Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  “What.”

  “I don’t know, intelligence. Charm. Class. Someone with great ideas. I told Rae I was planning on asking you and she was thrilled.”

  “You’re sweet. But I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, think about it, at least. Don’t dismiss it out of hand.”

  “So, there’s a hotel at this place, or...”

  “No. Big farmhouse and a big kind of studio place with a bunch of different bedrooms. Great big cozy stone fireplace. You’ll love it. We could room together. Think about it. That’s all I ask.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll think about it. But only because you are such a godsend to stay and help me like this. I think I would have died of exhaustion.”

  “There, there. Give us a hug. Atta girl.”

  “Damn that Hollis.”

  “Yeah. Damn that Hollis.”

  Chapter 23 – Angus

  The Lion Tree, by Angus Mann

  “Where did you last see her?”

  “Who?”

  “Who?” Colonel Ivanova leaned in against the table. Reserved incredulity was her specialty. “Keep that up Lieutenant and we will be here a very long time.” She crossed her arms over her breasts. A sigh. Her face assumed a look of overly patient indulgence. “Julianne Miller. That’s who.”

  “That’s not what I call her.”

  “What then? Julie? Sweetheart? Darling? Jesus, Alan, how am I supposed to know? It’s not like you’ve ever mentioned her.”

  There was anger and frustration in her voice that felt good to him. Not because it was pleasant. It wasn’t pleasant. But it was personal. She had used his name. Even if only to cut at him, she had stepped back out into the open.

  He touched the swelling nodule on his neck. One finger. Then two. It hurt, but it was better than the arm restraints. Better, at least as long as he behaved himself. Otherwise he would know new pain, she had said. He would be begging for the restraints.

  But the new pain had already been inflicted.

  That she had warned him with a smile he loved did not help.

  “Jules. All her friends called her Jules. And shouldn’t you address me as Lieutenant?” He did not mean to smirk.

  Elena lowered her chin in a slow nod, still looking at him. Her eyes acknowledged his small victory. And in the singular glint of this look, he saw her. Briefly, as daylight through a thick bank of cloud or the moon through a midnight tangle of vine. Then she disappeared again. Like a spirit leaves the body, abandoning the eyes; leaving the expression intact but hollow.

  “Where did you last see . . . Jules?”

  The table between them was a standard issue picnic variety, painted a muddy, camouflage green and large enough to seat ten. It was not, of course, real wood, but the effect was real enough. Like everything else. Like the grass. Like the air and the sky. Real only because it was familiar. Familiar because we are drawn to what we love.

  “I don’t care for your tone, Colonel.”

  “Good. Where did you see her last, Lieutenant?”

  It was odd to be having this discussion – if you could call it that – plopped in the yard out behind the Officer’s Quarters. It would have been more fitting to be inside her office, two blocks away from the O.Q. Sitting in one of those stiff-spindled chairs on the other side of her desk. Listening to her words slap the bare wall behind him. Staring out the window behind her at the pompous circle of flags hanging limply above the garden.

  But she had wanted to have the discussion outside at the table on the small carpet of grass behind the O.Q. That suited him just fine. He couldn’t stand to be indoors any more than she could. They at least still shared that much. Fourteen months here had not cured them. That was not nearly enough to want to be back indoors. They still needed to be outside, unconfined. Free of tiny decks and quarters and holds.

  Of course, outdoors was still indoors, wasn’t it?

  Under different circumstances he might have laughed at the irony. The great outdoors was about as real as the picnic table; about as genuine as this thing she called a discussion. The only thing really out-of-doors was death itself.

  He looked past the lips of Elena Ivanova. There was the spongy, gray horizon that never seemed to change. Small, rocky hills jutted up into the cotton sky maybe fifty, sixty kilometers out. Fields of young, low corn rolled so far out into the west that it vanished into the flatness of a greenish-white smear. Closing the distance to the east, knee-high wheat the color of a foaming, bloodless gold. A sourceless light glopped over the plants like bright syrup, bleaching the color from the leaves and stems, as though the entire world was a horribly over-exposed photograph. There was no wind. There was no sound. There were no people or animals or bugs. Only stillness and suffocating light.

