by William Bell
Silence.
“Well, what?” Chad demanded when it became clear that Instant was not going to say more.
“Walking around nude is illegal, even in this town. He was arrested.”
“Wait a minute!” Chad said, a note of triumph in his voice. “How could the police arrest him if they couldn’t—”
“He tried to understand how the cops had caught him. After all, he was invisible. He was totally baffled. Couldn’t figure it out. Anyway, they hauled him into court. The judge told him he was going to jail for indecent exposure. The old guy protested, ‘How can you convict me for exposing myself when you can’t see me?’ So the judge said, ‘If I can’t see you, how come I know you’re standing right there in front of me?’”
“Exactly,” Chad put in, as if he’d just scored a point.
“And the old fella answered, ‘Because you can hear my voice.’”
Chad fumed. “You’re nuts.”
“That’s exactly what the judge said to the invisible man when he sentenced him to six months in the loony bin. ‘You’re insane,’ he told him. But the old man wasn’t too upset. He planned to escape. He figured it’d be easy because—”
“Yeah, yeah, don’t tell me. Because he was invisible.”
Pause. Chad, his cheeks red with frustration, began to read again. After a minute or so, Instant sat back in his chair.
“I wonder how he ended up sitting on that bench, though,” he mused.
“There’s nobody on the damn bench!” Chad exclaimed through gritted teeth.
“Shhh!” came from all sides. A girl at the next table pointed to the For Quiet Study Only sign and gave Chad a disapproving look.
“Buzz off!” he told her.
A minute or so passed in silence.
“So what’s this invisible guy’s name, anyway?” Vanni asked innocently.
Chad slammed his novel shut, jumped to his feet and stomped away, bumping into tables as he wove his way toward the door.
Instant looked very pleased with himself. “I guess Chad never saw that movie, The Invisible Man,” he said.
“The original version, with Claude Rains?” I asked, showing off.
“That’s the one.”
Vanni fixed me with her eyes. “Please confirm that you are not going to tell us the plot.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I laughed.
SCREENPLAY: “BOGEY AND JAKE”
by
JAKE BLANCHARD
FADE IN:
INT. THE BAR IN RICK’S CAFE AMERICAIN, as in the movie CASABLANCA—NIGHT
CUE BACKGROUND MUSIC—“You Must Remember This” on piano
JAKE sits at a table in the deserted nightclub. Dim lights, chairs upended on tables. Jake looks at his wristwatch, drums his fingers, glances around.
BOGEY saunters in through a door behind the bar. Stops at the bar, picks up a bottle of brandy and two glasses. Walks to Jake’s table.
BOGEY
Mind if I join you?
JAKE
Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for hours.
BOGEY
Take it easy, kid. You’ll live longer.
JAKE
Sorry. Thanks for coming.
BOGEY
Whaddaya mean? I own the joint.
JAKE
Right. Well, thanks for agreeing to see me.
BOGEY
(removes a cigarette case from the inside pocket of his tuxedo jacket, opens it, holds it toward Jake) Cigarette?
JAKE
Thanks.
JAKE takes a cigarette. BOGEY puts one between his own lips, lights it with a wooden match, offers the match to Jake.
JAKE
(lighting up)
Thanks.
He blows a few smoke rings while BOGEY shakes out the match and drops it into an ashtray.
BOGEY
Well, what can I do for you, kid? Your note said you was in a jam.
JAKE
It’s about a girl.
BOGEY
(smoking, pours two brandies, shoves one across the table to Jake)
Uh huh.
JAKE
(takes his drink, knocks it back)
I’m at sort of a dead end.
BOGEY
Uh huh.
JAKE
She loves somebody else.
BOGEY
So what’s the problem? Plug the guy.
JAKE
Plug—?
BOGEY
Yeah. Get yourself a heater. A gatt. Put his lights out. Punch his ticket.
