Before the dragons can so much as sulk, the thin wail of infants interrupts the momentary silence, and suddenly everyone is moving.
I glimpse only a flash of new pink before four doctors converge on the squirming things, carry them to the other side of the room, cover them, suction them, and rub them with what seems unnecessary vigor.
One of my dragons is still cowering up in the corner, held at bay by a distrustful orderly. My husband strides forward, St. George, snatches the janitorial bucket from the surprised man's hand, and throws it down at the foot of the operating table, just in time to catch the steaming placenta the OB has tossed away. The dragons slide out of their defensive postures and slink casually toward the bucket.
My husband stops by my monster head, puts my stretched mouth back into place by kissing it, scrapes the scales off my face with his unshaven cheek, and then goes to take a look at the infants. As he examines them, I cannot see the expression on his face.
I turn my head and close my eyes, listening to the OB hum in four-part harmony while she sews me back up. I try to rest, and concentrate on the pulling and pushing sensations somewhere in the vicinity of my navel, as I am threaded back together. I breathe, as I have been instructed.
Something warm is placed on my chest, and something else, bundled, in the curve of my neck.
I can feel their wet breath on my skin.
When I open my eyes, the first things I see are the dragons, in the corner, snouts thrust into the big galvanized steel pail, eating the smoking afterbirth. I lift my head and turn away from them.
I study my sons. They glow like miraculous larvae.
I push back blankets and categorize all their parts.
I can smell my blood on them.
I do not flinch.
* * * *
My first discipline is theater.
I've written and read many press releases for theatrical productions, and I know that if you want to appeal to the widest possible audience, you have to define the work in no uncertain terms, with simple, broad adjectives.
I also know that in order for theater or art of any sort to be interesting and alive, it has to tell the truth.
Or some form of it.
I know that truth is subjective: difficult to define and almost impossible to explain with simple, broad adjectives.
I know that every time I try to define myself I become tongue-tied.
I can't even explain to people what it is I do for a living.
I write in the small spaces between being a teacher, a performer, a mother, and “a middle-aged, mildly anxious white female,” which is a definition I once read on my chart in a neurologist's office.
"Afterbirth” is autobiographical, of course, but one has to be careful these days, so I call it a story.
If dragons show up in an otherwise banal hospital delivery room, what can I do?
If they're honest dragons, they stay put, making the story difficult to define and therefore a tough sell to any known market. The dragons don't care. They're not there to appeal to the widest possible audience. They're there because they really mean it. I see them in color, in far clearer detail than I see my husband or my children in the story, which may be why I occasionally find myself in a neurologist's office, sneaking a peek at my chart when she leaves the room.
Stephanie Shaw
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The 121
David J. Schwartz
People always get my origin story wrong. I wasn't “born in an explosion,” I am the explosion; if I'm the chicken, the bomb was the egg. It's just that no one's ever taken responsibility for laying it. Anything else blows up, anywhere in L.A., and the gangs and factions fall all over each other to take credit, but someone takes out the craft services tent on the set of a minor erotic space opera and no one says a word.
One hundred and twenty-one people died; I know because I killed them, but also because parts of them are still with me. Their souls, maybe. They're kind of ... suspended, I guess. Like me. It's kind of a hard thing to talk about. Most of the 121 hate me, and they withhold themselves from me—including the bomber, whoever it was. It's exhausting, being hated. Hating yourself. On the other hand, without all that rage I'm pretty sure that whatever I am would have burned out by now.
Not knowing who the bomber was used to bother me more than it does now. It was a real problem for Marty, my agent. Before he signed me, we spent an hour going around the question of whether I was Muslim. Marty doesn't like Muslims. He didn't like the fact that I spoke Arabic and Farsi, but then it turned out I spoke Hebrew, too, so he didn't know what to think. He wanted to see all the evidence files from the investigation, but they haven't even let me see those. He was like, “Do you worship Allah?” I told him I'd never thought about it. I was four days old at the time. Then he's like, “Do you feel Muslim?” Sometimes Marty is really stupid.