  It was still better than being indoors.

  Behind him, to the south, half a kilometer on the other side of the Base, was the sorghum. How appropriate for this place, he thought. A crop of cloying sentimentality.

  “Can you spare one of those snappers?”

  “Answer my question.”

  “Ocean Park. At home. Four days before we left. That’s where I last saw her. Can I have a goddamn snapper now?”

  She extracted one from the side pocket of her uniform. It was the same side pocket he had playfully pilfered a hundred times. She dropped it on the table and he lunged for it before it could roll between the thick planks onto the grass. He held it between his lips and pinched off the end with a sharp soft snap. A point of fire glowed to life and he closed his eyes. He nodded.

  “She wasn’t at the launch?”

  “She never came to the launches. Never saw the point. Anyway, she was sick.”

  “Sick with what?”

  “Just didn’t feel good. Is the Army going to allow me an opportunity to grieve?”

  “Grieve all you want, Lieutenant. Just answer my questions.”

  “I don’t understand why this is happening.” It was that tone again. The wounded bird. “I did not hurt her.”

  “She’s not hurt, Lieutenant. She’s dead.”

  “I didn’t kill her. What makes you think I did? I was . . .”

  “You were what? Here?”

  “Yes. With you. Here. Jesus, Elle, it happened ten months ago. How could I?”

  She lit off a snapper of her own. Pale blue smoke roiled behind her gleaming teeth. She looked at him like he was a child that refused to learn his own name.

  “That’s Colonel Ivanova, Lieutenant. I won’t say it again.” Long exhale. “It takes over ten months to get a relay. You knew that, didn’t you?” Another pull on the snapper. “Of course you did. We’re a long ways out there, Lieutenant. Even for a beam of light.”

  He looked at her in silence, the leaden truth of those words nearly crushing him. They were – he was – a long ways out there.

  “But now I’m getting a steady stream of information. Three, maybe four updates every twelve hours or so. Who knows what they’re doing now. All those UNIX MP’s. They’re on to something else for sure. Like little sleuthing carpenter ants.”

  Another pull on the snapper. Another cuckolding of smoke in a bed of pink flesh and sharp white bone.

  “But ten months ago they were speaking your name every other breath. And every other breath they scribbled out a message, stuck it in a photon bottle and tossed it into the ocean. Now, after all this time, those little bottles of light are beginning to wash up on shore. It’s like looking at old starlight really. We’re looking at history. But I’m learning a lot about you now, Lieutenant. An awful lot.”

  “There’s nothing to learn.”

  “Really. What was she doing when you last saw her?”

  “She was in bed. It was early. I said good-bye. I left.”

  “Left for where?”

  “The Base. Reporting to you. Where else would I be four days to zero-count?”

  “How long were you married?”

  The past tense. What a fraudulently clinical perspective. As though that part of l
ife was a body on a table, a severed appendage, a scrap of meat to be carved up by forceps and scalpels and sterile opinion. How terribly wrong that was. He was no longer married. He was a widower now. God, a widower. She read his face and nodded slowly.

  “She’s really dead. It’s a fact now, Lieutenant. How long were you married?”

  “Six years in July.”

  It should have been July, he thought. Now. Today. This should be a brilliant day in the month of July, with the sun high and the breath of the world, redolent and clear, pushing clouds like sails. The cornfields should be sounding their paper rattles and the wheat rolling in golden whispers and the orchards gushing pulpy, sticky juice. The ground should be rippling with kingdoms of insects and the air streaked with plumage. Sing song voices chasing after children chasing after dogs chasing after life. July. The world should be overripe and ready to drop from branch to palm.

  “Did you love her?”

