for the pain
that day, and given him a rocker-switch he could use to drizzle it
into his IV when it got bad. He'd hit it just before the lawyer came
to see him and now he couldn't concentrate much. Plus he wasn't used
to talking. Writing online was better. He could write something, save
it, go back and re-read it later and clean it up if it turned out he'd
gone off on a stoned ramble.
"You know we're engaged in some very high-stakes litigation here,
right, Darren?"
He hated it when people called him Darren.
"Death," he said. His toothless lisp was pathetic, like an old wino's.
"Death, OK. This high-stakes litigation needs a maximum of caution and
control. This is a fifteen-year journey that ends when we've broken
the back of the company that did this to you. It ends when we take
them for every cent, bankrupt their executives, take their summer
homes, freeze their accounts. You understand that?"
Death hadn't really understood that. It sounded pretty
tiring. Exhausting. Fifteen years. He was only nineteen now. He'd be
thirty-four, and that was only if the lawyer was estimating correctly.
"Oh," he said.
"Well, not that you're going to have to take part in fifteen years'
worth of this. It's likely we'll be done with your part in a year,
tops. But the point is that when you go online and post material
that's potentially harmful to this case --"
Death closed his eyes. He'd posted the wrong thing. This had been a
major deal when he was at Disney, what he was and wasn't allowed to
post about -- though in practice, he'd posted about everything,
sticking the private stuff in private discussions.
"Look, you can't write about the case, or anything involved with it,
that's what it comes down to. If you write about that stuff and you
say the wrong thing, you could blow this whole suit. They'd get away
clean."
Death shook his head. Not write about it at *all*?
"No," he said. "No."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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