ALIAS: Harvey Ludlow Volière
AGE: Twenty-Six
BIRTHPLACE: New York
NEIGHBORHOOD: Cathedral Heights
EMPLOYMENT: Biochemical Engineer (Researcher at WAB)
FACE CLAIM: Max Irons
[ tw: profanity, recreational drug use and alcohol, assault, gunshot wound, pseudocide.]
Here lies Harvey Ludlow Volière, who has grown up…
…With:
— his uncle;
— his own goddamn dick in his hand as he tries and fails to figure out what’s going on;
— two irresponsible shithead parents out of the door when he’s not more than 5, gone with the wind and a sleeve of amex black cards.
( If he asks his uncle on odd days of the month, they’re on the run from Pablo Escobar’s goons; and on even ones they’ve fucked off with the Cirque du Soleil. Every four years, mostly to spice it up, on February 29th he gets the courtesy of annoyed silence and two fingers of Deveron single malt. )
…In:
— a world full to the brim with machiavellian douchebaggery aspirations;
— a one-man spectacle of repressed abandonment issues and habitualized showmanship, with metaphorical red velvet curtains coming down never ;
— firm belief in the grave importance of bi-weekly jerk offs to the Wall Street Journal reports.
…To become:
— the financier ( of banking variety, rather than that of a french almond cake, although not to call him a snack would be an unforgivable example of defamation and slander );
— a proud valedictorian of Economics at Dartmouth;
— an otherwise all-around assault on moral and reason, volleying himself merrily across the frontlines of glorified extortion and authorized robbery.
Nearly none of the latter, of course, comes to its much expected fruition. Well, scratch that shit anyway.
Here lies Harvey Ludlow Volière, who has lived…
…Deliciously and spectacularly, snorting xanax up one of his nostrils and adderall up the other, shredding dollar bills into the parmesan on his Farro Gnocchi and living to be an absolute treat — not a burden, you watch that mouth — to society.
So he’s a jolly good fellow, there, for a while. He lives a life of shallow delight that doesn’t quite feel like enough, but suppresses that feeling masterfully — and the quiet and lonely nights of throwing his occasional chance at emotional intimacy out the door to be left alone with his stubborn solitude and dysfunction, those we won’t talk about.
He treats his studies with fervent diligence because he’s just good that way, a good would’ve-been-worth-staying-son and a good would’ve-been-easy-to-love-nephew, if only they knew him like this.
He tends to his strategically and carefully crafted social circle, surprisingly genuine in all the attachment that should’ve been calculated, really, when it comes down to it for people like him.
Everything is just very normal, in that skewed 1% kind of way.
That is, evidently, before Harvey comes into his one true inheritance:
Here lies Harvey Ludlow Volière, a Shit Magnet of The Highest and Most Unbelievable Order, who has died….
…After getting shot around the corner of the intersection between Balch Hill and East Wheelock, around friends and foes, and around a bullet lodged for a minute too long in his shoulder.
Yeah, fuck, let’s rewind.
One the night his uncle disappears, Harvey is barely 21 — stuck in his dorm with a tie inverted around his neck as a noose, balls deep in preparing to defend his thesis on income polarization, and blissfully unaware of what future holds in its store.
In the following months he learns his uncle isn’t so much dead or kidnapped or missing as he’s just willfully fucking gone, because Harvey sees the small hints left just for him, knows how these things look by now, doesn’t he, because all the magicians in the world couldn’t top his familiar intimacy with vanishing acts if they tried.
So he’s unravelling slowly, through a bullshit funeral that means fuck all if you know the truth, through properties signed over, through the momentary ruffling of the press and the subsequently unavoidable gossip.
He can handle all this, he thinks, until in his newfound belongings he stumbles on decades worth of passwords and storage unit addresses; all of them amount to a small library’s worth biochemistry research he barely understands, but can feel the buzzing of its pages regardless, the whispered importance of things buried or hidden, the endless weight behind the cutting edge magnum opus of his uncle’s stupid secretive life.
He can handle all this, he thinks, until he gets shot over it.
There’s not much he can do on his idiotic whiskey-filled night out anyway, no matter how menacing they make their demands: no secrets he can give up if he can’t comprehend what they are, and no addresses he can give up if he barely cared enough to memorize anything in the first place.
As it goes, the official story is that Harvey Volière died at 3:15 am on a Wednesday, first week of November, having nearly bled out in an ambulance and suffering complications in the OR.
What rings a little more truthful is that Harvey Volière, the relentless parasite that he is, has woken up post-surgery the next morning — and gravely slighted by the whimsical revolving door of family members throughout his youth, decided he’s still on the “early life” part of his designated wikipedia article, anyway, and did the only thing that made sense.
In the wake of dawn on the 6th of November, Harvey calls the right people and writes the right checks in an act of dramatic and shameless pseudocide, commemorating vanishment as the ultimate legacy of Volières.
Here does not lie Harvey Ludlow Volière, who has not died, because death is just too fucking good for him.
From a greedy piece of shit floating on piles of money and bankrolling nerds straight into their grand discoveries just for him to later take all significant credit for, he becomes a tragic little nerd all on his own.
In the next 5 years Harvey Volière wises up. Bounces around unsightly 4 stars hotels under fake names, briefly considers plastic surgery before rejecting it as the one crime against humanity he won’t commit, and transfers universities every year in his pursuit of a frankensteined degree in biochemical engineering, stitched together from classes completed all over.
And when he feels that just maybe, just maybe he finally has a chance to someday make some sense out of all of his uncle’s work, he moves straight to Bayfield: where they’ve vacationed every other summer throughout his adolescence, and where twenty three years ago his uncle had first started his research at University of WA.
WRITTEN BY RICHIE. SHE/HER. GMT.
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