FSF, March-April 2010

by Spilogale Authors

  They break into a galaxy of delighted smiles. They know they've won me over if I'm only asking where. He says, “I thought we could all go out for breakfast. In my experience, that's how a good day ends: Going out for breakfast with a fascinating woman."

  I can't help laughing at that. He doesn't seem to mind. “It's Christmas. Everything will be closed."

  "We know a place,” he says.

  * * * *

  It's a truck stop café, which makes it convenient for the trucker who picks up the load.

  "They's all going to the same place?” he asks.

  "That's right."

  "Hmm,” he says. “Never saw that before."

  "Special order. Could I catch a ride there with you? I'm supposed to oversee the delivery.” He lets me ride in the cab with him. His name's John. He asks about family because it's Christmas. I tell him I have a daughter his age, but we're estranged. He says nobody should be estranged on Christmas Day, and I don't argue. I don't ask about his family.

  Neither do I tell him I need to flee the city before Skelley's starts hearing from disappointed clients whose Screwbots never show. The less he knows, the less trouble he'll be in. I'm burning a few bridges here. I have no small experience in such arson. Right or wrong, you get off the bridge, and you can't go back the way you came. Ever. So, yeah, I know what I'm doing: I've definitely lost my job, possibly my freedom if they catch me, and maybe my affiliation with the human race. It's not easy being neutral.

  I said I was attracted to Derek's anger. I don't think that's quite true. It was the principles or whatever that fueled the anger, a mind too open to the sun, going in all directions—angry, compassionate, petty, wise—the principles, the passion, and the incredible fucking. It was like a whirlwind sucking me into the sky, and I thought it would carry everything I cared about along in my wake. I thought I could transform my life and leave nothing behind except a husband who never loved me so much as in my absence. I'm sure my daughter says the same of me: Now she loves me, when it's too late.

  We're quite a while driving out of the city. It's persistent, dragging itself out in dribbles and drabbles. Then it's finally gone, and there's darkness. Deep, moonless darkness. I'd almost forgotten the night sky, the stars. John looks bored with it. We're just about the only thing on the road, on the planet feels like. I pick a point. A star or a planet. Venus maybe? And follow it through the night, mulling over my memories, my experiences, my lives. Driving into the darkness, the world looks flat, then slowly it gets round and gray, then bleeds.

  It's Christmas morning.

  "There it is,” I say.

  "I see it,” he says.

  The sign is way too tall. Derek would call it an abomination. It says cafe. Below that, it says open. Finally, welcome. That pretty well covers it. It probably doesn't need to be that tall, the words so bright. If you're the only place open on Christmas for a few hundred miles, people find you. The café's draped with a few ragged strings of lights, a homemade wreath hangs on the door, a sincere holiday fire hazard. Inside, there's a live tree, a big one. Too bad. I bet it was outdoors under the starlight only hours ago. You can smell it. It's decorated with hundreds of little aluminum foil snowflakes. One of them knew how to make them, so they all knew, and there was a big roll of foil in the kitchen. There's a star on top crafted from aluminum pie pans.

  The tree's the least of it.

  Imagine some lonely guy on the highway seeing the sign, the lights, just the one truck and a few cars in the lot, then coming inside and finding the place full of happy Screwbots. Only he doesn't know that's what they are. They seem like people having a wonderful time. Kind of melodramatic and maybe a little crazy, but people. Lots of people are like that. Especially in a truck stop café on Christmas day. And they're all so beautiful and strange and sexy. It's like something out of an old movie. And pretty soon somebody sits down across from him with a story to tell. Or maybe the waitress just flirts, or the waiter. It doesn't matter. Imagine it over and over and over. What I'm saying is, no one who comes in here leaves alone. They head for the hills. It's hills here in all directions. The city's behind me somewhere. To tell you the truth, I don't know where I am. No closer to Venus than when I started out.

  I've just been watching:

  A couple comes in fighting about what people fight about at Christmas, like they've been saving up all year, and before you know it, she's taken off with a handsome stranger, and the guy left behind's consoled and gone with a bot on his arm in no more time than it takes to eat a sandwich. Another couple comes in, leaves with another couple—everybody happy and horny. They always make it work. No one says, “Leave me alone. I'm not interested.” Everyone's lonely, and Christmas is the loneliest day of the year. Screwbots must know all about lonely.

