Jack and Rosemary

Jack had been home from work for only a little while. It had been a long day and he was slumped in his old recliner staring at, but not really watching, Brian Williams read the day’s news. Jack had pulled the delivery menu for China Palace out of the drawer in the kitchen where he kept dozens of delivery menus but he hadn’t worked up the initiative to pick up the phone and order the house special.

Jack was roused from his ennui by the doorbell being buzzed over and over again. Frowning…he neither expected nor wanted visitors…Jack rose from the recliner and padded over to the door. He opened the door and, before he could say anything, Rosemary surged into his arms sobbing and babbling incoherently.

Rosemary was Jack’s girlfriend. They had been dating for almost 14 months. Rosemary was a short, wispy girl…her head came up to the middle of Jack’s chest…with long chestnut hair and deep brown, vaguely haunted eyes; she was kind of plain and kind of pretty at the same time…plain and pretty, the way librarians and meter maids and best friends of leading female characters always were in old movies.

Jack artfully guided Rosemary into the apartment and closed the door. Rosemary continued to sob and babble while Jack held her close and stared off waiting for her to take a breath. Jack was able to make out snatches of coherence out of Rosemary’s stream of words. “My father’s going to kill me” stuck out particularly clearly.

Rosemary’s father was the only person in the world that Jack was really afraid of. Her father was a brooding, ruddy hulk with bulbous cheeks and hooded black eyes; Jack always wondered how such an enormous man could have co-created a girl as petite and delicate as Rosemary. Rosemary’s father always regarded Jack with bored contempt and Jack quickly learned not to try to get to know the man better (Rosemary’s mother, on the other hand, was pleasant enough woman who treated Jack with kindness; Jack could tell that she had once been as willowy as her daughter. Rosemary’s mother had vaguely haunted eyes as well…though they were two or three shades lighter than Rosemary’s eyes…and she always smelled of rosewater and red wine.)

“What’s the matter, Rosemary?” Jack said when she finally took a breath.

Rosemary took a step back and looked up at Jack with her liquid, deep brown, vaguely haunted eyes. She took a deep breath and said, “I’m pregnant”. And then she buried her head in his chest and started sobbing again.

Jack put his arm around her and stared off profoundly puzzled. “I’m pregnant”…Jack let the words cascade about his synapses as he tried to make sense of them.

“What are we going to do?” Rosemary gasped out between sobs.

Jack weighed the implications of that question as well. “We?” he thought. “Hmph, that is the question, isn’t it?” In the 14 months that Jack and Rosemary had been dating he had never once seen her naked below the waist…they had kissed passionately on many occasions and he had stolen longing squeezes of her breasts through her sweaters and her cotton bras; Rosemary had on rarer occasions allowed fleeting egress to her bra and she had even once let Jack fondle her breast with his left hand while he masturbated with his right.

But she had never allowed his hand to venture down below her pert bellybutton. She was a good girl she explained…just like her father raised to her to be…and she would go to her wedding bed a virgin. Jack had found that to be enormously frustrating but eventually he decided that he could live with it (it was easier than finding another girlfriend, he reasoned, and one day she would change her mind or they would get married.)

And now she was pregnant.

Jack found his voice again. “Rosemary,” he said softly, “why are you telling me this?” He was, given the circumstances, keenly interested in her answer.

Rosemary stopped sobbing and looked up at him her eyes ablaze with withering indignation. “Because you’re my boyfriend,” she said as if Jack's question was the most idiotic thing she'd ever heard. And then she leaned against him and started sobbing again.

Strangely enough, Jack couldn’t think of a credible argument to her statement at that moment.

At some point, Rosemary stopped sobbing and went into the bathroom to wash her face. Jack called the China Palace and ordered 2 house specials. After the food came, Jack and Rosemary ate in silence and then fell asleep on top of his bed still wearing their street clothes.

Four days later, Rosemary told her father that she was pregnant. Rosemary’s father came to Jack’s apartment and slammed him against a wall and, reeking of bourbon and cigar smoke and disappointment, told Jack to make it right.

