This Location of Unknown Possibilities (2 page)

Yours in gratitude,

L. Strachey.”

“ZZZZZ,” the woman wrote, picturing a smothering quicksand of words.

The man folds the letter and replaces it with another sheet, entitled “Lady Hester Stanhope.”

He begins to write.

“She renounced the world.”

He pauses at the period.

Leaving a few inches of blank space, he continues to write further down the page.

“The end came in June, 1839. Her servants immediately possessed themselves of every moveable object in the house. But Lady Hester cared no longer: she was lying back in her bed—inexplicable, grand, preposterous, with her nose in the air.”

STRACHEY

‘Inexplicable, grand, preposterous.' Yes, that's it.

The scene dissolves.

I'll say
, the woman thought.
It dissolves way before that
.

After poring over pages at random she skipped to the last scene. Eyes wandering from script to picture frame to credenza, the woman resolved only to push on to the next script. “As for you, lady prisoner in the desert, I'm going to let you stew for a bit.”

2
.

T
he woman pressed an intercom button. “Can you step in here for a minute, Søren?”

“Sure, I'm free right now,” the assistant said.

The woman looked up as Søren—chestnut tanned, the Nordic white hair of ABBA's Agnetha, and dressed as if ready for a country club tennis match—opened the office door and brought in the steady hum of Studio City traffic.

“You're looking a tad frazzled, Liz.” He paused at the door. “How many of those have you chugged today?”

“What are you, my mother? It's this script. I'm tearing out my hair.”

“Yes, I can see stray platinum strands there, not to mention black roots.” He enjoyed the daily dramatics of his boss and the boyish inability to let one hour pass without newly stained clothing or mussed hair. “Or is that grey?”

“Watch your tongue, spray tan,” the woman said, smiling. “You're not here to talk hair-dos, much as I'm sure you'd love to. This, this divine script.” She tapped the cover page with the Sharpie. “How did it get in here?”

“I don't know. The usual way?”

“Who the fuck let it though my door?”

“Technically, me. Mea culpa.” He bowed in mock-penitence. “I dropped it off with the other three. But they arrived as a parcel, and that always means the same thing: direct passage to the holding tray on your credenza.”

“Okay then, you're off the hook. Let me read a morsel to you. Just to whet your appetite.”

“If you must.” Søren placed a clipboard and cellphone on the glass desktop. “I'm counting calories, though.”

“I must. Sit, please.” She indicated a chair. “And close the damned door. Thank you.”

The woman cleared her throat. “Alright then,” she said, adopting a posh British accent, “are we ready?”

“Yes, Liz, any time. Tick tock.”

“Alright, alright. In this scene the heroine is sick with plague and her kinda sorta boyfriend is tending to her.” She read:

FADE IN:

EXT. THE DESERT, 1813 - NEAR DJOUN - NIGHT

In the near distance a straw-brick walled home, at which two figures stand in front of a double-door gate. As a horse approaches, the men hurry to open the gate.

CUT TO:

INT. DJOUN - CANDLELIT BEDCHAMBER - NIGHT

DR. MERYON

There, there, Lady Hester. Calm yourself.

LADY HESTER STANHOPE

Your suggestion is difficult to obey, my friend. I fear I may pass over soon.

(She coughs.)

MERYON

The illness courses through you. We can but wait.

STANHOPE

But wait?

MERYON

That is all one can do.

STANHOPE

Plague is a portent, a punishment.

MERYON

Nonsense. You are one amongst many. The lowly shepherd, the pasha's infant daughter—will you have me believe that each is a recipient of divine punishment for mortal sins?

“P U,” Søren said. “When does fur-faced Moses show up with stone tablets?”

“Wait a sec, I'm nearly done.” Neck tilted, she peered over low-slung glasses.

MERYON

Rest, my lady. This cool cloth will vanquish the fever's rage.

STANHOPE

You are too kind to a foolish old woman. I should sing your praises… although you are aware I am no Margaret Martyr!

MERYON

(smiles)

Your humour returns! It can be nothing if not auspicious.

STANHOPE

I cannot help but wonder, Doctor . . .

MERYON

Yes?

STANHOPE

If Fate has brought me to the desert.

MERYON

Rest, rest, dear one. Your philosophical musings will be the death of you yet. Here, you must take more of this thorn apple tea.

“I can see the cast's procession to the stage on Oscar night,” Søren said.