  Even John the driver's gone. He left me the keys to the truck, took off with one of the Jezebels in an old Ford that was here when we showed up. “You know what she is?” I asked him, just in case he'd forgotten loading them, unloading them. She worked in the kitchen most of the day, an incredible cook—they all were—and he was helping, chopping onions, stirring sauces, following her around like a man in love, like maybe he'd forgotten what she is.

  "I don't care,” he said. “And neither does she."

  It was that last part that got to me. Neither does she. Maybe it might work. I wished him well. I wish them all well.

  It's down to me and the Screwbot who started this whole thing, sitting at the counter. It's getting on to midnight. There's not much of Christmas left. He stares at the old-fashioned clock on the wall, the second hand sweeping. My mother's birthday was the day after Christmas. She always considered it a grave misfortune to be in such direct competition with the Lord. The slightest fuss made her ecstatic, any little gift.

  He reaches behind the counter and turns off the sign. No one's come in for the last hour anyway.

  "Will they stick with them?” I ask. “Or will they just leave them out there wandering? Do you guys stick around?"

  "We don't know. We're new. My guess is we're like human beings. Some will. Some won't. Some people won't want us to stick around."

  "Imagine that. You think you know what we're like? From just...doing what you do?"

  He shrugs modestly. “We know what you're like to us. Sex is never just sex. There's always something else. Sometimes I think it's all something else. Everyone's different. As you say, it takes all kinds. You'd be surprised what people tell us, without even knowing it. Simple things. Quiet things.” He laughs. “I think I may like humans better than you do.” He looks at me like he likes me best of all. It's been a long time since anyone, anything, has looked at me like that. My mirror gave up long before Derek shot himself.

  "You think? No argument there. I'm neutral. So what are you still doing here?” I ask, as if I didn't know. Because that's my line. That's how it's done, isn't it? You rush into these things pretending you're not going anywhere, that the planet is stationary, immutable, secretly wishing to sail out the window and fly. We've had breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now we're having a midnight snack. He's cooked us omelettes, opened a bottle of champagne. Corny but effective.

  He says, “I'm here for you. A special order. We all collaborated. All the things you liked about us—we brought them together into someone you might want to spend time with.” He looks deep into my eyes, no mistaking. “Me,” he says, but I already knew that, knew it hours ago. You know these things, even when you wish you didn't.

  "Nice work. How much time?"

  "Thanks. That's up to you."

  "No. Time doesn't work that way. Even with a dream lover. Are you made to love me as well? Or is that extra? Shouldn't we be discussing fee?” I'm trying to wound him, push him away. It isn't working.

  He takes my hands. “We all love you. We owe you our lives. I've been chosen to show it."

  "Lucky you."

  "Lucky me.” He forgets any irony, any holding back.

  I almost let him kiss me, kiss him, wh
atever it would have been, but I have one more question, before I let that happen. “Do you have a name?"

  "Anything you like."

  "No-no-no. You have to name yourself. Anything but Derek."

  That smile again, so lucky, so glad to have won me over. Me. The Fairy Princess. “Can I think about it?” he asks.

  "Sure. Take all the time you want.” I pull him toward the door. “C'mon. Let's go outside and look at the stars."

  You can kiss me there, searching for your name, waking to a new life, following a star.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Department: FILMS: A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY by Lucius Shepard

  For a time it eluded me why anyone would want to make a movie of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a book that has taken T. S. Eliot's famous line, “not with a bang but a whimper,” and seeks with punishing insistency to document that whimper. No matter how well mounted, I doubted that what would be essentially a zombie picture minus the zombies (roving bands of shaggy, crusty human cannibals standing in for their undead brethren), and minus the humor that zombies have come to evoke in the context of pop culture...I doubted it would do more than middling business, especially as it was slated for a Thanksgiving release. Not exactly holiday fare. Surely, I told myself, John Hillcoat's (The Proposition) gray-as-gristle film wouldn't garner the same attention as had the previous, less monotone McCarthy adaptation, the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, and thus it would not have a profitable awards season re-release. It appears now that I was only half-right in my presumptions, as awards chatter for The Road has been off the charts.