Seven days later, Jack and Rosemary were married by a disinterested civil servant in front of four witnesses: Rosemary’s parents (he scowling, she smiling opaquely), Rosemary’s sullen best friend Lily, and Jack’s incredulous best friend Art. That night, in a motel near Disneyland, Jack finally got to venture below Rosemary’s pert bellybutton (making love with Rosemary wasn’t quite as magical as Jack had always imagined it would be…but it was okay enough and Jack slept contentedly that night.)

Jack and Rosemary moved into a two-bedroom apartment a few blocks away from Jack’s old apartment.

Rosemary never told Jack who the father of the baby…a bright-eyed girl she named Roberta…was. And, to be fair, Jack never asked. Jack would decide that it was probably the guy that Rosemary left with on a cool autumn day some 6 months after Roberta was born.

It was the most logical assumption to be made from the letter Rosemary left for him with Roberta’s babysitter. Jack read the letter three times, parsing every word, and then he paid the babysitter, collected Roberta, and went home to his apartment. Rosemary’s things were all gone but she had left the apartment in pristine condition.

Jack fixed a bottle for Roberta and called Chicken Delight and ordered the 3-piece meal. He sat in his recliner feeding the baby and waiting for his dinner to arrive.

Jack and Roberta moved into a small house in the suburbs. Art and Rosemary’s mother were the most frequent visitors and the housekeeper/nanny was a matronly widow, named Mrs. Agnes Stephenson, with smiling eyes that lived a few blocks down the road.

Jack met a quiet-spoken girl named Amy at the bookstore she worked at (Jack decided that Amy sort of looked like Drew Barrymore only a bit taller and a lot less worldly-wise) and they hit it off (they had magical sex at the end of their third date.)

Amy and Roberta took to each other almost immediately (which Jack found to be a good sign...and very cool to boot.)

Amy moved into the little house a little over five weeks after she had met Jack (Mrs. Stephenson was fine with that and she continued on as housekeeper/nanny…Lily, Rosemary’s sullen best friend, who occasionally accompanied Rosemary’s mother on visits to see Roberta, was not pleased but Jack saw no reason to give her displeasure any foothold in his life...Rosemary's mother, smelling of rosewater and red wine, said she was glad that Roberta would have a woman in her life after all.)

Rosemary sent Roberta plump greeting cards…always from a different part of the country…every year on her birthday and on Valentine’s Day and at Christmastime; Jack never opened them…he put them away in a cedar box for Roberta to have, if she wanted them, when she was older.

Jack and Rosemary never got officially divorced.

Jack and Amy never got officially married but 14 months after they met they had a son…Blue…which pleased them and Roberta to no end.

Press Your Luck

Last night I dreamt I was driving a bus over hills and dales while behind me they were taping an episode of Press Your Luck (the cheesy, kinda addictive game show from the 80's)...not sure how they got all of those people in the bus but it was a dream so I just went with it.

Ahead of me in another bus the ever-avuncular Gene Rayburn was hosting an episode of The Match Game (couldn't tell if Charles Nelson Reilly was there but odds are he was...)

At one point we crested a hill and Gene's bus took a hard right and disappeared around a curve...I kept going forward. And the road suddenly fell away and we were in free fall going down what seemed like a hundred miles towards a rather forbidding plain.

"Damn," I said, "this isn't good."

Behind me a cute, chubby redhead was bouncing up and down and screaming "No whammies! No whammies!" as I tried to figure how exactly to tell the Press Your Luck audience that we were all about to die.

And then I woke up.

What does it all mean? Hell if I know. I've found it's better not to overthink these things (they're just dreams after all, right? Right... )

Namaste, y'all.

Balancers

Years ago, I wrote a short-lived comic book called Stealth Squad (we had 3 issues published and distributed nationally.) The comic originated with the artist, my friend Philip C. Lane, who came up with some of the core characters and then asked me to flesh out the concept. It was a fun time...I'm a long-time comic book fan and having my own super-hero team to play with was cool.

After we stopped putting out the comic I continued to work on the backstory that I came up for the comic's "universe". Eventually I scrapped most of the super-hero trappings and used some supporting characters that I created to tell a different kind of story in a novel called Lives in the Balance.

