THE STORY SO FAR: Fabian Rourke and Robert River, old high school buddies, have reunited because Fabian wants Robert to work for him at Council Corps, a mysterious company that has a hand in world and national affairs.
Fabian Rourke was so glad to leave Wholesome High School.
He graduated and ran away, never to look back. His departure was strange and unexpected-- people assumed he was going to go off to college and become a lawyer or a doctor, or maybe even a writer or a journalist.
There were rumors of why he left Wholesome and fled to the cultural Mecca of Los Angeles: problems at home, issues he was dealing with, mysterious allusions to dysfunction... but Fabian never confided in his friends about anything.
Robert River never before felt one ounce of guilt for not asking Fabian about his private life, but now that he was working for his old friend in a decidedly sudden fashion, he now wished he knew what made Fabian Rourke tick.
And Fabian wasn't going to give any easy answers.
Of course, Fabian always knew the story, because it pretty much motivated him in every facet of his new life as a Mover, the kind of person who makes things happen behind the scenes.
Fabian lived as a bohemian for a while, holed up in crash pads in Hollywood and Silver Lake, smoking opium and writing reams and reams of unpublished manifestos and short stories. What he did for work is anybody's guess. In rare interviews Fabian had intimated that he'd performed such menial tasks as telemarketing and newspaper subscriptions before he made it big.
There was a phase when he was managing a rock band known as Spooky Electric. They were a Prince cover band. The lead singer had plastic surgery done on his face so that he could further resemble Prince. After two years of toiling in L.A. clubs, Spooky Electric called it quits. But it was during this brief foray into music that Fabian met Drake Nimbus, the man who ended up heading his sonic operations at Council Corps.
Fabian and Drake pooled their money together and started up a small nightclub on the Sunset Strip called The Opener. They didn't own the space; rather, they rented out another, better known club on Tuesdays and Fridays. They had all sorts of acts playing at The Opener: hair metal, thrash, skate punk, old school rap, pre-techno dance, freestyle dance, and Latin dance. Later on they branched out into all-ages Goth nights and once they even sponsored a White Pride Night, which led to an ugly confrontation outside of the club and the eventual draining of The Opener's resources, thanks to numerous lawsuits that arose from the ill-fated booking.
Within months, The Opener had closed in an inglorious haze.
Fabian caught a lot of flak for putting up the money to sponsor an evening of neo-Nazi hardcore groups and skinheads, but Fabian didn't care-- he made a lot of money that night, even if he had to put it all back into "cleaning up the mess", as he liked to put it.
Years later, Drake Nimbus finally understood what Fabian's intention had been that night: to exploit a cause that he detested by embracing it. The experiment had failed because Fabian and Drake hadn't taken into account the controversy that such an event would generate, but Fabian still wanted to try the same type of thing on different levels.
Soon, Fabian had Drake in a sound lab, coming up with ways to "sonically assault" crowds of unsuspecting people, while Fabian started making money sponsoring conservative group meetings and right-wing lobbyist conventions. On the surface, it seemed that Fabian had gone mad, switching sides like Daniel Lazarus, the former Black Panther who sold out and went publicly Republican.
But Drake started to see the subversiveness of Fabian's plans.
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Fabian Rourke was so glad to leave the town of Wholesome.
Gone was the small town hypocrisy, the religiously laced undercurrent that caused ordinary folk to turn mean and nasty, parading sanctimonious self-righteousness on the outside in order to hide the repugnance and wickedness of their hearts. At least in the Big City, there was no mistaking the calculation and greed that drove everyone to act like animals. It was purer than in Wholesome, where the sickness crawled underneath the radar and never reared its ugly head above the surface.
When Fabian and Drake were recruited by Council Corps scouts to join the organization, the first thing Fabian did was go back to Wholesome and "clean up the mess".
Local politicians were suddenly being outed in the newspapers, and since most of those who were outed had been hardline anti-gay legislative figureheads, they proved to be most embarrassing.
A few child-porn rings were busted, featuring prominent community pillars like Little League coaches and well-respected policeman. Priests and businessmen were suddenly being arrested with alarming frequency, usually in connection with such shady dealings as violating the Mann Act or purchasing cocaine off the streets.
The most surprising turn of events, however, was when an English teacher from Wholesome High voluntarily turned himself in to the authorities, tearfully alleging that he had been sexually involved with at least 30 female students in the ten years he had been teaching at the high school.
The shock from this news sent reverberations throughout the town of Wholesome, and soon many women and girls were coming forward to corroborate this teacher's claims. Many of the women said they never told a soul about his behavior because they knew that no one would believe them if they spoke out.
But what the newspapers and the local press couldn't figure out was why the teacher turned himself in. The suspect himself never explained his decision, other than to say during a press conference that "what [he] did was wrong, and it has been on [his] conscience for a decade..."
While the news was splashing the lurid details of this scandal all over the front pages, very little attention was paid to the Wholesome High ten year reunion that was taking place that week. A lot of former students were in town for the reunion, but most of those who attened had never left the town to begin with.
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Fabian Rourke was so glad to be returning to Wholesome.
Normally, he abhorred things like high school reunions, because he never really liked anyone in high school, save for his small group of friends.
Ironically enough, none of his old friends were going to the reunion. Kelly Paper flat out refused when fabian called her and asked her if she was going; so did Rachel Edison; Tom Fargo could not be located at the time and it was safe to assume that he didn't have any inkling of going back; and Brian and Robert were nowhere to be found.
Thus, there was no real reason for Fabian Rourke to return to Wholesome.
No reason at all.
If you ever find a copy of the program for the Wholesome High School Ten Year Class Reunion, you might notice that Fabian Rourke's name is not on the list of attendees.
And yet, he was there. Drake Nimbus can verify this-- he was with him when they drove out to the small farm town and set up their van outside of the school auditorium.
With their surveillance cameras and sound equipment, they were having a blast, trying out their sound guns and frequency modulators on unsuspecting subjects.
Drake and Fabian, to make the activity more interesting, placved bets on what a person might do if they were unknowingly subjected to, say, high-pitch soundwaves that were undetectable to the ear but still able to influence brain chemistry.
Fabian lost $50 to Drake when one test subject failed to jump up in the air upon being blasted with a sound bullet that could deafen a dog. Instead, the subject went into an epileptic seizure and twitched on the ground until an ambulance was summoned.
The man who was subjected to this treatment was a guy who used to be the big bully in school, a burly kid named Doug Petit. Fabian remembered him as the guy who broke his nose in 9th grade. The reason? None was ever given. But Fabian knew why Doug punched him out that day.
Because he could.
And so, that's why Fabian induced a grand mal seizure in Doug Petit that night, ten years later... because he could.
When Drake and Fabian drove home that night, they considered themselves lucky to be part of Council Corps, making changes and addressing the wrongs that had been committed in the world, but not the world that others knew of-- this was a shadow world they were existing in now, one that never spilled over into the overt world of appearances and images.
And yet, it seemed to them that their new purpose in life was to merge the Overt and the Shadow.
They were thrilled.
CHAPTER EIGHT: Whenever I feel like it...
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