Sam had heard the story multiple times. Telling it was a pastime for Jesse when he was drunk. Sam had even managed to write about it, taking a slightly fictionalized version of events and putting it into the book. But there seemed to be no avoiding this sermon, confronting Jesse when he was in his cups could get ugly.
"I already told you this before, didn’t I?" Jesse said.
"A couple of times." Sam admitted.
"Yeah, I know it." Jesse said. "But there's another part..."
"What's that?"
"When I was over there, I kept a journal."
"I didn’t know that." Sam said.
"It wasn’t an all the time thing. Or an everyday thing. But every once in a while I wrote down something I saw or thought or did, because I was under the impression I would want to remember it later. I was wrong as it turns out, I've spent most the time since then trying to forget that I was ever there in the first place."
"I get that." Sam said.
"I guess you do." Sam said. "You’re a good friend, man. Sometimes I forget that." It was dark out, and Sam could not tell if Jesse was crying or not.
"The reason I brought up the journal." Jesse said. "Is because of what I wrote after my...after she left me, while I was over there."
Sam said nothing.
"I was angry." Jesse said. "So I would rant in the journal. At first just a little fuck you bitch, I'll kill you type deal. But I had plenty of time over there to sit and think. Just doing nothing, but sitting and thinking. And I started to type out these long...I don’t know what you would call them. Fantasies I guess. About how she would die. Her and the other guy, or sometimes just her. Sometimes I would write about it as if it were an accident, other times I would have her killed, or whatever. I filled up that journal, in the end, cover to cover."
"What happened to it?" Sam asked.
"We went home when the deployment was over on a Navy ship." Jesse said. "One night I went to one of the hatches and threw the thing into the ocean. It felt like an absolution when I did. Like I had slipped a noose of my own neck, and not just hers."
There was some silence between them. Finally Jesse broke it and said. "Look, man. If I had the kind of...I mean, ability over that chick, that dumb bitch, that you have over Lena, she would have been dead. And it would have been my fault. And yes, she was unfaithful. Yes, she betrayed my trust while I was over there, and that was wrong. But I can live with that, with both of us being alive. I couldn’t with her dead."
Sam said nothing. He felt detached from his body in some numb way, as if he were flying high over the boardwalk, the beach, and the city beyond, gazing down on two insects debating about their brief lives and worrying about their mates.
"Just be careful, okay dude?" Jesse offered. "That's all I'm really saying."
The script for the Black Terror movie was written in several weeks, with Sam breaking down and purchasing several books on screen writing during the process, including one Complete Moron' guide which proved to be very helpful. In the end Sam concluded it wasn’t his best work, but it was a paying gig, and the check from the studio had already cleared. He sent it in and was done with it. To his great surprise his agent called back, only days later, telling him the studio wanted him for a rewrite.
"With a team this time." The agent said.
"A team?"
"A bunch of guys working together in a room. Standard industry stuff."
"They aren’t going to use my script?"
The agent laughed. "What did you think, kid? That they were just going to film what you wrote."
"I don’t know."
"Look." The agent sighed. "You wrote a treatment. That's one version, an idea of what could be used. At least four or five other guys were contracted out to do the same thing. And I say four or five, because I don’t want to hurt your feelings. It’s more like ten or fifteen, cause this is a tent pole, and that's a really big fucking deal for the studio. A lot of money on the line, get what I'm saying?"
"I don’t know." Sam said. "I mean, I didn’t know. If I did, I might not have wanted to do it."
The agent sighed. "Jesus Christ kid." He said. "Why did you come out west?"
"Excuse me?"
"I don’t know. If you come out west, I can only assume you wanted to work in the industry. That's the usual story. Most people that find the work, they learn not to bitch about it. If you wanted to schmaltz with the whole literati crowd and everything, that’s the big apple. You can find some area of Brooklyn that kicked all the blacks out and all you guys can discuss Hemingway or what the fuck ever."
"My great-grandfather."
"What's that?"