While finishing that novel, I went back to source material with an eye towards creating a series of short stories to tell the comic book story we didn't get to continue. The series, which was going to be called Balancers, was going to tell the story of the world changed by the sudden appearance of people with superhuman abilities. This is, of course, the basic idea of the hit TV show Heroes...hey, it wasn't an original idea when I came up with my story either :-)

I only finished the first story before moving on to other projects...one day I may go back to it (I do love the characters and I have a wealth of background material created for this universe") but for now this is the first chapter of Balancers:

BALANCERS

(featuring some characters and concepts created by Michael K. Willis & Philip C. Lane for Petra Comics)
(c)1999, 2007 Neverending Rainbow Enterprises and Petra Comics

Part 1: “The End of the World as We Know It”

The world changed utterly in a flash of light and a clap of thunder. This event was witnessed by none save a small handful of people working in a secluded complex in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. All but two of those people died in the explosion that sundered the night and reduced the complex to strangely glowing rubble.

The two survivors…battered, bruised, and glowing golden in the crisp night air…struggled to their feet looking around at what they had wrought.

The man who looked older…Dr. Robert McKinley…felt tears well up in his eyes as he glanced in horror at the ruins of his dream, of his life. The complex was borne of his blood, sweat, intelligence, and hubris. The Laboratories of McKinley and Associates had been his pride and joy, the crucible in which his honor and glories were to flow. And now it was dust and ashes.

McKinley looked for other signs of life and one name came to his lips. “Maria?” He said forlornly. He had felt drawn to Maria, his brightest and most loyal young associate, in the past several months. But the pull of his work…and the bitter taste of rare defeat that had lingered since his wife had left him for some idiot accountant who “paid attention to her”…had led him to postpone giving voice to his growing feelings.

“Maria!” He called more urgently, mocking echoes of his plaintive cry filling the air.

The man who was indeed older…a man who called himself Anthony Reade…regarded McKinley with a measure of pity and an empathy he was loathe to give free reign to. Life was so short for them, he thought idly, and then he bent down to the prone body of the woman Maria. Reade had noted the unspoken attraction between McKinley and Maria…he had found it encouraging that the voluptuous curves of the raven-haired beauty had not been lost on his otherwise myopic associate. “She is here,” Reade said somberly.

McKinley, his clothes in jagged tatters, stumbled across the rubble as Reade cleared the broken mortar, wood, and bricks off Maria’s lifeless body. He knelt beside her, his mouth agape and mute, his eyes filled with tears. He took her into his arms and hugged her close. “…no…” he said, finding his voice. “She’s dead…”

Reade stood up, his dark eyes filled with tears of their own despite his best efforts to maintain his composure. He put his hand on McKinley’s shoulder and held it there while McKinley’s body convulsed with silent sobbing.

Reade looked around at the rubble…at the slowly dissipating glow that surrounded them and the ruins of the lab…and then he looked up into the night sky. “They’re all dead,” he said softly. He cursed himself for a fool and felt cold dread seize his heart as he contemplated the possible results of his actions. “They’re all dead,” he repeated with a gravity that made it certain that he wasn’t just talking about Maria and the others who had worked with them in the lab.

Reade stopped and listened intently. The insistent wail of sirens let him know that the explosion had indeed been noticed despite their remote location. The authorities were coming with their questions and their accusations and their inability to comprehend the magnitude of the crisis that had just been created. Indeed the magnitude of that crisis was only just beginning to sink him with Reade himself.

Reade shook off his dread and replaced it with a growing resolve to undo what they had done. If they could. To do that in a timely fashion, he knew that he had no time for bureaucracy…he had more time than he deserved but the rest of humankind did not.

Reade shook McKinley’s shoulder. “The authorities are coming, Robert,” he said urgently. “We have to go.”

McKinley, still consumed by his grief, looked up with uncomprehending eyes. Then he shook off Reade’s hand with an angry shrug. “I’m not going anywhere,” he sobbed. “Maria’s dead…everybody’s dead….it’s all my fault…”

Reade, knowing they had precious little time to wallow in grief or debate, lifted McKinley to his feet with surprising ease. “We don’t have time for this!” he said sharply.

