personal

Second Sunday

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I didn’t quite know what to do with myself yesterday, with this sudden excess of Saturday. I made some failed attempts at both reading and writing, then settled into watching The Godfather Part II after dinner. That’s about as exciting as my weekend got.

Today, I did do a little writing, at my weekly free-writing group:

“There is no such thing as the future,” the doctor said. “Time is flux. Time is change. Time is — “

“Time can go to hell,” said Elliot. She stoked the campfire, then stood, brushing the dirt from her knees. “We’re not talking probabilities here, doc. There are events that play out the same way every time we run the scenario. That’s close to written in stone, if you ask me.”

“Even stone crumbles,” the doctor said.

“Tell that to Kennedy, or Lincoln. Dead every time. No matter how many new variables we throw at the board, time still plays out like we expect it to. The future, for all its flux, still happens on schedule.”

“Tell that your oracle.”

Elliott sighed. Now that had been an unexpected wrinkle. She usually didn’t like to hire on locals for this kind of operation; the paperwork at the other end was a pain, for one thing, and who had the time to run every primitive, pre-codex yahoo through a crash course in temporal mechanics? Better to rely on the techs who’d already been embedded in whatever century she was visiting, along with fully briefed participants like the doctor, who’d traveled her with her. But the codex had wanted her to investigate; they said the Oracle at Delphi exhibited anomalous behaviors, rippled the waters of causation or some bullshit like that, and they wanted a team of field techs to observe in situ.

What they hadn’t said was that the seer would be expecting them.

“She sure as hell isn’t my oracle,” Elliot said. “Up till now, I figured the whole vision thing was hokum.”

“In later centuries, it might have been,” the doctor said. “We still haven’t established if the accuracy of this particular vision is unique to the young lady herself or — “

“Or divinely inspired?” said Elliot. “Please tell me you’re not putting money on Apollo, doc. We’ve got troubles enough without ancient gods getting into the mix.”

Not quite sure what to make of that, but there you have it.

Back to work tomorrow, although luckily back to work from home on Mondays after a couple of weeks.

Independence Daze

Red, White, and Blue

It was a rainy 4th of July — or at least it was until this evening, when the skies cleared and the over-abundance of fireworks came out. Not that the locals need a particular reason to set off fireworks, of course. It’s hard to judge exactly where they’re exploding from — at a guess, I’d say one block over, across the tracks — but they’re just about a nightly occurrence. Tonight, they might have been a little brighter and louder than usual, a little less timed to goals at the World Cup or wherever, but it’s a little same-old, same-old, if you ask me. (Of course, if you ask the dog, it’s the end of the world, and no, he’s sorry, but there isn’t room for you too under the kitchen table.)

I spent the day inside, thanks to the rain, mostly just happy to have the day off from work. I watched a little television but mostly read, finishing The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, which I really liked.

Then this evening, I re-watched The Godfather, which I haven’t seen since the first time I saw it, many years ago now. It really is a terrific movie, and it looks stunning in Blu-ray. But it’s also something like three hours long, so that kind of took up the rest of my evening.

All in all, it wasn’t an eventful day, but it was a pleasant one.

Thursday

It’s been a long week, maybe because it’s actually a short week, with the holiday tomorrow. I’m looking forward to having the day off, even if I don’t have any real plans for it beyond ignoring what promise to be excessive neighborhood fireworks.

Sunday

I took another long weekend starting this Thursday. I didn’t do a whole lot with it, didn’t go anywhere more exciting than the dry cleaners, but it was nice to have a few days of just hanging out. I watched several episodes of Comedy Bang Bang, which is funny and weird and which my only sporadic listening to the podcast version hadn’t really prepared me for. I also watched a few episodes of Columbo, which, maybe surprisingly, still really holds up.

I also watched Julia, starring Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and Jason Robards. All three of them were nominated for Oscars for the movie, and it seems a little strange that Fonda is the only one of them who lost. Robards and Redgrave are both good, but they’re each only in the film for a small handful of scenes, and for my money Fonda’s a lot better. (Meryl Streep also pops up; it’s her first film role.) That said, I can’t really claim to have enjoyed it, and it’s a strange duck of a movie, not least of all because it’s quite possibly all untrue.

On Saturday afternoon I drove out to the airport to pick up my parents. They’d been away for a couple of weeks on vacation in France — ah, the joys of retirement — and came back bearing gifts of Belgian chocolates and T-shirts.

Last night, I watched The Last Picture Show, which I’ve had out from Netflix for way too long. Wikipedia informs me, coincidentally enough, that “Julia was the first film to win both supporting actor categories since The Last Picture Show six years earlier in 1971.” (I hadn’t planned my movie-watching that way.) The winners for Last Picture Show were Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman, and they’re both really good. Not a lot to say, but I really liked the movie.

No movies today — I passed up a chance to go see the new Transformers movie, which seemed like the smart play. Instead, I finished putting together the newest issue of Kaleidotrope. I’m really pleased with it, not least of all because of the (triumphant?) return of the horoscopes and fake advice column. There’s also some really great short stories and poems and a cartoon. I hope you’ll check it out.