"My great-grandfather was Robert Samuel Gage. I was named after him."
"Your losing me."
"He was an artist."
"Like with pictures..."
"Sculpting, mostly. He studied under the guy that did Mount Rushmore."
"Uh huh."
"He moved out here from Ohio. Did some work on a water fountain, a few public buildings. Art Deco type stuff."
"Your killing me. You wanted to drink from a water fountain."
"It wasn’t that kind of fountain. It was the kind of thing you throw pennies into for good luck. He sculpted most of his life, and at one point in time, lived out here where I am. On the beach in a house that doesn’t exist anymore. I remember my mother telling me about the concrete lawn, because they couldn’t get the water right for the grass to grow. She showed me this old movie on a projector, called faces of Lincoln. He sculpts the president and narrates about his life. I found out later that the thing won an Academy Award. I came out here for that."
There was a moment of silence from the other end of the line, and for a while Sam thought that the agent had fallen asleep, until he broke in with a tort "Are you going to do it or not?" To which Sam replied that he would.
There was no waiting in the lobby of the studio this time, or being escorted to some producer's secret lair. He told the secretary who he was and she gave him directions to a room. The room turned out to be windowless, filled only with a conference table and several inexpensive looking chairs. Sitting in them were several men approaching his age or a little older, most of them experiencing early pattern baldness or the spare tires of middle age. They were all dressed on the nerdier side of casual to the point that they could have stolen their wardrobes from a high school dungeons and dragons group, or the local Hot Topic, which in the end equaled out to the same thing. The only thing that signified these men of being any importance was the conversation he walked into, which was most assuredly about the movie.
"There is nothing on this guy anywhere." Said the writer with a Danzig t-shirt.
"We all know that." Said the only man in the room with a tie, albeit one with little Superman s-shields up and down the center. "He's not Spider-Man."
"No." Said Danzig. "But he's not even Iron Man, or Moon Knight, or anyone. This is someone that hasn’t been written about in close to seventy years."
"Yeah." Tie nodded thoughtfully. "And when he was put in something, it was always, wow, look at this cool looking old obscure guy, in a group of cool looking old obscure guys. It was never about the Black Terror, exactly."
"I had an idea." Sam said, interrupting.
"New guy!" Danzig smiled, showing yellowing teeth. "Go right ahead."
"Why don’t we just outright steal parts of the best stories?" Sam said. "I mean, make Black Terror an orphan. Give him a home city. Give him a joker, or green goblin, or whatever."
Tie sighed. "That would be great." He said. "If we could even call him Black Terror."
"That fucking name." Danzig said, and a murmur of assent went around the room. "Might as well call him the Yellow Panic, or the Jewish Peril. What the hell were they thinking back in the forties, anyway?"
"That white people ruled the world." Tie said. "I mean, that hasn’t changed, but at least you can’t go around deliberately insulting other groups, or whatever."
"And if we cut it in half." Danzig said. "That's almost as bad. Then it’s just 'the Terror', and it sounds like were supporting Al-Qaeda, or something."
The debate went back and forth around the room. Mostly the writers simply griped about the improbability of the task, and the hazards involved in its completion. Occasionally a new idea would be formed, and tossed back and forth until it was written down or discarded. Finally a smoke break was declared, after a few hours, and Sam decided to walk outside with Superman Tie if only to escape the glare of the fluorescent lights above. The Tie lit up, and sighed deeply in contentment, before shaking his head.
"It’s a mess." He said. "This whole thing is bad."
"I'm Sam." Sam said, realizing he hadn’t given anyone his name yet."
"Tobin." Superman Tie replied. "How long have you been writing? For the industry, I mean."
"This is, uh, my first gig."
Tobin laughed. "Try to find another one." He said. "There's a good chance this abortion won’t even get made."
"You think so?"
"Oh yeah." Tobin said, and after another puff, "At least I hope so. How many of these things have you seen?"
"What superhero flicks? A couple."
"The good ones?"
