Sometimes I write things

In years past the happy family traveled to Florida for vacation. To call the Lauros happy, maybe, overemphasizes that aspect of them, but happy applies in this misty past. See them: carefree Anne, with her big brown eyes and her infant son cradled against one arm; shadowed John, whose face always seems turned away from Cassie, and little Cassie herself, not more than four in this faded memory-idyll.

Laughter and good cheer fill the glass-bottomed boat, Water Weird, as it skirts along the Keys. Summer has reached its zenith, and a throng of tourists crowd the deck around the glass. Tropical fish the colors of crayons, all 64 in the set; turtles and anemones: we’re talking the serious Life Aquatic.

The moment lasts forever, and then it ends abruptly. Stormclouds rush across the sky and replace the flawless glass dome with a rippling blanket of damp cotton batting. The seas heave and shake, and the air of genial cheer aboard the glass-bottom boat becomes much more strained. In the excitement, Cassie finds herself swept overboard. Anne screams.

Once she’s in the water, warm and inviting and wine-dark, everything is once more groovy. Beautiful music fills her ears, drowning out the shouts from above, as Cassie sinks down towards the reef, and towards the mermaids, ethereally graceful and smiling broad, toothy Esther Williams smiles. The mermaids dance around Cassie, tug at her toes, and sing songs of warmth and salt and safety. Together they pirouette, twirl, and fillip through the water.

Rough hands grab her by her flowing hair, and Cassie jerked back to the surface. There’s blood in the water, and her mother is screaming.

TITLE SEQUENCE (MUSIC “HEROES” BY DAVID BOWIE): DUNGEON MAJESTY starring MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL, PHILLIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN, WILLIAM H. MACY, OWEN WILSON, and DAVID DORFMAN as OLIVER. WRITTEN BY BRYANT DURREL, MICHAEL GRASSO, ROBERT MACDOUGALL, JESS PEASE, and JEFF WIKSTROM. DIRECTED BY ROBERT MACDOUGALL

WITH JANE ADAMS, SEAN BIGGERSTAFF, THORA BIRCH, FRANCES MCDORMAND, and SPECIAL GUEST STAR ANGELINA JOLIE as NATURAL TWENTY.

A wild animal, maybe. A big bear, wandered in from some faroff national park, wearing a peculiar hat and distributing leaflets. Lumber forward, lift windshield wiper, paw smacks down flier, release wiper, lumber on to the next car. A small child on a bicycle rides past, and nearly hits a tree because she can’t reconcile the obviously-a-bear body of the costume with the feathered arms and enormous bald eagle head. The paper mache beak must be a foot long.

The man in the disfigured bear suit pauses after depositing his leaving on a muddy Honda Civic. He thinks better of it, and removes the white piece of paper from under the car’s windshield wiper, replacing it instead with a pink one.

Ferdinand Klotz does not like his father’s car. It’s too big, the wheels are too far apart, and the dials are all digital, which may be an affront against nature. But, since he sold his car when he moved to New York, he doesn’t have one now, and he has to slum around in his old man’s luxury sedan. He’d prefer something a little less garish.

This isn’t what’s stressing him out, though. And stressed is, again, too strong a word. It sets up expectations which will only go unfulfilled. Call him not stressed, call him rather “distracted.” His haircut is short and low-maintenance. Ferdinand’s body resists stress, but he’s easily distracted.

He’s entirely distracted by the woman in the passenger seat, Datur Eble. She’s trying to bite her nails and failing, because she has already bitten them down to nubs. This morning Datur appears even more agitated than usual, as evinced by her bleeding cuticles and hair all tragically askew. She has Mapquest directions to the bank printed out and is double-checking them every twenty seconds.

“Turn on Appleton,” she says.

“I know,” Ferdinand says. “I used to time how fast I could get from the house to Mom’s bank. Best time was like fifteen minutes, but I really tore up the median. Sod everywhere, big divots in the grass –” Ferdinand at this point connects “grass” with “Madagascar tropicals,” which he assumes are some kind of plant, from the context, and stops talking, but it’s too late.

Datur shudders. “It’s not my fault!” she shrieks. “We wouldn’t be late if you hadn’t killed my Madagascar tropicals!” Her volume level might be appropriate if she and Ferdinand were on opposite sides of six inches of bulletproof glass.

“Datur, Datur, I didn’t kill them. And you said they were sick, not dead, I’ve never seen them, how could I –”

“That’s just it! You’ve never come to see them, you don’t support me or my career! You just don’t care!”

“We’ve only been in town for three days, I just haven’t had a chance yet to see the nursery…”

Datur shudders again, as if she’s about to explode but is through sheer force of will controlling the blast. “Okay. Fine. Okay. Look.”

“Okay.”

“Look. When you talk to your mother, what are you going to say?”