I would fire him, but Marty keeps me working, and as long as I'm working, the Trinity doesn't bring out the hoses. Besides, he was Phil's agent, too. Phil Lima is my writing partner, and my best friend.
* * * *
I never knew L.A. before the war, with its club music, its price-tag elegance, and its plastic charm. You can still spend a few thousand for a pair of shoes, here, but that's got more to do with inflation than with any designer's name. You're better off resoling what you've got or buying off the black market. Not that I have to worry about shoes, myself.
Phil knows all about the black market. Screenwriting wasn't bringing in a lot of money, the way things are, so Phil had his hands in a lot of things. If he'd been caught, he'd have been in deep trouble; the Trinity will put you to work at the desalinization plants if they catch you smuggling. Phil says there was an agency that handled smuggling, and immigration, too, but they were Homeland Security, so they're landlocked in St. Louis with FEMA. After Justice captured L.A., the attorney general placed everything under the jurisdiction of the FBI, the DEA, and the ATF. That's the Trinity. There's still an LAPD, but they mostly handle security and take orders from whichever acronym is standing closest.
I'm fuzzy on all the history and the way the old USA worked before it splintered into a hundred-odd pieces. Everyone tells a different story. Sometimes it was the drought that led to the war, sometimes it was the strikes, sometimes it was the election protests. Phil tries to give me the facts; he says you have to know a lot about the world if you're going to write about it. But the war is one thing that the 121 all have an opinion about, and we can't have a conversation about it without every single one of them jumping in to share a theory, not to mention reminding me how much they hate me. As if I could forget.
I'm not much of a writer, on my own. I don't know much, and a lot of the things I do know, I don't even know that I know. The 121 have a lot of life experience, but most of them are too busy hating me to share it. Sometimes bits seep through. I know things that I shouldn't. I know how to drive a cement truck, and how to light a scene that's supposed to be in the dark, and twenty-seven different recipes using chorizo sausage. I speak fifteen languages that I know of. Most of this is passive knowledge, not active. I have no idea it's there until it comes up.
Still, I learn things from them. They're kind of like parents, I guess. Except I don't really like to think of the bomb or the people who built it as my parents, so I'm not quite comfortable thinking of the 121 as my family. A family with one really bad egg, maybe.
After I didn't burn out and dissipate into smoke and ash, I needed a name, so I called myself 121 in their honor. Marty doesn't love the name. Sometimes he'll tell the casting agents that he calls me “Hunter,” which he doesn't, because I hate it. Marty thinks Hunter sounds like an old Hollywood name. Marty thinks there's still a Hollywood.
* * * *
Today I'm working on a DEA film about a kid who falls in with a rebel gang and plans to smuggle his family up the coast to the Free Cities. Only he has to sell drugs to make the money for it, and a rival gang tries to steal the drugs. Th
ey get into a shootout, and a little girl gets killed. The ship he finally puts his family on is destroyed in an accidental explosion. That'll be me, in the credits: Accidental Explosion.
If the details of the plot sound sort of vague, that's because they are. They'll film about forty different versions, one for each of the major ethnic gangs in the city. But they'll use my footage in all of them.
Sometimes I like working, but this job is pretty dull. For one thing, they're filming in black and white. The director says it makes the characters easier to empathize with. That's important, because the purpose of these films is to convince people that as shitty as it is to live in a place where most of the drinking water is recycled urine—and even that's rationed—you're better off waiting to be discovered at the salt docks or with the salvage crews than trying to leave.
So I roil and billow and all that, and they film me from multiple angles to milk it for maximum dramatic effect, but it's all in monochrome. I'm better in color. The first film I was on, the director wanted a look that was “less smoky, more flame-y.” He said all the white and black smoke was boring, and he asked if I could do more in the yellow-to-red spectrum. I'd never tried it before, but I discovered I could. It's something I practice now in my spare time, trying out new color patterns and progressions. Being able to feel beautiful helps a little with the self-loathing.