"A couple were okay."
"See, and that's the thing. The best stuff has already been mined. All the good stories have been adapted. We’re sucking at fumes here, and it’s not going to be pretty. It’s probably better if this doesn’t get made." Tobin shuddered. "I have a friend who got a producer cred with 'John Carter'. After that bombed, he had a real hard time finding work. Went all the way back to commercials."
"I don’t know about that." Sam said. "I mostly write books."
"What've you written?" Tobin asked, and Sam told him the title. Tobin claimed he had never heard of it, but then again, "I don’t really read that much, anymore, unless it’s too doctor a script or something. The sad thing about doing what you love, is you get too close to it, sometimes, and you might not love it so much anymore."
"I hope that's not true." Sam asked.
Tobin flicked the cigarette butt next to the back door of the smoking area. "You ask me." He said, "Books, movies, even effin' video games....all physical media, it’s all rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Kids don’t buy anything these days, once they've got a computer, you can just download whatever you want, for free. Kids grow up like that, getting everything for free, how or you going to get them to pay for anything? Hell, you can toss television in there too, inside of ten years it’s all gone."
"I hope that's not true." Sam said. "I mean, I love, you know, the physical feeling of a book. Turning its pages, cracking the spine. I try that on an e-reader, and its crap."
"I can’t stand those things." Tobin said. "And I hear you, man, I feel that way about the movies. You ever go to a festival?"
Sam shook his head.
"You should sometime." Tobin said. "Get in there with a few hundred people who really dig film, like the art of it, and a really good performance, and the crowd is really something."
"It is?"
"It really is. If I were to, you know, elaborate, I would say that it’s the exact opposite of those teenagers that laugh at the dumbass trailers. You know, the one where you can see the movies going to be shit, and people laugh anyway. C'mon, let’s get back in there."
For the latter part of the day, the writers settled into sort of a team. Ideas were pitched around the room, written down, and finally a rough outline was cast out, that seemed to be a compilation of a few of the more popular scripts, at least from whoever in the studio appreciated them. Five scripts were handed out to each writer at the end of the session, Sam was somewhat thrilled to see one of them was his. He rode the high of his feeling all the way back to Santa Monica, dozing in and out of the local radio stations. It had been a long day, and he was tired. He hoped that Lena had made dinner, and thought that in the future he might write something down on the laptop about her always making dinner, whenever he went out late for work. The parking lot was full nearby the condos; he found a far spot and started to walk. For some reason he came by the back door with the sliding glass, and stopped dead when he saw inside his apartment.
Jesse was coming out of the bedroom, and putting on his shirt. Lena was walking beside him, without any pants, in a pair of underwear he had bought her when they went to the mall together. They were smiling, and then they kissed, and when that happened Sam melted back into the shadows, beyond the gaze of the security lights. He walked back to the beach. It was dark outside, but not completely gone, the sun had set to the point where the sky was devoid of any light yet still possessed a quality other than blackness, that seemed to differentiate it from the ocean below. When he sat in the sand, Sam found that he was shaking.
There was no denying the evidence. His best friend and his girl were having an affair. Except it wasn’t that simple, really. Lena wasn’t really his girl; after all, she was his creation. He had written everything about her, or rather, had written her, how he wanted her to be, and she complied. Was it such a simple oversight as he had not written a phrase like
Lena remained physically faithful to her boyfriend
So she simply did not respond? As if she were a robot who, not being told "don’t kill humans", killed humans. Was that simply all there was?