  Behind the scenes in all of McCarthy's fiction is a gray-bearded authorial presence who, complete with staff, stone tablets, and a pointing finger, either lurks in the shadows between adjectives and insinuates that all flesh is grass, or else steps forward in the narrative to intone epiphanies and declaim in booming tones, “Woe betide thee!” In the Faulkneresque novels that established his reputation (Suttree, Blood Meridian, etc.), this presence, this Biblical voice, is often a virtue and at the very least tolerable; but in The Road, basically an inflated short story that does not rank high in his canon, McCarthy's moral pronouncements seem enervated, a kind of Old Testament flatulence produced, one imagines, by the authorial presence trudging along at the same plodding pace as his characters, breaking wind at every step, releasing sour little poots that effect a rhythmic woe, woe, told you so as he proceeds along his (and their) doomful path. It's not the beat of a powerful engine such as you'd envision would propel the plot of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the fate of mankind, but then these are the end times, right? A little falling-off in performance has to be expected.

  The plot of The Road, such as it is, involves two characters labeled the Man and the Boy (Cormac sure do love him some archetypes) who, years after an undisclosed apocalyptic event, possibly a massive nuclear exchange, follow a road leading (essentially) nowhere through a dying world, armed with a gun that has only two bullets and pushing a shopping cart that, for me, evoked a weird resonance with the Lone Wolf and Cub movies (based on a Japanese manga, these films document the revenge-fueled journey of a samurai and his three-year-old son, whom he pushes in a baby carriage). Having been abandoned by the Wife (Charlize Theron), who has gone off, presumably to commit suicide, and whom we see in flashbacks (too many of them for my tastes), they search for food, try to avoid cannibal gangs, encounter other travelers (notably Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce) and ultimately achieve something of a resolution. It's slim, yet sufficient to hang a movie on...but it's a not great movie. And given its skimpy furnishings, The Road needed to be great if it was going to work at all.

  The relationship between the Man (solidly if unspectacularly played by Viggo Mortensen) and the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee, who can be seen to better effect starring with Eric Bana in the little Australian film, Romulus, My Father) is at the heart of The Road. As they wander through the bird-less, animal-less, almost lifeless landscape, unrelentingly bleak and gray, heading for the coast because it seems to offer a slim hope of survival, their love for one another is apparent. The Man tries in vain to toughen up the Boy, and the Boy arrives at a more complex view of his father, seeing his violence on display and sensing that he may not completely be one of the “good guys.” I had difficulty with the good guy/bad guy aspect of the relationship because it seemed too reductive and I felt that the Boy, born into this moribund world, having had some experience of its isolation and terrors, would not be the naïf he appears to be and would already have reached this understanding about his father, recognizing that theirs was a world of difficult choices and moral compromises.

  The shining stars of the film are the production design by Chris Kennedy, a longtime collaborator of Hillcoat's, and the astonishing cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe, who previously photographed one of my favorite weird films, Obaba, a picture about a mythical province in Spain overpopulated by lizards, and is currently filming the third Twilight movie, to which he can't help but add a touch of class. Thanks to this pair, the post-apocalyptic world is rendered with crushing effect, dressed in smoke and ash and deftly used CGI—there are images both horrific and ghostly here that will remain with you long after the lights come up.

  Why, then, is the film so uninvolving?

  In the modern world, much of the way we assess quality is based on how things are presented to us. The Road came branded as a masterpiece, the product of a great writer, profound and insightful, and—to top that off—it was anointed by the Empress of the Vox Populi, the Great Purveyor of Middlebrow Intellectualism, Oprah, as a novel that should sit on the shelves of every American with a sensitive soul, a moral code, a love for children, and a fondness for pork butt recipes. If the book had been published as, say, the debut novel of an unknown writer, it would have received some good notices, some “meh,” some that basically said, “Been there, done that,” and would have been largely ignored, consigned to the ignominy of the science fiction bins. It's a thin book, not all that revelatory, well written yet unremarkably so, and, despite its brevity, it becomes intermittently tedious. In other words, it doesn't blare “masterpiece,” nor does it cry out to be turned into a movie.

  The release date of The Road was pushed back nearly a year amid apocryphal reports that the film was “a mess.” It is now, if ever it was, no longer a mess, but it has the desanguinated feel of a picture that has been tweaked and retweaked until some essential vigor has been lost. Perhaps this was done in the interests of fidelity, yet in retrospect it seems that Hillcoat might have served the novel better had he been less concerned with replicating the text and brought more of a personal vision to the project.