While I wait for my fourth take ("Let's try it a little bigger this time, Hunter"), I work with Phil on our script. Mostly it's Phil's script, but he tells me we're partners. It's about these three former caliphs—al-Qahir, al-Muttaqi, and al-Mustakfi—who lived as beggars on the streets of Baghdad back in the tenth century. They'd all been deposed and had their eyes put out in pretty quick succession, and by 946 they were all three on the streets at the same time. Phil's idea is that they hate each other but end up working together to solve a murder. It's kind of a buddy picture. He wants to set it in L.A., with the ruined buildings and the paranoia and the starvation and all, but he knows that'll never happen. The three caliphs are supposed to echo the Trinity, see? Only they're blind, which is Phil's comment about Justice, I guess.
The film where I was born, that was a lot different. It was an adaptation of one of Holly Martinez's books. Holly wrote pulpy lesbian science fiction erotica about a spaceship captain named Carolina Dakota; books that sold ridiculously well and had been made into a half-dozen softcore features. None of the 121 had read any of her books, but I've seen some of them. They have taglines like “SHE WAS A SMUGGLER OUT FOR JUSTICE—AND LOVE!” and painted covers of a woman in a skintight black bodysuit. They were a little outside the propaganda guidelines, but Justice kept making them because they made money on the outside.
Holly and I don't talk much. About the only thing we have in common is that I killed her, and I don't even remember that. All I remember of being born is confusion. I didn't know who I was or what I was, just that I was growing and knocking things down and burning people. I think I knew I was killing them, but not what they were or what that meant. My insides got to 800 degrees Fahrenheit, which means they died pretty much instantly. I think that's supposed to be a comforting thought.
My core burns about that hot, still; hotter when I shrink down, like I have to do to in order to get into Marty's office. I can get down to about the size of a volleyball; any smaller, and I'm afraid I'd collapse. Or explode again. Or both. I worry about that a lot. I worry that all the anger inside me will overwhelm me and I'll take out the entire city. I'd have to change my name, then. Two-Point-Five Million just doesn't have the same ring to it.
No, I know it's not funny.
* * * *
We wrap for the day, and my own personal Three Stooges meet me at the studio gates. I guess I better explain: after I was born and didn't die, the Trinity shot at me for a couple of days. The bullets didn't do much, but I didn't like the hoses. I was preoccupied with all the angry souls inside me, but I ended up flying up out of reach, which was when someone picked up a bullhorn and started talking to me. Until then I hadn't realized I could speak English.
After I made my deal with Justice—I do film work for them, and they don't bother me with hoses—protestors started following me. They thought I was a sign of the end times, I guess. They carried signs that talked about a sixth bowl and something called the “Mountain of Megiddo.” I don't know what any of it means. Anyway, after the world didn't end, a few of them changed their minds and decided I was actually sent by God. There were some fistfights then, and the Trinity locked some of them up, and I guess most of the rest of them got tired of waiting. By the time I was two months old, there were only three of them still following me around.
They don't really talk to me, and I don't know their names, but I've overheard them talking, so I know where they stand. The one I call Moe is convinced that I'm a harbinger of the Antichrist. Once he threw a bucket of holy water at me; that scared me, but it wasn't enough to put me out or anything. The Trinity warned him, and now he carries a Super Soaker and sprays the ground when he loses his temper. Larry, on the other hand, thinks I'm a messenger of the Lord, like the Burning Bush. Sometimes he tosses fast food wrappers and other flammables from a safe distance. I swear he's just getting rid of his trash. Then there's Curly, who's undecided. He thinks I'm important, and he follows me around because he thinks Something Big will happen eventually. He just hasn't decided if he thinks that something is going to be good or bad.
The three of them argue a lot, but I think they're actually friends by now. They follow me around in an old VW Bug. Larry's skinny, so he usually sits in the back. Phil thinks they're Trinity spies, but then Phil thinks everyone is a spy.