JAKE
I can’t—
BOGEY
Snuff his wick. Ice him. Shoot—
JAKE
I get it, I get it.
BOGEY
(takes a drink, lights another cigarette)
You got a problem with that?
JAKE
It seems a little drastic.
BOGEY
Oh, I get it. You’re yella.
JAKE
Yella?
(grinds his cigarette out in the ashtray)
Look, I think I came to the wrong place.
BOGEY
This is Rick’s Place.
JAKE
I know.
BOGEY
Of all the gin joints—
JAKE
(disconsolate)
Right, right. She hadda walk into yours.
BOGEY
(takes another drink, refills his glass from the bottle)
I’m glad we had this little talk.
JAKE
Right.
BOGEY
Glad I could help.
(beat)
Somethin’ else eating you, kid?
JAKE
It’s this Big Project for school.
A screenplay.
BOGEY
I’ve been in a lot of flicks, kid. You need—what?—a topic?
JAKE
Yeah. A central idea.
BOGEY
Hmm. That’s a tough nut to crack. Mostly I just say the lines. Somebody else does the scribbling. I’ll have to think about it.
JAKE
That’s what I’ve been doing.
BOGEY
Well, good luck, kid.
BOGEY stands, picks up the bottle and exits as MUSIC rises to a crescendo.
FADE OUT
CHAPTER TWO
WITH ONE WEEK TO GO until my BP proposal was due, I still had nothing solid to offer. My mind was a blank. The proposal had to be approved by a teacher in the project’s discipline. Instant had already gotten the nod from Mr. Lewis, the chunky, tuba-playing head of music. Vanni would go through Mrs. Cleaver, and Alba through Call-Me-Saul. Because I was not attached to a particular program, I had to hand in my proposal to Ms. Pelletier.
Except I didn’t have one.
A screenplay, certainly. But a screenplay of what? I could adapt a novel. I could write a remake. I considered Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the famous sci-fi story, but there were already at least four movie versions. I remembered bragging to Alba that one day I would do Casablanca with her in the Ingrid Bergman role, but as long as she was with Chad—or anyone else other than me—that was out, too. Besides, Casablanca was so perfect it would be almost sacrilege to lay my greasy hands on it.
“What are the chances Pelletier would buy into a case of screenwriter’s block?” I said as English class was getting under way.
Locheed had divided us up into “collaborative outcomes-based groups,” and Vanni, Instant and I had been joined by Daneale Halliday, a girl in the vocal-music program who also sang R & B at a club on the weekends. I had the feeling Instant had a thing for her.
Instant shook his head in answer to my question. Vanni smirked as if to say, “Yeah, right.” Daneale didn’t respond at all. She was focused on the play we’d been assigned to interpret.
“We have to discuss this,” she pointed out, anxious to get us on track, “and build an interpretation.” She checke
d her wristwatch. “In twenty-eight minutes.” She picked up her pen and held it above her notebook like someone ready to take dictation.
“Easy,” Instant began. “The play is about humankind’s brave but essentially futile struggle to find meaning in a hostile and indifferent universe.”
Daneale gave him a blank look. Her oversized brown eyes blinked once. “Come again?”
Instant repeated his sentence. The three gold chains hanging from Daneale’s ear brushed lightly against the coal black skin of her neck as she bent her head to write.
“So we done here?” Instant asked innocently.
“Sounds good to me,” I replied. “Mission accomplished. Outcome achieved. In”—I looked at my watch—“three minutes.”
“What do you mean, ‘a different universe?’” Daneale asked.
“Not different, indifferent,” Instant replied. “The universe doesn’t care about us. We’re just dust. Molecules. We live; we die. None of it matters. Life is pointless.”
I knew Vanni couldn’t keep out of a discussion on such a heavy topic for long. “Vladimir and Estragon spend the whole play waiting for Godot,” she explained, “but he never shows up.”
“Godot?” from Daneale.
“You haven’t read the play, have you?” I asked her.