“Ha! At first I only saw the script's procession to the shredder. It starts off even worse, but surprise, surprise it actually gets better.” Lizzie patted the closed script. “Maybe not this guy's take, but the basic idea of this tough old broad fighting for a piece of the pie. There's potential.”

“And so you want me to . . . ?”

“Oh, sorry. I just wanted a sounding board.”

“Gee, that's me.” Exasperation crept into his voice. “Nothing else to do, not a thing, ma'am.”

“I'm going to run through it again. Get me Zora at
V, but not now. I'd say in about ninety, I have an idea I'd like to fire by her.”

Søren tapped a reminder note.

“You know, I think maybe we should send this out, get it in better shape, toughen it up. That script trainer in Silver Lake, what's his face.” She doodled flowers over the X slashed across the title page. “It's flab, complete and utter flab, right now. But, and that's a big, big but—ha ha, don't even say it—there's something here. Core strength, let's say. I mapped out a couple of ideas, where the story could go et cetera, so don't forget to include them with the script. And tell whatshisname that VNetwork is the vendor I have in mind. He's a pro, he'll know what will and won't snag their interest. Just give me a hour.”

“Sure, no problem. Anything else? Another latte?”

“What the hell, sure. I need to keep my mouth occupied. I'm pretty sure my heart can take it.”

“Right. I'll be back in fifteen.”

“Bueno.”

She turned to the list of comments:

—Penniless aristocrat turns her back on England?

—Virgin? In love with doctor?

—Icon re: Elizabeth, Amelia Eirhart (sp??), Joan of Arc

—Loses mind? Visionary? Mystic?

—A woman that carves a place for herself in a man's world.

Liz added a final question:

—Where's the
drama
???

I

POINT GREY TO BURNABY

It's much more inspiring not to go to places than to go.

—Karl Lagerfeld explains Chanel pre-fall
2012

(December
6, 2011
)

A CAREER IN ENGLISH!

1.

A
transparent stream of mucous seeped from Marta's left nostril, slow as a glycerin tear. Clasping a tissue, she blew gently in hopes of avoiding the unnerving pop—Oh my, is this an aneurysm?—of distressed eardrums.
I cannot have caught a cold
, Marta thought. No, not a cold at all, she determined, merely aggravating invisible particles enveloped within nasal drool. Natural, normal, automatic immunoresponse triggered by diminutive organic motes suspended in odourless, life-sustaining air. The bad inseparable from the good. Serpents and fruit trees. Typical. Pseudoephedrine mood swings too, Marta noted crankily. Springtime. She'd experienced better days.

Tilting the desk chair back, Marta blotted the watery rims and pictured the lids as bee-stung, having swelled and grown blotchy. Bloodshot eyes too, quite possibly. Would students in the impending class look up from their phone screens and comment, believing she'd been crying? Surely they'd have no ready-made explanation for the spectacle of a weepy professor. What soap opera scenario might they spin? A lost grant, perhaps, or tenure unfairly denied. A sniping review. The visible handkerchief and a vague comment about the peril of pollen would suffice to nip murmured speculation in the bud. They'd readily accept that external source over the implausibility of crushing disappointment or, another long shot, heartache so fierce that it had spilled into the classroom.

Marta's desk clock and computer agreed:
12
:
45PM
. Exactly five minutes before she must depart for the week's final class. She closed the skinny office window. It wasn't supposed to be opened, anyway. People had heightened sensitivities in these sea sons of compromised immune systems. Everyone expressed keen awareness of bounding allergens and environmental flux; rogue microbes failed to recognize personal space, and protection had become imperative.

In lieu of the marvelous transparent domes and lab-engineered enhancements of science fiction, Grounds+Maintenance had just finished with a series of practical paper and email bulletins that explained how the building's renovated ventilation system rendered a breath of fresh air obsolete,
counter-productive
. Marta's eyes had settled on the falsely reassuring scientific language of the latest:
cutting edge technology
that
deployed
ozone and ultraviolet light for
optimized ionization
and
departicalization.
In short: hinged windows have become an outmoded indulgence, comrade, and the health of you and the university community relies on individual cooperation, thank you for the ongoing compliance.

As she cautiously dabbed the inflamed leaking rims a final time, Marta began to organize the papers on the desk, sliding notes—lined yellow sheets highlighted in purple (key concepts, pointed questions for students) and green (relevant trivia, humorous asides)—into the valise and pitching the scarcely read administrative announcements into the recycling bin.

Two white sheets remained.

