Megabride
YOU
Draft 1 / Your suspicions stand confirmed, you have caught Mr. Famous Author in flagrante, the evidence of his plagiarism of your own far better fiction lies revealed
Draft 2 // The circle is closed at last, you have in your unyielding grip the sticky fingers of a literary picklock caught snaking across your doorjamb, the reptilian C.K. Pompas will now be forced to swallow his own tale, disgorging it as your own.
Draft 3 /// You now have the evidence that Pompas has been stealing your stories. It’s all there, in “his” latest piece in the April issue of Unreal City. He has appropriated the body of your work. In his reverse-Midas grip the spirit of your work is nowhere to be seen. Like a true hack he has hacked away at your style and left nothing but the bare bones of your plot strutting and clanking along in pale imitation of the living original. Six months ago the editor of The Hopeless Maze sent back a story of yours accusing you (in an inked scrawl across the first page of your manuscript!) of a weak imitation of a story they had recently published by the renowned C.K. Pompas! The resemblance, you saw, was unmistakable, but it was his that was the “weak imitation.” How could you attempt to prove such an allegation without risking the total alienation of that insulting little twit of an editor who ruled one of the best-paying markets for the sort of stories you liked to write? Apart from an incredible coincidence, the truth had to be that your own story, still unpublished, which you had submitted to various magazines over a period of several months before sending it to The Hopeless Maze, had been read and plagiarized by C.K. Pompas himself.
And now the channel of plagiarism has revealed itself. You had submitted the earlier story to Unreal City four months before its zombified double showed up in the pages of The Hopeless Maze. Both magazines, Unreal City and The Hopeless Maze, are owned by the same publisher and share the same editorial offices on Madison Avenue. Ergo, some editorial assistant at Unreal City, which has just printed this new desecration of your toil, has been copying your work for Mr. Pompas before sending it back, rejected, to you. Pompas’s new story, “The Fourfold Singularity,” winks out at you with brazen whorishness from the pages of Unreal City, / a glistening shell // a grinning adulteration /// a glitzy simulacrum—all vital organs excised—of your own “Double Duplicity” mailed off to UC not six months ago. Your own cast of four central characters, to whom you ingeniously gave equal emphasis throughout, you now find truncated by a relentlessly conventional mind into the aesthetically predictable pattern of one main character lording it over a troupe of marionettes so that the entire point of your conception has vanished.
The difference, however, between the present act of bald-faced piracy and the preceding one (and how many still undiscovered depradations even before that? you grimly wonder) is that bitter experience gave you the foresight to squirrel away in your bank deposit-box a notarized, dated, and sealed copy of “Double Duplicity” before you submitted it anywhere for publication—so that you now have legal proof of your priority of composition! There will be those who say that the “idea” is an old one, that the “plot” has been done before, but not even the most biased judge will be able to deny, in addition to the totally duplicated storyline, the existence of whole paragraphs in Pompas’s version lifted practically word for word from the manuscript of “Double Duplicity.” True, the later versions of “Double Duplicity” you have been sending out have undergone, in places, some extensive stylistic changes, so that there is now almost no sentence-for-sentence similarity between your story / as it now stands // in its present embodiment /// in its latest avatar and Pompas’s insouciant hatchetwork. That fact—of the continual transformation of your handiwork—indicates no more than the underlying dynamism of an evolving Self whereby you molt verbal skins like a snake. The comparison between your legally preserved earlier draft and Pompas’s denatured copy is all that will matter in a court of law.
What will you win by pressing the case? First, immunity from future literary burglary. Second, damages that compensate for Pompas’s financial gains at your expense and for the incalculable harm he may have done to your career. Third, the positive attention of editors to your own work (who cares whether the result of your notoriety or your actual literary quality?). You will mount, therefore, a two-pronged attack. The editors at neither Unreal City nor The Hopeless Maze will give you the address or phone number of C.K. Pompas. The same for the publisher of his latest novel, Megabride, which has leered at you many times from its rack at the local supermarket. Very well. You will outline your case in a letter to the editor of Unreal City (suggesting that someone in that office has been transmitting your work to Pompas), including in that letter a sealed letter to be forwarded to Pompas together with a copy of the copy you kept of the bank-vaulted copy of the plagiarized version of “Double Duplicity.” Knowing it to be a legal matter, the editor will not fail to send off your little packet to Pompas.
