Bonus: Rod Serling Scene from upcoming novel On the Fade

2011-05-05T18:19:00.000-07:00

(this is not certainly not the final edit . . . and, well, it hasn't really been proofbread ether !)

* * *

It was Spring when Veten saw him sitting at the bar in the Salty Dog.

He was driving near the waterfront in the VW bus, and saw his black Lincoln with a yellow and blue California license plate sitting out front. It was time to talk to him, Veten decided. He’d been thinking about if for a long time, ever since Sheryl mentioned him.

Veten parked the bus next to the Lincoln, and stepped on into the small dark bar he’d only been in a few times before. The Salty Dog had a low ceiling held up with iron beams, and round iron posts, and smelled like beer and feet. It had dim lights, a pool table with the white in the balls smoke stained, some of the neon signs that looked at first festive, Drink Bud, but as the year went on, Veten kind of felt the there was something sad about the signs, Genesee Beer, not sad like the way blues music felt, but sad like the party was over an no body was there anymore.

He was the only person at one end of the bar, there was a couple, the man with a long beard like Quizon’s at the other, “chatting it up” with a young blond woman in a short green dress and long boots.

Veten headed over to him, non-chalant plus cool-like, and reached for a cigarette himself, and then made a show of fumbling for his lighter that was in his left front jeans pocket. He noticed Rod had some matches near his drink, which looked like a tall glass of straight whiskey.

Rod saw this show, and picked up his matches and handed them to Veten.

“Here sir,” he said.

He didn’t look like he looked on TV, well, he did, but he didn’t. Veten struck the match, and lit the cig. “Thank you,” he handed the matches back. “I’ll have what our man is having,” he said to the bartender, a muscular guy with a military buzz of a haircut. The bartender nodded.

“Do I detect a Russian accent,” Rod said, smiling warmly.

Rod was tipsy, Veten could tell. He sat down next to him. He was a small man, with jet black hair, and bushy black eyebrows. His eyes twinkled, Veten noticed, more than when they were stuck in the tube. A tall glass of amber was plopped before him.

Veten sipped. Bourbon, not bad, a bit like paint thinner, and lemons. “Yes,” Veten said, rolling the word. “My accent is going away, I think, with my time here. That’s is what the people tell me. Sometimes they speak so fast, though, with the slang, and I’m confused a bit.”

Rod kept smiling. “I hear ya, Comrade. My students here are like this. More so in far out Cali, dude.”

“Ahh, yes.” Veten said. “The surf talk, Dude, regular guy, you know, stand up guy.”

And Rod laughed, and squashed his spent cigarette. “What other lines do you know?”

“Damn you all to hell, you blew it up.”

Rod winked at him, and went for another smoke. “I didn’t write that one. My name is on the credits, the script I wrote for that movie wasn’t even used.”

“How about the ending? That was a good idea, with a the Statue of Liberty.”

“I meant that as a joke. I think it came out, okay, I guess. Heston is so wooden. The whole production reminded me of an episode of the Flintstones.”

Veten wasn’t sure what he meant. The cartoon with the background that just kept repeating itself as a kind of statement on monotony. The rock buildings the lived in.

“But why am I complaining,” Rod said, perked up. “I guess I took the damn thing as far as I could with it all.”

“This is a good thing,” Veten said. “A rare thing.”

“So what movies did you grow up with in Russia?”

It was a legitimate question from an entertainment TV creator, but Veten didn’t have a clue. He tried to see every film that came out, and watched a great deal of television, but knew next to nothing about actual communist Russian film. All he could think of was “Eisenstein, and propaganda, really just rolled off my eyes, I can’t recall. Few, er, western films made it, over, certainly no television.”

Rod just nodded, going along.

Veten casted for more to say, there would be no fooling the extremely sharp man though completely drunk man. “We all read Dr. Zhivago, even though it was banned.”

Rod lit completely up, and pounded the bar. “Good will out!” he said. “This is a good thing to hear. I think there is hope. Hope for us all. In dark times I think the whole world will be annihilated, cooked, roasted, torched, burnt . . . but here we are, sitting here at this god forsaken bar, the Russian and the American Jew, and this could be anytime, anyplace, and any planet, even, that continues on after the petty squabbles are left to the dust of history.”

“Right,” Veten said. “So right.” Though he probably wasn’t, Veten saw a certain gloom lifting off the man, a gloom that he wasn’t aware was there, until he saw, suddenly, he had something to fight for.

Veten suddenly understood him.

He was a crusader.

His TV show, had an agenda.

This was a good thing for the Arth, really. It hadn’t made as much sense, in the field of MASH, and Archie Bunker, and Steve Austin and John Boy it was hard to discern the streak of cynicism in the face of anarchy, and cataclysm, was really designed to wake a person up a bit.

“Our friend here will have another,” he said.

In a few moments Veten’s empty bourbon glass was replaced with another. Veten sipped freely, and it did taste better because it really didn’t taste like anything at all.

“We all knew Stalin was a bad man,” Veten said, now, “lightweight” that he was, as Sheryl called it, we was intoxicated, and on his way to more of it. “Nobody who calls himself Joe Steel is going to be a good man.”

“Well shit,” Rod said. “That’s right. Joe Steel. What’s Lenin mean?”

“You know, Rod, I think it means cold ass river.”

“Well I’ll be damned.”

“I don’t think so, not you, but perhaps him.”

Rod pounded the bar again and laughed with clenched teeth, the cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth.

The couple down the way were looking at them, and grinning. Buzz cut bartender was fiddling with the little TV nearby.

“I always wanted to go to Russia,” Rod said. “Do you miss it?”

“Yes, and no.”

“That sure sounds Russian.”

“I, er, I have been here for just a few years, and I feel at home here. There are some things I miss.”

“I miss home too,” he said, suddenly wistful. Then looked into his glass. “I don’t know where the hell that is.”

“Oh,” Veten said. “You live in California, but here too?”

“Yes, but I’m afraid that’s not what I mean. You don’t know what you got until it’s gone.”

Veten thought that sounded like a song he heard on the radio in the bus. Paved paradise, put up a parking lot. Which made paradise in the past, presumably, instead of at the hand of building and construction, and them struggling with the whole idea of progress, and the loss of essential soul, which was behind them but should have been ahead of them.

“You have a family?” Rod said.

“Yes, I have a wife . . . back home,” and Veten didn’t say three of them, but not at the same time. “You call this ex, I think. We just say, wife, not wife. I have a grown son, and two grown daughters, all scientists.” Veten looked into his glass too. He’d never see them again, would he?

“I have two daughters,” Rod said. “One tolerates me, and one hates me.”

“Now how could one hate you?” Veten didn’t know. He liked him.

And then Veten said, in a what the hell. “Ahh, the one who hates you is just like you!”

Rod looked up, and squinted at him. Then nodded slowly. “I haven’t’ been the best dad, you know. I’m always working working working, and they grew and grew and I’ve been so damn self absorbed with all this.”

“And fame must be hard, then?”

“That too. That’s why we come back to this area, this lake. To reconnect with something that I lost.”

“Maybe you didn’t lose it, maybe you gave it away.” Veten said, the drunken philosopher, and he realized his self censor had been bourbon eroded.

“Now that’s an interesting thought.”

“I have not seen all of your shows, but the one where the man is dead and returns to his hometown, is this you now, where in fact you can’t even come back as a ghost because they’re telling you it’s time to move on.”

“Well, now, I think I’m beginning to be very glad I ran into you, I don’t even know your name.”

“Ahhh,” Veten said. “This is a name I made up,” and he shook his hand. “Ted Veten.”

“Ted, good enough. What’s Veten mean, in Russian?”

“It means philosopher.” Oh uh.

“Aptly named, as some such!”

Veten got out another smoke, and they were both chimney’s out the side of their mouths.

“Were you a good father, Ted?”

“You know, I could have been better. I was always busy . . .”

“. . . Philosophizing . . .” Rod said.

“Yes, and I do have regrets.”

“Any of them hate you?”

“Not that I know. Now the wives . . .”

“Oh no, don’t get me started . . .”

“Yes . . .”

“Wait, did you say wives?”

“Yes, well, there were three of them. But the one, here, that is to be my wife, she’s . . . she’s the soul mate, as you say.”

“I don’t say it,” Rod said. “I don’t believe that one.”

“Oh, perhaps I don’t really understand what it means.”

“It means God made your destiny, and hooked you up together.”

“Well, then, I’ll leave the jury out on that one.”

“Do you believe in God, Ted?”

“No . . . no I do not, Rod.”

“That a commie!”

Rod patted him on the back, and Ted laughed.

“Do you?”

“Well now . . .” Rod said. “I believe in a creative force, that for good or bad, made the world, the universe, and made us from some dust left over. That this God has any thing to do with our day to day lives, Lord of the Dust, sickens me, and even the idea robs us of the innate power we have to control our own destines.”

“Yes. This dust, the dust we are made of, comes from stars, or even exploded stars,” Veten said. “Not much more powerful in the universe than a star.”

At that moment, Rod Serling really peered into Veten’s eyes, and for a long, almost uncomfortable moment. Then suddenly “Ahhhhhhhh . . .” he said, and waved like he was shooing away an idea that had suddenly appeared between them.

Then “How about that Yuri Gregarin!”

“We are sending men into space in fucking tin cans!” Veten said loudly.

People were looking at them, a couple of others now in the Salty Dog, and even the bartender.

“Crack me a Genesee monkey,” Veten said to him.

Rod burst out laughing and the cig flew out of his mouth and onto the floor. He stumbled off his stool, and looked for it for a minute, then gave up.

“Oh,” Veten said. “Beer, not monkey.”

“I wonder if this fire trap will burn down, now, headline’s going to read “Rod Serling’s cigarette sends Salty Dog back to hell.”

“Yes, perhaps!”

A bottle of beer was clunked down before Veten by the scowling bartender. He took a sip.

“All you hoped for?” Rod said.

Veten put the bottle down. “Shark piss!”

Rod slapped his hands together. “You know Ted Veten, let’s blow this rat hole. We’re drawing a crowd like flies.”

“Bzzzzz,” Veten said looking around. They did have an audience, the couple from down the way, and about five others, one woman pointing at Rod.

Rod threw a $50 dollar bill onto the bar, and was heading out toward the door.

Veten stumbled behind him.

They stood peeing into the dark water of the flood control channel for a long time.

“You got a car, Ted?”

“I have the Vee Double U bus.” Ted thumbed behind them and zipped up.

“You seem okay to dive,” Rod said.

Veten thought he probably could manage. He’d been driving for four weeks, and was drunk, but maybe not as drunk as Rod. The first gear was the hardest.

“We can get some beer for the road. Ted, I’ve always wanted to go see Mark Twain’s grave.”

“Okay,” Veten said, game for an adventure like those he read from the fine writer, Huck and Joe, off to . . . ?

“Good, it’s settled!”

Veten pulled the bus up into the parking lot of the Short Stop 24 hour deli, the only place open that late at night. They sold beer and cigarettes and whatnot and this and that. Where they were going, still he had no idea.

Their duplex was a few blocks down the street. Sheryl was in Washington DC for research, and he did want to go, but he couldn’t get off work, but just in case, Veten decided, he’d leave her a note.

“Right back in a Flash Gordon,” Rod said and bounded off into the all night deli.

Veten got his note book that he’d been writing words down in that he stored in a pocked behind the seat, and wrote:

Dearest Sheryl, I am going off on and adventure with Rod Serling, I think things will turn out all right, but if you find this note and I don’t return, the . . . Veten crumpled it up. If anything happened to them, it would be on the news, Hollywood TV star and library worker die in Vee Double U bus crash.

Veten wasn’t worried. He wanted to do the right thing, but he wasn’t worried. And felt that he was doing the right thing.

He watched Rod in the store through the big glass window. He was joking to the poor sleep deprived teenager, saying something, and the teen looked at him in amazement, and Rod tipped his head back and laughed, and shook the kid’s hand, and he was out into the night with two six packs of beer and a red and white carton of Marlboros under his arm.

He hopped in.

“Ahhh, I think we are ready,” Veten said, and cracked a beer.

“I have the utmost certainty,” Rod said.

“So, which way out of town . . .” Veten buzzed the shifter into reverse, and let the clutch out slowly, but it still bucked.

Then he got them out on the street, floored it in second and it really didn’t go much.

“Furl the t'gallant-sails, and close-reef the top-sails, Starbuck, and head south along lucky 13.”

Veten laughed, recalling the Starbuck being on the Pequot of Moby Dick.

And Veten really wanted to tell him there were whales on other planets, but never as big as the ones on earth, and the earth whales seemed to talk more. “. . . that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.” Veten blurted out.

“Aye!” Rod said, and they chuckled.

“Mark Twain’s grave . . .” Rod said. “Did you ever go to Tolstoy’s grave?”

“I’m afraid I have not.”

“How about Tchaikovsky?”

“No.” It took him a minute to remember who that was. “I don’t even know where that is.”

“I don’t, either. Seen Lenin like a wax dummy mummy?”

Rod had lost him. A hill was coming up on the dark road, lines shooting up into the sky ahead, as they made their climb out of Ithaca, and Veten blew the shift down . . . Craaaaakkkkk!

“Atta baby,” Rod said, and opened another beer, and passed it to Veten. Veten slugged it, it had lost all taste, and it sort of felt like his body was fighting it for a moment, a bit sour in his stomach . . . he downed half the bottle and put it between his legs.

Rod puffed his cigarette out the side of his mouth in the dim light. “Permanence is what this sojourn is about, Ted. Permanence.”

“Oh, how so?” Veten said, knowing that’s what Rod wanted him to say.

“What you or I, though I don’t know what you do, what you or I leave behind on this rock floating at the edge of the galaxy, besides some genetic information in our children that is of no claim to us personally, what do we leave that matters?”

Veten did see two lines for a moment on the right side of the road, they faded back to one. He looked at the big, clock like speed dial, 45, not a highly dangerous speed at all compared to a chopper. “What it matters is in the heart of the beholder,” Veten said. “And this, we do not have claim to.”

Rod was silent for a moment. Veten looked over at him, and realized Rod was staring at him, that peering look again. Veten gave him the thumbs up.

“Ha!” Rod said. “Amazing. I guess you’re right. I never thought of it that way.”

He looked off into the night. A car flew up along the side of the bus in other lane, passed them, and pulled back in front of them. It had a long strip of red taillights. “Thunderbird,” Rod muttered. “A phoenix, and Charon’s ferry.”

Veten tried to piece it together, couldn’t. “Is this a dangerous car?” It didn’t seem like a police car.

“No no . . . just and old saw rambling.”

“You are not that old,” Veten said, and drank the rest of his beer.

“I feel it . . . what we were talking about?”

“Permanence,” Veten said.

“Oh yes. I’ve wasted a lot of effort this electronic frivolity called Television and hare brained scenarios disguising themselves as meaningful drama.”

“Only you can say that about your own work,” Veten said. “You will not find many others who say such.”

“So. Why didn’t I ever write a good book?”

“Perhaps you will.”

“I don’t think I will I never wanted to go that deep. It scares me.”

“Is that why we are going to see Mark Twain’s bones?”

“It is, they’re already lasting much longer than Monsters on Maple Street.”

“Ha, this is where you are wrong, Rod,” Veten squinted out into the giggling light before them, a truck streaked by the other way, and he heard a whale like “Arrrrrrrrrrr,” of it’s horn fading off into the darkness with it. “A printed book is not transmitted into space with the satellite, and beyond the satellite, and beyond the fine moon, toward Saturn, and out into the stars you call the Sagittarius constellation and toward the center of the galaxy called Milky Way . . .”

Veten realized he had, perhaps, just relayed too much.

Rod just nodded. “But what does it all mean? Will it make the least bit of sense, or will it be indistinguishable from soap commercials and weather reports, and that’s assuming there is intelligent life out there to even distinguish anything, and big leap of leaps . . . assuming they haven’t blown themselves to bits in the ascent to becoming a race of intelligent and advanced enough beings to make TV receptors to watch what me and Matheson and the crew cooked up about them coming to earth to harvest people . . .”

“Ahh, to serve man!” Veten said, grinning.

“Jesus wept,” Rod sad, shaking his head. “I should have never stepped in front of the camera.”

“I’m sure aliens eat people,” Veten said. “Why not?”

“Uhhhggg.”

“We’d eat aliens if they didn’t look like people, I bet.”

“I think you might be right. . . . so Ted, though not being nosy, I have been called a writer with curiosity . . . what is it you do?”

“I an adjunct professor in history at the university, and I also work in the library.”

“Oh, that’s a good one . . . why they have you doing two jobs?”

“I have one seminar I lecture a semester, so far, and first they hired me in the library, after I came here, so I keep working there. I’m helping set up some of the MARC, the computer catalog stuff, right now.”

“Now this is something,” Rod said. “Did you learn about computers in the Soviet Union.”

“I am pretty much self taught on things. This is fairly simple.”

“I’m sure it isn’t, Ted!”

Rod was right, but Veten couldn’t tell him actually why . . . the weren’t words in English for the cataloging terminal interface he invented.

“Then you were a professor in the USSR, that must have been . . . you defected, didn’t you!” Rod sat straight up, and pointed his cigarette around so it made flowing streaks waving it in the dark air of the Vee Double U bus.

“I did . . . I have.”

“That’s why the university is easing you into the system, no big hub ub, no big deal. You changed you name, then, Ted . . . Vetin . . . don’t tell me what it really is, they think I’m a commie, anyway, even though I fought for this place.”

It was good Veten didn’t need to he had completely forgotten the fake Russian name he was supposed to have had originally before he became the made up name Ted Veten, which, of course, translated as our Man Veten.

“You were in a war, Rod?” Veten said.

“I was, the War, 11th Airborne in the pacific, first they taught me how to fall out of planes without puking, then transferred me to the 511th, handed me an M1 Carbine to shoot some Japanese in the Philippines. Rough stuff. I was no good at it.”

“This calls for more beer!” Veten said just as an open one was handed to him. He realized Rod was talking about World War Two, or . . . WWII.

