Blatant Lies

 In the graveyard there was a familiar song playing as Alec waded through the grass and the stones towards Prince. He saw them from a distance lingering around the plot with bottles of vodka and lighting something on fire with matches.
  “Hey!” he shouted bolting towards them and after a collective glance they scattered in all directions, dropping whatever they were holding and shouting to each other to meet somewhere he couldn’t hear. As they ran out of sight he found himself standing over a small pile of junk: empty to half-full bottles of booze, ashes, and torched remains of paper planes. He turned off the stereo playing that Backstreet Boys track and took out the CD to examine it. It simply said “PRINCE.” On his headstone he saw more tags, wishes and protestations. Names and initials had been written in lipstick and pieces of paper had been stuck to it with both scotch and duct tape. He pulled one off written in sloppy cursive,
  “would have known you better. i would have been your suicide girl. yor hero was a mystery to me but i think i understand him when i feel like i wanna just set mysef on fire like he did to hollywood. anyway prince u don’t know how much a change you gonna make. i’m gonna get a car and leave because it would be better to die like”
  Alec tossed it away feeling sick to his stomach. He stared at the sky but the sky was too bright from the sun, so he looked down at the stone in regretful embarrassment of its condition.
  “1979-2010”
  In the months that had passed he had cleaned out every scrap of paper from Prince’s office and, with little hope hope, searched through every one of them for something to contradict what he couldn’t accept. Prince’s apartment had been repossessed and Alec had been the only person to receive all of his worldly possessions. Fifty bottles of unquaffed hard liquor still dominated Alec’s kitchen and half of his studio had been covered with bizarre antiquities, including a gorilla suit that smelled of vomit and the key to a post office box that had held nothing but naked pictures of women Prince had slept with throughout his life. Discovering nothing revelatory, Alec had figured out only one way to get an answer to the question of whether or not his friend had died on purpose or not.
  When his phone met an incoming call he let it buzz a few times before answering. The voice of Rubrick’s secretary chimed,
  “Mr. Careful? Are you there Mr. Careful?”
  “That’s me.”
  “Mr. Rubrick has a moment regarding the message you left with me.”
  “Connect us, will you?”
  *click*
  “Mr. Careful!” Rubrick belted out as if charmed, “Careful, I wish you’d been here to see the book off. To be honest, I didn’t have much hopes for it but you must understand that it was astounding. There’s talk of a screenplay in the works, the thing … it’s gone viral.”
  “This isn’t what I called you about.”
  “No, but I didn’t think you were serious. You can’t still expect me to validate any copyright or ownership requests. To be honest, I’m a bit stunned you didn’t accept my invitation to the release party.”
  “I’m stunned you figured you had the right to invite me.”
 ”Look, Alec … I’m going to call you Alec. You have to understand that Prince’s book,  Alec, that work, it doesn’t belong to me, to you, to anyone. There is no more question about this. Whatever proof you have that you can take to court would be stomping on Prince’s corpse.”
  “That would be redundant. I’m going to take it to court and the book is going to be out of your hands.”
  “Alec-” Rubrick paused and there was muttering as he spoke to someone else in the room before returning,”-Alec you’re not … you don’t have the means. Leave it alone. I’ve consulted my own legal assistants and there’s nothing you can do in court, no matter what you think you have there. I’m begging you, for everyone’s sake and especially the readers to just let the damn thing exist!”
  “I need to talk to you as a human being,” Alec felt his voice cracking as he spoke, “This conversation can’t continue like this. I need to ask you something as one man to another.”
  Rubrick sucked in his breath before answering, “Mr. Careful? Are you all right?”
  “Alec. Go ahead and call me Alec.”
  “Okay, Alec, are you … I mean, I can’t talk for long unless it’s related to-“
  “Did you murder him?”
  “No,” Rubrick said, followed by a long pause on the line that seemed to stretch out across the graveyard, a tangible blanket of temporal stasis. In that field of blank time Alec saw Prince’s tombstone besides his mother’s and his father’s and beneath the three boxes containing nothing but ash and dead air. He felt watched by eyes from a great distance: not Prince’s, who he believed was dead and obliterated by that, but the eyes of many millions of human beings focused in on the pile of empty vodka bottles and paper trash those teenagers had dumped across his plot. He felt their gaze disassembling and deconstructing the last physical remains of a man he had known and loved and reassembling them into an immaterial simulacrum, a sort of phantom Prince that pranced across the grasses throwing his arms wide to welcome them to the mysterious and compelling depths of his suicide sideshow. The studio audience, the world, applauded him as he fired a bullet through his brain again and again and gasped in amazement as the bloody mess of his conscious mind, his compassion and fear, formed a the silhouette of a sobbing and melodramatic face fit for a soap opera.
  “No, I didn’t murder Prince, Alec. It wasn’t like that. You … must understand that he wanted very badly for his book to be published.”
  Croaking, Alec asked, “You spoke with him?”
  “Of course I did. I’d read the book and I thought it was brilliant, but I knew that it couldn’t sell on its own. Prince couldn’t get famous off of it, not like he’d told me he wanted to be. I told him his royalties wouldn’t be terrible by any means, of course, but … we had a talk, and …”
  Rubrick had trailed off and Alec heard more mumbling on the line. Desperate, he screamed into the phone,
  “And WHAT, RUBRICK. WHAT. FINISH YOUR SENTENCE.”
  “I … have to go. Business matters.”
  There was a click to dead air and Alec’s phone fell to the dirt. In the breezy silence of the grassy fields of the long dead, surrounded by sunlight and those little puff balls that one may catch and wish upon, Alec, sobbing, began to kick at the loam beneath his feet. With every stomp of his heel he let loose another growl until he was screaming in a falsetto that cracked and broke apart, too raw to sustain. He kicked a bottle and sent it spinning into a gravestone where it shattered into pieces. He kicked at the paper scraps and kicked the grass until he had torn great chunks out of it to expose the raw earth beneath. Worms fled from the warm sunlight back into the dampness of their home as he fell to the ground and broke down completely.

FIN