Sometimes I write things

Driving down the highway, Morgan’s gothmobile. Morgan is driving, Ferdinand is in the passenger seat, and Oliver and Andrew are in the back. In contrast to the rain and drizzle of the last few days, it’s a blindingly sunny morning. The grass on the median and on the shoulder is wet and lush and high and studded with wildflowers — Queen Anne’s Lace, dogblossoms, dandelions. Cotton-candy clouds and contrails perk up the otherwise clear clear sky. Bright lights, primary colors, and Morgan’s black-on-black van looks awfully incongruous.

Some bubblegum Top 40 piece of pop music is playing on the radio, and Morgan switches it off and starts playing a cassette tape of something screechy and dissonant. Ferdinand reaches over and turns it down.

“Normally I’d kick your ass for messing with my sound system,” Morgan says affably, “but I’ll let it pass ’cause I know you’re in pain.”

“Yeah, sorry about assaulting you,” Ferdinand says. “I misread the situation.”

“When we’re hurt, we lash out, that’s what I’ve learned. Yes, friend, I too know the searing pain of heartbreak and unrequited love.”

“Uh-huh. I’m just going to pretend you didn’t say that. I think that’s for the best. Now tell me about this…” Ferdinand leafs through what appears to be six or seven photocopied pages stapled into a packet. YE DARK CONCLAVE FENCON 2005 on the front over an image (badly degraded by the photocopy) of a heap of blood-soaked rosepetals on a tile floor. “…Duel of Primacy?”

“Duel of Primogenacy,” Morgan corrects. “What do you want to know?”

“Well, what’s the point?”

Morgan responds, but we’re not interested. Pan back from this to the back seat. Well, not formally back seat. The van lacks back seats, but there’s an old love seat wedged in place. Oliver has a dozen Krispy Kremes in his lap. He and Andrew are both sipping lattes and reading the comprehensive FenCon schedule. Andrew is extolling the virtues of buying event tickets in advance and planning out each and every minute of the convention so as to maximize gaming time.

Oliver seems disengaged. Maybe it’s the halfhearted way he’s sipping his latte, or maybe it’s the glum way he stares out the window while Andrew talks.

Andrew picks up on this, eventually, when Oliver stops responding to his questions. Tenatively he asks what’s bothering Oliver. (Whatever could be bothering Oliver?)

Oliver asks who Kestrel is. Who is Kestrel? Kestrel sent his father to Muncie. Kestrel set him up! And Andrew is Kestrel’s friend! It’s like, Andrew’s friend double-crossed Oliver’s father! His father! And Andrew won’t tell him who Kestrel is! Oliver hates Kestrel! Oliver hates Andrew for being Kestrel’s friend!

While Andrew tries to smooth things over with Oliver we pan back, out of the van, four or five carlengths to a vintage DeSoto the color of ash. One driver, no passengers. A Hawaiian hula girl dashboard ornament and tinny Xavier Cugat playing on the radio. A craggy statesman who may well be the oldest man alive — seriously, he makes Senator Jackson look young and vibrant — a cadaver in a leisure suit, that’s what’s driving the DeSoto. That’s what’s tailing the van.

Back at the Lauro house, Cassie. Cassie sitting quietly, sipping a cup of coffee. She inhales, like she’s going to say something, but she doesn’t. Instead she takes another sip.

Slowly we pan away from Cassie to the other side of the kitchen table. Alice, sitting quietly, sipping a cup of coffee. She looks furtively at Cassie, like she has something to get off her chest, but then she keeps glancing away.

Back to Cassie.

Back to Alice.

Alice finally speaks. “This is –”

The phone rings, interrupting her. Cassie and Alice both leap up from the kitchen table and race to the telephone. Alice has the advantage of starting out slightly closer, but Cassie is younger and faster. She picks up the phone midway through the second ring.

“Hello?”

It’s Dale.

“Hi…”

“Who is it?” Alice whispers.

“It’s Dale,” Cassie whispers back.

“What does he want?” Alice whispers.

Cassie turns away from Alice and looks at her shoes. “So what’s up?” she asks Dale.

Dale was just thinking of her, wondering if she had plans for tonight.

“No, no plans.”

Because there’s this party, and maybe she would like to…?

“I’d love to, yeah. Uh-huh. Great.”

Cassie hangs up. “Dale invited me to a party,” she tells Alice. “Tonight.”

Cassie half-expects some kind of diatribe on the horrors of leaving the house on a Saturday night, citation of Department of Justice statistics on the various ways people can suffer at college parties (alcohol poisoning, date rape, inhalation of carcinogens from improperly-installed insulation), et cetera, but instead Alice nods slowly. “Oh,” she says. “You know what? I’m going to have a glass of wine.”

