writing

Sunday

I wish I could say I spent no more time working from home this afternoon, but that would be a lie. I spent a couple of hours before dinner summarizing some more of this large report I’m not going to get a chance to work on tomorrow.

Before that, though, I did get to go to do the Sunday crossword, watch some Babylon 5, and go to my Sunday writing group. So there’s that.

The radio was playing that old familiar song, the one that she had always liked, and Albert switched it off. I won’t remember doing that, he thought. I won’t remember standing here, thinking this, and then I won’t remember the song, or the radio, or even, eventually, her. All of this, every last moment of this, will be gone. If Margaret was there now, he’d want to tell her this, force her to remember for him, but it was that kind of thing that had made her leave in the first place. When she’d left, all he’d had to turn to was his work, and that was why was here, now, and why in ten minutes from now he wouldn’t be. In ten minutes — no, Albert looked at the clock, saw it was now only eight — there would be someone else standing here, someone other than Albert. The computer would no longer tell him what that new personality would be like, not since Albert had forgotten his access codes, but he could already feel it reaching into the darker corners of his brain, taking up residence. The Albert that he was, standing here now, wondering who had turned off the radio, that man was being rewritten. Why had he done this again? There had been a reason, he was sure of it. National security? To get back at Margaret? He wished Margaret was here now to tell him what that reason was, or at least to get him back into the computer using her own access codes. Everything had gotten hazy since Margaret had left.

It was cold in here, standing by the window. There was snow on the ground outside. Albert was tempted to call it frigid, but that didn’t sound like the right word. He wished he could think of the right word. It was difficult to think ever since somebody had turned off the radio.

“Because we focused on the snake, we missed the scorpion,” he thought, wondering why. Were those the new thoughts or the old, the buds of spring pushing up from the earth or the last of the autumn leaves to fall from the tree? He didn’t think he’d been a poet, and that had the ring of poetry to it. But then again, what he thought, and what he was, had been narrowing to a fine point over the last couple of days. And in just ten minutes — or was it five? — all of that would be gone. Albert just hoped whoever he was becoming was someone good.

And that was Sunday.

So again it’s Sunday

Yesterday I took down the Christmas tree in the living room, boxed up the ornaments and tinsel and lights, and then disassembled the tree into its many components (“branches”) and returned that box to the attic. It was exactly fun, but it needed to be done.

Later that afternoon, I finished reading my first book for the new year, My Friend Maigret by Georges Simenon. I liked it, and the nice thing about having now discovered Simenon is that the man wrote close to 200 books in his lifetime, so I’m unlikely to run out any time soon. Though I am somewhat disappointed to discover that so few of his Maigret mystery novels seems to be available in English translation, much less in this series design I rather quite like. I enjoyed My Friend Maigret, though like Inspector Cadaver, which I read last year, the book was less of a murder mystery than a leisurely stroll through the detective’s mind.

Then yesterday I watched Passchendaele. It’s not a perfect movie, though I did like it considerably more than Paul Gross’ first film as director, Men With Brooms. He and Caroline Dhavernas are both quite good in it, no surprise, and there are moments of real beauty in the film, both in specific lines from the script and in the scenery. (Seriously, I’ve been to the Canadian Rockies and can attest to their wonder, and Heather has been known to post a photo or two in her time, but there are scenes in the movie, set in the foothills of Alberta, that are just achingly beautiful.)

Again, not a perfect movie, maybe occasionally a little too on the nose about the horrors of war and a little muddled in its storytelling, but well shot and grounded in very good performances.

Today I wrote a little:

She wasn’t afraid of anything except for dying, and since that had already happened, Lisbeth said, she was fearless. Those who knew her — and there weren’t many, maybe just a few handlers at the agency — knew it was a lie, but it was a lie they were happy enough to let her keep if it meant she got results. She acted fearless, and the act was all that mattered. The results were all that mattered. If a lie was needed to keep those results coming, then so be it. She wasn’t likely to encounter the thing she really was afraid of in this line of work, not anymore, at least not if she kept her head down and focused on the job. No one at the agency was going to help her do anything else. What she really was afraid of was the thing that had killed her, and that thing was long dead as far as she or any of the official files were concerned. Fearlessness was a lie, but it was a lie that won out in the end.

That had been before Hobbs’ End, of course, and the murders that had happened there on Lisbeth’s watch. It had been a mistake to send her, her handlers said, and Lisbeth herself had been reluctant to go. The case was too familiar, too much like the events that had led to her death, five years earlier, and that had led her now to be in the agency’s employ. She had never been to Hobbs’ End, never even heard of the town, but that didn’t matter. She wasn’t afraid, she said — of course she wasn’t afraid — but it was a coincidence that hit a little too close for home.

But they’d sent her, and because the lie of fearlessness was all she had to guide her, she went. At that point it was only a disappearance, or rather two dozen, a high-school class that had vanished on a field trip. A teacher, two parents, and all of the students but one. By agency standards it was almost run-of-the-mill. There was no reason to suspect the same thing that had happened to Lisbeth five years earlier was happening again.

No idea where it’s headed yet, if anywhere, and I’m not entirely in love with the way the last sentence underlines the fact that Lisbeth is not really a character so far, just someone that this is happening to. But it was free-writing well spent, I think. Better forty minutes of mediocre, or even terrible, words actually on the page, than years of theoretically perfect words never let out of your head.

So that was my weekend. A lot of the snow has melted, first in yesterday’s sun and then in today’s rain, but I’m still glad I won’t have to head back to the office until Tuesday.