“I wanted to go to Germany and kill the Nazis, for what we heard they were doing to the Jews, among other things, but they sent me to the ass end of the world. Typical Army procedure. But, really, I realized I didn’t have the stomach for that. I could fall out of plane just great, though. I even tested ejector seats during college.”

“Ha, me too!” Veten said, something that was almost true. He suspected an ejector seat had to do with a rescue vessel of some kind, of which Veten had extensive training in during school, as any galactic crew member needed.

“Do you fly?” Rod said.

“I do, yes,” Veten lied, but didn’t. He thought about the Hapitan Foi, their surface ship, perhaps a little bit similar in controls to a Phantom fighter jet, but he’d only scanned a flight manual of that at the library, and never actually flew the Hapitan Foi. “I was more of a logistics man in the Red army, you know, there were so damn many of us, no match, no match for the Nazis . . .” Veten trailed off.

Rod seemed to buy the explanation, nodding.

He was reminded again of what the Nazis did to the Jews, the Gypsies, and anybody else they wanted erased from their super race. There were not any similar feats of such absolute horror in galactic history that he could recall. And the conflicts that came close were records in ancient history of planet over planet, never beings on one planet annihilating another.

But the Arth had it all. The genocide (no word in Ro) of the Native American Indians, the holocaust of the Jews of Europe, the napalm of children in Vietnam, the firebombing and atom bombing of innocents in World War II . . . it went on and on and that was only three hundred years worth, the core of their recorded history was chapter 1, war, chapter 2, the next war, chapter 3, war more war . . .

Veten sighed.

“Sorry to bring up the war, friend,” Rod said. “I betcha yours was worse than mine.”

Veten just sipped his beer, nodded, pretending he was a dead Russian soldier in the snow like he’s seen in Dr. Zhivago. “I was no good at killing, either, just staying alive.”

Rod held up his bottle, Veten looked at it for a moment, wondering what he was supposed to do, then clinked it.

“What to make of it,” Rod said. “We’re not going to make it, are we?”

It was curious in its bluntness, this question that was always on the tip of Veten’s mind . . . Veten realized he was aiming the bus so the middle line was underneath them, instead of a bit left of the left wheel.

“Make it to Mark Twain’s grave?”

“That too . . .”

“I’ll move it on over,” Veten said, and did.

Rod grinned wide in the glow of headlights coming at them. SWISH, the car was gone.

“Well, Rod, you made it this far,” Veten said, and instantly regretted it.

Did Rod catch it?

How many slip ups were there since it began?

Did he want to tell Rod he was Veten from . . . space. Why did Sheryl even suggest he track him down. It was suddenly seeming wrong, the idea of conferring with the sharp, funny, drunken man . . . what answer was there that he would have, personally, that he didn’t convey in his show. It was already established that many sensible Arth people readily believed in . . .

. . . aliens.

Did he want to let Rod know . . . is that what it was?

It wasn’t for him. It was for him. Proof to the believer . . .

“I guess,” Rod said, finally. “I guess I made it this far. I saw a buddy of mine’s head torn clean off, from a supply crate dropped from our own plane, no less. That could have easily been me. All of it could have.”

It was time.

“I will tell you a story, Rod. Much of it won’t make sense, right now, but when you think about it, later, it will make more.”

“I’m intrigued, Ted!”

“In my library there is a book called the Into the Mysterious Land of Quizon . . .”

“By Joseph Carpenter, I read it as a boy. Imaginative and opium induced, I believe . . .” Rod said.

Veten chuckled. “Well, this book in the library is a first edition, and it has some pages that were left out of the subsequent editions because they were too hard print . . . they looked like jibberish . . . the section with the runes.”

“Ahh . . . the runes,” Rod said. “Perhaps from the Vikings that came over before Columbus.”

“Yes yes . . . a text left behind in a different language waiting to be translated.”

“Oh, but were they jibberish, or Viking words? Or Sandscrit, even? I do see a similarity . . .”

“You are familiar with the runes?”

“I will sheepishly admit that I have first editions of all Carpenter’s books, first editions of Melville, a Moby Dick even with the last page mistakenly left out, making the entire story not make any sense, and one Huck Finn of Twain.”

“Oh, this is great,” Veten said.

“I was making a lot of money, for a while. Still, I got them off of Orson Welles for a bargain. Matheson, he’s one of my writers, bought his black Cadillac Eldorado cheap, too . . . Welles, poor misunderstood genius . . . I digress, go on with the runes . . . ”

“The question is, why would anybody write anything?”

“Oh, uh, well, shit Ted . . . you got me there . . I don’t know.” Rod said, and there was a long pause while he looked out the side window. “I do know. You want to make a mark on this earth, perhaps you know your time is limited, a procreation of sorts, a drive to leave something because . . . something is better than nothing.”

“What does it matter?”

“I’d like to think it does, but . . . one of my deepest fears, is it doesn’t.”

“That’s what the yogi swami guy said,” Veten said. “I went to India with my wife, and met the yogi swami guy, and he spouted the water can of bullshit.”

“Oh, Ted, good to hear it!”

“Let me put this rambling story this way, Rod. The idea that it doesn’t matter, that you are dust blowing back into space to be recycled in another supernova, is a selfish idea, a dangerous idea. A person’s job is actually to contribute, in a small way, but in a way, to the universe, and billions of people doing this make a civilization that will stand the test of time, and hold together for eons.”

“Is . . . is this an idea for a show, or, er . . .” Rod said, looking back out the window.

Veten looked right over at him. “It’s what you have all been working toward, it’s what you are all made of, it’s not ego, it’s survival. I just want to tell you this. It’s no show.”

“Oh, okay. I like it. But I’m going to have to think about it . . . It’s heavy. It’s big. So . . . what was Carpenter doing with the runes?”

“I’m going tell you in a little bit.”

“Okay.”

“You are right, not everyone makes it. To be called a civilization, there are certain criteria. The first is no killing other people, this ties into the second, absolute sharing of resources, which ties into . . . a very high standard of living brought on by phenomenal advances in technology that entirely removes the struggle over resources from human interaction.”

“Sounds like space communism.”

“It is!”

“This what they’re working toward in Russia, but we don’t know?”

“Of course not! Meet the new Tsar, same as the old Tsar!”

“Holy shit, Ted.”

“What I did not know, until this year or so, was the extent technology is advanced through war, the very same technology that will liberate you some day.”

Rod rubbed his chin, staring at Veten, the popped another smoke out of his pack, and lit it up. “That sounds like a conundrum of poor resolution.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Ironic, huh?”

“Yes.”

Rod just nodded. “Who’s going to launch the nukes first?”

“The Americans. It will always be the Americans. The world is afraid of the Americans, a lot of it has to do with the movies, I think. And, they’ve used them before.”

“Is America that suicidal, you think?”

“No, they will win.”

“How? There is no way to win, it’s mutually assured destruction.”

“But it isn’t, Rod, I’ll tell you why. America is the only country that I’ve seen that in some way models the beginnings of a civilization. At least in ideas, not in deed. The ideas will spread, and I think you will have a Russia that will more like America, a China, some day, and India, more like America. Contribution is rewarded, even it its crippled way, with the money and all that, but it is rewarded, and it has not been in the past. This is the key to the absolute phenomenal advancement in the last 200 years, simply put, contribution is rewarded.”

“What about forced labor, like Mao and their recent blast into the twentieth century.”

“A terrible bump in the road.”

“You know he grew alge on his teeth,” Rod said.

“Sour power.”

“Oh yeah!”

“And you have seen this good in some Native American Civilizations, African . . . Aboriginal, smaller units where no one is oppressed, but unfortunately always war to settle difference with others.”

“This is not a utopia,” Rod said. “You’re talking about something else . . . it feels like it makes sense.”

The bus droned on for a moment around them. Veten didn’t remember he was driving, seemed to be doing all right, and Steve McGarret wasn’t behind him or anywhere to be seen on the dark road.

“I never thought of it this way,” Rod said, finally. “A future so alien from the present the scars of the past have completely healed over, a past that we’re heading into right now.”

“Yes,” Veten said, so glad he was so smart.

“A future where it is expected people just do their thing, and no one tells them what to do.”

“No one is the boss, unless they are the ones agreed by most to hold the key decision in a situation, based on assessment of particular skills.”

“No universal agreement?”

“No universal nothing, except people don’t kill each other. Nothing else is ever universally agreed on.”

“People ever die?”

“Yes. They live a long time. People die in accidents, or situations that are out of the realm of control.”

“They explore other planets, of just stick close to home and be?”

“They explore other planets, and determine if the civilization warrants their help, or should be left alone. These left alone worlds almost always self destruct, or are thrown back to earlier phases of existence, or are hit by damaging space bodies, comets, asteroids, solar flares, if their technology hasn’t adapted to deflect the damaging etceteras.”

“That’s a downer. What’s God got to do with any of it?”

“God made the stars, and we’re made up from blown up stars, and that’s it.”

“Sounds just right. How about the soul?”

Veten paused for a moment. Then “The soul belongs to space.”

Rod smiled in the dim light. Then he said, quietly, “What were you going to tell me about the runes, Ted?”

“I knew Joseph Carpenter for many years, his name is Quizon, and he’s a scientist. The runes are actually in a language called Ro, and when it’s written down, it does look a bit like Sanskrit but it isn’t.”

There was a long pause of the bus’s straining engine.

“Oh, that didn’t make any sense . . . Go on, my friend.” Rod said.

“Quizon was very clever, he put a text of Ro in his book, and called it runes, hoping there was a slight chance someone would be able to read it, and if they could, they would realize it was Quizon, in the year 1820, the time he was lost to, and he had finally figured out what and how our accident happened . . . 1820 communicating with 1974, and hopefully 1984 or even 2006, for this is when we actually were heading to Arth, your time, before we had our first accident and were thrown back to what’s called 600 BC and our captain set our gigantic disabled transdimensional ship down on the surface of Seneca lake. We lived there for two years as we tried to get the ship going again, and it had another accident. This scattered every one of us through time. This is what I discovered in the library, one day a few months ago. And if I ended up here, they ended up there, and there, perhaps even in the very same spot, near some rail tracks at the edge for Truman Glen, but at different times.”

There was a long pause. The bus dogged on a big hill, Veten threw it down to second, CRACK! BONK! GRRRRRRRRRR. But then it was okay.

Rod just looked at him, no expression.

Of course . . . if it was going to go badly, there would be a great excuse.

Veten was trashed. Snookered. Blotto. Hammered. Plowed.

Rod was three sheets to the wind, cooked, baked, smashed, and he just sat there in the dim light for quite some time, puffing and staring at Veten.

Finally, in a strong voice, Rod said “Tapetum lucidum.”

“Mmmm?”

“When we were outside pissing in the inlet of Cayuga lake, your eyes lit up like a wolf’s from the light of a distant streetlight.”

“Oh, I . . . yes.” It was the first thing Sheryl noticed too.

“Human beings don’t have this reflective surface on the inside their retinas.”

“I’m a human being,” Veten said.

“Oh. Well then what’s with this story?”

“We’re all human beings.”

“How could that be?”

“We all have a common ancestor.”

“But offspring with slight variations, then.”

“Exactly!”

“And you are smarter.”

“Not by much.”

Rod grinned. “And you sought me out in the worst bar in town so you could tell me this.”

“Yes.”

“How many other people know?”

“A few.”

“Are . . . are you going to do anything . . . about it?”

“I was hoping you might have some ideas about finding the others . . .”

“. . . ahh, the others scattered through time!” Rod sat in the dim light, smoking. His eyes closed. Nodding. “Yes.”

Veten realized he was actually thinking. Thinking it through, drunk as they were, he could see wheels spinning above him, or how ever the saying went.

Finally “What was your job on the ship?” Rod said.

“I . . . well, I was the philosopher.”

“Well shit.” Rod whispered, and held his forehead in his hand, then, originally, looked straight up out the front windshield and up into the sky. “The philosopher. That’s a job. That’s a job where a civilization that isn’t falling apart.” The looked back at Veten. “It was a job here, once.”

“Still is, perhaps.”

“You must think our philosophy is trash.”

“Much like the Arth culture in general, some of it is genius, er . . . galaxy class, and some of it is trash.”

Rod laughed and whacked the dash. “Were you as well regarded as much as I like you?”

“I . . . perhaps.” It was a good question assuming Rod liked him. Veten reasoned there wasn’t many who didn’t like him, if any. This is what would be called blessed on Arth.

“Here is what I think, Ted . . .” Rod said. “If any of them came out ahead of you in time, they will find you. I feel this. I know this. You should do things, write things like Carpenter did, publish. Have articles in the paper, they’ll be archived on microfilm in libraries.”

This was sensible. Veten reasoned as much before, they would go into libraries and scan for him in archives. Or, assuming they’d continue in the direction they seemed to be going, they’d connect their computers together over radio waves or cables and create a mega archive that way. That could be a long way off, though.

They would find him. He was close. The would have to be closer. This confirmation was the exact thing he needed to hear.

He had to wait. It was only 32 years. He remembered 32 years ago like yesterday . . .

Infinite Jim (First Pages)

2010-10-03T05:03:00.000-07:00

SERLING MEMORIAL

The TV on the wall droned on, and Jim faded out.

He was good at fading out, always had been, even when he wasn’t so close to dying. Fading out was a clean relief from the mustard yellow walls of the hospital room, a break from the clickety-clack curtain on ceiling tracks that the doctor pulled for privacy when it was time to lob another diagnostic bomb.

Jim had been blown to bits by all the bombs.

There wasn’t much left of him. First the firecracker—a small pop—he was HIV plus. Then dynamite, he had hepatitis. Then the Nuclear Bomb, millions of creepy things had invaded his weakened, immune-less body and he was going to die pretty soon, quite probably very.

And each time a new explosive was chucked at him, Jim noticed his Doctor, Dr. Snow, stood further away from his bedside. Eventually the small, olive-skinned, balding Doc seemed to just glance around the curtain, mumbling bad news at Jim and rushing off.

Okay then, thanks for the fuckin’ update, Doc, Jim would say, but just in his mind. What was the point of telling him anything, anymore?

Jim knew what was coming.

He faded back in. He was lying on his side. The curtain was open. His roommate’s side was empty. Jim stared over at the vacated bed. Dead? Was his name Tony? Car wreck? Then pneumonia? Poor dude. Car wreck pneumonia sounded right, but he wasn’t sure.

Jim also faced the hall where the nurses swished on by. Beyond the frame of the door, ten feet away, the world was too blurred to make out. It was like he needed major thick specs, and all his life he had perfect 20/20. Maybe, he admitted, his eyes were just finally giving it up.

At first, a few days before, he’d noticed the nurse’s station had become a bit darker, like it was on emergency power. A day later, by the evening, the entire unit of phone books, file cabinets and chatting nurses—the very edge of his world for a month—had been eaten up by a dull gray fuzz. He could barely see movement out there. He did still hear their voices out there, quite clearly. Even laughter from time to time. And all the paging and phones. What else was out there?

Mister Death is out there now, Jim was sure. Waiting patiently. That’s why he couldn’t see beyond the room . . . This thought brought no panic in him, and he was worried about that, for it really should have.

Someone came through the fuzzy gateway of the room. The good nurse, Latika? She was tall and black, in bright whites. She came to his bedside, put her hand gently on his shoulder, and rolled him over from his side onto his back.

“There we go . . .” she said.

Jim greeted the white pressboard tiles of the ceiling. And here we are, he said inside. He knew the tiles quite well, their relief bumps, usually trippy with the painkillers, but now, strangely . . . flat white just like a new snow.

Shit, he thought, close-up vision’s going, too.

“Sorry I didn’t come by sooner to change the view for you,” she said.

And suddenly Latika surged into clear focus between Jim and the tiles. And she was smiling, a true grin on a wide, dark face. Her eyes were heavy with resignation, though. He realized he had been seeing it on people for a few weeks now . . . the look said oh so sad he’s gonna die.

Jim couldn’t speak back at the moment. Not a peep. He tried to joke “The view still sucks, thanks anyway,” but he felt like something deep inside him had been unplugged.

The TV news babbled away, leaking cranky tones around the room. It went from unnoticed on his part to really really annoying him. Jim suddenly wanted like anything to tell Latika to shut it off, toss the fucking thing out the window, and then they’d listen to its wonderful crash! on the loading dock below.

Instead, Latika gently lifted his frail, skeletal neck and stuck a pillow behind his bony head so he could get a good view.

Damp black hair fell across his face. She brushed it to the side. “You have such wonderful baby brows, James.” She said this like she felt she was never going to see them again ever. He felt sorry for her and not for him about that.

About the eyes, he’d heard this before from people. Girls. They liked it on him. Big brown eyes on a square-ish face. Like the face of an Irish gangster, he always felt, with his kind-of-flat nose. Which was just fine. He had curly black hair, long and big on his head. When he was well, he was actually okay looking.

But not now.

Latika left back for the gray world beyond.

Jim moved his two-ton hand with all his strength to the TV clicker box hanging on the bed rail nine inches away. He missed. His meager arm fell short and rested softly on the blanket, releasing the trapped smell of bleach from the cloth.

So he just watched the blurry CNN. More mayhem out there in the world, he was sure. But really he had no idea what was going on in the world. Why, my goodness, he thought, there were so many things he was missing while he was dying . . . Jim grinned to himself.

Who the fuck cared.

But . . .

Suddenly something very clear materialized on the screen.

It was the face of a tan, moon-faced man, with long black hair framing his head. The guy’s voice came booming at Jim like someone was turning up the volume with each word.

“Well hey there . . . I was wondering how long it would take you to come around!”

Jim was pretty sure the guy was an American Indian. It was probably some kind of commercial about how everybody needed to stop trashing the Earth. Come around, you white idiots!

Then, the guy looked down out of the TV right into Jim’s eyes, and nodded at him.

“Uhhh,” Jim grunted.

“Poor Jim,” the guy said. “They’re sure good back there at keeping the dead alive longer than they should.”

Now, panic.

Jim lost all his weak breath. “Uhhhh uhhh!” he let out. Drool spilled down his stubbly chin and over his gown.

“Anyway,” the guy continued. “Not for much longer.”