Sometimes when it's just me and the Stooges, I can listen to them argue and pretend I'm not even there. It's like the turmoil outside matches the turmoil in, and they cancel each other out. I like that, feeling like I'm just part of the scenery, something people don't even notice. Like a ghost, or a painting. But after a day on set I have a lot of trouble getting to that place, so I head down to Grand Avenue Beach and out over the ocean, leaving the Stooges behind.
I float out past the swimmers and the patrol boats and just hang there looking at the sun, the only other sustained explosion I know. I wonder sometimes if anyone dies when a star is born.
I have another job lined up for tomorrow, an ATF training video. Training videos are kind of my bread and butter. Not that I need money, but I like working, and it's part of the deal. The Trinity propagandists like to use explosions as exclamation points, and with me around they don't actually have to spend money destroying anything.
I stay out until sunset and echo the colors back at the sky while the surf echoes us both. I stare down at the fragmented colors and wonder if I could still burn beneath the waves.
* * * *
Al-Qahir was the earliest of the three blind caliphs to rule. By the time of his reign the caliphate was in decline, and he did what he could to accelerate that. He tortured the mother and sons of his predecessor (who also happened to be his brother) in order to gain their fortunes. He had his nephew and heir walled up alive, Cask-of-Amontillado style. Finally the courtiers got him drunk, put out his eyes, and threw him in prison for eleven years.
In our script—Phil's script—al-Qahir is the eldest of the caliphs, with a long gray beard and a beige suit with too-long pants and sleeves, who used to be head of Columbia Studios before Justice captured L.A. The script begins with al-Qahir speaking over shots of the city's ruins:
AL-QAHIR (V.O.)
You must know by now that the United States of America never existed. It was a fraud perpetrated by idealists and idolaters, storytellers and slogan writers. Even the dream of it would have collapsed long ago, if not for the movies. Hollywood told comforting lies about the imagined country, assuring citizens that crime didn't pay, that lust was love, that the government was doing its best. What is Mr. Smith Goes to Washington but a consolatory fiction? Once we gave them the dream, it was a simple matter to splinter it, to
divide them by the lies they believed. We appealed to sexual depravity, naked greed, and godless humor; at the same time, we indulged fears and doubts in order to allay them with fairy tales of law and order and crime scene investigations. The America of the mind disintegrated into 300 million separate nations, and all we had to do was give the infidels what they wanted.
Sometimes when Phil and I are working, Holly starts criticizing. She wants to know why al-Qahir sounds like the attorney general, or what the idea is behind having tenth-century Muslim caliphs running Hollywood Studios. Phil and Holly met in a creative writing course in college, and as far as I can tell they've been arguing ever since.
"For twelve weeks we argued about everything we read,” Holly says, “and then he asked me out. I told him I was a dyke, and he said OK. We went out anyway, just to hang out. Our politics and our sense of humor were just about identical. It was our aesthetics that differed."
I still haven't figured out why Holly doesn't hate me like the others. Phil thinks she just appreciates the dramatics of it all.
"So why did you ask him to work on your films?” I ask her.
"Because he's good."
"I think so, too,” I tell her.
"You're a little sweet on him, aren't you?"
I have to think about that, so I don't answer.
* * * *
Nights are long when I'm not working. Sometimes Phil wants to go to Westwood to check out Marilyn Monroe's grave or climb to the ruins of the Griffith Park Observatory. The thing is that I've been to all of those places a hundred times before, or at least my ghosts have.
A little before curfew, the Stooges take off for the night, and I head up the 101 to the Hollywood Reservoir. The guards at the checkpoint between the reservoir and what's left of the Hollywood Bowl get nervous when I hang out there. I'm supposed to inform Justice of all my movements—Marty always lets them know where I'm going to be working—but at night I don't bother. It's not like they could stop me from leaving if I wanted to, and leaving is something I've been thinking about lately. I probably won't, though. The 121 are like psychic anchors; sometimes it's like I'm just a vessel for their nostalgia.
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