  But, of course, that was all ridiculous. This place knew no Julys. There was no sky and no wind. He was a widower. Jules was dead and nothing would ever grow. Not here. Not anywhere. He was, suddenly, an alien and alone in his own existence. He was, as she had said, a long ways out there. There was no sound in his ears, nor feeling in his soul, save the little bottles of light beaching at the far end of a dead, black sea.

  That, now, was everything.

  “Did you love her?”

  “Of course I loved her. She was my wife. Look, I’ve got work to do. The others will be waiting. They . . .”

  But she was waiting for him, blocking the exit to this discussion.

  “The others are all at their stations working away, Lieutenant. They can manage without you for awhile. My orders are to get to the bottom of things. I think we can do that better up here than down there, don’t you?”

  He said nothing, rolling his near-spent snapper between his fingers. The idea that he and Elena Ivanova carried the only beating hearts on the surface of this world was almost more than he could grasp. The idea that her treatment of him was due to her orders from UNIX and not her own feelings was simply more than he could conceive.

  “Would you really rather be under ground?”

  “No.”

  “Okay then.”

  “The dome floor is already sealed?”

  “Of course. They can’t open it during a pressurizing cycle, which will take,” she looked at the window in her wrist, “at least another couple of hours. So relax. We’ve got plenty of time to ourselves up here. I don’t want you to worry about fuel cells or cryopods or mapping protocols. It’s all under control. No one is indispensable, Lieutenant Miller.” She looked at him a moment and added, as if only by way of afterthought and not deliberate cruelty, “but you already knew that.”

  He said nothing, looking out toward the edge of the world he could not see. The cotton sky seethed its lacquered, bleaching light and seemed to flicker and pulse at him, detecting some bioelectric resonance of his heart.

  “Good. Let’s continue.”

  She took a last deep drag on her snapper, exhaled, and then popped the moistened tip into her mouth with a delicate swallow.

  CHAPTER 24 – Tilly

  Looking back, I am embarrassed to say that I did not take the news well or maturely. I thrashed about angrily for weeks and, frankly, acted like a spoiled child who has come to believe that she is no longer daddy’s favorite.

  My sexual relationship with Blair Gaines came to an abrupt end, although I continued to see him after hours. He would frequently ask for my company, calling me on my phone between his meetings and in the mornings on the way to his work. I took every opportunity to deny his requests, as rudely and as forcefully as possible. He was in love and I used that against him shamelessly, unable to have such vengeful feelings and not actually exercise them. But then, after refusing him, I would generally show up at his place at the end of the day anyway, brooding and petulant, as though I was doing him a favor against my wishes, and each time I was warmly received. In those days Blair took of me whatever little was available to be had, mostly my poor company.

  It would have been better for both of us if I had simply taken the news and left him. The few friends to whom I had entrusted knowledge of my relationship with Blair all counseled me to never see him again.

  My mother would have certainly given the same advice had I ever told her about Blair, although it would have been less advice than histrionic lecture, heavily seasoned with concerns about my reputation and the media and my father’s reaction to it all, which would have ultimately segued into how the scandals of my life affect her. It’s not easy seeing those tabloids, Tilly. It’s not easy talking to our friends when that sort of news comes out. Your father shuts himself off from the world and won’t talk to me about anything, like somehow it’s all my fault. I’m all for sex, Tilly. I’m no prude, but…

  As far as my mother was concerned, I never let on that my relationship with Blair was anything more than actor and director. In fact, my discussions about Blair had always quite deliberately tended to emphasize his romantically repellent qualities – his short temper and his arrogance and that distinctive Australian chauvinism. Her relief at these assessments was so obvious that I could never have told her the truth about us.

  But, for the record, my mother’s advice would have been the same: take the news and either fight it or lump it, but never go back to Blair.

