by Ray Succre
It was explained that the train did not go to Florida, where the worker had once been told, and in fact, the train did not exist once it left the station. It was a ‘nowhere train’, and for the past decade, Renton had been loading cargo onto it. A ghost train. Renton was informed that within the stacks of boxes were the memories of the deceased, being taken to the afterlife to meet them there. Every box contained the memories of a person that had recently passed away. Losing a box would cause the memories to never arrive. This would be true death for the soul waiting for them. Mr. Renton became agitated, unwilling to believe this.
In the third act, the train began to leave the station and in a moment of compulsion and rebellion, Renton jumped aboard, to see where the train really went, where the boxes ended up. There was a close-up of the magnate watching this, an expression of intrigue on his face. After leaving the station and continuing for a long while, the train slowed and stopped. It had been a long journey. Renton did not recognize his surroundings. He seemed to have arrived at a station, but with nothing behind it. No mountains, no landscape, no blue sky. There was a station, but no backdrop. No world. All was white and plain.
He looked out over a large crowd of people waiting at the station. Most of them were older men and women, though there were a few youths, and even a small child near the front. They began asking for the boxes, giving him the order numbers on each box’s shipping tag. Each person held a receipt of ownership. Confused, Renton began handing the boxes down from the car, one by one, checking the receipts and handing out the boxes. Near the end of this, the magnate stepped into view on the platform.
REVOLVE TO:
RENTON in the train car, looking about, both irritated and a little frightened. The MAGNATE approaches and climbs into the freight car with him.
RENTON:
(frustrated)
So you’re here, too? All right, I’ve had about enough of this. Out with it: What’s going on? How can any of this be real? And just who are you, anyway?
MAGNATE:
Fair enough, Mr. Renton. My name is Peter, and I’ve been in shipping and receiving for some time.
RENTON sits down and rubs his head, annoyed. We pause as he slowly regains his composure, about to ask another question. PETER cuts him off, however.
MAGNATE (FROM HERE ON, PETER):
Sir, you still have another box in there.
RENTON turns around and notices the last box in the cargo hold. He fetches this slowly, mind elsewhere. After a moment, he sees the name on the box. CU shot of the name: MICHAEL RENTON. He looks at his employer.
RENTON:
What is this, some sort of joke? You listen to me, you might be the boss but I want answers, and I want ‘em now. I don’t understand any of this.
PETER:
I know. And how could you? You’ve been in our labor force for some time, and our laborers are not privy to the inner workings of the business. You’ll understand well enough, however, and quite soon.
RENTON:
What… what does it all mean?
PETER:
Mr. Renton, I’ll inform you that you’re a civil servant of the afterlife. A worker-bee, of a sort. You provide a service to us for a very specific form of payment, and I’m happy to inform you that today… well, today is your payday, Mr. Renton. You see, you don’t remember much about yourself. You have a name, but where did you grow up? East. That is all you can remember, correct? How old are you? Well, you feel to be in your forties, but you don’t actually know. Try this one: When is your birthday? Everyone has one, of course, but the date of your birthday hasn’t come to mind once in these last ten years.
RENTON:
I… well, you’re right. I don’t really know any of that. I’m… I’m a little slow sometimes… lost in my head. I’ve always been that way.
PETER:
No, Mr. Renton. That is not true. You assume you are slow. In all actuality, you are a very bright sort of man. A little too clever, in fact. You simply have no memory. This is about to change, sir. Your own memories, no matter how intimate or personal, are all contained in the very freight you now hold. Everything about you is in that box.
RENTON:
My… my memory?
(Looks up sharply at PETER)
Everything? In this little box… It’s in here? All of it?
PETER:
Every bit. Your past. Your tastes. Your personal thoughts. It’s all there, Mr. Renton, from your like of key lime pie to your fear of heights. These memories have been kept from you, as punishment for living a sordid life, you see. And you’ve worked for us without your memory for the duration of your contract, which has just expired.
RENTON:
Expired? What are you telling me?
PETER:
Oh, friend. You’re officially fired. But that’s no longer important. You see, Mr. Renton, you passed away nearly ten years ago. You’re after, now. With us, here. It’s best to face it head on.
RENTON:
I’m… you’re telling me I’m dead?
PETER:
It’s all in the box, Mr. Renton.
We see RENTON pause, thinking this over. He then slowly opens the box. A moment of recognition comes over him.
RENTON:
(muttering, slowly growing excited)
Wait... It- it’s me. I think it’s me! Oh, I remember this. And that, too. Oh, all of it! There was... How- how could I have forgotten something that feels like this? I could never forget any of this... Oh, dear lord, I’m me! I’M ME!
We see a look of dismay overcome him then. He looks up from the box slowly. He bears the quiet sense of ill news.
RENTON:
And I- I was a bad person, wasn’t I? Yes, yes I was. I think I might have been cruel. I did some bad things, didn’t I?