An uglier possibility. He had told Jesse how Lena worked. Had he simply decided to write his own code, so to speak? Would it be worthwhile to look on the computer, and see what had changed since last time? Possibly a word search would be all it would take. Change the word "Sam" to the word "Jesse" and there you had it. Was Sam really his friend, after all? They had known each other once, years ago, in Ohio. Sam had wanted to write and Jesse had wanted to join the Marines. After it was done, purely by chance, as far as Sam saw, Jesse had decided to spill out to his friend what he had seen and done over there, and Sam had turned it into a book, which had done remarkably well. The entire time there was a scraping sensation in the back of Sam's head, which told him he was cannibalizing Jesse for his own gain. But that hadn't stopped Sam once, and Jesse seemed not to mind. Or so he thought. Maybe it gnawed at the back of Jesse's mind too. Maybe it kept him up at night, along with nightmares of war, and the memory of a wife that had loved him once and left him alone. There was deep pain inside Jesse, and maybe this was just comeuppance for Sam's role in exploiting that pain. In other words, maybe he deserved it.
The ugly feeling swelled up inside his gut, until before he knew it Sam's feet were taking over, and he was walking back through the beach across the sand, toward where his apartment stood. When he slid open the door he saw Lena unloading the dishwasher, and noticed that she had put a pair of yoga pants on.
"Who was just here?" Sam demanded.
"Nobody." Lena shrugged. She had a deer in the headlights expression broadcasting her lie. Sam went directly over to the laptop and typed in.
Whenever Sam asked Lena a question, she told the truth
"Now let’s talk." Sam said. And Lena walked over to the kitchen table, and sat down with her hands crossed. "Who was just here?"
"Jesse." Lena said.
"What was he doing?"
"He stopped by to see you." Lena said. "I don’t want to tell you this. Why am I doing it?"
"And what were you doing with him?"
In a low voice, Lena said "We were having sex."
"Why did you do it?"
"We were talking about something." Lena said. "I mean, he was talking to me. And he was looking at me funny, and I just leaned in and kissed him. It kind of went on from there."
"Have you done it before?"
"With you."
"I mean, have you done it with him before."
"No."
"With anyone else."
"No. Only you." Lena was starting to cry. "When you ask me a question." She said, "I think about what I want to say, but it’s like the words get ripped out of my mouth. It hurts."
"
Did you think about how it hurts me?" Sam said. "Your my girlfriend."
"Is that what I am?"
"Aren’t you?"
"I don’t know." Lena said. "You never asked me to be."
"What if I did ask you?"
"I don’t know what I'd say. Your always gone. Sometimes I'll be here and you'll be here, and you won’t even say anything to me. We just go on and do what we have to do. You went somewhere today, and didn’t tell me how long you'd be gone, or when you'd be back."
"So you want me to check in with you. Is that it?"
"I don’t have anywhere to go. I don’t know anyone here, except for Jesse. I don’t know what I'm supposed to do, except for every once in a while I want to do something, and I do it. I wish you would think of me. I wonder if you think about me at all, most of the time. I wonder who I am to you."
Lena was crying hard now. Sam got up and went to the laptop, and erased what he had written earlier. When he looked up she was gone from the kitchen table, and he didn’t want to track her down. He had a lot to think about, and didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do.
He reasoned that if this was a normal, or typical relationship, the thing to do would be to break up. Lena had cheated on him. Perhaps she construed the relationship in a different way than he did, but he thought of her as his, and expected her to respond accordingly. It dawned on him that maybe the problem was that he hadn’t written her the right way. He had written her to sleep with him, to keep him company, to respect him, certainly, but all that did not necessarily equal up to love. And even then, there were plenty of people out there who loved each other, and managed to cheat on their spouse. She was a virgin before Sam, that is, she had not existed yet, as far as he could tell. Perhaps it was only natural that she wished to experiment at some point.
But Sam managed to look in the mirror, and deeper, uglier thoughts began to surface. Jesse had several inches on him and more than a few pounds of muscle. Sam had been a confirmed ectomorph throughout high school, skinny and scrawny, with a face covered in freckles. He had always managed to get by being friendly on top of all that. Maybe Lena was simply shallow. Maybe a girl he had created on a piece of paper, and a flickering screen was realizing that he was not the center of the universe, not even that much of a prime catch to begin with. Without wanting to he thought of the pair of them locked in an embrace, and then the act itself. He leaned over the keyboard and typed
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