Back to work

I took me a while to get to sleep last night, even though I turned in at fairly reasonable hour, but I didn’t have any problems getting back into my normal schedule this morning. In fact, I managed to get up a little early and start writing morning pages again.

Picking up my notebook again, I was a little disheartened to see that last year I’d carried the practice no further than March — I was sure it had been longer than that — but I do think it’s a good habit to get back into. And I wrote again this evening, not progressing very far on my short story, but progressing some. The forward momentum might be short-lived, since it’s only the second day of the new year, but wanting to write is better than the other thing.

Work was okay, although our local network servers were down for a good part of the morning and then again in the afternoon. It made working rather difficult, and led not just me to wonder if maybe the universe didn’t really want us to go back to work after all. Tonight, the universe is throwing a huge snow storm at us — it’s coming down pretty fierce, and the LIRR has already promised to run on a shortened schedule tomorrow (because of course they have) — so there might just be something to that theory.

I won’t know until tomorrow morning if I’m actually headed into the office. I’ll need to call to find out if the office is open, then find out if the trains are running, then make a decision about whether I can get to the train, particularly if it’s still snowing. I mean, I wouldn’t mind a snow day — I still have three and a half seasons of Babylon 5 to re-watch — but it was also good to get back to the office today, and it’s not like I don’t have actual work to do.

But we’ll see.

Black Sunday (aka Winter vacation, day 14)

This afternoon, I drove to Farmingdale for my weekly writing group. The weather was pretty bad, raining hard, and the visibility on the road was pretty low, but I wasn’t too worried about it until the empty gas tank light came on in my car.

I was already about halfway there, so I decided to risk it, knowing there was a gas station less than a block from the parkway exit. And I got to that station without any problem. I pulled my car up to one of the self-service pumps, got out and opened the tank, reached for my wallet…and realized I didn’t have my wallet with me.

Luckily I did have my cell phone. I called my friend (and fellow writing grouper) Maurice and asked if he could drive back a few blocks and do me a really big favor. I’m pretty sure I didn’t have enough gas to drive all the way back home, so Maurice came and lent me some cash so I could fill up the tank. It’s nice that I can laugh about it now, but nicer still that Maurice was willing to do that — and that I didn’t get pulled over or get in an accident without my driver’s license on the way there or back.

After all that, what I actually wrote at the free-writing group seems almost incidental, but here it is:

“So you want to be a genius,” Teddy says. “Okay. We can pump you full of adaptogens, a whole catalog of herbs, some we’ve only just discovered, and we can let the brain take over. We can let your body learn to heal itself, forgive the physical and mental abuses you’ve heaped on it over the years, and go the whole holistic route. You’ll think clearer, at least, I guarantee it.

“Or,” he says, holding up a syringe, “we can give you this.” The liquid inside is a thick, jaundiced yellow, and Teddy taps a finger against the plastic cap at the needle’s tip. “It’ll make sick as a dog, maybe kill you. It’s killed lots. But it’ll also rewrite your DNA, and if you survive the process, one of the perks is increased brain power. I won’t kid you, most of the people who take this don’t survive, but every one who does is card-carrying member of Mensa.”

“So,” he says, “which is it going to be: forgiveness or illness?”

Marcus hasn’t really thought this through. Teddy’s reputable enough, comes highly recommended; Marcus doesn’t doubt the man’s discovered new herbs or that the stuff in the syringe can do what Teddy claims. The people Marcus had to go through just to get this appointment are all the proof he needs that this is legit. But the man’s still a salesman, so while Marcus thinks he’s already made his decision, he feels like he should probably ask at least a couple more questions.

“When you say ’rewrite my DNA,’” Marcus says, “do you mean like evil genius lizard people?”

“Ah,” Teddy says, “you heard about that. That was this, I won’t lie, but the formula’s been refined since then, and Dr. Andersen — “

He sees the confused look on Marcus’ face.

“Professor Cobra?” he says. “Of the Evil Snakes Gang?”

“Oh, right,” Marcus says.

“Well, anyway, he wasn’t monitoring his intake. Took way too much, shared his needles. That’s a big no-no. If I had it to do over again, I’d steer him onto to the herbal route. Might still, if the those Redemption Society super-hacks ever let me near him.”

“Uh huh,” Marcus says, “so you’re saying that isn’t going to happen now?”

“Well…” Teddy says, “again, I’m not going to lie to you. Everybody’s different, but there’s always a risk when you throw alien pathogens into the soup.”

“Alien path — “ Marcus starts to say.

“Yeah. Ancient Martian stuff. Rumor has it, it’s what killed them off. In its purer form,” he adds, seeing the worried look on Marcus’ face. “This is a lot more dilute, and Martians weren’t the heartiest of stock to begin with.”

“No…” Marcus says. He’s seen the footage like everybody else, that army unit from Mars the Redemption Society accidentally unfroze at the North Pole. They turned out to be pretty easily defeated, but Marcus still remembers how tense those weeks were back as a child. “And this is from Mars?”

“Born and bred,” Teddy says, “then cultivated here on Earth, nurtured. It’s a living thing, and like I said, it might kill you, but if it doesn’t it’ll definitely make you smarter.”

This evening, I made a double-feature of Black Sundays — first the 1960 horror movie, which is a lot of bad dubbing but great atmosphere, and then the 1977 action thriller about the terrorist plot to commandeer the Goodyear blimp at the Super Bowl. It’s entertaining, even if there aren’t many real characters in it. (Robert Shaw and Bruce Dern do their best, and their best is pretty good.) They made for an odd double-feature, but for some reason I had my heart set on it when I noticed they were both available on Netflix streaming.

Yeah, I don’t get me either sometimes.