PETER:
Yes, Mr. Renton. A troubled life that troubled the lives of others, but not so bad as to warrant outright dismissal. You were still loved, after all, which meant you were salvageable, you see. Still eligible.
RENTON:
For what?
PETER:
Isn’t it obvious, Mr. Renton? Why, full retirement.
RENTON:
Full retirement, you say…
PETER:
(smiling)
Yes, for services rendered. You’ve performed admirably. And for this you gain not only your memory and the knowledge of an excellent job done… but you are hereby granted your official retirement package, with all benefits. Welcome to the end of the line, Mr. Renton. You’ll like it here.
CUT TO:
Tedium. Emery had put little thought into the script, had shirked his rewrites onto Belmont, and felt the story in general, while good, had not been delivered in a way that surpassed the mediocre. Belmont had made it filmable, and was likely more deserving of the Emmy than the writer of the episode. The episode had been directed well, yes, but was simply one amid dozens of other episodes, some better and a few worse. Yet there it was, announced from the stage, having been chosen for an Emmy. He felt like a rubber fashion doll that couldn’t scrub away the phony smile.
CUT TO:
TITLECARD: Best Writing
FADE TO:
CLOSING SET of ‘The Cargo’. We see the idle train car, open, and several boxes inside. Behind this, we see but white. HOST ASHER enters from left, standing before the train.
HOST ASHER (CLOSING MONOLOGUE):
Michael Renton was a man with no sense of self, a drone working out the wearisome days. He worked possibly as penance, or perhaps in sentence, and through this redeemed himself as worthy of much more. You see, it was in helping others, in moving them along, that Mr. Renton could be salvaged. Ten years as a child helping others cross the street. In this way, a man knows himself most by his deeds, and perhaps Mr. Renton, rest in peace, shows us that it is never too late to make up for past transgressions. Michael Renton has learned that his self and his tastes are but the piecemeal of life, that his memory and his past are but one man�
��s freight, to be gathered, boxed, and then shipped… to The Other Side.
FADE TO:
The podium. The writer. All the awards in the world of stages. Emery attempted to stand still and speak in the manner an audience expected. This now-celebrated story did not have the power or moral of All the System, or the other Emmy award-winning stories from the past six years, but there he was, standing before the podium, appearing jovial and so pleased. He was not. The Other Side was host to many talented individuals, and it was time they got something for it, but the givers kept looking at Emery. He felt like an ass. It felt like there was a bit of a joke in the air, something errant in the room that tapped at his ears and knocked at his head. The milk of his thoughts had curdled into those clots of disarray that accompanied all self-doubt and humiliation.
Orson Banry’s script, I Sing of Arms and a Man, had finally aired, mid-season, but had made for a piss-poor episode, Emery thought. Still, even that script was stronger, more acrobatic, and contained more heart than The Cargo, and was far more worthy of an award. Emery was more of the mood to smash Banry’s skull with a brick, however. He had recently discovered that Banry was suing him for a sort of intellectual theft, shouting plagiarism and filing a case for copyright infringement. It seemed the copyright office was having trouble distinguishing between thematics and specifics, lately. Larry, not wanting to be involved in this mess, was keeping ominously silent regarding to writerly dispute.
The trouble was a phrase. The two words “elevator effect” existed in a particular Banry story. They were used by a character to describe the situation of a man’s mind not traveling in time with his body at the same speed, which might result in a spectacular disarray and psychosis upon his arrival in another time, a short hiccough of madness following time travel. In Banry’s story, this had been explained by a scientist as “that precise instant in which an elevator ceases moving and its occupants’ insides feel to continue downward... that’s the mind after travel through the sleeves of time, the psyche having travelled minutely slower than the physical.” It was a minor mention in a story that focused on something else entirely. Emery, having seen the term in a story two decades prior, and having forgotten it long ago, had referenced the term “elevator effect” in one of his own scripts, using it to highlight something utterly different: the process of gaining knowledge at a superhuman speed. If a man were to gain knowledge using osmosis, would he ever reach a point where he gained knowledge faster than he could actually go through it and store it? During that time, he would seem slow, dull, as if taken by Alzheimer’s disease, but on the verge of waking up, indefinitely. His mind would be overrun by sorting and processing, rather than contemplation and consciousness. If this could happen, how long would it take his mind to catch up to what it had taken on? Emery had used the term “elevator effect” to describe that length of time. He truly thought he had concocted the term himself. Of all the writers he could have nudged with an accidental crossing of ideas or terminology, Orson Banry was perhaps the worst possible by which Emery could be linked. Recent history had proven as much.
He had not taken from Banry in the traditional, plagiaristic sense, stealing another person’s writing and claiming it as his own, but in the inventory sense: He had taken a process and two-word term another writer dreamed up and used it as a diving board into a completely different function, in an utterly different story. It was as if Banry thought he could trademark the idea of time travel, or copyright a descriptive phrase like “the spins”. Anyone who wrote about the war and used the phrase “The Big One” was technically doing the same thing Emery had done. “Elevator effect” was not copyrighted and had not been trademarked. As a term, it existed in the world like “elbow grease” or “John Q. Public”.
