About Fred

A quiet weekend, and a quiet Sunday. I wrote this with my weekly writing group:

Robert found the box, but it was Edie who pried it open, which she said entitled her to at least half of whatever they found inside. Robert started to argue, he said Edie was always doing that, but when he saw it was nothing but a sheet of paper at the bottom of the box he lost interest and said, “Fine, you can keep it. Just…tell me what it is?”

He was worried Edie might say something like, “What, can’t you read?” And she might laugh, which she sometimes did, like everything he did or said was some kind of big joke. But she just kept looking at the paper, which was yellowed and curled at the edges with age, but also filled from top to bottom with the black scrawl of words. Robert couldn’t make any of them out — he could read, if not well — but Edie was clearly amazed by whatever the thing said.

“I think it’s some of contract,” she told him. “It’s pretty short, but it’s all kind of…I dunno, legalese.”

“Uh huh,” Robert said, “that’s…” But that was what? He started to wonder if he’d maybe made a mistake; maybe the paper (or even the box) had some kind of value after all. They could bring it to, he didn’t know, auction or something. Maybe it had historical significance. People were always paying good money for old things, and maybe it didn’t matter if this was just a single sheet of paper if it was the last will and testament of Paul Revere or something like that. “That’s interesting,” he said.

“Get a load of this,” said Edie. “It’s a contract for somebody’s soul.”

Robert sighed, but out of relief more than anything else. So, okay, interesting, but that’s all that it was. Somebody’s idea of a joke, but nothing they could make any money off of. Let Edie keep it. He didn’t have to feel cheated, because there was nothing to be cheated out of. He smiled.

“It’s a contract from somebody selling their soul to the devil in May of 1976,” Edie said. “Somebody named — ” she scanned the page — “David Falconer.”

Robert sighed, this time he hoped a little more loudly. There had to be something here at the dump they could turn a profit on.

“’The bearer of this document is hereby granted full and binding custody of my earthly and mortal soul’” Edie read. “It’s signed and dated and everything.”

“Is it, whadyacallit, notarized?” Robert asked.

“He was selling it to the devil, but here it is.”

It’s more an idea than a story, but I like the idea.

Last night, I watched Cloud Atlas…and didn’t much like it. There are a couple of good movies lurking within it — I’m not spoiling anything by saying there are six loosely interconnected stories across many different time periods — but there’s also a lot that doesn’t work, most everything doesn’t work well together, and there’s also an over-abundance of very bad makeup. Seriously, I don’t know which was less convincing, the six-foot Hugo Weaving as a female nurse or the Korean-born Doona Bae as a redheaded American abolitionist. (I’ll go with Nurse Noakes, if only because she’s part of what is easily the film’s worst sequences.)

David Mitchell’s original novel, which I read and quite enjoyed back in 2006, creates connections between the characters and settings mostly through tricks of narrative nesting. I’m not sure the film benefits from making those connections literal, by having the same actors portray many different characters (often aided by that aforementioned makeup). It gets silly quickly, and repeatedly, which does not seem like the film’s intent. And I’m not entirely convinced that the message of “our lives are all connected and everything we do recurs” was necessarily the book’s intent, much less that we needed nearly three hours of prosthetic noses to get that message across.

But that was pretty much the extend of my weekend.