“I had two gigs on the weekend. I didn’t get home ’til three, earliest, both nights.”
“I think Godot means God,” Vanni went on. “It’s a French nickname applied to the English name for Dieu. You know, like Pierrot is Pierre. Godot is God. The play was originally written in French. The author was Irish, by the way.”
Daneale nodded. The gold chains swung. “Oh.”
“So God doesn’t care about us,” Vanni said. “That’s my interpretation. He doesn’t arrive. Instant is right. Life is meaningless. The play ends where it began. Didjever wonder—”
“I think it means there is no god,” I interrupted. “Godot doesn’t appear because he doesn’t exist. He’s a figment of V and E’s imaginations.”
“So let me get this straight,” Daneale said with a hint of exasperation. “Samuel”—she picked up her copy of the play and checked—“Beckett, who was Irish, wrote a play in French, which he himself translated into English, which tells us God doesn’t exist and life is meaningless.”
“That’s about it,” I said.
“If nothing matters and everything is pointless,” she asked, smiling, “then why bother to write a play?”
“Good point,” I said. Maybe Daneale wasn’t such a dud after all.
“So we done here?” Instant asked again.
“Yup,” I said. “Right, Vanni?”
“I suppose. Now we can get back to Jake’s Big Project.”
“Which, like Godot, doesn’t exist,” Instant added helpfully.
Daneale ignored us. She was writing furiously, trying to put down everything we had said before she forgot it. Instant watched her.
“I had an idea, though,” I said tentatively.
“Uh huh,” Vanni said skeptically.
“A movie about three nauseatingly lovable British kid-wizards named Henry, Harriet and Randy who go to a school of sorcery where everybody has a magic wand and annoying teachers in academic gowns reward the students by giving them points.”
“Uh huh.”
“And one day Henry persuades his two pals to help him cast a super-spell. They wave their magic wands all over the place.”
“Uh huh.”
“Henry wants to make his aunt, uncle and fat, obnoxious cousin disappear in a cloud of brimstone smoke. But the three lovable magicians screw up—they’re only kids, after all—and they end up time-and-distance travelling to an American plantation called Tara, just before the Civil War.”
“Uh huh.”
“Henry’s spell has caused a race-reversal. Scarlett O’Hara is a slave. So are all the other white people.”
Daneale looked up from her writing. “This is starting to sound good,” she said. Instant laughed. Vanni smirked.
“I call it Gone with the Wand,” I said. “What do you think?”
Vanni pretended to give it some thought. “It’s a dumb idea.”
“Is a dumb idea better than no idea?”
“I suppose you could wait for Godot and ask him.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked Vanni. “Still considering that adaptation?”
“No, a small collection of poems. Cleaver already approved me.”
“What about you, Instant?”
“I’m writing and performing the music for Alba’s play.”
“Daneale?”
“I’m working with Instant.”
So my suspicions were confirmed.
“Alba wrote a play?” I asked.
Vanni let out a snort of derision.
“No,” Instant replied. “She and Chad are going to put on a scene from The Taming of the Shrew.”
“What is a shrew, anyway?” Daneale asked.
“A nasty, bad-tempered woman. A harridan, a scold, a battleaxe, a—”
“Stop showing off,” Daneale told him with a smile. “We get it.”
“So I’m the only one without a plan,” I pointed out needlessly. “I am alone in a hostile and indifferent universe, and I’m going to fail.”
Vanni rolled her eyes. “And you won’t get into heaven, and no one will ever want to marry you.”
Daneale picked up her copy of Waiting for Godot and waved it at me. “Don’t worry, Jake. According to Beckett’s play, it doesn’t matter anyway.”
York’s policy was that as much as possible, performance-oriented BPs—music or drama—were formally presented to an audience of students, usually at an afternoon assembly. The teachers connected to the project would be there and would grade the performance on the spot, with the supervising teacher’s mark counting for 50 per cent and the other staff grades averaged for the balance.