CUT to Alice back at the kitchen table with an open bottle of wine. Cassie looks at her quizzically.

CUT to Alice with a two-thirds empty bottle of wine. Cassie is now holding a glass of wine, which she does not appear to have drunk from.

“Did your father invite you back to Thailand?” Alice asks her.

“Yeah…”

“Yeah, me too. How dare he?” Alice slams her wineglass down. “What gives him the right to come in, and say all those things, talk about the… did he tell you about the black sand?”

“It squeaks, yeah.”

“What makes him think I, we, could just go gallivanting off and… I need something else.”

Alice gets up from the kitchen table and heads upstairs. She returns a minute later, clutching a plastic baggie with some kind of green plant matter inside.

Cassie is aghast. “Mom! Where did you get that?” Cassie has always assumed marijuana simply doesn’t exist within a three-hundred-mile radius of her house.

Alice ignores her. She expertly constructs a joint and lights it. “He just doesn’t… your father and I did a lot of living. He and I… that man is something.”

“If you two ever had sex I don’t want to know about it,” Cassie says.

“Wisconsin to Panama to Bimini to St-Kitts to San Esteph… and now he’s out in the Pacific… and I have to stay here. We have to stay here.”

“Well… don’t have to, Mom. You could go with him.”

Alice thinks about this while she smokes some more.

“Mmm. First thing we need to do,” she says, “first thing we need to do it bust Enzo out.”

Establishing shots of FenCon: the enormous dealer’s room, the foam Thirty Years of Dungeon Majesty display, chainmail bikinis, and Bruce Campbell signing autographs. More nerds than you could shake a stick at. Pan across one especially large and ordered clump of nerds to Ferdinand, at the edge of the convention.

Ferdinand didn’t preregister, so he’s stuck in line while Morgan and Oliver and Andrew go their separate ways. The FenCon convention seems huge — the line stretches back for hundreds of yards, and moves slowly. The attendee immediately in front of Ferdinand is reading the Simarillion and the one behind him is watching DVDs — plural — on a handheld player. Ferdinand glances at his watch, then cocks his head — he sees or hears something we the audience don’t.

Ferdinand hops the cordon and jogs up towards the front of the line, ignoring the occasional jeer. The camera swings around behind him, briefly giving a view similar to a third-person shooter. Simultaneously all the color slowly bleaches out of the frame; all the nerds go grayscale. In black and white they look eerie, half-dead.

He slows down as he approaches the colorful one screeching at the front of the line, and then the con-of-the-living-dead effects end. Datur apparently didn’t preregister either, but she has a very full schedule and is supposed to be at a Vaempyre Dark Conclave meeting in five minutes. Five minutes, do you hear?! She does not have time to go to the end of the line! Why won’t they let her in?! Further, why is this convention so disorganized?! People she’s supposed to meet with might be in this line! Why is it moving so slowly?! Why is everything always such a complicated mess?!

She seems to have been going on in this vein for some time. To their credit, the convention staff do not tell her that the reason they won’t let her in is because she’s a screeching harpy and they hate her.

Ferdinand steps in and expertly shifts the focus of the staff’s attention from Datur onto himself. “What we have here is a disagreement, an issue, and every issue has two sides. There’s this side of the table, and then there’s your side of the table over there, and really, this is fundamentally a dispute between the two sides of the table. But all disputes are about people. We’re people, you’re people, and all these people in line: they’re people, too. We’re all just trying to get by. All we want to do is get into the convention — and you have the power, you have the authority to make that happen. Make that happen, do that for us, people helping people, and you’ll see that we’re not enemies. We’re not really on different sides. We’re just some people who need a little help.”

So he secures Datur’s convention badge, and his own, and he gives her her badge, and she’s looking at him like he’s grown a second pair of arms, and he says there’s a hole in your schedule from 11:45 to noon, meet him at the snack bar, please, he wants to talk to her. And she’s, like, stammering and trying to be cold, all “I’ve got a lot of people I need to talk to,” and he’s all yeah, I’ve read the Vaempyre FenCon Blood-Schedule of Events of the Sickly Night, and you’ve got fifteen minutes unaccounted for, can’t I have them? And he leaves before she has a chance to say no, or indeed to stop stammering, to find Andrew.

Andrew is in fact not at FenCon. He ditched Morgan and Oliver shortly after picking up the badges, made noise about visiting the dealer’s room, and instead doubled back and caught the shuttle to the Indianapolis train station. In a men’s room stall he changed out of his jeans and FenCon 2004: Twenty-Nine Years of Dungeon Majesty t-shirt and into dark slacks, a white short-sleeved buttoned shirt, and a red tie. All are badly wrinkled, thanks to the hours they spent crumpled into a ball at the bottom of Andrew’s backpack.

