lise: This scene, we wrote together I think, in emails back and forth while I was on vacation.

kel: There were little pieces of it that had been lying around since the beginning.

 

JC calls every night for five nights to talk about constellations and Chinese cooking and a basket weaving class that he's thinking of taking. It's almost normal, it's almost like JC's on the other bus and they're keeping themselves entertained while Justin and Chris and Joey push each other around in front of the XBox.

On the sixth night, JC says, "I think you should come over. I have, I have some things that I think you should have."

Lance says, "Sure, man," but then waits four days. Not because he's scared, he's just been busy, he talked an archivist in Munich into sending him a bunch of their old German appearances, Chris and Justin in the pool in their first house. It's way better than the stuff he found on Ebay and he's got some notes, some of it is even funny. Maybe.

On the fourth day, he changes into a fresh pair of pants and drives over to JC's house. JC's standing out in the front yard like a scarecrow when he gets there, and Lance wonders if he's been waiting all that time, but he seems to be smelling or possibly petting a hedge of roses, so maybe not.

JC waves from over by the hedge and says, "Hey, the stuff, the box, right?"

Lance nods, and sits on the steps while JC goes inside. JC's house is huge, but empty, with blank holes where furniture and the rest of the signs of a normal life should be, and so Lance waits in the almost sunshine and tugs at the cuff of his pants.

JC come back out again with a single shoe-box. "You should keep these things," he says, "I'm not -- I don't have space for them anymore." Lance thinks of JC's three guest-rooms, each of them occupied by just a chair or a garage sale coffee table. The he thinks of JC's living room, every surface covered with picture frames turned down on their faces and he just nods.

He takes the last of Justin's things from JC's outstretched arms, all cradled in a worn cardboard box. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?" JC asks.

Lance replies, "Yeah, this is just part of it," and he really believes it.

lise: Kel, since I know you're going to, explain how this story is all about what Justin left behind.

kel: No, that's not this scene, that's a couple scenes ahead.

lise: Well, okay, what I thought you were going to say is: JC thinks that by holding on to these physical representations of Justin, that they mean something. That because Justin left something behind, that means Justin is still with them.

He takes the box home and sets it next to a stack of Entertainment Weekly back issues. He watches seven German talk show appearances, seven tired performances of "I Want You Back," and makes two cups of tea. He drinks one, but pours the other out in the sink.

Then he opens the box.

It's just a shoe-box, and it's not even really full. There are six takeout menus right on top, Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Indo-Chino-Polynesian fusion cuisine.

Underneath that, there are two mix CDs, cheap CDRs in thin plastic covers. Lance recognizes these, he's got two or three somewhere in the deep recesses of his sock drawer. The stuff that the record company thought was even riskier than spoken word, low hums and thick beats that made Lance's head ache.

kel: The stuff about the German/English dictionary was one of the first snippets that Lise ever e-mailed me and it's probably one of the only random fragments that we actually remembered to incorporate as we were getting ready to post the story.

lise: I was at a friend's apartment, in Toronto, and flipping through a German dictionary - and staring back at me from a random page was those four words, one after another in succession. It was a sign.

Mixed in with that is a German/English dictionary, and Lance remembers this part, too. Justin left a German dictionary behind at JC's place right before he moved and never gave anyone his address. A couple of times, JC tried to return it but eventually it found its way onto the bookshelf and just never moved again -- JC hadn't touched it and no one else had either, but now it's here in the box.

He opens the dictionary at random, and a page falls open willingly. Words like "falter" and "fairy" stare out at him; an F page. Someone has underlined four words in succession, four little words all in a row. Lance reads them one by one.

The first one is family, '1. familie (f).' The next is famous, '1. beruhmt', then fan, 'anhanger', then finally fanatic, which is 'fanatiker' and if Lance isn't imagining things, is underlined a little more strongly than the other three.

The inside of the cover says "Justin Timberlake", which is proof of something. Lance puts it back in the box.

The next thing is a shirt, sky blue button-up, just a shirt, not even name-brand. But Lance recognizes it, because JC wore it every single time he was on television for the month after Chris disappeared. Lance didn't understand why, it never quite fit him right through the shoulders, but when he holds it up in the light, he understands why.

kel: We decided at one point that Justin used flavored condoms, and the Sandies ended up writing it into a story about six months before we got around posting this one.

lise: Which story?

kel: "The holy childhood meets its maker on a mystery hill".

Underneath the shirt is a roll of condoms, chocolate flavored. Everything else is a wash of memories, but this is new, this is something Lance didn't know before.

Justin slept with JC.

He picks up the phone and dials before he can even really think about it, because there shouldn't be anything else that Lance doesn't know and when JC actually answers for a change, Lance knows he must have planned it this way. "You never told me," he says, and waits.

JC breathes and shudders on the other side of the line, and finally says, "You know, it was nothing. He didn't even love me enough to --"

Lance thinks that if JC says anything about Justin never loving anyone like he loved Chris, he will throw the phone through the sliding glass door, and possibly himself as well. And so he says, "Shut up, don't you even -- just stop," and that's about all he can take from JC this week.

 

lise: Finally - the end of this scene is where everything blows wide open, this is where the words "love" and "Chris" are in the same sentence. That dangling line of JC's, that he didn't even love him enough to-- is one of the best lines Kel has written ever.

Those last two lines, I think are fundamental to the whole tone of the story. Because it's very much a narrative in which what isn't said ends up being what's important - negative space are the words I'm looking for - and nowhere is that highlighted more obviously than that line of JC's.

Also, the phrasing of Lance throwing his phone and himself out the sliding glass door, that's brilliance, Kel. I love that line, too, and I don't feel bad saying it since I didn't write it.

kel: My Querada homage! normally I would run and get my copy of Son of Interflux so I could transcribe the line that I'm ripping off, but I can't find it. it goes something like, "I got the idea for 'Theater of Shadows' while working on another painting. The other painting was going badly, so I threw myself through a sliding glass door. The idea for 'Theater of Shadows' became clear to me in the ride in the ambulance on the way to the hospital."

But that's maybe neither here nor there.

Lise already gave me a bad time for giving away the end of JC's line, here, so I won't torment her by elaborating on it further.

lise: No, go ahead.

kel: Man, I'm not even sure what to say. The line speaks for itself. Justin killed Chris because he loved him most intensely. there's a reason why this story sometimes gets rec'd as timbertrick but never as JuC, even though we explicitly said that Justin and JC slept together and we never ever said whether or not Justin and Chris did. Next.