The screen flickered like a candle in a door’s draft. Then, the TV completely disappeared from the wall. Then the whole rest of the room—yellow walls, clackity curtain on a track, gray fuzz of the hallway beyond—faded to a dull white.

And then the American Indian guy appeared over him, the flat white ceiling above him. He smelled like wood smoke. The guy grinned wide, seemed really happy. Jim closed his eyes, tightly, for a long minute, hoping the hallucination would stop, and the world would come back, even as worn-out and shitty as it was . . .

When Jim finally opened his eyes, the guy was still looking down at him, but above him was a deep blue sky.

The Insensibles (first pages)

2010-10-03T03:48:00.000-07:00

It begins.

A thirteen-year old guy with a peach-fuzzy mustache and a large cowboy hat plays a cheap acoustic guitar as sunlight streams in through a smoky basement window. He’s pretty good, considering he sucks . . .

It ends.

The skyline of the giant Megatropolis is laid out under a clear, bright sun . . . and from high off a great stone bridge a CD is flying through the air, falling toward the blue-gray river below. And it spins and spins, then hits the water with a tiny white flash of a splash.

. . . Fuckin’ rock and roll.

CHAPTERO NUMERO UNO

On my way to the center of the universe and away from its shitty edge, I took the scenic route for a bit in the old black Ford van, roaring down a smooth, two-lane strip of rip through the Catskill mountains.

And though warmish, I still wore my black leather jacket, (ghost still says moo, I sometimes think), black t-shirt, Skull and Crossbones belt buckle, black jeans, and black Nikes. And me: quite long blond-o hair . . . though I’ve got a little braid on one side to keep it out of my eyes. In the back I had my 100 watt Marshall amp stack, my Gibson SG, an old Ensoniq keyboard, a crackly PA mixer and speakers, some good mics, my tunes, and a duffel bag with everything else . . . and what more could old Jake Bersonte here need in life?

Really, save for two people, I didn’t even say good-bye. I’ll send ya a post card! you cave people under a cloudy cloud of New Biggsburg, NY gloom. Anywho, what were you ever going to do with skinny, longhaired me? (Big-brown-eyed and cute, girls say about me when they’re being nice.) The Rock and Roll guitar player extraordinaire. I think, and that’s what they tell me, though sometimes I just run up and down the fret board and spew spaghetti out the crunchy Marshall . . . so, now, it was getting time for some real playing.

Some real music.

Then, cruising along, the van suddenly sounded like it was going on 7-up of its V8 . . . that is to say, a cylinder was not firing and the whole thing began shaking around me like a plane about to crash.

Oh well. So that’s how it was going to be.

So, I cranked Slipknot louder on the cheap player I tapped into the dash . . . and they were pretty good, punko-thrash, and the tree-covered hills were rolling about and, really, I’d say it was a great drive heading on into the city.

And that’s The City.

The Megatropolis. That’s what I call it. The center of the universe.

That’s where the real bands play, not the bands fighting over forty-minute spots in a bar, battling with DJs or cover-tune bands for fifty bucks a night and a PA rental that costs a hundred . . .

Megatropolis.

I came over the last hill, and just for a second the trucks and busses before me parted like Moses and his Dead Red Sea, and there it was all spread out before me like a great funhouse of lights, and a black river shining back those lights. And out there were the great, twinkling towers of hope and commerce, full of things happening, and people doing things, making decisions, creating things . . . and I was moving there, finally, to where things happened.

And I didn’t delude myself in saying “streets paved with gold” or any of that Irish Bullshit.

I just wanted SOMETHING TO HAPPEN.

I slowed the van as we and my traffic brothers and sisters soon came to a stop, rounding and downing into some cave mouths set up after the tolls. You go into Megatropolis from the asshole, you see. (Well, there seemed to be three assholes.) That’s how it is done. Ten bucks, green fluorescents on the ceiling, some flashing brake lights and more exhaust, and you’re spit out into where things happen just like that.

And the damnedest thing happened.

That Slipknot CD shut itself off.

I sat in traffic just into the city that’s an island though you wouldn’t know it, and I got static. And then, the player tried to find some stations, stopped on one.

And it was this weird classical music. Though it wasn’t your old Wagner or fine fine Beethoven. It was modern classical minimalistic music, with a sad, soulful clarinet, and a synth repeating a simple, counter-tempo riff. And I just let it play as I moved in the bus taxi sea, knowing not where I was going. And I really got into this beautiful set of whispers this city was placing in my ear.

Quite soon, traffic was a sudden solid brick, and there was a slouching black man in a hooded sweatshirt jacket outside my window, knocking on it. “Ahh, city folk,” I said.

Dude was holding a plastic spray bottle. I rolled down the window.

“What, Brother?”

“Wash you window, a dolla.”

“Naa, I got those little nozzles that do that,” I said.

And he looked like no shit, I just need money, dummy. So I had an idea. “Say,” I said. “Do you know where I am?”

“You in the city, what you tryin’ to find, Boston?”

That was funny. I handed him a map. “Find us.”

And he held it one way, then another. “You here,” he pointed. “Where you goin’?”

“I’m going somewhere down there.”

“You all twisted around,” he said. “You gotta go back, make like a C on the streets, left and left and left, then you head on across town, after a bit you hit second, right there, go on downtown, taken any even east-west, like fourth, over to where the streets is named by alphabet, a b c whatever you want, and you right on where you goin’, way down there.”

And that guy said exactly what I needed. And I could use it just like that, I remember what I hear, every bit of it. I can record it and play it back, and it’s always been that way. I said, “Make a C on these streets, left and left and left, head on across town, hit second, take a right there, go on downtown, take fourth, over to alphabet streets, and I’m way down there.”

And he said, “That’s right, Brother!”

And I said, “Hey, thanks, Man.”

“What it worth to you?” he said.

What was it worth to me? I popped the Slipknot out of the CD player, put it in its case, and handed it out to him.

And the guy just kind of looked it over. Had to be worth at least ten bucks. He nodded and walked away.

Traffic started to move, and I cranked the minimalist music and drove on, and began to do my Megatropolis driving alphabet dance.

Horatio’s apartment building was the color of grease fire smoke.

I was wondering what he was doing in such a shithole, and the building looked like something somebody would inhabit, like . . . squatter, and not pay rent to the man, and there the place was, looming ugly in the streetlights, and I thought to myself shit, it’s too bad how far old Ray has sunk.

I parked the van, hopped out, double making sure everything was locked—sliding door, passenger door, driver’s door, back doors—and then checked again. I could feel the ratty eyes eyeing blondy here, though I did not see them . . .

I felt them. And I wasn’t city man, I was bumpkin. Though they weren’t going to know it.

I moved on up to the building’s door, matching the address with my scribbled down piece of notebook paper. Double making sure of that, too.

Nobody said on this “buzzer” Welcome, it’s me, John and Jenny Smith, hey, come on in for a bite and a smoke. Nobody wrote anything, so who knew? But I had my city-smart hat on, and the piece of paper said 3C, so third floor, three up from the bottom, figured C would mean at least three “apartments” on the third floor, and sure enough the buttons were arranged in clumps, I’d say A upper left, B, upper right, C, lower left . . . and pushed it.

A long pause. Presto chango. Buzz buzz. I pushed again.

“Waaaat?” Ray’s voice came out, and it was so Ray. I smiled.

“It’s me, man.”

“Who’s me?”

“It’s Jake, man.”

“Jake, where the fuck you been!”

“I’m standing right here!”

A pause.

The door before me went ZZZZZZZZZ in the tone of a groan, and I pushed it, and was it locked before?

I shuffled up some dark stairs that smelled like cooking, beer, and cat piss. Two landings up, I stood in a dark hall, and suddenly saw the light, Jesus . . . the door at the end of the hall flew open, and there stood the silhouette of Horatio Ray Heinz.

“Jake!”

“Ray, you asshole!”

I went over to him gave ol’ Ray a hug. Probably had been about nine months since we shared a stage, with him singing, he was trashed and me too, and I hit him in the back with a mic stand when he gave me a nasty look after a shitty solo on my part. And he quit that band, and I quit that band shortly thereafter, because we way sucked, really, and he was moving to the city, anyway. But all that stink was behind us.

Ray had longish, jet-black hair, and he had a cultivated five o’clock shadow-thing going on with his chiseled TV-actor face and steely blue eyes. He had a shiny silver nose stud and an intricate tattoo looking like some kind of blue latticework on his arm. That was new.

“Nice ink, Ray,” I said.

“Can’t believe you actually finally left Upstate Shitpile,” he said. “If you’ve actually left.”

“Oh . . . I’ve left, let me tell you.” And we went on in his dump. A little fridge, a sleeping cot, a bathtub, and a window framing some dubious blackness beyond. He had some paperback books on a wall shelf (Ray was always reader) and wonderfully . . . an acoustic guitar against a small, rusty gas stove.

It was Nylon Willie. I had forgotten I gave it to him.

“Duuude, you still got Nylon Willie!” I said, and went over and grabbed it. I did some flamenco, something I could only do with three right hand fingers so far and that would have to be good enough.

And Ray went “Umph,” which was his way, really, of saying Wow.

“That guitar sucks,” Ray said. “You can have it back.”

“Thanks, man!” And it was called Nylon Willie because it looked like Willie Nelson’s guitar that had a hole in it that he played all the time, and it had nylon strings.

Ray sat on a fold-out wooden catering chair and popped open his fridge. Then he got a couple of 40 ouncers and passed one to me. It was semi-cold, of swill brand. I unscrewed the top and slugged away. No use getting dehydrated.

“Did you bring some ideas?” he said.

“Oh, I got ‘em.” I sat on the edge of his cot. And it felt like plywood. Poor old Ray. What did the girls think of the coffin lid? I smiled at him.

“Like what?” he said.

“Four piece. Wall of drums, you know? Monster sound. Big . . . wooden sound, like big ass sailing ships out to heavy sea . . . graaaaaaaaa. Zeppelinish.”

“Could be time to stage that comeback sound,” Ray said, eyebrows narrowing in a squint.

“It’s not a comeback sound, man,” I said. “It’s an always sound.”

“Maybe. It’s more subtle than you’re pitching here,” he said.

Pitching? Did he mean chucking? Ditching? Whatthefuck? “I’m not pitching, I’m making, man,” I said.

Ray just looked at me, sipped his beer.

“You know, Ray? No more whining,” I said. “None of that little-man-worried-about-his-business trapped-in-the 1MEG sound. Rock and roll,” I said. “Where you gotta hear the heavenly bodies move, gotta feel the earth breathing beneath you, you know, the way the ocean moves . . . Real . . . Big . . . Heavy . . .” I held my arms out wide.

“I’m sold, man,” he said, grinning. And then he had that look of Ray Planning on his face. “Just one thing, though, Jake,” he said.

“What?”

“You don’t sing.”

And that was fine by me. I have a good, tenorish voice, and I sing on key. But I’m not a singer, anyway. “That’s fine,” I said. “I don’t sing. Not even backup.”

“Right,” he said. “You cut your corner of the carpet in this band. I don’t play guitar because I suck, you don’t sing.”

“Ray, you can play guitar if you want, man.” And he wasn’t that bad back in ol’ New Biggsburg. Not good, not bad.

“I’ll hold it for video shoots. I won’t plug it in. Okay?” he said.

I said “Hold it for video shoots, ffffffffffpppppppt.” I noticed half the 40 ouncer was gone within me. And I’d had nothing to eat since New Biggsburg. “Anyway . . . keyboards,” I said.

“What about them?”

“I got one. It can play itself. I’ll set if off to the side for atmosphere if we need it. Samples and shit.” And I read him. Seemed like some more wheels were turning, and then, I had to say it. “But nooooo turntables.”

“Yeah, I guess there’s no place for that. But atmosphere can be bullshit, too.”

“Depends on what you’re breathing,” I said.

Ray just shook his head. And then he looked at me like “you’re a fucking genius, Jake, did I ever tell you that,” but he never told me that, and he didn’t have to. “Oh, Jake,” was all he said, and smiled wryly.

“Anywho, Ray, where we going to practice, like here?” I joked.

“No fucking way.”

“Rent space?”

“There’s studios uptown to rent, but that’s by the hour. Lame . . . we have to live where we play.”

“Oh. In a warehouse?” I always wanted to live in a warehouse. I don’t know why. I’d lived in a crummy old Victorian house rock-walled basement, in a suburban kind-of-ranch-house basement, in a basement apartment, and another basement apartment. It was a sure thing that if you lived in a warehouse, you wouldn’t be in the basement. It sounded light, airy, inspiring. I looked about Ray’s dump again. He’d want to live in a warehouse, too.

“Yeah, something like that,” Ray said.

“Hey . . . you bring girls here?” I said.

“Of course.”

“They ever come back?”

“Jesus, Jake!” He took a long swig from the 40 ouncer and chuckled. “You got me on that one.”

“Raaaay.” My beer was gone-o.

I decided right there it really was time for us musicians not to live like worms, or beetles, or bees, or mice stacked on top of each other, is the word warren? Ideas didn’t hatch in warrens, Edison didn’t cook up light bulbs in tenement apartments, Oppenheimer and his bomb dudes didn’t cook up Fat Man and Little Boy in a basement. Mozart didn’t pen his work in a ten floor-walkup. (Did they build ten floors up back then? Just where the hell did Mozart actually live . . . anyway . . . ?)

Les Thugs / Entire Short Story

2010-10-03T02:25:00.000-07:00

LES THUGS

It was a lime-green skateboard. It wasn’t a good skateboard. In fact, Kevin Goode decided it wicked sucked.

It was not as wide as a real skateboard. Also, a real skateboard was made out of wood, with good trucks and wide wheels that could be steered. Kevin skateboard was fiberglass, skinny, and . . . just steered sort of. It was a German skateboard, called a “Vul Kan,” purchased by his parents at the nearby Paris department store Prix Unique for “something” francs because they felt sorry for him. Perhaps the francs came out to twenty bucks.

He appreciated them going to that expense. But the Vul Kan really wasn’t worth it. It would have been better, much better, to use the money to ship something from home.

Now, back in the USA, Kevin had two bikes and a good skateboard. One bike was red with slicks, a banana seat and a sissy bar. This was a concoction he and his father made out of a junky frame and second-hand parts. The other bike was a black BMX bought brand new from Grandway. Kevin liked both bikes equally as much. He liked the red for its old chopper-ness, the BMX for its newness and ruggedness. And his skateboard went wherever he wanted, and didn’t look like a big piece of green soap.

The separation from his cool pained his heart.

No cool bikes, or cool skateboards, or cool TV, or cool anything, really, for Kevin in Saint Mandé, the eastern-most suburb of Paris, dix neuf cent swwwaaaaacent dix sept, or some such babble that made up the French year 1977 . . . There he was, eleven years old, with longish sandy hair (very cool in the USA) in Sears Toughskin jeans (didn’t exist in France except on him) Cincinnati Reds sweatshirt (the only one walking around in France) with an ugly, wobbly, not cool skateboard on wide sidewalks that had a coarse, textured surface that sent vibrations up into his Converse Chuck Taylor’s, making his feet tingle, then go numb. And many times the tiny, hard wheels would dive into a crevice in the walk and stop him dead. Or, trying to make a wicked turn, he’d just slip right off the board like it felt like dumping him.

If he had the red bike chopper, he could destroy France. But, en fain, France was destroying him.

“Ey, espion American!”

Kevin looked up from the sidewalk. He stopped the skateboard and flipped it up and grabbed it in the air.

“Comment ca vas?” Kevin said back. It was his “pal” Lucien, from school. Lucien was coming out of his sooty old stone apartment building, and Kevin just said how’s it going? the standard greeting he had mastered in his small list of French he’d mastered. But, alore, Lucien had told Kevin he was German, or “a German spy” as far as Kevin could understand it, and that French wasn’t his language, either.

Now, Kevin’s father, Jack Goode, said Lucien was certainly a French name. Jack also saw Lucien once at Kevin’s school, and said something to the effect that with Lucien’s shorts, black shoes and black socks, and the shaggy, garlic-smelling sweater Lucien always wore he was absolutely French.

And then, looking at Kevin very seriously, Lucien proceeded to say, as Kevin followed it, “Quand ill faut . . . tout . . . regard . . . picine . . . oiseaux” in his croaking voice, and Kevin pretty much gave up. Something about a bird getting trapped in the indoor swimming pool their school used.

What the hell did these kids talk about all the time? Kevin wondered. And why? The French kids just weren’t right in what concerned them. As far as he could tell, big deal birds in the pool. They didn’t know who Godzilla was. They never heard of him. Star Wars, a movie Kevin had been anticipating ever since he saw the picture of the gold robot and the guy with the black radiator face in Fangora, was playing in USA everywhere as he stood there, and it wasn’t even playing in Paris. Anywhere. His pal, (real pal) Charlie had seen it three times already. And that was weeks ago. Kevin found out in a letter that took two weeks to get to them . . .

Ahhhhh, that was civilization, Kevin thought. Seeing Star Wars three times. Not, most certainly not France of no Star Wars . . . no Godzilla, just birds in swimming pools.

Id i ots.

“Je pense que je vas, maintenant,” Kevin told Lucien in clunky French. A sort of “see ya, gotta scram.” It was getting late, the parents would be wondering where he went. For they did care. And really, because of that, Kevin cared what they thought. Except about not shipping at least one of the bikes to France.

“D’accord,” Lucien said, and then something about his mom was in the hospital, maybe working there, and he had to fix his own dinner, or something about his grandma fixes him dinner on Wednesday nights, and she is the most terrible cook, not like mama, but then he’s no mama’s boy.

Kevin and the Vul Kan finally made it back to the gates of the “flat.” Or whatever his parents had decided to call it that week. A part tement, with a French accent, was dropped. So they went onto flat, which Kevin thought sounded England English.

The flat was a nightmare, Kevin’s Kevin word. Why nightmare? ‘Cause it was, he had decided. The flat was a carriage house over the garage of a small Saint Mandé Mansion that had three fancy courtyards in the back. The entrepenuriste, or whatever he was called—the landlord . . . the executive who lived in the mansion—was Monsieur Du Farge. Or Monsieur Cut du Fromage. Or, M. Fart.