“I was thinking I’d lead in with ‘hi, Mom.’”

“If you’re not going to take this seriously –”

“I’m taking it seriously. I am. She said, Ferdinand, she said, come into my office Monday morning and pitch it to me. I’m her son, that gets my foot in the door, but, and this is reasonable, but I need to make the pitch like anyone else.”

“I’m just afraid she’ll see you as weak. Don’t be weak.”

“She’s my mother! She knows I’m weak.”

“Take this seriously, please! I’ve made sacrifices for you. I have a master’s degree in Forestry. We’re in Muncie; are there any forests here?!”

“There’s a park…”

Datur slaps her forehead with the palm of her hand. “Will you at least change your tie?”

“I like this tie!”

“It’s just… aren’t you afraid that tie makes you look like a failure?”

“What? No. It’s a nice tie. And Dad gave it to me, so Mom probably picked it out.”

Datur licks her hand, then leans over and pats down an errant cowlick, then starts. “Appleton! Turn!”

Ferdinand easily makes the turn, and drives straight into a traffic accident – there’s a major caused apparently by someone parked in the middle of the road, several blocks down.

“Oh, ferp!” Datur emits an incoherent curse, and leafs through her Mapquest directions. “Turn, turn onto Davis.”

“No, no,” Ferdinand says, shaking his head, “we can just go around. They’re letting people around.”

Maybe they were letting people around, but they’ve stopped by the time Ferdinand and Datur are blocked in by cars behind and to either side of them. A police officer and a fireman and a tow truck driver are all arguing with one another, and a small dog is running around in circles, barking.

While Datur takes out her cell phone and calls Mrs. Klotz at the bank to explain their inexcusable tardiness, Andrew Latta stares at the toy Chihuahua, more interested in it than in the car wreck. Perhaps detecting his attention, the Chihuahua runs over to him and begins barking furiously at his shoes.

Andrew takes a deep breath, brushes his unkempt hair back out of his eyes. He cracks his knuckles and looks at his destination: the Twenty By Twenty Room (Warhammer 40 000! We Have Pokemon!).

He has to psyche himself up to actually go into the store. “If you’re not comfortable here you won’t be comfortable anywhere. If you’re not comfortable here you won’t be comfortable anywhere. If you’re not comfortable here you won’t be comfortable anywhere. If you’re not comfortable here you won’t be comfortable anywhere.”

Down a flight of stairs marked with an enormous cardboard display advertising Chainmail miniatures, over a mysterious puddle of black liquid, and into the store. Several truckloads of gaming materials are packed into a space barely able to contain them – suspended shelves hang from the ceiling, every wall is coated in a veneer of Magic cards, and a life-size cutout of Seven of Nine points to an unlit display of obsolete Games Workshop figures. In the corner three junior-high-school-aged obese white boys are playing Magic and cursing like sailors, and a cheap boombox is playing “Mama Told Me Not to Come.”

Andrew takes barely any of this in, though. His attention is focused on the woman behind the counter, who couldn’t look more out of place if she were Queen Beatrice of the Netherlands. Maybe it’s her leather boots, maybe her skin-tight pants, maybe the scrollwork tattoos peeking out from under her clothes, or her belly button ring. Maybe it’s the slightly-too-small baby-T she’s wearing, black with NATURAL TWENTY in red block letters across the chest. Maybe it’s the tongue stud. Maybe it’s the way she’s leaning forward, salaciously.

“Can I…” she pauses just long enough for Andrew to feel his heart pound three times, “…help you?”

Maybe Andrew is hallucinating. He didn’t come in for this. He came in for the new edition of the Compleat Thaumaturgist, the new version-5.5-compatible edition. He already owns versions 1, 1.5, 2, 2 revised, 3, 3 the collector’s edition, 4, 4 revised, 4 revised limited edition, and 5.

“Is there something in particular you’re…” again with the pause, and maybe Andrew’s about to die, “…looking for?”

“Compleat.” Andrew squeaks. “Thaumaturgist,” he adds, after struggling to maintain consciousness after the stress of saying ‘Compleat.’

“The Compleat Thaumaturgist,” the sales clerk says knowingly. “You a wizard? You cast spells?”

If Andrew had the power to speak at this point, he’d explain that while he owns nearly every Dungeon Majesty supplement every published (missing only a few of the Finnish-language convention modules) and has memorized the rules and rules changes across all the different editions of the last thirty-odd years, he’s never actually played, no. Instead, he just nods slightly.

“Well, you’re in luck: it’s just come in today. Haven’t unpacked them yet,” the sales clerk says, indicating a large cardboard box by the door. She leans further forward, winks, and adds “would you care help me open her up?”

This is, finally, too much for Andrew. He takes a step backwards, right into the cutout of Seven of Nine, turns, sees her, and realizes he’s surrounded by impossibly hot fantasy objects. Suddenly he wants to leave the Twenty By Twenty Room more than he’s wanted anything in his life.