Emery was annoyed, but the public was listening. Several writers had plagiarized Orson Banry in the past, and the author was known for being litigious with these thieves. Emery was quite respectful of those suits and claims, and had always admired Banry’s willingness to go after unscrupulous plagiarists. Now that the author considered Emery one of them, however, things had escalated and Emery found himself on the receiving end of something undue. The studio had tried to enter into communication with the angry author, but Banry was unresponsive save for his simple remark of “we’ll talk in court.”
Banry would no doubt lose the lawsuit, which would be paltry compared to Emery’s loss. Emery’s respect for Orson Banry was now poisoned, and worse, the lawsuit had hit the newspapers. Banry was good at getting attention, and some were now watching The Other Side with the belief that Emery Asher was a bit of a thief, a fraud. The answer, according to the Dozier, of relieving these potential moments of ill favor with an audience, was to give more air time to scripts written by Moffat and Belmont, as well as a few outside writers here and there. The trick with keeping the show in the light of legitimacy was but the simple requirement that there be less Asher in Asher’s show. He had fulfilled his forty percent of the fourth season’s upcoming scripts, and had now been cut off. The majority of the season, for the first time since the show’s conception, would be other writers. Writers like Belmont and Moffat, Collery and others, but also writers like Banry. That was perhaps the final insult in the legal squabble between Emery Asher and Orson Banry: Rumor that the successful novelist was in talks with the network to gain a regular episode slot on Emery’s show, in exchange for dropping the lawsuit (but truly in exchange for shutting his far-reaching mouth).
“I want to thank all of you for this wondrous turnout. It’s so good to see people come out to honor television in this way. It’s— it’s truly a writer’s dream to be given an award like this.”
A day’s lie. The one he could allow. Each day held one such lie, and this would be Saturday’s. Tomorrow, he would lie to Beth and tell her things were going well. The following day, he might lie to Moffat and tell him that the fourth season was going to be exciting. After that… well, the act of lying would be endless, really. He would eventually lie to himself and consider himself a success, after all the awards and all the episodes, after the book and the shows, the fan letters, and even the congratulatory honors his television compatriots gave him from time to time in letters and pats on the back. He would be a success, ever on. The lie in this was internal. He was no longer a success in his own mind. Not where it counted. His fight against his growing arrogance was eating him alive. No compliment was good enough and no criticism harsh enough. He had arrived in a vivid, beautiful place, but soon found himself unable to see it through the impenetrable, morning fog. This obstruction would not dissipate. He was losing his grip on everything.
What good was there in struggling to better yourself when all concerned thought you were good enough, when they accepted your half-assing with the same reverence as your hard-won triumphs? Were you good enough if everyone but you thought so, or were you giving in and detaching from your potential? No, as a professional, you were supposed to know more about your work than the public could. You were not to take their word for it. You had your own word to handle, and a sense of integrity with which to grapple.
The workings of the television world and, it seemed, fate itself, conspired to water down and vanquish all he had sought to begin. No one understood. Emery had finally transformed, he had become The Other Side guy, in body first, and now, in mind. He did not feel to be bettering his work, but instead pouring it out like un-aged whiskey from a cask. He felt he had begun trading merit for expediency.
Emery looked down at his hands, settled on the podium, the insect hairs protruding from the meat, felt the beat of his nervous heart within his thorax, the shell of this tautly holding in his organs. He opened his shaky mandibles and his squelching voice tittered out.
“We’ve been lucky to have such good fans, and you’ve truly kept the show going.”
Jamison and Maury sat in a Red Room afterlife, pouring over their writes, chatting about what a dismal loss Emery had proven to be. The wire cord around Jamison’s neck con
stricted, choking him as he worked and worked for eternity. Maury sat back and smoked, looking upward at the ceiling from the damp basement of WKCR. He blew a smoke ring and then lifted one of Emery’s scripts, examining it. The red pen dove in, scratching out every word, replacing them and correcting usage. The ink soaked through and the words were but retch. Maury worked like a tactician as the seconds passed and the pages began to bleed their ink onto the desk.
“It’s all of you, is what I mean to say,” Emery said. The audience waited.
Suicide was the dismal failure of a soul to survive its own condition. It was a tepid housecat curling up before a wolf’s maw, a hawk ripping out its own wings over a pond. This was seen as a way out for a person who no longer felt of use to himself or the world, when he was obsolete or ruined, drumming along without his heart or mind knowing which was for what anymore. The way out was a man hanging from a cord in a garage. This was worse than the natural death, which came as a stroke in the morning, a fall from a height, the snap of a weld in an otherwise strong chassis. These were near sacred manners with which a life could be extinguished. These were the acceptable ways. Suicide, however, was the result of torpor and loss.