The Jackass was the name Kevin’s father gave him.

Kevin walked through big tall iron gates of the grounds, and closed them with a CLANK! Ne fais pas ca ovrear! Or something . . . Don’t make so much noise, American boy! M. Fart would say. But it didn’t seem like he was around. Just to check, Kevin pulled up the sleeve of his sweatshirt and farted loudly on his arm to scare some pigeons away.

Fart’s car was there, though. Kevin scooted around a shiny black Mercedes diesel sedan that leaked oil in great puddles on the cobblestones below it.

At the carriage house, Kevin opened the door to the apartment upstairs, pas locked, and he trekked up a steep staircase under one dim, bare bulb. The flat door was locked. Kevin had the klee.

No one was home.

“Hey, Mom . . . Dad . . . ?” he said into the small, empty hall.

He looked into the five by five-square kitchen with tiny, groaning fridge and a deep gray sink full of dishes. A tall skinny window overlooked the first of the courtyards below. A blimp was droning outside, overhead, mismatching the fridge in a wobbling pitch battle. It had some words crawling across the bottom of it advertising shampoo, or butter, Kevin wasn’t sure which.

Kevin checked his parent’s dark bedroom. Then he went peed in the water closet at the end of the hall. The toilet was in the closet! Tank high on the wall. Pull-chain, yank it . . . “ROOOOOOOAAAAERRRRRR” and the pee went out into the street for all he knew . . . out to that guy with the broom made of hay who’d turn on the hydrants and flush the gutter every day.

And onto into Kevin’s room, which was also the dining room, living room, and the room with the apparatus du television, which smelled like burning dirty diapers when it was on. It wasn’t on much. Only three channels. One night it played a John Wayne Western with a very high, girly-sounding French voice dubbed in for the Duke. It would have been funny, but it wasn’t.

What completed the flat as a real le nightmare, though, was the wallpaper of Kevin’s “room.” Red. Velvet? It was textured. He could run his hand across it and it was fuzzy, like the posters that glowed by black-light they sold in the “head shop” (his Father’s term) back home. Kevin called it red velvet wallpapeure. When the bare bulb “chandelier” was on at night, it made a 3D effect that would reveal weird shapes, like the pointed tops of the iron fence out front, in a more shiny red. But during the day, these “fleur de lease” were hard to see.

But just before bed, chandelier out, with the lights of the courtyards and the buildings rimming the block coming in through the tall, skinny French windows, three “fleur de lease” grouped together just the right way made very scary shadowy skulls on the wall looking down at him as he lay on in his hard little couch/bed.

Kevin was too old, onze ans, too old of course to be scared of fleuur de leeese fuzzy wallpaper skulls and dim bare bulb chandeliers and TV sets that smelled like burning dirty diapers and a droning blimp and a droning fridge and a roaring toilet in a closet . . . and he had no idea what was in the garage below, the Mercedes was always outside leaking (it didn’t go in the garage because it leaked) but then, there were the dreams of the catfish-face taxi, the Citroën, chasing him, and the gangs of Vietnamese moped riders (La Guerre est fini!) chasing him, the warm warm Coke (the fridge didn’t really work,) the bloody bloody hamburgers at the McDonalds on the Champs Elysee, the smell of garlic from all those armpits on the One Metro line subway cars with the smooth and squealing rubber tires, all the attendant horrors of his French school, the landlord’s grand-kids stoning a courtyard tortoise to death and blaming it on the American, the wallpaper . . . the wallpapeure.

A nightmare . . .

“Hi honey . . .” It was his mom, Karen Goode, behind Kevin in the hall as he stood in a trance outside his room. He hadn’t heard her come in.

“I saw you skateboarding away, I was calling out to you. You were off in your own world.”

Karen Goode was smiling, holding a bag of groceries and a baguette. She kissed him on his forehead. France seemed to agree with mom, though. Her blond hair was in a bob that seemed to come out of fashion magazines, and she raved about the lipstick she found that she couldn’t get back home. She even bought new glasses, which Kevin thought looked too big and funny at first, until he saw some other people wearing them, including a picture of the actress Sofia Loren. He decided that worked, in a way that he couldn’t really explain.

“How were your adventures?” she said. She went into the kitchen, pushed some of the stuff around in there to make room for the bag and the bread.

“That skateboard is too crummy, Mom. Can we pleeeeeeeeze try and get the red bike here. I’d even leave it. Sell it for big bucks, I bet. They never saw anything like it here.”

“We’ll talk to your father about it. Again.”

She came out of the kitchen, stood in the little hallway with him, and sighed. “You know how he is about these kind of things.”

“I’m serious, Mom. It would more than make up for the shipping cost . . . I bet I could get a hundred dollars for it.”

Mom smiled at him. “A hundred dollars?”

“Yeah.”

“I just don’t think they like American stuff here, Kevin.”

“That’s what they want you to think. I was teaching a couple guys some baseball the other day.”

“You were?”

“Though they throw like girls, here. I think that’s why they couldn’t throw grenades and lost France to the Germans.”

His mom laughed. “You should tell your father that. That’s a good theory.” And she seemed to mean it.

“Kev, I’ll tell you . . .” his father said, later. The three of them were sitting at the little table under the bare bulb chandelier, eating couscous with some kind of cooked black meat, and the baguette with sweet butter. His father glowered over the table. He was a big man, with a big black beard, puffy black hair and thick, black-rimmed glasses. “. . . The shipping on the red bike is actually going to run about two hundred and fifty dollars.”

Kevin just looked at him, shrank back in his seat a little. “I’ll . . . pay . . . I’ll pay you back.”

“Errrr. I know you would if you could.” Jack leaned back into his chair, pulled a thin cigar from his shirt pocket and lit it. Kevin’s mom topped off her glass of red wine, and shrugged at Kevin.

“Two fifty, and it would take five to six weeks to get here,” Jack continued.

“Two hundred and fifty, we could buy a bike here for that,” Karen said.

“And what, ship it back home to add to the flock of bikes?”

“Uh . . . yeah . . .” Kevin said, and then kind of realized where it was going.

“Skateboard here. Bike in Ohio. That’s kind of the way it’s got to be . . .” The smoke roiled around Jack. “Sorry about it, Kev.”

Kevin didn’t say anything. He just looked at his “stew.” The couscous, fine. The meat, beat. The Coke . . . warm. The smoke, he was used to it. Kevin wondered if he could sell the skateboard when he got home. The green Vul Kan had lame trucks, metric he was sure, that wouldn’t change over to the big American wheels, and it was shaped to only go one way. Sure, he could sell the Vul Kan, but not in America. Kids there knew what sucked. Like disco . . . sucked. Like France . . . wicked sucked.

And the Wednesday was over. There was no school on Wednesday. It was Thursday, and back to school. Saturday, of course, there was school for half the day. But not Wednesday.

And what he said every Thursday morning, and Saturday morning “What the hell is this, go to school on Saturday?” Kevin said this to the catfish face Citroën car at the curbside, then “You’re ugly, buddy.”

An old woman putting out some trash was looking at him, scowling. She had very curly gray hair, and was wearing a bright blue apron.

“How do you goddamn do?” Kevin said to her, in English, and smiled his biggest smile.

Her scowl lifted a little. She nodded.

“Nice goddamn day, eh?”

She nodded back to him, now perhaps a glint of it dawning on her what was really going on.

And Kevin was down the block, and didn’t look back. The thrill of the exchange got him going, but he was really crossing the line, and knew it. And he was getting worse at this, or better, depending on who was watching. If it were his friends at home, he was the champ. But, well . . .

Kevin arrived at the tall iron gates to the school. More iron gates, these shutting out the world from the inside of a school made out of chubby black stone blocks. The gates remained open until precisely 7:30 AM, and then slammed shut, so if you were late by a minute, you had to walk around the building and have someone buzz you in. One day, a month or so ago, Kevin was ten minutes late, and no one answered the buzzer, so he turned around and went home.

Home a few hours later, that is.

Aujourdui, the gates were closing just as he slipped in. And right then, he knew he forgot something . . . caiher, ruler, pencils, forgot something, but he just couldn’t figure out what it was, and he went into the dusty slate courtyard with a vague feeling of dread. Everybody was up in class by now. The courtyard empty of the ferocious soccer game that happened before school . . . “Kids hyped on all that café-au-lait,” his father said, finally consenting let Kevin drink warm Coke for breakfast.

Kevin skipped up the stairway to his fifth grade class, and flung open the closed door.

“Hellowww Jaaaaak,” most of the class said. Monsieur Blanc, the “professeur,” was smiling. He seemed in a good mood.

Today.

“Caio,” he said back, and took his seat. Kevin’s name, of course, was not Jaaaaak.

Bit it was, for now. Kevin Jacques (Jaaaack) Goode of Columbus Ohio, an American youth of superior bike jumping, rocket building, street hockey, and even art, sat to take his place as the class . . . as the fool, object de regard, or . . . class retard, mille neuf cent sox in the pants dizzz sept, or some other such way of saying 1977 in Saint Mandé France, the right leaning suburb of Paris.

Kevin sat on the upper right side of a big U of desks that went around the room. There were two rows of double desks in the middle of the room, and then about fifteen desks making the U around them. Where Kevin sat made him closest to the teacher, M. Blanc (White.) who usually stood in the front right part of the room. Kevin looked directly across the room to Lucien, the “German spy.” Beside Kevin was Michelle, tall, curly, with wide-spaced blue eyes. Thick wrists. Kevin liked Michelle, but had a problem with Michelle. Was he a girl or a boy? If Michelle was a boy, he seemed girly. If she was a girl, she was boyly. Michelle took of his shirt when he played soccer, but . . . Kevin was almost certain Michelle was a girl. The more he got to know her, going on two months now, with his hoarse voice, strong arms . . . Tomate said Michelle was a girl.

Tomate (Tomato) sat in the seat right in front of Kevin, the top of the first desk row. He was thin, stretched out, clumsy, and liked to laugh a barking “Wha ha ha ha!” and slap his desk. Tomato wasn’t his real name, Kevin didn’t know what it was. He heard it, couldn’t pronounce it, and forgot it.

But then, the whole stupid class didn’t really know his name, either. Kevin Jacques Goode. Jacques was the name of his godfather he hadn’t met yet. He was a Corsican soccer player who got his parents out of some kind of jam when they were in France before Kevin was born. Kevin’s father was a Fullbright Fellow, whatever that really was, and was working on a history book that was going to help him get an associate professor job, (it did) but . . . there was some mention of gypsies, and belly dancers, and running out of money, and perhaps, crime. His parents never told Kevin really when went on. All he knew was this Corsican Jacques saved his parents, apparently, and the deal was they had to name their first-born son after him. So, since he was going to a French school, why not use his French middle name . . . call me Jacques, mes amis. So that’s what he and his parents told the teacher . . . Mister Blanco White.

The French would have none of that.

All Americans are named Jack.

“Comment ca vas, Jaaaack?” asked Michelle next to him, smiling. She was sweating from the morning soccer.

“Bein, poutetre . . .”

WHACK WHACK WHACK! went Missiouuuur Blanc’s pencil on his lectern, the beginning of the day, the lessons, the le blah blah droning . . .

Oh boy. Some days were worse than others.

Kevin was a tuner-outer, really. It was a skill he perfected in Ohio. They’d even tested him, but determined that he didn’t need drugs, he wasn’t learning disabled, or hyper, he just needed to “apply himself better.” But anybody would tune out in a French school. Understanding every fifth word, if that, soon Kevin Jaaaack was gone. Not a good combination . . . a school so boring it couldn’t even be understood.

“Eeeeh, Jaaaack?” Missiouuuur Blanc was moving in on him. “La Chien, dit, Chien . . .”

And M. Blanc got down to an almost kneeling position, and began with “Wooof Woof, La Chien, elle dit Wooooof.”

And the class le laughed.

Kevin didn’t know what the hell was going on at all, now. He just smiled, trying to recover. Dogs don’t say “woof,” they say “Bark bark.” And you don’t say “Eeeeeiiii” when you hit your damn thumb with a hammer, you say “OUCH!” French idiot.

Kevin kept smiling on the outside.

And then, Michelle said something that sounded like “Jack has horses in America, isn’t that right?”

Kevin had never even ridden a horse.

And Vincent, (VanScaunt) sitting next to Tomate, with his wry grin and his thick black eyebrows, said, “Michelle likes the horses, oh, he likes the horses.”

And . . . alas, Kevin had seen it all before, M. Blanc’s back of hand moved through the air like a big bird and got Vincent on the side of the head.

“C’est suffi-cent, alore!” Blanc said.

And Vincent said “Eeeeeiiiiii.”

Kevin hated it when the whole class looked at him, now putting his mastery of the French word for dog even in question, and was glad for Vincent’s whacking just to distract them long enough to move on. The Chein thing was really embarrassing because it seemed like the third time it happened to him. Dog, car, plane, cat, horse, would come up in a lesson, one way or another, and he’d find M. Blanc barking or meowing beside him.

So most of the class thought he was that stupid.

Not those in his immediate circle, the five kids in the class who seemed to like him (all troublemakers,) just the rest of them. Certainly the guys who sat straight up, and looked straight ahead, unsmiling, unflinching, and the guy next to him, who did the same, pole up his butt, with his notebook, ruler, pencil, marker all laid out in a specific way on the desk, each the same . . . they’d sneer at Kevin in the very same way, too. Or they’d whisper behind his back. Kevin was ready to take one out, maybe two, in a fight. He lacked the nerve, really. Would Tomate get in and defend him when lez fussy guys all ganged up on him? Who would? Michelle?

Lunch was a bad time.

It was in line . . . going into the cafeteria . . . that he realized what he forgot. His lunch payment. Alain, some tall guy with a drooping chin who worked at the school, stood in front of the cafeteria and read off the names of those who paid their lunch, and, alore, it was Kevin and the other foreign kid who didn’t.

What do the French do with those poor sops who didn’t bring their lunch payment? (It paid for a month and was big francs.) Why, the French humiliate them by putting them at a special table off to the side of the cavernous old lunchroom, and serve them bread and water.

Regular lunch was a four course catered affair with weirdoes in aprons brining . . . some kind of sauce on potatoes, then a little piece of tough smelly meat, then some sort of custard in a bowl, and finally a little salad. And only water to drink. No milk. No chocolate milk. No Seven-Up bien sur.

Kevin, embarrassed to be at the “no pay” table or whatever they called it, again, actually didn’t mind the bread and water at all. And before Kevin could sit down, the foreign kid had his bread polished off, but didn’t touch the water.

He nodded to Kevin, smiled, and flashed him a peace sign as Kevin sat. The Kid was in the fourth grade, and certainly not French. At first Kevin thought he was Chinese, but just generally figured he was probably from Vietnam, like the moped gangs.

The exchanged how do you do’s . . . they’d spoken a little bit before, and the kid even knew a little English, it had seemed. The kid’s name sounded like “Ma Tay Oh Cha Lata something.” So . . . Marty.

“Marty . . .”

“Yaaak.”

Marty was small, really small. His hands were half the size of Kevin’s. Kevin could see the veins in his arms, a combination of being really skinny and having tough little muscles. His eyes were deep brown and always a little watery. His black hair was longer than Kevin’s, even.

And, in halting French . . . “You can call me Kevin, Marty.”

“Ke vin?” He understood.

“Yeah,” Kevin said in English.

“You Kevin,” Marty said in English. “Yeah.”

“How much English you know?”

“Me?” Marty pointed to himself with a thumb. “Fuck you.”

Kevin laughed so hard he was half off the back of his bench seat. It was a huge laugh that filled the whole cafeteria, and all the heads turned to him, le chien woof woof, and a tear formed in Kevin’s eye.

“Hey, fuck you, Marty . . .” Kevin said, laughing.

“Hey, fuck you . . . Ke vin.” Marty smiled. Kevin split his bread in half, gave Marty the half and it was gone fast.

Kevin leaned over the table. “And fuck school, too. Especially this one full of ugly fuckers.”

“Yeah, fuck you school,” Marty said.

“So, Mom, that Vietnamese kid is really cool,” Kevin said to her. They were on the Paris One subway, on their way out and about underground to do a bit of book shopping, destination, some shop near Notre Dame that sold books that were in English.

“That’s good, then,” she said.

“Now, I’m not saying that the French school will work out, but he’s okay.”

They were on a wait-and-see program about the “French” school. It was a private school. Catholic. There was an American school somewhere way far far away deep in Paris. It was very expensive, and they really didn’t have the money. The French school was two hundred a month, and another fifty for the lunch. The American school was thousands. School is school, Kevin thought. It was bad anywhere. But free in Ohio.

French idiots.

“He even speaks a little English. All swear words.”

Karen smiled down at him. “You might even make a friend for life here . . . you never know.”

It was an interesting concept. One that Kevin really didn’t care one way or another. Though the idea of such a person like Marty in that school made some difference about how he felt about it. A seat opened up on the subway, and they both took it. The Metro had a gentle rocking motion, and that was about it. No clanging or banging most of the old red car Metros, just a whiiiiish noise. Like the future should be, Kevin thought. Whiiiiisshing through tunnels, lights streaking by. Out the widow, another subway floated by, going about the same speed, this one a clanging red car line. Kevin looked out at les Français, met the eyes of a bearded old man in the other train for a moment, then the red car line began to sink below them, and a wall came up and the train disappeared.

Later, when Kevin and Karen Goode came up out of the Metro stop . . . like with the Eiffel Tower, the ghostly basilica of Sacré Coeur, and the gigantic castle mansion of Hotel Des Invalides war museum . . . the gothic cathedral of Notre Dame hovered there before them, not looking real. The scale was huge, and the round stained glass window in the middle huger, and Kevin just stared up at it with its spider arms coming out of its sides. "Cool!" he said.

Then they went into the musty, old-smelling bookstore called Shakespeare and Co. Kevin went right for sci-fi, which was all in a cramped back room. He found a fat paperback that looked good, sitting prominently on a table in a field of others. The book was written by a certain Samuel R. Delaney, Fall of the Towers Trilogy, three books in one. It had a spaceship on the cover covered with weeds. He liked the cover. Had no idea what was inside it, just liked the idea, too, that there seemed to be a lot of whatever the story was.