McKinley, again startled by his associate’s remarkable physical abilities, was stunned into silence for a moment. Then he slapped away Reade’s arm. “We have all the time in the world, Reade!” he wailed angrily. “It’s dead…the dream is dead…all these bright young people are dead…everything’s dead!”

Reade narrowed his right eye and shook his head. “That statement may be more true than you know and we are the only ones who can do something about it.”

McKinley frowned quizzically but then put any questions he had aside and turned away. “Go away, Anthony,” he said looking down at Maria’s body, “it’s over.”

Reade reached his hand out and touched the back of McKinley’s head. Reade concentrated silently for an instant and McKinley stiffened, his eyes going blank, and slumped backwards.

Reade hefted McKinley effortlessly, cradling him in his arms. “No, my friend,” he muttered, “it is not over. Somebody has to save the world and since we’re the ones who put it in danger, we’re the ones elected to fix things.”

Reade walked off towards the nearby woods carrying McKinley’s comatose form. He glanced back at the bodies in the rubble and sighed heavily. “We have to make it right,” he said resolutely. He walked into the darkness of the forest as the sirens drew closer to the ruins of the laboratory. We will make it right, he thought, we have to. Then he drew his perceptions inside and searched for the One Thousand. The Balance is ever, he chanted to himself earnestly, the Balance is all.

Six Days Later

The pratfall wasn’t really a surprise…I lived inside my head so much that I often forgot that I was living in the world and bumping into and over people, places, and things was an everyday happenstance…that I awoke six days later in the hospital was, on the other hand, something of a surprise.

The doctors and nurses fussed and poked and prodded and waved lights in my eyes and, with a discernable (and, to my way of thinking, wholly unprofessional) amount of bemusement in their eyes and tones of voice, told me that I would be okay as I long as I remembered to watch where I was walking from then on. I thanked them and filled out the telephone book thick stack of insurance forms; I gathered up the get well cards (leaving the balloons and floral arrangements behind after noting down who sent them) and my iPod and wandered back into the world (from wheelchair to taxi seat to the cool solitude of the recliner my Dad had given me when I moved out of his house and into my so-called adult life.)

Carrie, my ex-girlfriend who had discovered she was a lesbian after we broke up (though she swears it wasn’t because of me…and I choose to believe that), had watered my plants and fed Giacomo (the haughty black cat who deigned to share living quarters with me) and collected the mail and the newspapers…in some ways, Carrie was a better girlfriend after we broke up than she was when we were together.

Giacomo sauntered over to the recliner in the aloof way that only cats can truly make work and, without ceremony, he jumped up into my lap and curled up in ball and went to sleep. As “welcome back” expressions went that was pretty good for an imperious cat like Giacomo and I put my hand across his jet-black back and smiled to myself.

Being in a coma had been pretty much like being awake…I had replayed the triumphs and tragedies and slights of my time on Earth…and I found myself laughing in the same places and crying in the same places and feeling sorry for myself in the same places over things days and weeks and years and decades past.

The theater in my head goes back over the same ground so often that it’s sometimes hard to separate the now from the then. And yet the show goes on…and the old tears and smiles and sighs and whispers become the new tears and smiles and sighs and whispers…and living inside my head stays a constant part of living in the world.

I went back to work a few days later (Carrie and Andi, Carrie’s girlfriend, picked me up because the doctors had said it would probably be best if I didn’t drive for a week or two and took me to the office.) Joan, my boss, spent a good twenty seconds (something of a record for her when it came to non-work related matters) inquiring about my health before she handed me a stack of work and left me to it.

My co-worker Deborah, who sometimes seemed to be positioning herself to be my future ex-girlfriend, took me to lunch and told me how she had spent a fair number of hours at the side of my hospital bed knitting and reading, drove me home and came up to make dinner (Giacomo acted like he liked her…more than he usually acted like he liked me…thus giving his approval for her to be my future ex-girlfriend; Carrie would be less enthused for some reason but Deborah would stick around just the same.)

The coma hadn’t completely shaken my habit of living inside my head…lifelong habits are not put to rest with six days of seemingly blissful unconsciousness…but it did seem to put it in more perspective (and the pratfalls, as a result, became easier to avoid…that’s something anyway, right? I chose to see it as a good thing and moved forward…though still often looking back…from there.)