“No that fine here,” he barks, and throws three of his credit cards (pulled randomly from his wallet) at the counter as he scoops up a used hardback of Ye Book of Philtres Second Edition (which he owns two copies of already), and dashes for the door.

He trips over the box she mentioned, and accidentally kicks it into one of the cheap free-standing metal shelves, which topples over, spilling GURPS books everywhere, and itself crashes into the display case of 40k Squats, which breaks open and by that point Andrew was already up the stairs and out, running.

Somehow he’s also got a pink flier in his hands:

DUNGEON MAJESTY! WANTED: DOUGHTY MYRMIDONS, CUNNING FILCHERS, and UNCANNY THAUMATURGISTS! / ALSO A CLERIC! DUNGEON MAJESTY! / CALL 555 6022 / 53 WILLOW STREET / SATURDAY 3 JUNE NOON

Orthogonal to this hapless man, a block over, Cassie Lauro and her friend Chip are walking. Cassie is not the carefree toddler we once saw: time and puberty and the Clinton administration have aged her once-youthful features, resulting in a girl still very youthful, but about fifteen years older than on that fateful day off the Keys. She looks at her feet while she walks.

The boy with her, Chip, drones on about the end of high school, the last gasp of carefree childhood before the coming freshmanhood at some college somewhere. But how can they spend this currency of youth? Muncie’s dead in the summer.

“There’s always the kiddie pool,” Cassie says.

Feh to the kiddie pool, says her bosom chum. The kiddie pool is filled with kiddies, and with things – substances – worse than kiddies.

Wistfully, Cassie fantasizes about lifeguarding. Her, with sunglasses and zinc oxide on her nose, up in a high chair – the sun on the water, reflecting and bathing her in glory. She would get paid minimum wage plus a quarter an hour.

Chip points out that Cassie isn’t permitted in the adult pool, much less qualified to lifeguard. She hasn’t been in two feet of water in more than a decade. In principle, though, he agrees with her: money is goodness.

Not for the first time, Cassie speaks of Magic Beans, the coffee shop towards which even now she and Chip are walking. The life of a barista: that is the life for her. Her college friend Millie makes it seem so glamorous. It’s been all but decided: from June to September she will work at the Magic Beans.

Chip knows more than we do, and he is suspicious. “This is a done deal?”

“…Practically.”

“Does your mother know?”

“…Not yet…”

“‘First of all, we’ll set aside the damage cash crops like coffee do to developing economies worldwide and the neocolonial trade disparity the coffee industry permits,’” Chip chants in sing-song mockery that does not sound much like Cassie’s mother (except for vocabulary and diction). “‘Do you have any idea how hot coffee can get? Espresso machines are putting out massive clouds of searing-hot steam! One misstep while carrying a latte, and you’d be scarred for life! Skin grafts! Physical therapy! Nerve damage!’”

Cassie struggles to respond.

“Can I ask you a question? Did you vote?”

The Magic Beans coffee shop sees only light custom at this point of the midmorning, so Millie is willing and able to converse with the man. He’s sad-eyed, prematurely wrinkled, like he’s been in the bathtub too long, and he’s sipping a medium black coffee. He wears his suit unironed and probably stained, and he’s clearly deadly serious with the question.

Millie in fact did not vote.

“Can I ask you another question? Why not? Didn’t you see our ad with the eagle?”

The prematurely aged man’s name is Alvin Wasserman, and his candidate just lost the special election to replace the former and recently deceased state senator from this district, the Honorable Republican from Muncie, Harold Deservantes (1911-2005). Alvin does not himself run for office – he’s too short, too inarticulate, and too intense. He fields candidate for the Indiana Democratic Party. In this reddest of red states, he leaps from disappointment to disappointment.

His twenty-year high school reunion was four months ago, and his blurb in the newsletter listed him as “self-employed/activist/between jobs.” Alvin had, at the request of the alumni committee, written a three-paragraph summary of the last six campaigns he’d run, but it apparently had been cut for space.

Millie does not recall the ad with the eagle.

“The eagle represented American values, and the jackals tearing it apart were John Ashcroft and Ted Olsen,” Alvin says, hoping this will jog her memory.

“What did you run for, again?”

Alvin does not run for office. Alvin isn’t that guy. Alvin is the guy behind the guy, the man behind the curtain who treads lightly and steps well. Alvin moves in secret through the political waters, agent of the higher powers, pulling strings and buying time. He is management.

“Uh-huh.”

So, can Millie explain why she didn’t vote?

Millie chews her lip in a manner Alvin finds distressingly erotic, as she’s almost young enough to be his daughter. “Because of the margins,” she finally says.

The margins?