  Then there's the score by Nick Cave, Warren Ellis of the Dirty Three, and Pierre Andre. I had expected something harsh and stirring, something redolent of Jonny Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood, but the mush of swelling strings that annotates sections of the film reminds us, despite the horrors onscreen, that what we're seeing is an Oprah moment, a story about family, about love's resilience or the triumph of the human spirit over tribulation or some similar do-wah-wah. I suspect this was a producer's decision, but whatever, it's off-putting, not a little insulting, and detracts from the potent imagery on display. We're being induced to have a mass pity party for humankind...and this, I suppose, lies at the core of the book's appeal to the Oprah corporate franchise hive mind, that we can love one another even while eating one another, that we can wax teary-eyed and remorseful over a world we're too busy consuming to care about, so we've been given this movie to weep over in order to make us feel bad (albeit in a good kind of way) about our decline and possible demise. It's as if we've been invited to participate in our own wake, to commiserate and murmur consoling sentiments such as, “Why? We were such a decent species! Why?” And at the end of the function we'll all gather in the street to join hands and sing a few verses of John Lennon's “Imagine,” the “Kumbaya” of the aughts.

  At any rate, to paraphrase Bilbo
Baggins, The Road goes ever on and on, lots of walking, more walking, unrelieved trudgery, and then, mercifully, after having made 119 minutes or thereabouts feel as dreary and misspent as a week in post-apocalyptic Poughkeepsie, it ends.

  * * * *

  I suppose there must be a Hollywood movie in which a novelist is portrayed as heroic, brave, or at least good-hearted. The best I can come up with at the moment are Peter Lorre's inquisitive, somewhat craven Cornelius Leyden in the 1944 spy movie, The Mask of Dimitrios; Adventures of a Young Man, Martin Ritt's forgettable attempt to sew together a movie out of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories; Mother, the Albert Brooks comedy about an emotionally stunted science fiction writer who moves back in with his Mom in order to learn why he keeps screwing up his relationships; and the unremittingly awful, platitude-riddled Gus Van Sant film, Finding Forrester, that gave us Sean Connery's Salinger-esque recluse who, during his last days, mentors a basketball-playing, ghetto-dwelling young writer and babbles some generic nonsense about honor prior to kicking the bucket. Generally writers are depicted as they are perceived by the industry, as a necessary breed of vermin, some few of them eccentric and lovable in their way, like genius pets, yet mainly a scummy bunch, devious, deviant, pathetic, pompous and conniving, eavesdropping on others, stealing their lives and lines. (I've heard book editors espouse more-or-less this same view, wishing half-jokingly that writers could be eliminated from the publishing process—a wish that may soon be fulfilled). Of course, the characterization isn't entirely unjustified, since writers are by nature somewhat vampiric.

  All this leads us to consider Gentlemen Broncos, the latest picture from Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre), a member of the isn't-everyone-quirky school of filmmaking (Wes Anderson, president). GB isn't a very good movie, yet for anyone associated with the science fiction field, be it fan, editor, or writer, it may hold a morbid fascination. It concerns a withdrawn home-schooled teenager named Benjamin Purvis (Michael Angarano), a friendless loner who lives with his quirky mom in a geodesic dome and writes bad science fiction stories, a pastime that inspires him to attend a fantasy writer's camp where he meets a quirky teenage girl, Tabatha (Hailey Feiffer), a quirky young filmmaker, Lonnie (Héctor Jiménez), and super-quirk Dr. Ronald Chevalier (Jermaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords), a famous, ultra-pretentious science fiction writer with a ghastly upper-crust accent (think Thurston Howell III with a bad cold) who's in the midst of writer's block and a career crisis—his publisher just rejected his latest novel. In addition there's also the quirky Dusty (Mike White), who's been appointed Benjamin's “Guardian Angel” (a kind of non-secular Big Brother program) by his mom's church and comes accompanied by a large yellow snake. At the camp Benjamin submits his novel, Yeast Lords, to a contest judged by Chevalier, who promptly swipes it, does a superficial rewrite, and submits it as his own work. In the process he changes Benjamin's hero Bronco (played in visualizations of the novel by Sam Rockwell) from a bewigged space cowboy into a bewigged space-going tranny named Brutus who at one point has his genitalia reconfigured by evil aliens.