writing

Great power with a side of great responsibility

So it’s Sunday again, and that means the crossword puzzle, the writing group, and a movie afterward. The crossword wasn’t anything special, although the movie was better than I expected. The new Spider-Man isn’t exactly what I’d call amazing — and it’s usually best in those rarer moments when it’s not treading all too familiar ground — but I found a lot to enjoy about it (particularly Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield). I’m not convinced we needed a Spider-Man reboot, much less a brand new origin story, much less that this brings enough new to the table. But you know, for an afternoon’s entertainment, it wasn’t half bad.

Oh, and the thing I wrote. Here it is:

When the plane landed, the doctor was afraid, and the Magus levitated the orbs.

“Why didn’t you try doing that to the plane?” the doctor asked with a weary laugh. “You could have saved us from all that awful turbulence.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” the Magus said, with the heavy sigh of a man all too accustomed to explaining himself. The twin crystal orbs swirled slowly an inch above the man’s outstretched hand, then fell with a soft plop into his lap as he turned his wrist to read his watch. “Anyway, we made pretty good time.”

“What do you mean it doesn’t work like that?” the doctor asked. “If I had the power to levitate objects, I wouldn’t be wasting my time with a pair of cheap plastic balls.”

“They’re crystal, actually,” said the Magus. “Quite valuable.” He held one up to overhead light, catching its gleam, then polished the orb with the end of his dark velvet robes. Satisfied, he pocketed them both. “And strictly speaking, it’s not levitation. I just…well, let’s just say I help the orbs forget a little bit about gravity for a short while.”

“I don’t understand,” said the doctor.

“Of course not,” said the Magus. “You’re a man of science. And besides, you’re pre-occupied by thoughts of your impending grisly death.” He stared down the aisle toward the front of the plane. “Do you think they’ve put away the drinks cart already?”

“What do you mean?” asked the doctor.

“I mean if it’s going to take this long to taxi to the gate, I wouldn’t mind another ginger ale.”

“No! About my death! Can you — can you see the future?”

“That’s a pretty fancy way of putting what I’m able to do,” said the Magus. He thumbed absently through the in-flight magazine. “I’m mostly just good at reading body language. And you have the bearing of a man about to die a not wholly unexpected violent death.”

“Did somebody send you?” the doctor asked. He was pinned between the Magus and the window, with no escape. Not for the first time, he regretted having passed on the seat next to the emergency exit. “Did Kendrick send you? I didn’t take his money, I promise. I told the FBI nothing!”

“Look,” said the Magus, “it’s not me you have to worry about. I’m just a guy in a velvet cloak with a long white beard and a couple of floating orbs in his pocket. Do I really look like I work for the Chicago mob?”

“Then what are you doing here?” asked the doctor.

“Saving your sorry life, I guess,” said the Magus. “Although until ten minutes ago I was just going on vacation.” He sighed. “Seriously, who do you have to kill around here to get another ginger ale?”

“Oh, sorry,” he told the doctor. “Poor choice of words.”

These weekend things go by way too quickly, don’t they?

Down the rabbit hole

I spent most of last night dog-sitting, while my parents were out, and working, as I had been all day, on the brand-new issue of Kaleidotrope, which is out for summer. I hope you’ll take a look at it and let me know what you think. There are ten stories, three poems, a comic, and some silly horoscopes. (Although no more silly than quote-unquote real horoscopes, which I swear I read only for the inspiration needed to mock them.) I hope you’ll take a look and let me — and the authors, and others — what you think.

Today, it was mostly just the crossword puzzle and writing. I provided the free-writing prompt this week, from something I actually saw during my commute home the other night. A woman at Penn Station, who I assume had just disembarked from the train on the opposite platform, just arriving in the city, was pushing a cart, on the top of which sat a white rabbit inside a cage. I probably could have written a dozen stories from that. Here’s what I did write:

She didn’t want to keep the magician waiting, but already the train had been twenty minutes late, stuck for all that extra time just outside the tunnels leading into the city. She’d stared at her cell phone all that time and watched it buzz and blink with messages she did her best to ignore. Mortini had called six, no, seven times — and he’d probably called the agency at least once or twice, too. God, what would Frankie say when she finally got back to the office? She’d have to tell Mortini she’d been in the tunnels already, her phone out of service, and hope he didn’t catch her in the lie. Bad enough to be running late without also intentionally brushing the client off with voicemail. That, as Frankie would undoubtedly tell her, was not good customer service.