After his mom bought it for him, walking back out on the sidewalk, he opened the Samuel R. Delaney book in the middle. And there was some kind of sex scene. Whoops. Oh well.

But at least it was in English.

Le School wasn’t going that well at all.

Being a little older in Ohio, it always seemed he had an edge on the other kids, but Kevin had started fifth grade French-style at the end of August, and now it was going on the end of October and he was getting “progress” reports. Or, not progress reports. He wasn’t making progress in his French instruction. In fact, the only thing he was good at was math. Sort of.

“Of course, what did they expect, anyway?” Jack Goode said, puffing a pipe and reading the New York Times at their living room bedroom dining room table. The advertisement blimp was droning outside, selling Nestlé crackers today.

“Kevin’s French is getting really good, I’m kind of cheesed about this, too,” Karen said, holding the “progress” report by the edges so it flopped over onto the table.

Kevin was a little embarrassed, but really, just mad at the French. He was fiddling with the TV, trying to get one of the three channels, but the picture started to roll up into itself like a fainting eyeball.

“I gotta take the back off this, guys,” Kevin said, not looking at them. “The horizontal hold needs adjustment.”

Then, looking, he caught his parents glancing at each other.

“I’m serious, there is something wrong with this . . . its tubes.”

“Kevin, the voltage in France is twice that of back home,” his father said, “if you hit the wrong part with the screwdriver it would kill you.”

“Ahhh, it’s not going to kill me, Dad.” Kevin whacked the top of the TV. Then one more whack, and the thing went dead.

“Well, that’s that, then,” Karen said, and lit a cigarette and let it dangle with her maroon lipstick lips, and Kevin decided his mother had never seemed more like a movie star.

“C’est la Guerre.” Jack leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. The blimp was very loud now. “Let’s a get a really good RCA console when we get home, and get rid of that old one. Because we’re American, and we can.”

The next day, landlord Monsieur Du Fart was yelling at the bottom of the flat’s stairs, and the veins were popping out of his light gray forehead.

Karen was at the foot of the stairs, at the door. Kevin was hiding upstairs around the wall in the hall, the door open, peeking around the corner, and he overhead M. Fart saying something in French to the effect “that kid, he was the one that broke the television wasn’t he! . . . He is a very destructive kid, he killed (murdered?) my tortoise, children don’t belong touching technology, you should something about something here is huh? and you, the parents, the parents, my god, it is always the parents that this something blah blah, if he were my child he would be (whipped or beaten?) to blah blah huh?,” and then, a whole bunch of words he’d never heard before that sounded like M. Fart was choking on the waxy stuff that surrounds a big wheel of cheese.

Finally, in perfect French, Karen Goode said “Kevin knows how to operate a Television, Monsieur Du Farge. Any American kid does. It’s old, and perhaps needs some repair.”

Fart just looked at her. “Well, of course, now it does, does it not? You will be charged for the repair, of course.”

“Of course,” Karen said. “I expected no different.”

No TV. Kevin read.

He read his Samuel R. Delaney until it appeared in his dreams . . . A thriving city full of really weird people, and empty city—its twin—fading in and out of reality with a radiation belt between them, and somewhere beyond that a forest, with a prince raised in that forest for his triumphant return to the city, or the empty city—perhaps ran by robots, once, and also, a far-off war fought in tubes, where the person fighting saw it all without leaving the tube, and could very well die in the tube if he was killed.

Kevin’s brain started feeling like it was going to explode. All the new experiences . . . and now, the wild sci-fi book. If he wasn’t going to get Star Wars, at least he got Samuel R. Delaney.

And on his walk to school, that warm, late-fall day, there was something new about the way laundry was hanging from the window in a passing courtyard, something different with the sounds of clanging pots, running water, and vibrant French merde merde cursing from inside an open window.

Kevin suddenly stopped, looked up, and watched the elegant, triangular Concorde super-sonic jet fly overhead. He watched it until his neck cramped up, and it was gone, but it’s roar could be heard for a while.

The catfish-face Citroën had started to make sense, he decided, as he passed it. The French tried to make a Corvette taxi, maybe. Good for them! Kevin finally kind of felt he owed this feeling of observation, of a big kind of new interconnectedness, to that Samuel R. Delaney, whoever he was.

But on that day, they were waiting for him.

Kevin came in though the school gate, a little early perhaps, and the soccer game was in full swing. It was the fourth and fifth grade, and Marty the Vietnamese kid was scoring all over the place. Kevin stopped to watch him. Marty gave him the thumbs up . . .

They were waiting for him. They came over to Kevin, two of the guys from his class with poles up their butts. They were not in the game, today. One was Steph, blond, blue eyes, the other Hercule, short black hair and squinty eyes.

Steph said “Tu est bête.”

Hercule said “Tu est singe stupide.”

(Something like You’re ugly/stupid, you’re an ugly/stupid monkey.)

Rage boiled up in Kevin. Also, fear, tugging at his stomach. It was going to be a fight. It had to be a fight.

“Fuck your mamma, and your papa, and your little dog too, shit face,” Kevin told them in English.

“Comment? Maman! Papa!” they both grumbled, and to the effect, “You don’t say bad things about Maman.”

And the first fist came at him, from Steph, too fast to block, and Kevin reeled, tripping and falling, and he was down, tasting the salt and iron of blood on his teeth.

Both Steph and Hercule were on top of him, Hercule holding him down and Steph punching him in the stomach. The forth or fifth punch knocked the wind out of him, Kevin gasped for breath, and he saw his mouth blood on Steph’s fist, and his blood on the tiles below him. One of Kevin’s arms broke free and he gave Hercule a huge “WHACK” on the bottom of his chin . . . Hercule’s teeth make a snapping sound.

Then, right from holding him down, and hovering above him . . . Hercule disappeared.

Then, there was a blur . . . just a blur of a small sneaker. Steph flipped backward and was suddenly lying four feet away.

Kevin got up.

Hercule was lying on the courtyard tiles, blood gushing from his nose. Steph was lying in a fetal position, moaning. Kevin spit blood, and for a moment it didn’t make sense what he saw.

Between them, standing all by himself, was Marty in a karate stance, glancing sharply at Steph, back to Hercule, to Steph, then Hercule.

The crowd had gathered around the fight, and were just staring at Marty, at Kevin, Marty.

Marty put his hands down, un-tensed.

“Hey . . . uh, geeez, thanks Marty!” Kevin said in English. “Wow. Karate!”

“Guung Fu, Ke vin.” Marty grinned very wide, and made a super fancy motion with his arms until his fingers were curled like scary claws. “It Gung Fu.”

After some hubbub and an incoherent lecture by Professeurr Blanc about the fighting, and some ice and paper towels on Kevin’s cut lip, (the Frencies didn’t get in trouble about attacking Kevin, but Marty had a note sent home . . .) and a long and boring day, Marty came over to the flat that afternoon.

No one was home. Jack was at the Bibliothèque Nationale doing research, and Karen was taking a class on French literature at the Sorbonne, according to the “where we are” little chalkboard in the kitchen. Kevin erased “school” under his name with the back of his hand.

Kevin didn’t mind being a latch-key kid in France. He knew it’d be fine if Marty came over, too. In fact, whatever he thought would be fine . . . about doing anything, and whatever anyone had to say about it, too bad.

“So,” Kevin said, waving his arms around in a kind of mock tour guide. “Zee living room bedroom dining room,” he said in a fake French accent.

“Peachy,” Marty said. Kevin laughed.

“The crapper’s in the closet.”

Marty just looked at him like “what?”

“Dooouble vay say, dans le closet.”

“C’est troglodyte, les Français,” Marty said, smiling.

Kevin had to run that one over a few times in his head. Was Marty saying the French were . . . cave people?

“Anyway, Marty, our TV is broken.” Kevin waved at the inert set. “I think we sound try and fix it.”

Marty looked at Kevin like “what?” Then, he slowly nodded.

“Oh, let me get you a Coke and some chips. What kind of host am I?”

Kevin went into the little kitchen, Marty following. Kevin opened the fridge, handed Marty a bottle of Coke, took one for himself, closed the fridge. He popped the top off on a bottle opener screwed into the kitchen wall. Marty did the same.

The both stood in the kitchen, Marty looking around, then peering out into the courtyard.

“Hey, merci for saving my butt, Marty.”

“You very welcome.”

A pause. “You like France?” Kevin asked him.

“Like France? No.”

“Was Vietnam better?” Kevin tore open a brown bag with the weird French potato chips and held the open bag to Marty. Marty grabbed a handful.

“Vietnam better. People better home. Food . . . it good.”

“How long have you been here, in France?”

“In France, one year. We live Australia, two year.”

“Ahhh, that’s why you speak English so well!”

“Mmmm. That why.”

“Did you like Australia? See any kangaroos?”

“Big kangaroos. Yeah.” He held up his hand high as far as his arm would reach. “Big.”

“So, like, did you see any war in Vietnam?”

“Mmmmm. Vietnam, we live . . .” and Marty looked out into the three courtyards. “In house like . . . mmmmmm.” Marty thumbed outside the window, across the courtyard to M. Fart’s mansion.

“A big house?”

“We live in big house. We . . . servants.”

“You were servants?”

“We have servants.”

“Ohhhhh. You’re rich people.” Kevin got it. “You had to run away.”

Marty nodded. “That right. House taken away. That war.” Long pause. “Killed Father.”

“Oh. Shit. That’s terrible,” Kevin said. “Oh man.”

“I see it, too. Communist kill him.”

“Fucking commies,” Kevin said, and took a big swig of his Coke.

Marty nodded. “Fucking commies.”

“My dad said the sun’s setting on them, anyway.”

“Sun set?”

“Communism’s wrong. It doesn’t allow for peoples’ innate motivation to succeed. That’s what my dad said.”

“Where is Dad?”

“He’s at the library, researching for a book he’s writing. You’ll meet them, Dad and Mom.”

“Where brother or sister?”

“Just me. Only child.”

Marty shook his head, laughed a little again. “Just you!”

“How many brothers and sisters you have?”

“I have three sister, and three brother.”

“Wow.”

Both their Cokes were almost gone. Kevin reached in, grabbed a couple more. Got the tops off them, handed one to Marty.

“So . . . you fix TV?”

“I’m gonna fix this TV, Marty.”

Kevin grabbed a screwdriver from one of the kitchen drawers, and his Coke, and the chips, and they both went back into the living room dining room bedroom.

Kevin pushed the TV away from the wall on its cart. When it got caught on the rug, Marty helped. It seemed as soon as he was there, Marty could almost lift the whole thing up by himself.

Marty watched as Kevin unplugged the big plug from the wall, then turned the TV set on.

“It not work without it,” Marty said, pointing at the plug.

“I know. I’m getting the charge out of the transformer. It will hold a charge to shock you. Zap!”

“Ahhhh,” Marty said. “Zap!”

Ten screws, Kevin had the back off the TV. It was full of dust, which he dumped onto the floor. Kevin peered into the banks of tubes and capacitors, Marty looked in over his shoulder.

“What all that?”

“These glass things are called tubes, they amplify a signal coming in from the antenna, and send it to this . . .” Kevin pointed at the back of the dark grey picture tube. “Then inside here is a little gun that zips back on forth on the back of this . . .” Kevin tapped the front of the TV. “That makes a picture out of tiny little dots.”

Marty, maybe not getting it all, still appeared very impressed.

“What I’m going to do is make sure none of these tubes are loose.” Kevin proceeded to pull a tube out of its socket. It was slim, glass, about the size of half a hot dog. There were little grey wafers inside, like floors of a building, and some wires up and down between them. Kevin inspected the bottom, six prongs and a notch, he lined the notch back up, fiddling around until it went back in.

“This one is good.”

“Ahhh, what that?”

Kevin followed where Marty was pointing. The fourth tube down in the row was burned black like it had been passed over a candle.

“That’s gotta be it, man.” Kevin reached and pulled it out. It fought with him, then . . . as he pulled it up toward him, there was a big glob of brown dust stuck to it.

“Yuck . . . uhhhhh,” they both said. And then, at the same moment, the realized it wasn’t dust at all clinging to the side of the tube.

Kevin looked at Marty, Marty looked back at Kevin.

“It’s a fucking mouse!” Kevin yelled.

Marty was laughing.

Stuck to the tube was a shriveled up, dried-out mummy of a mouse.

Kevin shook the tube, the mouse fell off onto the carpet. It seemed crunchy, light.

“I don’t know, I’ll put it back in and see . . . but it could have been the mouse knocked it loose and got zapped.”

Marty had the mouse in his hand now, poking at it. “It luck, or no luck?” Then he put it in his pocket.

“I guess you think it’s luck, Marty.”

Marty shrugged. Kevin stuck the tube back into its socket. He had to jiggle it back and forth a little to work it in. Then Marty helped him get the back of the TV on, and Kevin handed him the screwdriver and Marty deftly put the screws back in.

“Okay . . .” Kevin plugged the set it with its weird plug.

Then turned the switch.

There was a crackling, a buzzing sound. Then the TV came on. The picture looked fine. And it didn’t smell as much like burning dirty diapers, either.

“Alll right! Slap me five, Marty.” Kevin held out his hand low, waiting for Marty to slap it. Marty just looked at it, smiling.

Then, Marty slapped him five.

As they were heading out through the front courtyard, Marty was spying into the black Mercedes.

“Ohhhhhhh,” Kevin joked. “Ne touché pas asshole’s car.” Kevin had told Marty all about M. Fart, the tortoise incident, and the man yelling at his mom . . .

“Kevin, the key inside.”

And Marty cracked the car door, and slipped behind the wheel.

A sudden, enormous rush of adrenaline surged through Kevin.

His feet were moving him toward the car, and there was a Kevin in the back of his mind saying “don’t do it, Kevin, no no no.” But all he had to see was Mouisser Du Fart bawling out his mom, and he was thinking about the shitty apartment and the Fart grandkids stoning the tortoise, and he was sitting next to Marty on the smooth leather. The car’s interior smelled like ammonia and cigars.

“Nice day for a drive, huh, Marty?”

Marty’s small hand pushed something one the dash. He let go, and the button that he pushed began to glow a dull yellow.

“Voila c’est ca!” he said, and . . . turned the key.

The Mercedes roared to life. It clattered like a truck. Kevin hit the electric window down on his side. What was next?

“We . . . we better turn it off, Marty.”

“You open gate, Kevin.”

“You’re crazy, man.”

Marty flashed his eyes at the gate, then at Kevin. Marty was great crazy.

Kevin was out of the car, running, and he opened the gate. He turned, the Mercedes was moving slowly toward him, Marty’s forehead and eyes barely making it above the wheel.

The car stopped hard, rocking back and forth.

Kevin hopped back in, closed the door smoothly and quietly.

“Aaaaaalonze I!” Kevin said.

And they were out on the street.

Marty crept them up to an arrêt/stop sign. He carefully looked both ways, and then moved the car slowly through the intersection. Then they cruised down the street, slowly, the engine gurgling away, to another stop sign. Kevin looked out and saw a woman with a bag of vegetables looking in at them. He waved. She shook her head and yelled something.

“This is great. This is great. This is great,” Kevin kept saying to himself. A car came up behind them. It began to honk. Marty rolled down his window, and waved them past.

A tiny Renault R5, a go-cart of a car, zoomed past.

Marty turned them around a corner. He seemed to be getting the brakes down with practice. And then, they passed a few Vietnamese guys standing on the corner by their mopeds.

Marty beeped the horn, waved, and kept on going by them.

One of the guys started yelling, and ran after the car.

Marty stepped on the gas just as a light was changing ahead of them, and flew through the intersection fast.

Kevin thought they were gong to run right into he back of a VW bug. He grabbed the dash tightly. They came within inches before they’d slowed enough that it moved away from them.

“Was that your brother?”

Marty nodded, grinning.

Kevin was laughing.

A little square police car passed them going the other way.

Marty looked over at Kevin.

Then, they were out into heavy traffic on Avenue du General de Gaulle. Kevin could tell Marty was suddenly having just a little bit of trouble with it.

And, it seemed, the feeling washed over them both at the same time.

“Let’s get out at the park. Just leave it, Marty.”

“Just leave, yeah.”

Horns were blaring at them. It wasn’t looking good. Marty started a turn off the Avenue de Gaulle toward the park, it was one way coming at him. He aborted the turn just in time.

Then, a bus pulled away from its stop and nearly sideswiped them. Marty yelled something in Vietnamese. Kevin could tell he was suddenly just a little bit . . . afraid.

Kevin pointed, Marty followed, and they were moving down a near empty street. It was a narrow, no-parking-during-the day rue. The trees of the Bois de Vincennes Park could be seen down the block.

Marty pulled the Mercedes over, now, finally, smiling wide, breathing again.

And they ditched the car there, parked, with the keys in it, and closed the doors quietly.

“That was the best! Kevin said.

It didn’t seem like anyone saw them get out. No one was around. Some guy was walking way up the street, going the other way. Kevin and Marty walked quickly, not looking back, putting some fast distance between them and the car until they were just kids walking along the sidewalk . . .

And then, alore, Lucien, the German spy in sweater and shorts came bounding out of his building . . . ugh, it would have to be the street with his building, Kevin thought. Lucien was looking in the direction of the Mercedes just like he saw them get out.

“Eeeeeeeh, Jaaaaack . . .”

“Eh Lucien. C’est Marty, ici.”

“Je sais. Mais pas Marty,” Lucien said, and nodded at him.

“It Marty,” Marty said.

And Lucien looked at Marty with a flash of disgust that really surprised Kevin.

“Anyway, Lucien . . . smell ya tomorrow,” Kevin said.

“Yeah, have nice day . . . azzhole,” Marty said.

Lucien just stood there, looking at the black Mercedes, and back at them, watching them walk away.

Kevin finally barked out a laugh. They were both really breathing again.

“He do smeel,” Marty said when they were almost at the park. “Like French kitchen.”