“Yeah. The election went, what, 62-38? That’s a twenty-four point gap. One vote’s not going to make a difference; this is a red state and a red district. There’s only a few states that are even slightly in contention in presidential elections, these days: Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire… Indiana’s firmly in the GOP column. If my vote doesn’t count in the presidential election, why should I bother with small-fry like the state senate race? The political reality being what it is, it’s pointless.”

Alvin needs a second to mull that over. “But…”

“Excuse me,” says one of the half-dozen people in the line that’s accreted behind Alvin. “Can I order?”

“Oh, sorry,” Alvin says as he steps aside and Millie shakes her head in an I-have-to-work-now kind of way. “Sorry.”

“Can I get a grande mocha?” the prospective Magic Beans customer says to Millie.

“We don’t have a ‘grande’ size,” Millie says for the eleventh time today. “We have regular or large.”

“Well, okay, venti then.”

Alvin, standing humiliated by the trash basket, sees Chip and Cassie enter.

“Can I ask you a question? Did you vote?”

Yes, Cassie says.

Wasn’t the election in November? Chip asks.

Was someone driving a brown Civic? asks a stranger in from off the street.

“Good! I’m talking about the special election. That’s my car,” Alvin says to each of them in turn.

Oh! Then no, Cassie says.

“It just blew up,” the stranger tells him, helpfully.

Alvin forgets about his push-polling for a moment and steps outside. Sure enough, there’s a lot of car pieces where his car had been. The cause of the explosion is not immediately apparent, but pieces of paper from the car’s cabin still flutter through the air, and it stinks of burning rubber and gasoline.

One of the pieces of paper flaps within arm’s reach, and without thinking Alvin snatches it out of the air. It’s a pink flier, miraculously undamaged:

DUNGEON MAJESTY! WANTED: DOUGHTY MYRMIDONS, CUNNING FILCHERS, and UNCANNY THAUMATURGISTS! / ALSO A CLERIC! DUNGEON MAJESTY! / CALL 555 6022 / 53 WILLOW STREET / SATURDAY 3 JUNE NOON

“I know and I am so sorry, I told Ferdinand not to go this way but… yes. I know. It’s terrible. Yes. You’d know that better than I would, Mrs. Klotz… Elena, yes. He’s an idiot.” Judging from Datur’s end of the conversation, she and Ferdinand’s mother were in total agreement in blaming him for blowing the appointment.

“Hey, they’re starting to let us by,” Ferdinand tells Datur, but she’s too busy frantically agreeing with Mrs. Klotz to take notice. He puts the car in gear and starts to pull out, but has to back around the truck in front of him (which isn’t going anywhere) and then this thing comes out of nowhere and oh my God!

whump

Ferdinand puts it back in park and gets out of the car.

“Jesus man watch where you’re going! I’m walking here! Have some consideration!”

Ferdinand’s first thought it that he’s hit a bear, a talking bear, but no, that’s not right. The figure even now getting up from behind the back of the sedan is a man in a costume. Or several costumes.

“You all right? Man, you just stepped right into…”

“I had the right of way, you nearly ran me over, man! You need to pull yourself together!” The words come not from the costume’s face, but from a grille concealed in the chest, below the feathers.

“…yeah, yeah…” Ferdinand nods slightly and squints at the stranger’s eagle head and feathered shoulders and biceps. “What are you supposed to be, man?”

“Don’t you know nothing? I’m an owlbear!”

“Owl… bear…?”

“Yeah, owlbear! You got a problem with that?”

“So you, like, combined two costumes?”

“No, I am an owlbear.”

“Did they have, like, octopus… panthers?”

“Do not give me crap here, my man.”

“Badger…” Ferdinand searches his brain. “Fish?”

“Hey!” The man in the owlbear suit gestures towards the costume’s head. “Eyes up here, that’s the face! Not in the chest!”

“Sorry, man. But at least I don’t, like, wear mismatched costumes…”

The owlbear points at Ferdinand’s tie. “I beg to differ my friend!”

“I like this tie,” Ferdinand mutters.

Datur finally notices that Ferdinand isn’t in the car, and rolls down the window. “What are you doing?” she calls back to him, panicked.

“I gotta go,” Ferdinand tells the owlbear. “You’re okay?”

“No permanent damage,” the owlbear says. “Here.” He hands Ferdinand a pink flier. “I think this could help you, man. You need to get your life together.”

Ferdinand nods, distracted, and heads back to the car. He reads and pockets the flier before he gets in, before Datur has a chance to see it:

DUNGEON MAJESTY! WANTED: DOUGHTY MYRMIDONS, CUNNING FILCHERS, and UNCANNY THAUMATURGISTS! / ALSO A CLERIC! DUNGEON MAJESTY! / CALL 555 6022 / 53 WILLOW STREET / SATURDAY 3 JUNE NOON