She’d only been with the agency a few weeks, but it was a good job, good benefits after she’d been there three months, and she didn’t want to lose it, not now. She couldn’t go back to her old life. Sure, the clients could be a little weird, eccentric and impatient, and Frankie’s perfectionism could sometimes come across as second-guessing; he was friendly enough with her, had been since her first interview, but she’d seen him hang other field agents out to dry over a job gone even just slightly wrong. Frankie was office manager, after all, and the customer was always right.

Even if that customer was a cranky old stage magician who had to have one particular white rabbit for his act. Didn’t she at least deserve a little credit for finding that rabbit in the first place? It hadn’t been easy. Catching the 6:05 train at all had been something like a minor miracle, and twenty minutes was nothing compared to how late she could have been.

Time travel was dangerous stuff.

She didn’t understand the science — Frankie and the agency didn’t pay her enough for that — but she knew she had a natural aptitude for it, could navigate where others would be instantly lost. The agency didn’t lose many field agents, but that was only because they chose their agents so wisely, because the interview process was so difficult, exacting. It had to be. Even a quick trip back to 1937 to kidnap a young boy’s pet rabbit — not really kidnapping, she reminded herself, since technically Mortini WAS that boy, now ridiculously old, disgustingly wealthy — was a recipe for disaster in the wrong hands.

Not entirely sure what’s going on here — the goal is to write, not edit, but I think it could be the start of something.

Tuesday various

Sunday

Today I did the crossword puzzle and wrote this:

They hung old Davy Capp, the Butcher of Biloxi, from the top of the hill that overlooks the town. The man was near on eighty, and put up no kind of fight, which I think just made it worse when they finally slung the rope around his neck. He’d lived almost half those years right here in Ambrose, a retired schoolteacher from somewhere back east — maybe Pittsburgh or Cleveland — or so everyone in town had thought. We didn’t ask questions — it just isn’t our way — and Capp offered little by way of biography. He was just an old man looking to live out the last of his years on a small parcel of land he said his sister had bought back before the start of the war. He kept to himself, but, for the most part, I think, he was well liked. Turns out, he actually stole that land from one of the poor souls he carved up down in south Texas, along with his name, and lord knows what else. I wouldn’t be all surprised if the man never even had a sister.

When we first saw the warrant, I was with Sherrif Ballard, taking his measurements for a new suit. He’d been putting me off for weeks, avoiding my shop, but the wedding was in less than a month and the groom was going to have to be dressed, like it or not. It was an old warrant, long expired, yellowed at the edges, and with a poor sketch of what Capp might have looked like when he was younger. I don’t think either of us would have paid it any mind if Jimmy Milton, one of the sherrif’s younger deputies, hadn’t pulled it from that morning’s mail and said, with a laugh, “Hey, Abner, don’t this sort of look like old man Capp to you?”

I don’t know that we ever did learn who sent Abner Ballard that old warrant.

I also sent out 70 rejection letters for Kaleidotrope. You know, for the whole crushing-writerly-dreams part of the weekend.

Happy Father’s Day!

Facehugger-mugger

Today was a pretty regular Sunday. I woke up, did the crossword puzzle, watched some more Would I Lie to You?, and went to the local Home Depot to get a new propane tank. I had to clean off an old empty one, which had been sitting alongside the garage for the better part of a year, which upset to no end the worms and crawly things that had made a home for themselves in the dirt that had caked to the underside of the empty tank.

Speaking of worms and crawly things — which might be a spoiler, although I think a relatively small one — I also saw Prometheus today. And while I hate saying this about a movie that looks this good, that has so many genuinely good moments and touches, and that offers some potentially interesting questions…but I was really quite disappointed in it overall. My thoughts are largely the same as MaryAnn Johanson, who writes:

It had me at hello, Prometheus did, and for a fair while, and I’m still in awe of it visually, for moments like this one: Scott draws out the sequence in which the ship Prometheus approaches the planet it has been aiming at in a way that’s like cinematic lovemaking, one that lets our eyes and our minds luxuriate in the notion that this is a whole ’nother planet, the ship deorbiting unhurriedly from the huge emptiness of black space into a brand new sky and descending into a new world that is so totally amazing in and of itself, just by its sheer existence and the fact that we’re there, that it barely matters what else might be found there.