“A French kitchen is a bad place, man,” Kevin said. “A bad place.”

There was silence for a while, each in their own thoughts. Kevin was sooo glad they didn’t get caught. (Would they still? Who was up in the windows being peering busy bodies? What would Lucien do?) They walked into the Bois De Vincennes Park, green upon green, babies in strollers with good-looking moms or scary-looking grandmas pushing, kids playing foootball (soccer) on the fall day, and far off a ruined medieval stone castle loomed in a haze.

They started walking in the direction of the castle.

And finally, Marty said something Kevin would remember for the rest of his life.

“Europe bad karma,” Marty said, not smiling.

Kevin rolled that one over a bit, getting the gist of it. He sort of had a grasp on it, karma. Something his mom would say once in awhile. Tricky Dick Nixon’s bad karma. Carter’s good karma.

“Yeah, Marty. Plus, we drive a bad car ma.”

Marty looked at him. He mouthed the words. Twice. Then he got the lame pun. He punched Kevin in the arm.

“Ahh hah.” Marty said. “Funny man.”

“Me funny? Still got that mouse?”

Marty pulled it out of his pocket, held it up so it was looking at Kevin. One of its dried out eyes had fallen out.

“How ya doin’, mouse?” Kevin asked it.

Marty shook it and said in a little voice “I do well, I lucky mouse. I save you ass from police ay.”

“So . . . that’s that,” Jack Goode said, coming in the door of the flat soaking wet one March night after a last ditch effort to save his research. As it is en France, Jack Goode’s access was suddenly fini . . . there was some kind of flap, or flop, he said, about the quality of American scholarship from some bureaucratic higher-ups . . .which resulted in Kevin’s father meeting an heir of Bonaparte himself at a bar to try and talk him into putting in a good word about the American scholar to get access to something he just had access to.

“It didn’t go well?” Karen asked him. Kevin and his mom were playing gin rummy at the dining room living room bedroom table.

“No,” Jack said. “We’re done.”

“Uh . . . we’re . . . we’re going home?” Kevin asked him.

“Yep. I’m done here.”

Kevin was jumping up and down in his chair.

“You’re so happy!” his parents said.

“I’ll miss Marty, but I hate France.”

“So well we know,” Jack Goode said. “Guess you can start saying good-bye to Les Thugs at school, then, Kevin.”

“I suuuuure will . . .”

And so it was just before spring that Goodes found themselves at Orly Airport, getting back on a KLM 747. Kevin felt a tingle in his spine the minute the big wheels left the wet pavement.

He was free. He was leaving a terrible terrible place of bad food, bad T.V., bad skateboard (Kevin left the board with Marty, who said he was going to chuck it in the Seine River), nasty French kids, and bad karma all around.

Though the Metro was pretty cool.

And the buildings were wicked cool.

It was really hard getting back to the USA . . . Alore . . . the plane was hit by lightning over the Atlantic, something caught fire in the cockpit, and they had to make an emergency landing in the Azores Islands and get on a different plane.

Actually, Kevin was sure they all would have died if he wasn’t carrying in his Toughskins jeans pocket Marty’s lucky mummy mouse.

FIN.

The Dark Machine (first pages)

2010-10-03T02:12:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER ONE. Sirius Mullen.

NOTICE: Pending Norvella, Christopher. 11-26-63699897. DOB - 1/8/27. DOD - 4/19/60. DOD -Note: Executed 4/19/60. Living relatives, 1. Norvella, Marbella Anna - mother. Miami Island District. 17, Florida. Lien. Incorrect payment #20004337.07 / 50,000 credits, STCP #1227. All properties become domain of State Corp #1227.

Sirius Mullen laughed quietly to himself while looking at the #1227 readout.

So, all of Christopher Norvella’s properties were the domain of State Corp. That was nothing. Norvella left behind nothing. According to the rest of the file, he never had any wages, never paid any taxes, and had absolutely no property at all. The 50,000-credit lien against the Norvella estate seemed to have been for a mistaken State Corp #1227 payout, an estate payout, ironically, sometime in the distant past.

Sirius thought it over for a long moment. The last thing he was going to do was put the lien on the mother of an executed son, poor woman. Finally, he keyed in quickly on the Dekk Unit in front of him “Nothing itself now becomes the domain of STCP-#1227.”

A prompt came up on the Dekk Unit screen. “What is the value of nothing itself?”

Sirius typed in “The value of nothing itself is 50,000 credits.”

Now balanced, the file saved and closed itself. And that was it.

Oh, he did a funny. Sirius laughed quietly again. Who would call him on it? It would slip by. It would slip underneath. It would certainly slip away.

Plus . . . who was this Christopher Norvella, really? He’d heard the name on holovision. But why in the world was executed? Never clear, no matter how much torque the spin the media put on the whole story . . . and the story itself had faded by now. And, so curious to Sirius as he sat at his desk, why didn’t Norvella ever have a job? Was there something erased, somewhere?

That’s what it was beginning to look like.

And then, for a brief moment, Sirius wondered . . . what really did Norvella leave behind that they didn’t know?

He sighed. He looked at the clock display on the Dekk Unit. It was getting close to the end of the day, quitting time. Home time. And with that . . . he suddenly felt slightly ill. Nauseous. Soon Sirius knew he would be head to toe full of dread.

It happened every day at 5:58. It was time for more pills, of course. But he didn’t want more pills. Pills pills pills.

Sirius shut the Dekk Unit down and folded it up. He leaned back in his chair and rubbed the smooth skin of his forehead, then up higher to the place that once had some hair, and far back to where there was still some. Did he just make a huge mistake? There’d be no retrieving the silly things he entered. Not without trauma, answering to the higher ups, this and that, a whole scene and flurry of “Sirius did what again?” . . . perhaps it would be better to leave it, and have it discovered, and quietly go on leave again.

Then, as it was suddenly getting darker outside, he shielded his eyes from the green glow of the office lights above him—hand over his brow as a kind of salute—without realizing what he was doing, until he felt silly about it. But no one saw him. There was no one around him, as he was supervisory level with no one to supervise. It was only him on that whole half a floor, and he could get away with cursing out loud, which he did. But, sometimes, he actually wished for more company in #1227 . . . someone to say to “see you tomorrow” to.

Sirius stood from his desk, took his small red star-shape tie off its clip at his throat of his light green jumpsuit and placed it gently on its hook on the unit divider. He took off his earpiece and mic, and put them next to the Dekk Unit, which was inexplicably buzzing, though clearly off.

Moving now, the nausea abated, and he felt a little better. But the dread . . . the dread was coming . . . and, Sirius felt suddenly very sad.

He didn’t feel sorry for himself. Never anymore, really. The sad was for the rest of it all. Everyone. It was a worn-out tiredness to the bone. It was death. The dead that kept showing up on his files. The dead, though why feel sad for them, he thought? They were getting a reprieve from the dying world . . .

The green office lights above him were suddenly blinking—off, on, offonoff, on.

Sirius looked up at them, blinked back. He moved to the row of porthole windows of his floor and looked out at the strange, throbbing vista. Across the ten-lane Westside Parkway, across the fat retaining walls of the swollen Hudson, power plant Fusion One’s giant white towers were pulsating under intermittently blinking industrial floodlights.

What was going on over there?

Beyond Fusion One, as far as he could see, was the New Jersey stubble-rubble of factories, maglev tracks and recycling/scrap yards. There were no lights on all the way to the distant hills. The horizon out there still held a dull remnant of a bloated red sun, but it was sinking fast behind a line of dark hydrogen tank silhouettes.

And then, the sun was gone.

“Aaarrgh,” Sirius grumbled. It was time to go . . . home.

He had to do something. Else. Sirius simply couldn’t face the maglev-tube ride back to his lousy Queens Bubble #555 living compartment, the heavy bustling horror of being stuffed in the train with all those other soon to be #1227 existences. Even if the population didn’t know how meaningless it all was, in the end, Sirius Mullen did.

The lights shut themselves off as he headed toward the elevator. One light made a strange popping noise out over his desk as the elevator door shut him inside.

Sirius walked out of his State Corp building and onto the crowded, percolating-with-people sidewalk. Nearly half of them were wearing their portovisophones, thin-lensed glasses hanging from a sleek headband, with a tiny camera and mic arching out in front of them on a little stiff wire like the fish-luring lantern on a monstrous deep dark sea fish. So the world was awash with half conversations, people looking at who they were talking to displayed in the glasses, other people talking to people with visophones or portovisophones . . . a world looking like people just walking around talking to themselves.

Sirius never wore a portovisophone. Wav-ether so close to his head gave him a terrible headache. And the “I’ll be there soon . . . I’m almost home . . .” had so little meaning to him, really. He moved from the shadow of his building, and winced up at its fine ugliness as he occasionally did. His State Corp division occupied a tall white tube of tiny portholes. The whole thing was like a seventy five-story submarine tipped on its side. He craned to see the top, today. What in the world was really up there? It was a darkening sky of blinking lights of aircraft, and even spacecraft with their solid dim lights moving quickly across the ether. It had been an unusually clear day, Sirius admitted. What that meant, he knew not.

He knew not.

His poly-boots were taking him to the maglev stop, but at the last second Sirius opted for a bar on the corner of 37th and 11th that he’d never set foot in.

The bar wasn’t named, as far as he could tell. It smelled like stale beer as he came in through the sliding door. It was full of people who didn’t look up at the thin, balding man in a light green jumpsuit that screamed obvious State Corp clerk. It was a good place, already.

He sat down in the near darkness at a worn, red plastic bar. He quickly caught the attention of the barkeep, a large man with a big beard who was wearing a tattered black jumpsuit. Sirius ordered a Jamaican ale, which came right then from the tap in front of him, plopped down before him in a big blue plastic mug. He took the ale in fast gulps. It was flat, and tasted woody, but Sirius felt the dread lifting like clouds after a rain.

He wiped it out, and called for another.

He was such a lightweight in terms of alcohol. Which was fine, he decided. Within three minutes, he was two-beer buzzed, and he turned his attention to a conversation going on between an old man and an old woman on stools right next to him. For . . . he’d heard the word . . .

“An’ how ‘bout that Norvella freak?” the wrinkled man next to him said. He was big for old. Strong-looking. Perhaps a military man, or cop, once. The man was swinging a huge bottle of South American beer, and sort of stank like metal from his armpits. Sirius almost broke in and said “How about him?”

“Sam . . . you have entirely missed the point again,” the older woman said. She was large-ish, with long, jet-black hair. She had smooth skin for old. “Any person who says anythin’ against the pro status-quo-ad-nausea State Corpse is a freak to your narrow para-digm. Well, maybe you’re the freak . . . and we’re all upside down, did you ever think about that?” The woman shook her finger at him.

Sirius wondered if she was screwing up her words on purpose, or if it was the peculiar blood-red drink in front of her, nearly empty. Or, was it some language of her youth coming back after a few rounds?

“They will never execute me for spoutin’ shit, that’s for sure. We built ourselves a pretty good world here, now. Finally. You think about it. We have everything we need. Don’t you forget the time of troubles. My feet still own the feeling that I didn’t even have a pair of shoes for a year.”

“Oh shuuuuut up. Pair of shoes for a year. Your fact’s become a romanticized fiction.” She rolled her eyes in Sirius’s direction, seeing he was now in on it.

“You take everything for granted now,” he old man said. “Take the fusion plants off-line and see how you women of a certain age get along without your face massager lifter machine . . . right?” Then the old man threw Sirius a wink, trying to get his support.

Sirius gave them both a thin smile, and that’s all he could manage.

“God, I can’t believe you. It’s people like you who killed the poor guy.” Then she pointed hard at him. “Killed him just by being you.”

“That’s right. I damn well did. I know where living a life of well-meaning ideas gets you. Nowhere but poor, hungry and dead.” He pounded the bar, revving up, then grabbed it, trying to stay on his stool.

Sirius briefly met the eyes of the woman across the top of the man’s brush of white hair. Her eyes were suddenly narrow with anger, and the weight of intoxication.

Life of ideas . . .

Sirius wanted to tell them both it didn’t matter what they thought. In the end, every person is as meaningless as the next. Rich, poor, fat, hungry, ideas, no ideas, bad meaning, no meaning, you’ll all end up dead.

Sirius ordered another ale.

On the maglev tube back to Queens Bubble, Sirius—quite drunk and actually feeling fine—zoned out on the holo-gram ads moving on their plates above the doors. The ads cast interesting glowing patterns onto the lemon-colored floor, like featureless ghost blob versions of what they were pitching.

Each stop, the auto-conductor squawked an unintelligible phrase from a speaker in the ceiling. Finally Sirius said “Braaaw arrrmram!” back to the speaker, mimicking an interested reply.

A thin teen boy nearby in a black headscarf and red jumper laughed at this, and smiled at him. Sirius could recall sitting across from this particular teen many times that year, the guy coming back from school, or wherever, the same time, same car Sirius took . . . third from the end. And he could tell right away that this was the first time the kid ever noticed him.

When Sirius’s stop came up, he stumbled off the train and nearly fell on the platform. The he plopped himself on the long moving sidewalk with the thousands of other long-faced, tied-from-their-ol’ meaningless and draining-day Queens Bubblers.

Idiotic place! he thought, and suddenly, he liked the roundness of the very word. Idi o tic.

The sidewalk was ill-maintained, and moved with clanks and screeches, and occasional lurches as it carried riders to each specific section in the bank of gray condominium towers plopped under the gigantic silver sheet of the bubble above. Sometimes, when the load on it was light, it moved too fast and people had to leap quickly, comically, off. Today it was impossibly slow.

Such was home for Sirius. Though touted completely safe from Uvs, dioxins, fumes and radioactivity of any kind, Queens Bubble was ugly supreme, served under diffused, yellow light. Idi o tic, a life of breathing in the air of his neighbors again and again just to be safe from dying, and it was killing him. Why . . . why? he thought. Why?

The reason was always missing from his imagined readout on the Dekk Unit, the readout that he saw in his mind many times:

Sirius Xavier Mullen, 44-88-75511338, DOB 7/12/16. Single. 1333. Apt #78, 822 Queens Bubble #555. Supervisory Clerk. State Corp #1227. Amend. History of mental illness. Nervous breakdown 7/12/55. Medicated. Homosexual: therapy ongoing. Attempted suicide 12/25/57. Medicated . . .

Though, as far as he could tell from the phantom readout, he wasn’t dead yet! In his mind, Sirius deleted the whole thing, and tossed the Dekk Unit out his State Corp building office porthole window—fifty floors high—and a great wind caught it, and the unit flew out across the retaining wall and it slipped into the dark brown Hudson, never to be seen again.

Corpus Callosum (first pages)

2010-10-03T01:16:00.000-07:00

PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG MAN

A long silver thread of drool hung from Bertrand Rupp’s lips. There was just enough of it to pool on the desk, but most of it was soaked up on the cuff of his argyle sweater.

“Hey Bert . . . hey Bert . . .” he would have heard if he was of hearing then. Tony, a classmate beside him, was calling. He had seen the seizure before, known him for years, though the teacher had not. Yet.

“What . . . what has happened to Bertrand?” she said, far off through a cloud, behind a haze, and somewhere beyond that.

It had been Bertrand’s turn to take a stab at the Shakespeare sonnet. The teacher, a young, well meaning red-haired woman named Ms. McCleary, picked him because it looked like he was paying attention. He was already deep into the seizure when she called.

“Hey Bert . . . hey Bert . . .”

“It’s his seizure . . .” Julie, a girl who had known him since kindergarten said to Ms. McCleary.

“No one told me anything about this,” she said, and rushed over to him. Bert’s eyes, behind thick glasses, were vacant like no one was home, and they were slightly crossed. “What . . . what do we do?”

“He’ll come out of it,” Tony said. “Sooner or later.”

Autumn

CHAPTER ONE

Kate McCleary looked down at the Formica kitchen table at the Sunday edition of the New Biggsburg Press and Sun.

She rubbed her temples hard until her eyes watered.

The headline pained her.

“Meter Reader Strangled and Severed.”

It was not so much the gruesomeness, or sympathy for the poor woman. Or the trashy New York Post style headline, even. For Kate, it was the dark, nauseating feeling that she knew the psycho who did it.

He lived across the street.

Bertrand Rupp was one of her 12th grade English students a couple of years ago. Bert spoke with a stammer, and he was an unusual epileptic who was prone to going into zombie-like petit mal seizures when it was his turn to read. Luckily, Bert’s style of seizures weren’t dangerous. He never was in any danger of swallowing his tongue, or flailing about on the floor, which could have been the case. He didn’t fall out of his chair, usually. But during his episode it was like his whole being went somewhere else, leaving a body behind to fend for himself, and then, in a few minutes, coming back to himself as if nothing had happened.

Bert wasn’t a bad kid, either. Solid B student. Almost a man, at least six foot two. Kind of hunched over. Very shy. Wore glasses with super thick lenses. Smiled every once in a while, more of a smirk. His body was kind of lumpy, like he was stuffed with pillows . . .

But he did it.

The Rupps white vinyl-sided Colonial with a meticulously manicured yard was right across street from Kate’s rented Victorian duplex.

From her window from time to time she was treated to a fine vignette of their domestic dysfunction. Kate often viewed the Rupp threesome, and she watched because it was fascinating . . . father Judge, homemaker mother, and giant, bumbling son . . . in a mode she suspected just not meant to be public at all. The father barked orders, the mother whined, and Bert, disturbingly, for he hadn’t shown it in class or at school ever, would violently lash out against inanimate objects around the house and yard when no one was looking. A rake whacked repeatedly against a bucket of recyclables, again . . . again . . . An old maple kicked repeatedly, kick . . . kick . . . in a rhythmic sequence lasting minutes. And all the while Bert yelled up a storm of obscenities. It just wasn’t right at all.

And . . . there had been a murder before, during the summer. A waitress from the Fire House Thirteen restaurant had been strangled . . . the murderer was never found.

Strangled and severed.

Kate sipped her coffee. It was cold. This was where her life was at, she chided herself, watching the Bert Rupps, and cooking up conspiracies making him a murderer. Oh Kate. She tugged at the knots in her frazzled red hair. Then she lit her second cigarette. Time to get a real life, Kate, she thought. In reality, it probably wasn’t him . . .