Marta placed the letter into a folder labeled Homeward: Admin. She'd already secured a photocopy in the Correspondence: History file in the desk's bottom left drawer. The letter's duality, banal and momentous, was proving so difficult to resist. She'd snatched glances between classes that morning. If nothing else the offer promised diversion, a break—ludicrous and unprecedented but invigorating—from routine, she'd been telling herself.
Tempted by celebrity, so facile,
chimed in a background voice, less friendly.

12
:
48PM
. She swiveled the chair away from the wall of books and studied the immense vista.
The scene felt underdeveloped, a photographic study Ansel Adams might have discarded, since all the surfaces—turbulent inlet, coniferous mountainsides, densely cumulous sky—seemed mopped by inky watercolour. Greywashed, a vision of springtime stripped of the usual green bursts and life-affirming connotations.

Black-pebbled concrete formed a thick frame around the inset window panes of the office. A home away from home, this stout fortress of a building. After the resurgence of seen-but-not-read Tolkien a few years ago, two arts students had said, “In the Dark Tower?” within the same week when arranging an office meeting—as though the roof sprouting paired horns or a wrathful amber eye would surprise no one.

Trends cycling as they did, though, the name's sticking was anybody's guess. The matte concrete slabs of the exterior had appeared on cineplex screens more recently as the barricaded compound of a fearsome African warlord in a mutant superhero movie sequel. Perhaps quizzical students now exclaimed, “I've seen that place somewhere before, I just know it” as they passed by. Or, equally plausible, no one commenting at all.

Marta conceded that the tower's facade—that of an unadorned modernist bunker—loomed imposingly. After that, she found the Tolkien analogy nonsensical. Early-, mid-, and late-career vanity and politicking flourished, naturally. But brooding evil, Machiavellian tactics? Hardly. Assigning a C+ to an essay barely indicated a sign of power, let alone chthonic malevolence. The
vin ordinaire
of any office environment, professional rivalries, intense resentments, and grievance accretions were likewise known, albeit stored out of sight. As for the elaborate class hierarchy—untanned latter-day devotees of Matthew Arnold still genuflecting toward Oxford nested at the tip of the pecking order; at the base, brown-skinned women with broken English providing custodial services: “If you find a moment today, er, Dhatri, will you please vacuum my office?”—Marta supposed that arrangement, like good and evil, reached far back, as old as tragedy.

The portentous architecture, then, meant nothing except unlucky coincidence. True, alongside the kind- and coldhearted, she did pass by hunched Gollums and tightly-wound Lizzie Borden types muttering in hallways from time to time; as with asylum lifers and feral animals, a simple rule applied:
steer clear, don't meet their eyes
.

Marta withdrew the letter and read the familiar words, for an instant miffed by the author's choice of a nostalgic typewriter font:

Dear Professor Spëk:

I have been instructed to contact you because our production team has the good fortune to be in your vicinity. You may have heard that
The Prophet of Djoun
, a biopic of Lady Hester Stanhope, is currently in pre-production.

Of course not,
Marta thought once more
, why would I have? Oh, movie people and their egotism.

Your expertise, as revealed through your book
Imperial(ist) Empress: Mysticism, Écriture Féminine and the Levantine Writings of Lady Hester Stanhope
, would be a tremendous benefit for our production. If you can spare some time, one of the project's executives, Mr. Jakob Nugent, would be happy to explain our offer and the technical details over lunch.

We thank you for your time and hope to hear from you soon.

Sincerely,

Lora Wilkes

Assistant to Jakob Nugent

Folding the letter, Marta shrugged: what's the harm of one meal? Alongside the usual low morale doldrums coinciding with the school year's sputtering out, distressed thoughts had been mushrooming about the shiny prestigious career she'd willed—through methodical labour, more or less—into existence, on track now and unwavering until the onset of decrepitude. That legacy brought to mind a luckless character from a Poe story, walled inside a dusty catacomb for eternity by pages instead of stones. Losing mental pliability year after year as bones grew porous and brittle: squinting at a hidebound future that hadn't yet unfolded drew Marta's breath short.

Marta pictured Poe pacing inside that leased white Bronx cottage on a swampy, sweltering August night, the air gassy and fetid; months earlier Lady Stanhope had passed away, obscure, half the world away.
Stripped to a disheveled vest and shirt and grumbling drunkenly, Poe threw the tale whose plot he'd been sketching into the unlit hearth: “Preposterous, what fool would wall himself in? No, there must be a villain and a lure.”