He’s pacing on the platform, holding a bouquet of flowers he bought from a vendor, and checking his hair every ten seconds, to make sure it’s still slicked down and hasn’t reformed into a cowlick or anything. Mary Lukas — Kestrel? — should arrive on the 10:03 train. It’s 9:59.

Behind him, someone in heels approaches. It’s “Angelina,” which isn’t actually her name but that’s better than calling her “Natural Twenty,” right? The audience has never been told her actual name, but we do know it’s not Angelina (An-JEL-In-Uh) and that Morgan et al call her Angelina. So “Angelina” taps Andrew on the shoulder and he turns and sees her and she’s like, hi!

And he’s like, hi. And now he’s flustered, because he can’t very well meet Kestrel while other people are watching!

–What are you doing here?

–Well, uh, what are you doing here?

–Asked you first.

–I’m…

–Waiting for someone? Anyone in particular?

“Angelina” eyes the flowers.

Andrew observes that “Angelina” is surely missing some Vaempyre Dark Conclave activity. “Angelina” is getting tired of that whole scene — it’s just not what she’s into these days, you know? She’s bored of it. It’s boring.

This isn’t quite what Andrew was expecting to hear. As the 10:03 train arrives and the station is filled with passengers detraining, “Angelina” thrusts yet another flier into Andrew’s hands.

“The Secret Door is like, blowing the hinges off!” She’s all excited.

‘An independent Internet forum for the thoughtful discussion and design of role-playing games,’ Andrew reads. ‘The global marketplace of ideas that is the Internet makes possible new horizons for creator-owned, novel content. WBP Theory. The Feet of Clay Principal. Breaking down barriers and analyzing the underlying structural models of gaming: failureism, apotheosisism, functionominalism. The Antioption Rule. What kind of fun aren’t you having? The Secret Door.‘

By the time he’s finished reading the pamphlet, the platform is once more empty; he missed the arrival.

“They have a booth!” “Angelina” gushes.

Andrew sighs. “Okay.” He gives the flowers to her, and lets her lead him back to FenCon.

“I think it’s great that the World War Two dead of Muncie are finally getting the recognition they deserve. Those men sacrificed their lives, their futures, their blood for us; we live in the world they bought at precious, precious cost. If not for the bravery and self-sacrifice of the American and Allied soldiers…”

Alvin, on television. He seems uncharacteristically calm, confident, and he’s not slouching. TeeVee Alvin does a double-take.

“Wait? What? Oh! Oh my! What’s all this then? It’s not a memorial to the brave men who spilled blood in the name of freedom, it’s a memorial to the men who died opposing them, who fought and struggled to defend Hitler and Tojo! An Axis war memorial? Do we as a community feel…”

Pull back as we lose interest in Alvin’s speech. The television is a portable model propped up on a bookshelf in Alvin’s office. It’s almost unrecognizable as Alvin’s office: the blinds are open and sunlight streams in, reflecting off the stack of framed black-and-white photographs Millie has taken down from the walls. Mondale, Tsongas, Lieberman — all gone. In their place: a few American flags, several color pictures of Bill Clinton, the issue of TIME with Barack Obama on the cover, and a still frame of footage from a rally in Florida 2000, Al Gore at the moment the world seemed poised to recognize his victory.

Millie is sitting at Alvin’s desk, talking on the phone to someone who is apparently feeding her mud and expecting her to call it a sundae, who is trying to play games with her and by extension with the democratic process, someone who had better listen to reason because Millie is no one to cross, yeah? Yeah? Yeah, that is how it’s going to be, and you’re going to like it, and… yeah? Good then! She’s a real firecracker.

Outside, we can see through a window. A dead-eyed salesman — one of Jack Nelson’s empties — sidles down the street, approaching the exterior of Alvin’s office in a sidelong and casual manner. Two steps forward, one step to the left, one step forward, one step right, two steps back. Nondescript staring into space, soul crushed and spirit broken. Shuffling.

The zombie slides a manila envelope under Alvin’s Millie’s office door, then shuffles away. Millie, still on the phone, sees it appear, but by the time she’s disengaged from the telephone and picked up the envelope and opened the door, the zombie is long gone.

Millie opens the envelope and pulls out a stack of papers. Medical records. Jack Nelson’s medical records. A few key words jump out at her.

hyperdichromasy
extreme color blindness
one in a million in the general population
very strong hereditary
father to son

Millie looks at Barack Obama, inscrutable.

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