She looked back up from the paper out her front bay window. Ol’ Bert was out there now, stumbling up the sidewalk toward his house. He swayed and pitched up to his front door, long arms dangling, dropping his father’s New York Times and scattering its sections all over the slate steps. Sometimes, Kate caught herself feeling pity for him, as one would an animal whose existence wasn’t under its control.

Bert stooped to pick up what he could manage, then disappeared inside the house, leaving part of the Times drifting across the yard and clinging onto the Rupp’s ornamental wrought iron fence.

“Amazing,” Kate muttered.

She got up from the kitchen table and headed upstairs. The wooden steps creaked and echoed in her much to quiet house.

“Oh, get it together, Kate,” she said standing at the bathroom sink. She took some cold cream and wiped away yesterday’s black mascara that had smudged beneath her green and bloodshot eyes. Too much gin, really. That was it. She felt irresponsible about her life, but at the same time . . . like she had finally sunken into a life of a complete, bona-fide adult. She drank cocktails now; at thirty-two it seemed like the right thing to do. Cocktails and Xanax had replaced the pot and cheap wine, and that was just “right.”

Wouldn’t do, she mused, the kids’ English teacher getting caught with a couple of joints. But an unnecessary prescription refill, okay then. Unfortunately, all she had to do was look at her colleague Willard Endinburg’s Martian landscape of exploded capillaries on his nose, and take in the tremors in his lips as he drowned his V8 in the teachers lounge to build a picture of what could come twenty years down the line with her a career in teaching at New Biggsburg High.

“Uhhhhhhgg,” she said at the thoughts. They made her feel horrible and lost. She started up the double spigots of the claw foot tub, brushed her teeth, put in some eye drops, and when the water reached capacity, she removed her robe and slid in.

Too hot, just the way she liked it.

Kate let her arms float, and hid under the water so it was just up to her chin.

She had been avoiding the scale. Her lifestyle and general state of mind had given her a contribution of about nine pounds. Not horrible, but a lot on her small frame. She could still hear her ex-mother in law saying “well, you’ve always been one of those big-boned gals.” Haaaaag, Kate thought. That wasn’t true at all. There was no such nonsense as “big boned.” In fact, occasionally, she felt a little more powerful being just that much larger. Stronger. Precisely not submissive. Maybe a little sexy . . . voluptuous!

But there was no one in her life to nurture any of those ideas. Gin helped. A vicious cycle, she admitted.

Plus, it hadn’t been too too bad, so far.

“Well Kate, you can be a slave to it all, or a master of it,” she said out loud to her pink nipples breaking through the water. “Or really, what you’re saying . . . is I can just be a master of what I choose to be a slave to.” She paused. “What do you think of that?”

A dog barked outside, muffled through the bathroom window. The toilet on the other side of the duplex flushed.

“Okay then.”

Kate got dressed in her usual weekend fare, black jeans and a Syracuse University sweatshirt. Just as she went to the phone to call her friend Jordan, he rang her.

It often happened that way with Jordan.

“Kate, did you read the paper?” was the first thing he said.

“About the murdered utility-reader woman! I was just going to call you.” She cradled the phone and sat down at the kitchen table with the paper spread out before her.

“Really. Mmm mm. I knew it, then,” Jordan said, then “Honey . . . look out for you ex-student Bert.” His usually smooth voice had an edge to it now. “We’ll be handling the arrangements for the poor woman. Today! Of all the Homes, this again . . .” Jordan did sound down about it. Not that his job was all that peppy. He and his father were undertakers. “Ohhh . . . the family wanted to know if they needed to provide shoes,” he said, quietly. “I just couldn’t remind them that the deceased didn’t come with feet.”

Kate moaned. “She didn’t have feet?”

“They haven’t found them. Nobody can see down that way in the casket. I mean, I just couldn’t say “no shoes ‘cause there’s no feet.” Jordan made quite an undertaker.

“What else did you find out?” Kate said.

“Well Kate, guess who found the body?”

“Who, the groundskeeper? It was at the golf course, right?”

“Right right. No. Who plays golf all the time?”

“Doctors, a doctor found her?”

It sounded like the line went dead. Jordan came back. “No. Are you sitting down?”

“Yes Jordan, I’m at the kitchen table.”

“Good, then you can’t look outside.”

“I can still see . . . across the street. What is it?”

“Kate, ready . . . Ol’ Judge Rupp found the body!”

“Go on! That sure wasn’t in the paper. Where did you hear that?”

“Parlor talk. He was out playing a few rounds, just happened to knock his clean, snow white ball into the edge of the woods and found the, er . . . woman.”

Kate didn’t know what to think. “That’s too much, Jordan. Too much. Now that’s a coincidence.” A stupefying coincidence.

“Ooops,” Jordan said. “Busy day, I’m afraid. Got to go help them all meet their makers. I’ll call again later.”

“Okay. Stop by later.”

“I will, bye.”

Kate hung up. She thought of Bertrand fumbling with the paper, and headed into the living room and looked out across to the maison Rupp. Just what Jordan said not to do. She just had to.

The newspaper was still clinging to the wrought iron fence. There was color to it. That’s all she could see. The big block of color matched the paper on her kitchen table. Not the New York Times at all. It looked like no one in the Rupp house would be getting the front page of the New Biggsburg Press & Sun today.

“Ah ha!” she said to her front window. But Kate really wasn’t quite sure what she meant by it. It wasn’t good. She knew that.

Cops and Zombies TV Pilot (first pages)

2010-10-02T06:59:00.000-07:00

                                                          Cops and Zombies

                                                                      Pilot

                                                                 ACT ONE
FADE IN:

EXT. OLD BROOKLYN COURTHOUSE, 1886 - DAY

It's an old wood courthouse on the corner of a street of other wood buildings, across from a big open-air market. Traffic is thick with horse-drawn carriages, and people are scurrying here and there as in any busy old city. It all seems fairly ordinary. Except . . .

. . . in front of the courthouse is a public hanging.

A good-size crowd has gathered to see it. A tall strong-looking man with fine features and long sideburns is up on the gallows. He's in a good suit, shiny boots. He looks out to the crowd. Unconcerned.

A BARRISTER-type in a tall black hat stands on the gallows, reading from a roll.

BARRISTER
Seamus (Shame us) Bingham Junior, having been found guilty by this court of Brooklyn, New York, of murder, arson, malfeasance, and piracy, you are to be hanged until dead on this day, May first, eighteen hundred and eighty six. Do you have any last words, Sir?

SEAMUS
(thick Irish accent)
Yes that I do, Sir. I'm a businessman, nothin' more. Sure I've done bad. But I'm what makes this land great . . .

This gets some heavy BOOS and HISSES from the crowd.

SEAMUS (CONT'D)
Without the likes of me organizin’, you’re all just at the whims of the pious, they just want to rob ya . . . too . . .

Seamus grins out to the front of the crowd.

Down in front of the gallows is a priest in black with a wide, ruddy face. Next to him is an older black man in a dark suit, with a wild mop of white hair. They're both glaring up at Seamus Bingham with waves of hatred.

Seamus now leers at the men in front.

SEAMUS (CONT'D)
Promisin’ heaven to this rabble . . . it’s just the maggots waiting for them, why don’t ya admit it. But with that said . . . I’ll be seeing you again.
(then loudly at the crowd)
And if finally what the Book says is true, I’ll be seein’ the rest of your lot in Hell, I’m sure.

Some more BOOS from the crowd.

The noose is slipped around Seamus's neck. He doesn’t struggle. He just says . . .

SEAMUS (CONT’D)
(in a whisper)
Bokor dit vie éternelle.

The gallows trap floor opens up under him . . .

AND:

. . . his nice books dangle in midair bathed in the smoky light that's old New York, accompanied by the sound of APPLAUSE and some CHEERING.

DISSOLVE TO:

EXT. FT. GREENE BROOKLYN, PRESENT DAY - DAY

A New York blue and white Police cruiser, lights on, streaks down an industrial-looking street called Classon Avenue. The cruiser is marked 86th Precinct.

INT. POLICE CRUISER - SAME

Driving the car is Officer LOU TAGALAFARRI. He's in his mid- 30s. He's good looking, but sort of worn out, and he needs a shave. He’s tired around his eyes like he doesn’t sleep well.

Next to him is Officer JON OLIVER, a handsome young black man. Late 20s. Muscular. He looks like he takes much better care of himself.

Jon is talking into the radio, the mic in his hand.

JON
Ten seven on the store again?

A female voice, DISPATCH, comes back to him.

DISPATCH (V.O.)
One six six Classon.

LOU
(to Jon)
That's not a store there, Oliver.

JON
Well, sounds like it got robbed, whatever it is.

LOU
Call ‘em back, there's no one six six Classon.

JON
(looks out)
No, it's right, Lou. See, we got two hundred . . .

A block of warehouses goes by the window, then the next. Warehouses.

JON (CONT'D)
One hundred eighty . . . sixty.

LOU
(exasperated)
Ahhhhhh.

EXT. 166 CLASSON/CAR 20 - SAME

Sure enough, there is a tiny convenience store, with an Asian man (STORE MAN) standing out front, waving his arms.

Lou pulls the Chevy over. Stops.

They both bound out.

JON
(to man)
Which way did he go?

STORE MAN
He go in car.

Store Man points down the street.

LOU
What kind of car?

STORE MAN
He go in little blue car.

LOU
Can you be more specific, Sir.

STORE MAN
Blue car, what I say. Little blue car.

JON
Like an old Nissan Sentra, or a Honda Fit?

STORE MAN
I no know cars. Ugly blue car!

Jon gets on his shoulder radio.

JON
Dispatch, twenty, ten twenty suspect is in a small, ugly blue car, possibly up on the BQE, Queensbound.

DISPATCH (V.O.)
Ten four, twenty.

LOU
Why you think he hit the BQE?

JON
What do you think?

LOU
Betcha he's ten blocks from here. That methhouse on Nostrand.

Jon mulls it over. The cops nod to each other.

JON
We'll be back, Sir.

The two fly over to the car and hop in.

Lou's back in the driver's seat. He floors the blue and white Chevy and they roar off.

INT. CAR 20 - SAME

Jon hits the light and siren buttons on the dash. They’re roaring down the street, WHOOP WOOPING through intersections. He gets the mic.

JON
Dispatch, ten eighty five on Nostrand between Myrtle and Park.

DISPATCH (V.O.)
Ten four, twenty. Backup should arrive in about fifteen minutes.

LOU
Fifteen. Why we even bother. We're on our own.

JON
(smiling at Lou)
Again.

EXT. CAR 20/STREET - SAME

Lou spins the car out across the pavement, and stops. Sure enough, parked at the curb-side is a beat-up little blue Geo Metro. The building nearby is a boarded up storefront.

Jon and Lou get out, weapons drawn low. Jon is scanning up and down the street. He checks out the car, empty. He nods at Lou.

Lou goes up to the papered over door of the building, knocks, RAPRAPRAP, then ducks back against a wall.

Jon moves out of the line of sight of the door on the other side but he and Lou can see each other.

LOU
NYPD . . . Open up!

There is no answer.

He knocks again, hard, RAPRAPRAPRAP, ducks back. No answer. Lou nods to Jon. Jon looks up and down the street again. Looks back.

And then . . . as they're both looking at the door of the abandoned storefront, in the background a small, skinny man climbs out from under the Geo Metro, and then sneaks into it.

And starts it up.

Jon and Lou jump.

LOU (CONT’D)
Oh crap!

JON
Stop!

The car pulls away.

LOU
That's it then!

Drawn Glocks now aimed high, Lou and Jon shoot out all the tires of the beat-up little car. The car drives a few yards on flopping rubber, stops. The guy hops out with his hands up.

LOU (CONT’D)
There you go!

JON
Hands on you head, and lie down on the ground, Jesus! (Heysus)

JESUS
Why it have to be you cowboys!

But Jesus obliges, he gets down on the ground without a fuss.

Lou and Jon move over to him, both holster their Glocks.

LOU
Is the money in the car?

JESUS
Jes.

LOU
Thank you Jesus.
(says Geesus)

Jon cuffs him on the ground. Lou goes into the car, fishes out a big wad of cash and a .22 revolver from the glove box. He puts them both in a big ziplock bag he gets from his uniform shirt pocket.

They've gathered a crowd on the sidewalk across the street. A unique crowd of hipsters with little beards and girls with lots of tattoos.

LOU (CONT’D)
(looks around)
Where'd all you come from?

HIPSTER
Well. Uh, we live here.

Jon looks around. Just the abandoned store front, and a low brick factory building next to it. And something nearby with big, chained-up garage doors. Nothing with windows for people, really.

JON
Why, man? This is no place for people.

Lou smiles.

LOU
(to Jon)
Ehh, they're all from upstate, gettin' that arty “urban” experience.

JON
(grins back)
Well they got it!

Jesus moans from the pavement.

LOU
Right, Jesus?

JESUS
I need my lawyer.

LOU
Yes you do. You very much do.

***

Edge World (first pages)

2010-10-02T04:55:00.000-07:00

FADE IN:

EXT. INTERSTATE HIGHWAY - DAY

From up high, it's the scene of a motorcycle accident in the middle of a highway.

Closer: a young guy in black leather and black denim lies on the pavement. He's bleeding profusely from the leg. A broken shorty helmet is rocking on the pavement nearby.

Beside him is a toppled and bent Harley Davidson Sportster in black and chrome. Oil and gas leak out of it.

Closer to him: he’s 25, handsome, fine featured. He has longish curly blond hair, and he's staring up to the sky with glazed eyes.

People are swarming around him. It’s just running legs in the frame, high-heeled shoes, work boots. . .

Flashing red lights are reflected on his face, the side of an ambulance floats in behind the crowd.

INT. CITY GENERAL HOSPITAL - DAY

This is JAKE SMITH. And he’s alive.

He’s in a dingy, light-green hospital room. He's propped up on pillows in his hospital bed, in a hospital robe, flicking the TV channels with the clicker. He's got dark circles around his eyes. He's got faint blond scruff like he hasn't shaved in a week. His right leg is secured in a contraption hanging above the mattress, steel rods with support trusses go up and down the length of it from ankle to the top of his thigh.

JAKE
(to the TV)
You lie, Ghastly.

ON THE TV:

A thin, pale man with hollowed-out features and one big eyebrow leers out from the TV on the wall. Definite Ghastly. Then, Ghastly is suddenly standing in front off a map with a bunch of smiley suns on it.

GHASTLY (FROM T.V.)
And for tomorrow, sunny skies again for the river valley, high in the upper seventies . . . just a little cooler in the hills. Pleasant, right Matt?

MATT (SOMEWHERE O.S.)
That’s right, Wayne.

BACK TO SCENE:

JAKE
(to TV)
Jackass. Pleasant. Morons.

He clicks the TV off.

A male VOICE answers Jake from offscreen . . .

VOICE (O.S)
Well then, which is it?

The guy, HENRY T. NARAKA, walks into frame. He's Asian, stocky, muscular, bald with a knit beret, and has the shadow of a goatee. He’s in a tank top and shorts. He's about Jake's age.

JAKE
Henry, man!

HENRY
(looking at him closely)
Jake, look at you.

JAKE
I guess. Shit.

Jake waves at the leg contraption.

HENRY
No, I mean you look good, alive.

Henry moves over to Jake, and they both knock knuckles.

JAKE
Am I?. . . No one told me what happened to the bike yet, though.

HENRY
Ahhh, the bike . . . that may be dead.

Henry goes to the end of the bed, picks up Jake’s chart and inspects it mock-officiously.

JAKE
I guess I knew as much.

HENRY
You in pain?

JAKE
Yeah. Not too bad. I'm on some kind of . . .
(says it s l o w l y, low)
. . . paaaaaainkiller, in this thing.

Jake thumbs to the I.V.tower nearby.

HENRY
(pokes the chart)
Mucho mega opiate omega.

JAKE
(grinning)
They already got me hooked, I know it.

HENRY
That figures.

Henry hooks the chart back to the end of Jake’s bed.

HENRY (CONT’D)
This doesn’t say. Any word on when you're getting out?

JAKE
They won't tell. Soon as I can ambulate, I suppose.

Both of them look over to the large window of diffuse light. There is an empty bed nearby.

JAKE
Yeah . . . So how are you?

Henry sits down in the chrome chair next to the bed, and stretches his legs out under Jake.

HENRY
How am I?

JAKE
Yeah.

HENRY
I'm okay . . . dark times, that's all.

JAKE
Yep. Guess so.

Very long pause. Henry just looks at him.

HENRY
(finally)
It would have really sucked if you died.

JAKE
Thanks.

There is another long pause.

JAKE (CONT’D)
(finally)
Jackass says nice out.

HENRY
It is!

JAKE
Then . . . let's fuckin' ambulate!

Jake gets the button strapped to the rail of his bed, and pushes it. A NURSE's voice comes over a little speaker somewhere.

NURSE
Yes, Mister Smith?

JAKE
Nurse, I really got to get outside. It’s for my mental health.

EXT. HOSPITAL/PARKING LOT - DAY

Henry is pushing Jake in a wheelchair out whooshing auto doors.

Jake's Frankenstein leg is propped up by a special rig jutting from the chair. He’s still in his robe, but he has a black T-shirt on underneath, and a blanket over the rest of him.

It is nice out. Beyond the hospital, a glowing white-yellow sun hovers low over the top of a nearby line of dark trees.

Jake and Henry ambulate across a half-full parking lot of modest and crummy mid-1990s vintage cars, along with a few black Mercedes sedans . . . and finally onto a rutted sidewalk. Minivans and ugly cars go by, heading up and down a hill.

EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD STREET - LATER

Henry pushes Jake up the sidewalk, up the hill, away from the hospital. Now they’re moving along a street of small, white clapboard and brick houses - some ranch style, a few with pointy Victorian roofs. A few of the houses have dead trees in their front yards - one skeletal dead maple, a couple bristly dead pine. Though the rest of the trees around seem okay.

