Delia met with Rexton in the hospital weeks before her show and convinced him to agree to appear as a guest. There she presented him with all the evidence we had gathered, of him orchestrating the campaign against her, his sock-puppet accounts all over social media, the flash mob organized by his fans, the attacks from his army of trolls.
Bang to rights.
He had been blissfully unaware of the counter-campaign we had waged on Delia’s behalf, since he didn’t frequent the message boards where they discussed what they did to her. He didn’t know that they had been gradually dropping off with only a few impotent hangers-on left. He was still in the dark about how everything had come to pass. When he tried to file a complaint with his publishers, they told him that they never employed anyone named Julia even as an intern, and I didn’t exist as a member of the editorial department.
The afternoon it aired, everyone at the office stopped to watch Delia, where she did her show on cyberbullying. Disgraced novelist George Rexton was her guest. His jaw was still wired shut, so he could only sit there and grunt whenever she asked him a question. She insisted on the show going ahead rather than wait for him to fully recover. He was, in her words, the embodiment of where cyberbullies could end up.
Roger and David were back from Cape Town. Cheryl had been updating them on the case via email, sparing no detail. Roger sat down and watched Delia’s show with the rest of us to witness the fruits of our labors.
The papers had been running stories of Rexton’s suicide note and his subsequent hospitalization. “Fall of a Novelist” was the common consensus. Marcie had leaked Rexton’s history as a troll and cyberbully to some choice reporters, and they ran with it, writing profiles of a deeply dysfunctional and disturbed man. His publisher was forced to make a statement to distance themselves from him. Even Jonah Vankin, the tabloid journalist whom Clive had hit with the car months ago on the Holcomb Case, started a blog and got a decent number of hits for running tidbits about Rexton’s behavior. He even wrote about the rumors of two men in black claiming to be from a nonexistent division of the police force showing up to beat up some of the commenters.
Olivia turned to Ken and Clive.
“Guess what, chaps, you’re urban legends now!”
Ken and Clive grinned and gave her the thumbs-up.
Delia was the only one who had the whole scoop, since she had hired us to dig it all up, not to mention mold and create the current story. On the surface, her show appeared to be going for the redemptive tale of the author who behaved extremely badly and attacked her, but she forgave him and offered him a chance at penance. We all knew this was the capstone of her revenge. She ran the video of him panicking at the erasure of his novel from his computer, listed his sins to his face and the nation in meticulous, agonizing detail, all the while he couldn’t swear or rant or answer back because his jaw was wired shut. This was her payback, to utterly humiliate him on national television and completely demolish him and his image forevermore. A man who wrote books of unreconstructed macho fantasies had been exposed as an impotent misogynist and fantasist, and his sales figures were plummeting by the day. As the architect of the counterattack against him, Delia had learned well from The Art of War, indeed. Indra, the god of war and thunder, showed up in the office, enjoying the final battle being waged on Delia’s show. I tried not to look at him as he watched and applauded.
“You broke his jaw, did you?” Roger said.
“I didn’t plan it. It just happened.”
“Delia loved it,” Marcie said. “The best punch line she could have paid for. It didn’t even occur to her to ask for it.”
“That’s our Ravi.” Roger beamed. “Always comes up with that extra touch.”
I got a bonus. For punching a man. I gave that blood money to Mrs. Dhewan to cover another installment of my mother’s debt. I gave it to her nephew Nandan, didn’t stay to chat.
“Is it always like this at the firm?” Julia asked as we headed home one night after the office.
“More or less,” I said. “Though usually with a lot less punching. Still want to work there?”
“Yes.” She didn’t even hesitate. “I feel like I’m learning something about the way the world works.”
“That was how I got hooked myself.”
“And I think I need to keep an eye on you,” she said. “You’re more fragile than I thought.”
A week later, I took a day off while Julia was being trained in procedural methods by Ken, Clive, and Benjamin. It was my turn to sit with Dad while he got his treatment. Nothing to fill the void of the drip-drip-drip of the intravenous feed running into my father’s arm except talk.
“You know how you used to tell me about mahatmas?” I said. “To be righteous and do good wherever possible? And I asked what if it wasn’t possible to do good?”
“I said then try not to do any harm,” he said.
“And what if it’s a bit late for that?”
“If you get to that point, at least take responsibility for the harm you cause. Own it.”
“You know,” I said, “I think Mum and Sanjita fight over that damned wedding to cope with your condition. What better way to distract themselves from the fear and stress than to row over and over again about the nuptials.”
“Ironic,” Dad said. “Considering it’s supposed to be a joyous occasion. Oh, you know the women in our family are highly strung. Let them have their drama. It’s their way of expressing love. I just hope I live long enough to attend your sister’s wedding.”
“Honestly, Dad, you’ve always been a moody sod, but now you’re getting downright morbid.”
“Ha! Wait a few more months for the chemicals to pollute my liver. You’ll see just how morbid a man can get.”
“Not funny, Dad.”
The silence again. And that need to fill it. With what, I dreaded to think.
“Have you begun seeing things again?” Dad asked.
“How did you know?”
“Your mother said you started taking your medication again.”
Even on drugs, my father missed nothing.
“Perhaps we are a story the gods tell each other to make sense of the universe,” he said.
“As long as they just watch, I’ll try to live with it,” I said.
“The pills aren’t helping, are they?”
“If they did, the gods would go away.”
“Let me offer another view. Perhaps you were always meant to see gods. It’s the nature of shamans.”
“Dad, you can’t be serious.”
“Why not?”
“Well—we’re supposed to be rational and scientific. That’s outright mysticism.”
“Or it’s a genetically inherited mental condition. You could continue to see it like that. Your uncle Pradeep had it, too.”
“Isn’t that what killed him?”
“Alcohol killed him. We should have understood better. He was self-medicating. He thought that seeing the gods had ruined his life. When you were a child, you saw them with him. That’s why we were worried you would become like him.”
“I don’t remember that part of my childhood.”
“Pradeep treated it like he was playing a game with you. You were too young to know the difference and too young to remember. Your mother and I never forgot.”
“I thought I only started seeing the gods when I gave up the religious studies and had my breakdown.”
“Oh, no. That was just the visions coming back for the first time since your childhood.”
“So I’m not going mad so much as this is just how I am?”
“Well, are the gods telling you to murder people and do terrible things to their corpses?”
“No, thank God. They’re very much in character as the gods we know. They’re still figures of morality. Sometimes I also see little signs and portents for what’s going to happen next. Maybe it’s an expression of my intuition or anticipation of events. As for the gods, they mainly stand there observing . . . though they wear modern clothes and they have mobile phones. I think they’re tweeting to each other about me.”
My father laughed. I realized just how surreal it sounded to say that out loud and started laughing, too. It was good to have a laugh with my dad again.
“We’re going to get through this, Dad.”
“And we’re going to help you get through this, too, Ravi,” he said, patting my hand. “Now, what’s on your mind?”
“I think I just had what psychiatrists call a ‘breakthrough.’ What you just told me just filled a gap I didn’t know I had, and I understand something about my life that I hadn’t before.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” said Dad. “You might just be losing your mind after all.”