And with my weekly writing group, I wrote this:

We were supposed to meet Franklin at the mouth of the cave, sometime around noon, but by the time we finally got there at half past, he was already gone. We could see that he’d been there, from the fresh ashes in a nearby circle of stones and the tin coffee cup tossed atop them, but of Franklin himself there was no other sign or note. Still, we weren’t worried — or at least I wasn’t.

“He probably just got impatient and decided go on ahead of us,” I told Sarah. “You know how your brother is.”

“That’s actually the only reason I’m here at all,” she said. “Because I know how my brother is.”

When Franklin had called us a week ago, it had been a surprise, the first time in maybe half a year that we’d heard from him. There’d been semi-regular reports from his doctors, whether or not his progress was any good, and presumably his and Sarah’s mother was still visiting him, if she could ever pull herself from the bottom of a bottle. But we hadn’t spoken to the kid since January, and hadn’t actually been in the same room with him since before Christmas, when he’d started having what had seemed like the worst of the attacks. When he asked us to meet him back at the cave — “you remember, don’t you, Mark?” he asked me — it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that we were hesitant.

“You’re out, Frank?” Sarah asked him. “How can you be out?”

I was on the other phone in the den, and I remember thinking we had a bad connection, because they both sounded so distant, like voices in another room, and I could hardly hear her brother talk. I could hardly hear him at all when he said, “We have to go back to the cave.”

“You’re not calling from the hospital?” Sarah asked. “Does Mom know you’re out?”

“I’m going to be there tomorrow,” Franklin said, like that answered anything. “At noon? I need you guys to be there too.”

And with that, he was gone. I let the click echo for a minute, wondering if Sarah was still there, and then I said, “Honey, I’m coming upstairs.”

Now we were here, back where it had started. This was where I’d met them both, six years earlier, and it had been shortly after that that we’d started seeing signs of Franklin’s illness. How long had he been trapped down there in the dark of the cave? It couldn’t have been more than an hour, but the doctors had called it a “precipitating factor,” or something like that. I knew for a fact they wouldn’t have allowed him to come back here.

Not entirely sure what to make of it, and it doesn’t really connect with the prompt I supplied (except maybe in my head), but it’s something at least.

Back to work tomorrow, and back to the office. Though I usually work from home on Mondays, we’re closed on Friday for the holiday, and we don’t get to take the Mondays when that happens.

Sunday

I did some cleaning yesterday, which is about as exciting as it got.

Today, I had my weekly free-writing group. And, well, the prompt was a little weird, but I had fun with it nevertheless:

“Children and the elderly go first,” the robot man said. There were gears inexpertly grafted to its face, a clockwork mechanism that let the human jaw beneath poorly mimic human speech.

You chose this? Manny thought, eyeing the metal thing and its patchwork of sheet metal and flesh, a rusting constellation of rivets scarred across its receding hairline. A hundred years ago you stepped through this very same time gate and let whoever’s on the other side do that to you. They said, let us strip off your humanity and and replace it with leaking motor oil, burnt spark plugs, soldered-on transistors, and you said sure. If the stories are true, you signed up for this, you and all the other temporal borgs watching over the gate.

At least the four of us didn’t have a choice in the matter. We’re going through the gate if we want to or not.

“There aren’t any elderly or children here,” said the Professor. He’d introduced himself, Conrad something, but Manny still thought he looked like a professor decked out in tweed. He was just missing the chalk dust stains and the elbow patches. “Perhaps we should just go through one at a time?”

“Doesn’t it make more sense for me to go first?” Ms. Earth asked, twirling a lock of her blonde hair and unnecessarily moistening her lips with her tongue. Watching her preen for cameras that were no longer there, Manny almost laughed. Only a girlish giggle would have been more transparent.

“What’re you doing, honey?” Abigail, the fourth in their little group of prisoners, asked with a heavy sigh. “The beauty pageant’s long done with. It’s not like Gearface over there’s gonna fall for your act.”

“I’m just saying,” the one-time beauty queen said, glaring at the older woman, “if we want to put our best foot forward with the Architects, maybe we should lean on the one of us who has some experience with public speaking.”

“Yeah,” Abigail said, “and who knows, maybe there’ll be a swimsuit competition.”

“C’mon now,” said Ms. World — whose real name, Manny now remembered, was Melody — “I just meant that — “

“Children and the elderly go first,” the temporal borg repeated, stepping in front of the time portal.

“Do you think if we don’t follow the rules it won’t let us go through at all?” the Professor asked.

“Now that’d be a real shame,” Abigail said.

“They’re not going to let us go back to what we were doing before,” Manny said, surprising even himself. “The Architects don’t let anybody go once they’ve chosen.”

“The kid isn’t wrong,” the Professor said. “Everybody goes into the future eventually.” He looked at Manny as if sizing him up. “He’s also as close to ’children’ as we get,” he said. “He and you should probably go through first.”

“And me?” Abigail asked. “Just who do you think you’re calling elderly?”

“It’s just relative,” the Professor said.