EXT. OVERGROWN OLD PLAYGROUND - LATER

Henry has parked Jake's wheelchair so they're both at the edge of a blue concrete wading pool. It’s cracked and drained, there is a garbage can in the middle tipped on its side in a puddle, and a half deflated soccer ball in there, too. There is a tall metal swing set nearby, but just a frame, no swings. And there is a giant leafless oak hanging over a sandbox with weeds growing up out of it.

JAKE
Thanks for the ride, bro.

Henry sits next to Jake on a worn, cracked wooden bench.

HENRY
(winded)
I needed the exercise.

JAKE
It's good to breathe some real air, even if it is this fuckin’ place.

They both take in the view. Beyond the playground is a gently-sloping hillside of brown grass and spindly bushes. At the crest of the hill are some high power wires, and beyond those, the low sun is now a great orange blob sinking further into the thick air.

HENRY
Jake, we got to get out of this place.

JAKE
(nods grimly)
I know. I know.

Long pause.

JAKE (CONT’D)
How?

HENRY
There has to be a way.

JAKE
Sometimes . . . sometimes I kinda think something has left, already, huh?

HENRY
Yeah. Maybe we’ll figure out how to follow it.

JAKE
Yeah, I don’t know if it’s escaped, though. Or lost.

Jake moves his leg a little, winces.

HENRY
That enough ambulate?

JAKE
I guess. Guess I got to get back to mucho mega opiate omega.

HENRY
Okay.

They both just look at each other and grin thinly, a knowing nod between them.

Henry gets up and pushes Jake away from the dead pool. They head back down the steep sidewalk. The top of the hospital hovers above some houses and trees way down the hill.

EXT. CITY NEIGHBORHOOD STREET - DAY

An older model Chevy Caprice taxi deposits Jake and his crutches in front of a dilapidated white colonial-style house with a big front yard . . .

And Jake is all in black, T-shirt, jeans (his leg is stiff underneath.) He's looking much better. Clean shaven. Even a bit healthy. He’s got duffle bag strapped over his shoulder, and a plastic bag of groceries wrapped around the duffle bag’s strap.

The house has peeling paint, a few black shutters askew, some missing, leaving a brighter white outline from where they were. There is a strange old craggy Japanese cherry tree in the yard. (But it’s alive.) There are heaps of mown, dead grass all across the lawn. The houses on either side of Jake's are immaculate and uptight brick.

Jake crutches across the lawn, and goes up to the front door.

INT. JAKE'S HOUSE - SAME

DARKNESS.

Then the CLICK, RATTLE of Jake as he fumbles with the lock. Then he swings the door open, SKREEE on the hinges, and a RUSTLE as he stumbles in.

He flips on a light.

There is an old black Steinway upright piano against one wall. Faded, worn orange shag wall to wall carpet below. There is an ugly floor to ceiling lamp with tulip shades. At another wall is a couch with colorful tropical birds prints in the fabric, an old Danish modern chair, and a coffee table loaded with magazines and books.

JAKE
I'm home!

Nothing answers. Jake drops his shoulder bag, unhinges the grocery bag, and crutches through the living room with it.

IN THE KITCHEN -

He crutches into a mustard yellow tile kitchen that’s small like a galley on a ship. Jake props open the dark maroon fridge at the end of the galley, unpacks the plastic grocery bag with difficulty (juice, beer,) puts a box of cereal on the counter, then gets himself a cold beer that is already in there.

IN THE LIVING ROOM -

Jake crutches back into the living room and sits down at the piano. He plays an unrecognizable, original tune. He's pretty good. He plays this for a minute or so. He downs the beer, plays just a bit more, playing around, trying something new out, then stops. He hobbles back to the kitchen with his empty can as the Steinway resonates faintly. He crutches back into the living room with a new beer . . . a phone somewhere in the empty house RINGS.

He makes a spot on the coffee table for the new beer, pushing away a few old Guitar Player magazines, (the top one in the stack has some guy on the cover that looks like Jake holding a Gibson Flying V.) He puts the beer down, and hobbles slowly out of the living room, and more slowly up the stairs out of frame. The phone keeps RINGING.

IN THE UPSTAIRS TV DEN -

Jake crutches into a knotty pine-paneled room with a big old console-type RCA TV. Seven rings into it, now, he misses the call. CLICK! The older-model tape answering machine gets it. Jake just screens . . . A gruff voice (BILLY ZEBULE) starts talking through the speaker.

BILLY
Jaaaaake. You there? Shoulda called us for a ride . . . You just listenin’?

A pause, the line crackles. Jake doesn't move to pick it up. He just looks at the machine as Billy keeps on:

BILLY (CONT’D)
You are there, aren’t ya? Anyway, we all think it's about time you host another party at your fine mansion. Like . . . tonight. So I'm putting the word out, Smith. See ya then. Bye.

Click.

Jake sits down on a ripped black leather couch that has yellow foam poking out from inside it. He sighs, seeing the answering machine is still flashing like it has two more messages. He struggles to get back up, crutches over to the machine and pushes a button.

NASAL MALE VOICE
This is a call for Jake Smith. Mister Smith, your Harley is at the city impound lot. You can claim it Monday through Friday, nine to five. After the first of the month, there will be a twenty dollar a day storage charge. Thank you.

BEEEEEEP. Then . . .

OLDER FEMALE VOICE
Jake, it's Kay Gdansk. I just thought you'd like to know some of your friends were creeping around the house while you were in the hospital. I heard the piano at three A.M.. It caused my sister great distress and you know she's suffering from Alzheimer's. This is a nice neighborhood, and we'd like to keep it that way . . .

JAKE
(to machine)
Oh reeeeeeeally . . .

KAY GDANSK
. . . Wayne mowed your lawn last week, by the way. Okay. Good-bye.

BEEEEEP. Then . . .

BILLY ZEBULE AGAIN
Jaaaaake. You there? Shoulda called us for a ride . . . You just lis.

Jake shuts the machine off.

There is a muted rumble of a lawn mower outside, now. He goes to a big window nearby and pushes it open to the sound of the mower ROARING away.

He surveys the back yards.

OUT JAKE’S WINDOW:

Out the window are rectangles of the neighborhood back lawns. In the lawn to the left of Jake's is an older, pear-shape woman in denim overalls, (Kay Gdansk) pulling some weeds out of her kitchen garden in the middle of her lush plot. Jake's lawn is a brown mess of piles of week-old mown grass and a sad brown-needled arborvitae. On the right side is a lanky man in a dress shirt and polyester slacks pushing a nice red Toro.

EXT. LAWN MOWER MAN’S BACKYARD - SAME

Why, it’s one-big-eyebrow Wayne Ghastly, the TV weatherman. BANG! Wayne hits a huge chunk of something hard under the mower, and the Toro dies.

Ghastly stands looking at the mower for a moment. Finally he tips the mower up and looks underneath.

Then he hoists the mower completely up on its side, and watches the mower blade fall right off into the grass.

WAYNE
Damn shit damn shit shit damn . . .

Wayne starts kicking the mower, and it flips over like a turtle.

INT. JAKE’S TV DEN - SAME

Jake is laughing at the window.

JAKE
Ha ha ha! Jackass.

EXT. GHASTLY’S BACK YARD - SAME

Seen low and from far across the lawn, Ghastly is heading back into his house, and watching him go - sitting upright in the grass - is a human skull with a chunk of bone missing at the right temple where the mower blade hit it.

***

Billy Arcane and The Wakinyan (first pages)

2010-10-01T05:34:00.000-07:00

FADE IN:

EXT. SOUTH DAKOTA COUNTRYSIDE - DAY

Two Lakota/Sioux men run down a rutted dirt path edged with tall goldenrod. The YOUNGER MAN is in his mid 30s, long-haired, muscular, in denim and cowboy boots. The OLDER MAN is in his 70s, thin, spry, with long white hair. He’s dressed in deer hide and moccasins.

The men pull away a tarp on the ground, daylight floods into small chasm below carved into the dirt. Lying at the bottom is a Lakota/Sioux TEENAGER. He’s skinny, almost boney, and wearing only plaid boxer shorts. His eyes are swollen shut behind black plastic-frame glasses. He waves his arms around in a blur as if he’s swatting at a bee.

TEENAGER
Get me out!

OLDER MAN
Looks like he’s allergic to bees.

TEENAGER
Uhhhhhh . . . it wasn’t just bees!

YOUNGER MAN
I was afraid you’d say that.

The men help the teen up out of the pit. The Younger Man picks him up and cradles him in his strong arms.

Another Lakota TEEN runs toward them. He’s a few years older, with long hair and wearing a dirty T-shirt and torn jeans.

LONG-HAIRED TEEN
Is Lee dead?

OLDER MAN
Of course not. Can’t kill a Wichasha Wakan that easy.

They all head off toward a 1970 Olds Vista Cruiser station wagon parked on a ridge nearby. The jagged dirt towers of the Badlands hover in the distance behind it.

FADE OUT.

TITLE ON DARK SCREEN READS: THE WAKINAYN

EXT. NEW ORLEANS, FRENCH QUARTER AND MISSISSIPPI - DAY

It’s a wide, very high view of most of the old French Quarter and the newer-looking riverside park and walkways. There are people and tourists around, but in the middle of it all, set apart from them, is a lone man in black standing on the sidewalk, facing wide, green Mississippi.

CLOSER TO:

The lone man in black . . . this is LEE WAKINYAN. He’s serious looking, with a black buzz haircut, wiry physique, and wire-rim glasses. His features are Plains American Indian, with high-cheekbones and a distinctive nose. He’s wearing a crisp black shirt, white clerical collar, black slacks. The ghostly, elegantly-spired Saint Louis Cathedral looms behind him across the manicured green of Jackson Square.

EXT. SAINT LOUIS CATHEDRAL - MOMENTS LATER

Lee walks toward the front of the Cathedral. Among passers-by - tourists with backpacks, and a couple of families with strollers - a white-haired tattooed man sits on a stool playing slide blues on a chrome Dobro. The guitar case at his boots has a few dollar bills in it.

Lee stops to watch, listens, liking it . . .

Suddenly, someone nearby cuts into the music:

“VOICE” (O.S.)
Skue me, Fatha.

Lee looks. It’s a MAN with leathery, ebony skin. He has one open eye, the iris chestnut, the whites exploded red. His head is cocked sideways, his arms are bent upward at the elbows to palsied hands. He’s wearing a white ruffle shirt, a cream-colored silk vest and matching, battered tuxedo pants.

MAN
Sorry to bother you, Fatha.

LEE
That’s okay.

MAN
Say, can you spare some walk ‘round money?

LEE
Not really, man. Sorry. Wish I could.

MAN
Ahhh . . . You in the same sinkin’ boat as me, then.

Lee looks at the Man closely for a moment, the slide blues guitar surrounds the scene.

ON LEE’S HAND:

He pulls a $5 bill out of his dress pants pocket.

BACK ON THEM:

The man takes it gingerly in a bent hand.

MAN (CONT’D)
You very kind, Fatha!

Suddenly, the Man, with a huge grin, holds the bill right up to Lee.

And we see it’s a crisp new $100 with the big Ben Franklin.

LEE
(happily bewildered)
Hey, how’d you do that?!

The Man pockets the bill in his tuxedo pants.

MAN
The good news spreads, you know. Like you folks been sayin’ all along. But say, Fatha . . . I’m lookin’ at you . . . you know what?

LEE
(grinning)
Er . . . what?

MAN
I think you an Indian.

Pause. Lee watches a huge crow land on a branch in the live oak behind the Man, and the bird seems to be looking over his shoulder right at Lee.

LEE
Well, I am, actually.

MAN
Good. I’m an Indian, too. What kind are you?

LEE
Lakota-Sioux from Pine Ridge, South Dakota. How about yourself?

MAN
African an’ Choctaw. Right on here . . . New Orleans . . . since the dawn of man.

With his bent arm, the Man pulls something from his tuxedo pants pocket.

MAN (CONT’D)
Say, Fatha, since we both Indians, you give me some walk around money, I give you this . . .

Lee takes what the Man hands him.

ON LEE’S HAND:

It’s a little skull in Lee’s palm. Two miniature eye sockets stare out at us. The skull has a smooth gray forehead, and a dark hole of a nasal cavity. There is no lower jaw. No teeth.

LEE (O.S.)
What!

BACK TO THEM:

The man is smiling wide. He’s scary, but his good eye is bright and alive.

MAN
It’s your tunka.

A pause. Lee just stares at it in his palm.

LEE
(whisper)
Tunka?

The huge crow lands on the Man’s shoulder. The Man pats its head.

MAN
You’re gonna need your tunka.

LEE
My tunka?

MAN
(nodding at Lee)
That right . . . Wichasha Wakan.

BANG!

SPARKS!

There is a cloud of tiny sparks in the air - like a bunch of 4th of July sparklers going off. They HISSSSSSSS . . .

MAN IS COMPLETELY GONE.

And Lee stands there, totally bewildered, skull in his hand. He stares at the sparks until they fade away.

The blues keeps playing, people walking by don’t seem to react that anything strange has just happened, and the crow is now high above him, yelling down at him from a clear blue sky.

FADE OUT.

TITLE ON DARK SCREEN READS: ST. MARTIN’S NOVITIATE

INT. OLD JESUIT NOVITIATE BUILDING - DAY

Lee sits across a big oak desk from two other men in a paneled office with a window framing some huge live oaks outside.

Lee is wearing a crisp black shirt, the two other Jesuits are in black robes. One Jesuit is dour, in his seventies, with a mustache, goatee, and droopy, watery blue eyes. This is FATHER MAJOR SHAFFER. Next to him is FATHER MAGUIRE. Maguire is a trim, lively-eyed man with a shock of gray hair and beard. A big plaster bust of Jesuit Pedro Arupé and an Iroquois false face mask look down at them from a shelf in the corner. Another shelf nearby has a row of round-bellied African fertility statues, and a big ivory Buddha. Directly behind Maguire is a ceremonial Lakota spear with draping eagle feathers.

FATHER MAJOR SHAFFER
God be with you, Brother Lee.

LEE
Also with you, Father Major Shaffer . . . Father Maguire. What . . . . what did you want to see me about?

Father Major Shaffer glowers across the desk at Lee.

FATHER MAJOR SHAFFER
This is an account of conscience, this meeting. You’ve been wandering the Quarter.

LEE
Uh . . . yes Father.

FATHER MAJOR SHAFFER
And that’s actually what you’ve been doing at the Novitiate all along, isn’t it? Wandering about, here and there.

The other Father, Maguire, looks at Lee much more compassionately.

FATHER MAGUIRE
Well . . . Father Major Shaffer, Lee’s been doing work at the shelter in the Quarter all this month . . .

FATHER MAJOR SHAFFER
That’s not what I’m talking about. Brother Lee’s deeds are not under scrutiny. It’s his soul. And it’s wandering around in a daze. I’ve seen it before. You’re a case study of the conflicted man.

Lee looks flustered.

LEE
Father Major Shaffer, I . . . that’s pretty much why I’m here, isn’t it?

Father Major Shaffer stands up abruptly.

FATHER MAJOR SHAFFER
We’re here for you, and you need to be here. That is what I want you to ponder. You’ve got the weight of two worlds on you. A conflicted Jesuit doesn’t serve the order. It brings it down. You’ve always been smart enough to know this. And smart enough to cover it up.

A view of the whole office, and it’s actually full of statues and totems of “the other” world.
Shafer walks out and leaves the door open. Lee gets up, goes over and closes it, comes back to his seat.

Long pause.

LEE
Wow. That was scary.

Father Maguire SIGHS and glances back at the feather draped Lakota spear behind him.

FATHER MAGUIRE
It always is, isn’t it?

LEE
What’s this really about, Father?

FATHER MAGUIRE
It’s about money, I’m afraid. Part of it. Brother Petersen saw you in the Quarter. He said you were giving our money to a homeless man, and then seemed to be in a trance and didn’t answer him when he came over to you.

LEE
Oh, I . . . I guess I don’t remember that. Anyway . . . did Pete say what the homeless man did with our money?

FATHER MAGUIRE
There is more to this story?

LEE
I did give five dollars to this poor guy. This was a very good trick, actually. He turned my five into a hundred and . . . er . . .
(then quietly)
. . . walked away.

FATHER MAGUIRE
Ha! Then perhaps this man should be working with us!

LEE
He’s sure working for somebody. I still don’t really know what this means . . . he gave me a tunka.

FATHER MAGUIRE
Tunka . . . is this rock in Lakota?

Lee reaches into a black satchel on the floor next to him.

LEE
Yes. In this context, tunka is a rock spirit. Only this one is in a little skull.

Lee hands Father Maguire the tunka skull.

FATHER MAGUIRE
Ghastly. It feels real. It’s bone.
(rolls around in his hand)
It’s bone carved to look like a skull.

LEE
That’s what I felt. Too small to be ... uh, human.

FATHER MAGUIRE
Did the homeless man say this was a tunka?

LEE
The strangest part of this is this is exactly what he said. And he referred to me as a Wichasha Wakan.

FATHER MAGUIRE
He knew you were raised a Lakota Shaman, then. He knew you from the shelter?

LEE
I don’t think . . . I don’t think so. Not with . . . No.

FATHER MAGUIRE
What about the trance, then?

LEE
Well, that must have happened, because he seemed to have disappeared into a cloud of sparks.

FATHER MAGUIRE
Interesting, Lee! Very! I do find myself wondering what Nightdog would think of this.

Lee SIGHS.

Pause.

LEE
Oh. I don’t know. We’re still not really talking.

FATHER MAGUIRE
The state of your relationship with your father has a direct impact on the sate of your work here, Lee. Drop him a line about the homeless man, the tunka, will you?

LEE
I will.

FATHER MAGUIRE
Now, onto some business. I think this will redeem us both in the Father Major’s eyes. A delicate situation has come up I’d like you to help with . . .
(hands Lee a folder)
It will be counseling with a couple that lost their newborn. Read this, and we can meet before if you have any questions.

LEE
Okay, Father.

FATHER MAGUIRE
Tread lightly on this, Lee, it could go wrong quickly. I’m afraid it already has . . . with me.

***