Guiltily peering into her unsettled state of mind, Marta saw first the luxuriant illegitimacy. From Chongqing to Zhenzhou, polluted industrial sprawls of dawn-to-dusk wage slavery were truly entitled to complaint. Ditto for a famished, war-pitted continent with medieval life expectancies. But not her, in an office with
optimized ionization
perched over a distant city of glass spires and postcard-worthiness. “A champagne problem,” her mother's diagnosis, sounded accurate in its way.

Marta nonetheless leaned toward
crisis of faith
despite the exaggeration; mundane as dandruff,
occupational doubts
didn't quite capture it.
Misgivings?
Discontentment
? A tad vague, undirected. Whatever the case, she'd trust intuition for the remedy.

Nudging Marta forward as well, the reasonable sound of her father's oft-voiced motto, “The proverbial knock of opportunity should never be ignored.”

Save for the onslaught of final exam grading the semester verged on being history, and she really ought to get out into the real world—an elsewhere—more often. Life's a banquet; do or die; broaden horizons; not the fruit of experience, but ­experience itself, is the end: carpe diem's bravado stretched back to cuneiform. Presumably, she'd find equivalent philosophy carved into a Bronze Age tablet. Who could argue with such longevity?

Marta pinned the vintage brooch watch—a thrift store find decades ago—to her sweater; another reality, a thirty-faced composition class, demanded acknowledgement. She'd contact this assistant to Jakob Nugent later.

The computer gonged for incoming mail. Marta read the weekly announcement from Exconfessio.

Ex G.B (Seattle, WA)—

1. I always see full-grown adults at stoplights picking their noses and it makes me want to stab them in the face.

2. I lost my wallet once with 4,000 dollars in it and the guy gave it back and would not take a penny.

3. I love my wife and kids, but would help a dog over a stranger any day.

4. I worked for the government and abused the job, stole time and hated every second and every person I worked with until I quit.

5. I had a friend commit suicide the day after he said, “Keep an eye on me.”

6. I saw a friend put his cock all over his wife's best friend's face while she was sleeping and then smack her lips with it and she never woke up.

7. I saw a guy fall off a 5-foot drop off into a mud pit and didn't help him; I only laughed hysterically from across the street.

Rereading, she savoured the cinematic fullness of each confession.

The week's offering was tamer than others but intriguing nonetheless. Another historical constant: people behaving badly (even when the story was patently untrue: what person keeps
4
,
000
dollars in a wallet?) had been enthralling onlookers for millennia. Gossip, rumour, whispered speculation, outrageous misdeeds. Such an excess of libidinousness—a perennial cup that runneth over—harbored in countless minds. Who could tell how it would manifest? Stabbed faces and hysterical laughter. Misanthropy over philanthropy at a ration of at least
10
:
1
, if one believed Exconfessio. What malice! Marta's nominal professional interest dedicated scattered thoughts to pondering what people chose as worthy of confession. An essay about secular ethics would be publishable, surely.

Last semester a student had handed in a curious polemical essay condemning Exconfessio. The pious student's evident outrage—galled in particular at the site's “inappropriate” All Confessions, No Reprisals™ mandate—initially drew in Marta. Actually signing up to receive the confessions (Seven Sins, Deadly Honest™ available in weekly and monthly allotments)? Whimsy, an afterthought. Reading the litany of offenses, she occasionally aligned herself with unseemly figures, the peeping tom or the supermarket housewife tsk-tsking at the vapid images of exposed cellulite and extramarital rendezvous in
Hello!

People were capable of declarations of astounding perversity. The alarming fact reassured Marta. Besides, the audacity of the confessions rarely failed to impress.

12
:
50
. Time to vacate the sixth floor. She applied lotion to hands now papery courtesy of Purell.

As for
Do You Know Yours Rights?
, Marta tacked the pamphlet onto the cork board, its message ready to revisit on Monday. The folded photocopy had been slid under the office door, one sentence highlighted in pink: “Managing perception of your brand is the essence of personality rights.” For the moment the immediate puzzles—the identity of the anonymous messenger, that faceless interloper's agenda—dropped away. And personality rights might be useful to mull over. Trickle down from celebrity culture and
Ratemyprofessors.com
—Marta's middling score of
3
.
2
an affront, like coming across her own name on a bathroom stall. Everyone an unstable, easily snuffed-out star and in need of tweaks, damage control and, always, upkeep.