  Good advice, except that I could not take the news. The news was utterly unacceptable. So I stayed close, railing at Blair and making a point of withholding everything that he wanted from me; things that I had long since stopped giving with an open heart. He looked like a whipped puppy most of the time, apologizing profusely and offering his sympathies and promising me better work on future projects. He took to confessing his love on a regular basis and pleaded with me to see the larger picture, explaining in unnecessary detail what I already knew about the state of his separation from his wife and their mutual desire to make it formal.

  But, while Blair had shed his indomitable, authoritarian personae in my presence, adopting in its place a weak and endlessly accommodating temperament that did nothing to improve his chances, he also never changed his mind about recasting the film. However much he loved me, he was truer to his art. However much he needed me, he needed Angus Mann more. Blair’s obsession with me was not compelling enough to dislodge his greater obsession with pulling the heart of Angus Mann into the film that loomed ever larger in his mind. He needed Angus, and Angus had his conditions.

  Lost to me in all of the drama of my meltdown was the real reason I could not bring myself to leave Blair Gaines. The truth was that we both needed Angus Mann and were both unwilling to let him go. Somewhere inside the cauldron of my anger was the quiet knowledge that Blair Gaines was the only connection I had to Angus, and that to abandon one was to forsake the other. Even if some undeserving harlot-of-the-week was chosen to replace me as Colonel Elena Ivanova, and even if I had no part in the project whatsoever, I was unwilling, unable, to simply walk away.

  For reasons that are clear to me now after years of reflection, but which were a mystery to me back then, I needed him. I actually needed the Ohioan writer of books and stories whose contempt for me and my talents and my life were always so plain on his face. I would like to be able to claim that Angus’ obvious disdain for my character did not matter, and that somehow I needed him in spite of his disapproval. But I cannot make any such claim, for his disdain for my character did matter, and the truth is that I needed him then because of his disapproval.

  In my own defense, though my manner of expression certainly left much to be desired, I did have reason to be upset. I had invested a great deal of my time and energy in The Lion Tree, and while I cannot say that it caused me to forego any other particular opportunities, it rankled me to see my effort put to waste. That, and yet something still much greater.

  I have never been an automaton. Acting has never been about pretending for me. Quite the contrar
y, acting has always been more about finding and expressing the parts in myself that are buried too deeply for me to reach on my own. I remember Angus telling me outside of his hotel – after he had disappeared and I was so worried for him – that writers and actors are the same in that we are enslaved by the characters we create. And while I dismissed him at the time, I knew there was a real truth in what he said. We do not become our characters necessarily, but we – the actor and the writer – do forge strong and intensely intimate relationships with them. Because while they are not us, exactly, they come from our very essence and there is nothing about us that they do not know.

  Something of my soul went into learning Ivanova and in bringing her to life. It was hard work that I was both proud of and moved by. We had bonded, she and I. We understood each other in mysterious ways that I could never have articulated. For Blair to so abruptly take her back, as though she were only a costume or a mask, as though she and I had not already forged a strong symbiotic identity, was impossible to accept.

  I was not the only actor upset. We were all upset, even the normally slow-to-burn pretty boy Casey Travern, who had counted on his role as Lieutenant Miller to broaden his screen appeal. Blair’s recasting decision sparked a mini-boom among Los Angeles entertainment lawyers as agents and actors went the way of the erstwhile screenwriters and retained high-priced firms to vent their outrage. I too went that direction, but not with much conviction. Contract rights were nowhere near the heart of my concern and I knew that lawsuits would not change anything important. Blair was never particularly concerned about the liability issues. After all, it was only a matter of money, and for all of the vituperative chest beating, the claims did not amount to all that much in the scheme of things. Most of them were paid off in fairly short order.

  Besides, legal claims from a handful of disgruntled actors were the least of Blair’s problems. Filming came to a full stop while Blair and Angus reworked the script, and it was to be nearly five months before production resumed. Union agreements had to be renegotiated. Supply contracts had to be cancelled and penalties paid. The recasting decision was the last straw for all but one of the producers who abandoned the project, cancelling their funding commitments and demanding their investments be returned with interest. I feared the project was completely dead.