Dave Press

“I love this episode,” says McQuarrie.  “It’s written by Richard Matheson.”

The name strikes familiar, digging around in my brain for a bit trying to remember, finally, reaching it, I say out loud: “The guy who wrote I Am Legend?”

“That’s right. Good form.”

“We have that book somewhere around here.  Or at least we did at one point. Who knows if we still have it?”

“Nah, those fags just wanted to send us for a loop. See what’d we do, coming back to this, but anyway…”

Here it comes. The plan, what we’re going to do and how it’ll end up fucking things up even more.  I would love for this moment to continue, and fortunately I have my little cig to help blank out the bad parts.

Finally, he continues. “…what I love about this episode is this guy thinks he’s living a normal life, but is actually playing the part of himself in a movie,” color me surprised that he goes in this direction.  “So, when the people on the crew see him as having some kind of nervous breakdown, they don’t understand that the character he’s playing is actually him, they shut the production down.  They shut down ‘his’ movie.”

“This was before there was such a thing as documentaries,” I reply, lighting up.

“Oh, sure. Look at it, the show is in black and white. Probably late fifties this show.”

“My Dad calls The Twilight Zone modern Grimm fairy tales.” 

“Absolutely, but it provides a scope of how we look at ourselves,” McQuarrie replies lighting his Pall Mall. I didn’t know they still make Pall Malls.  “Even to this day! I had a friend at Uni who used to say all the time: ‘My life is a movie’.”

“Little self-absorbed isn’t he?” I choke through the smoke, taking it all the way down while a man on the television screams crazily.

“Yeah, he was, but it stayed with me. Throughout those times in the service, my partner, Diana, and all of  this stuff happening now—my life is a movie.  Our lives, really. It’s simply too incredible for our lives to have become this dramatic. Most people go through their lives nine to five,have kids, have a nice house, and hopefully they get to do what they love. Spies, assassins, conspiracy. This is a movie, and you wrote about it as a movie.”

I take a second to look at it and I simply have to agree.  “Yeah, I wrote about this, and if we make it out of this, that script is going to be the center of our story.”

“Yeah.”

This is when I realize that we are going to make it through this, because I want that story to happen.

[related].

They get back into the Tiburon and cruise down the street at a slow, deliberate crawl.  Leslie turns from the front seat and addresses Davis.

“Readers would not have made the connection between this case and that article would they?”

Davis turns his eyes from the window and just looks at her.

“By making the cops,” she continues, “say something on it you put your connection into the reader’s head. If they had just said nothing you would have been seen as reaching. But with a ‘no comment’ they gave you ammunition to your theory. They should have just said nothing.”

He swallows hard. Gives her a look like it was elementary, my dear Watson. “Well, yeah, it’s not like anyone reads anymore, and they sure as shit don’t make their own conclusions. Readers like their opinions to be spelled out to them.”                          

She smiles and turns to face the front.

[continued].

There is a house in the middle of a field settled in front of rolling hills placed just outside of a town that doesn’t matter.           

The house has a patio that extends around the first floor with pillars, not unlike the ones you’d find on the White House, that rise up to the second floor framing fifteen windows.  You can see the house from the main road. A road that only welcomes five drivers a day, but for six or seven miles there is nothing but patted down field.  A shed to the left side of this house has two parked cars in front of it: a metallic blue BMW X5, and a red ‘67 Mustang with black convertible top. We come in through the left hand side of the house, to a strawberry-blond haired woman, lying on her stomach, blood coming out the back of her head.           

This grisly scene spills out into a mess in the doorframe, leading to the kitchen where remnants of a salad were left out.  Stairs go up after the left side entrance. Climbing the stairs, immediately after the main floor, are two doors one on the right and left side.  The left side room is too small for a full bath, but managed to squeeze in a toilet and a sink. The room across from it is a closet. The balcony off the stairs has a landing with two uncomfortable wood chairs matching a coffee table littered with magazines.            

The couple called this the Sun Room, because of the windows around all sides.  They had been thinking about knocking out the windows and making this a second patio, but they hadn’t been living here long enough to really do anything about it.           

Off the Sun Room, there is another smaller hallway with a door at the end.  This door opens up to a huge bedroom with white carpet, a bronze bed frame with sheets that match the carpet.  The room is void of pictures except a lone picture on an end table, naturally, of the aforementioned couple.           

The bathroom door is parallel to the back of the bed and when we enter the walls are red with pictures of pine trees framed in birch wood.           

A graying curly-haired man sits on the seat of the enclosed shower, his head in his hands.  A gold chain hangs from his neck.  Swinging around now—catching the man’s eyes—shower-stream pushes his hair straight down his eyes. There are traces of wrinkles under his eyelids but not because he’s old, but because he feels he has nothing more to care about.           

His name is Marten, and is completely, a loss for words.            

We hold on his face until he wipes the water and hair back.

Concentrate.  What just happened? He looks up at the showerhead, begging it for an answer, the water only pushing his hair back behind his forehead.