Because the productions were mounted by individual students, they required minimal staging. Alba’s one-act two-hander would need only a plain, dark backdrop and some furniture, not a constructed set, so I had no work to do. But luckily I was co-opted by Call-Me-Saul, the supervising teacher, as stage crew—which meant moving the few pieces of furniture on and off the stage before and after the scene. And being around Alba.
Alba held the first meeting for the whole production team. We got together in the drama classroom after school, moving our chairs into a circle by the window. Outside, fat snowflakes danced on a brisk February wind. Alba, as beautiful as ever in tight mauve jeans and a black shirt, was all business as she took a seat beside Chad and went over our duties. She was director and would play Katherina the Shrew. Chad would take the part of Petruchio, the gentleman from Verona who woos Katherina. Snowy Jenkins—a strange name for a brunette—was stage manager. Snowy was almost as easy on the eyes as Alba, a fact that was not lost on Chad, who kept sneaking what he thought were stealthy glances in her direction. Only Chad was vain enough to think he could get away with that in front of a group of people. Instant and Daneale were writing and performing the music, and for some reason Emile Dupuis, black-clad from head to shoes and skinny as a strand of spaghetti, was on the lighting panel.
Alba introduced us and outlined our respective duties—she had thought everything through in detail—then turned the meeting over to Snowy, who aimed a big smile at Chad before she led us through a schedule of rehearsals. She handed out sheets of paper containing the same information and broke up the meeting so the actors could begin the first read-through of the scene.
According to Snowy’s schedule, printed out in a flowery italic font that was almost impossible to read, I had no part in the whole production until the first dress rehearsal, so I was a little surprised when Alba came to me about a week later. Drama class had just ended with Call-Me-Saul shouting at us for “not taking this art form seriously enough.” I had a meeting with Pelletier to explain to her why my nonexistent proposal was late again, and I was rushing
out the classroom door when Alba took me by the elbow and led me back inside.
“Jake, I need your help,” she whispered dramatically. “I’m in a jam.”
Whatever she asked, I was determined to say no. I reminded myself that the last time I had let her talk me into helping her I had thrown away my chance to win her heart. She looked deep into my eyes, the way she had that day in the library months before, the way she knew would dissolve any man’s resistance—especially mine—like hot water on sugar, and I urged myself to be strong and inflexible. I straightened my spine. I called up images of power in my mind’s eye—stout concrete pillars, rebar, thick steel girders, those robust braided cables they use on suspension bridges—and waited.
“I fired Snowy yesterday,” she began. “She wasn’t working out.”
Thick oak planks, glued and bolted together. Cast-iron stanchions. Cement roadbeds.
“And I need a new stage manager.”
“I … I’m not qualified,” I almost shouted. I was so relieved. “I can’t do it. I don’t know how.”
“I’ll teach you,” she breathed, stepping closer.
Bridge abutments, marble arches, the Great Wall of China.
“It’s such a short production, it’s over before it starts. You’ll see.”
“But—” My eyes dropped. Her chest rose and fell with her breathing—more than necessary, I thought.
“We’ll be working together,” she said, almost whispering. “Very closely.”
“I—”
She looked up at me. Her lips parted.
Fibreglass, Kevlar, titanium mesh.
“You’re my only hope, Jake. Without a stage manager we can’t go on. Say you’ll help. Please.”
“Well …”
Then she kissed me.
Not a kiss that Bogey would have received from Ingrid Bergman. Not a hard, long, searching, Hollywood kiss. A peck. Like you’d give your little brother on his birthday.
But it did the trick. “Okay,” I said.
After she had swept out of the room, I stood in the same place, half my mind bristling with self-criticism of the “You stupid jerk, you fell for it again” variety and the other half swamped with sweetness and light. I’d be with Alba a lot. I’d be an important part of the show, and she’d rely on me.