And then Prometheus lost me quickly after that, and never won me back again. Even if we had no thought that this might be connected to Alien, it ends up feeling like an Alien retread, as if it feels it must hit the same general notes…

I’ll leave out what those notes are, since that’s venturing much more deeply into spoiler territory. But do understand this: if you go in expecting an Alien prequel, you are going to be disappointed, and yet the film is so very much an Alien prequel, in spirit if not deed, that it almost can’t help but disappoint. The DNA of Ridley Scott’s earlier film (and a fair bit of James Cameron’s follow-up) is all over every frame of this new movie. Some of it just feels reminiscent of Alien, but a whole lot of the movie feels like Scott actively stealing from his younger self, and to considerably lesser effect. If I had somehow wandered into the theater, knowing nothing about the production, or about how the story for Prometheus had developed — if I hadn’t even known that Ridley Scott was directing — my one thought, at the end of the movie, would have been: “Wow, what a gorgeous but empty rip-off of Alien.”

Oh, it’s also kind of disgusting and shockingly violent in places. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — quite the opposite if done well — and heaven knows I managed to find some redeeming value even in The Human Centipede of all things. But there was a stretch of Prometheus that felt like Solaris directed by early David Cronenberg, and I’m not sure it was used to much better effect than making the audience squirm.

All that said, the movie does look incredible, and I think it had me completely, the same way it had Johanson, until at least halfway through. A lot of the actors are underused, but they’re quite good in their limited scenes, particularly Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba, and Charlize Theron. (I’m not really sold on Noomi Rapace, though, to be honest.) It’s the fact that there is so much, at least initially, to recommend Prometheus that ultimately makes it so disappointing.

Right before the movie, as part of my weekly free-writing group — the same friends I saw the movie with — I wrote this:

Jack isn’t dead, not exactly, but he might as well be for all the good he’s done us lately. He just sits in the corner of the room, almost never says anything, just stares off into space. I swear sometimes it’s like you can see right through him, like he’s just floating there, half-invisible, or like we’re all the way invisible to him. Tara says we shouldn’t blame him — Jack’s been through a lot lately, more than any of the rest of us — but Tara’s been saying a lot ever since the accident, won’t shut up really, and it’s all too tempting just to tune her out most of the time. Kendall just grumbles a lot, says something about there being no honor among thieves, which I guess is his way of suggesting we should maybe leave Jack behind — every man for himself, or something like that. But I think each of us remember what happened too well to do anything like that. We’re too scared to split up, even if that’s what we would have done if the accident had never happened, and even if deep down we’re just as equally scared of each other. We don’t owe each other anything. But we were all there when those control room doors slammed shut, and the lights went out, and we heard that thing that called itself the Master of Puppets snake its voice into our heads and tell us that we had been chosen to serve it or face death.

Maybe that’s Jack’s problem: maybe he couldn’t decide, and he stared too deep into death before staggering back.

Tara says we shouldn’t have come here, and yeah, sure, but what good is that kind of hindsight going to do us now? When the lights first shot back on, she was convinced it was a joke, some bad-taste prank Kendall or I had decided to play on her. Like it hadn’t been Tara who suggested we break into the old abandoned missile silo in the first place. Like it hadn’t been Tara who’d showed up at Kendall’s dorm complete with maps of the area she’d swiped from her Air Force commander father. Like it hadn’t been Tara who insisted we all get high before hiking out. It’s all well and good to regret all of that now, but regret isn’t going to get us out of the bargain we all struck just to stay alive.

Because, sure, it’s tempting to think it’s some kind of prank, or the drugs, or some kind of shared delusion. I get that, believe me, I do.

But nobody who actually heard that evil son of a bitch talk to them would ever imagine it was anything except powerful and dangerous and infinite.

I’m not really satisfied with all of it. Elements like the “Master of Puppets” and abandoned missile silo are owed to the writing prompts, and I’d probably excise them completely or rework them considerably in any rewrite. But there’s something here, in my head if not on the page, that I think I’d like to revisit.

The same way I’ll probably revisit Prometheus when it comes out on DVD. I think a director and/or screenwriter commentary could be really quite interesting in this case.