Tag: fiction

Beryl Haise carefully extracted the last Marlboro from the cardboard pack and placed it on the table in front of her. Gently, she moved it to the middle of the place setting where the afternoon sunlight would best illuminate it. She stared at it fixedly. Xavier Cugat’s “Mambo No. 5” played on the jukebox.

Across the table, her friend Fisher Pinckney exhaled a thin stream of blue smoke and said “You know, Beryl, one of these days computers are going to get more complicated than women. Geeks like me will have to get a girl for relief.”

Disregarding this, Beryl said, “I can’t believe that bitch made fun of my accent. What does that have to do with the food?” She turned the cigarette so its long axis went left to right, perpendicular to the silverware. She shook her head slightly and rotated the cigarette back to its original position. It was a battered specimen of its race.

Fisher said, “Don’t worry about that woman. She’s bitter. She’s got nothing better to do with her time.” She continued to stare unhappily at the cigarette. He said, “How long are you going to keep torturing that poor old cigarette? Didn’t you quit in September?”

“I love this cigarette,” Beryl replied languidly. “I love it more than my TV, more than my little Toyota. More than at least three of the last four guys I’ve dated.” She paused briefly. “Actually, more than all of them if I don’t hear from Don before Thursday.”

“Does it count as a cigarette break if you just sit here and touch it for five minutes?”

From the other end of the bar, Cooper the bartender called out quietly “Pascal’s here. He doesn’t look happy.”

Beryl stood up quickly and brushed the wrinkles out of her apron. She put the cigarette back into its crumpled box, thence into the apron pocket. Pascal Faisani walked past, his face dark and self-absorbed, without acknowledging them. The jukebox band sang happily: “Ay-ay-ay Mambo, Ay-ay-ay!”. Pascal closed the door to his office with a thump.

Cooper gave a small grin and walked over to them: “It must be that review. He’s pissed. Now I’ll be mixing him martinis all afternoon.” Fisher Pinckney chuckled. His beer was almost empty, but he tipped the Corona bottle up one last time to avoid looking at Beryl.

She rolled her eyes and said, “Oh right. Like I was supposed to know she was a restaurant critic.”

“Wasn’t she talking into one of those little tape recorders?” asked Fisher.

“I wish I hadn’t told you that, Fisher. Anyway, it’s an old trick to intimidate the wait staff. And it doesn’t work with me.”

“Evidently not.”

Pascal’s voice sounded from his office: “Cooper! I need a martini, and I need it now.”

As Beryl left with martini in hand, Fisher said, “Well, it’s their loss. I love the new modern primitive menu.” He examined the big colorful chalkboard menu on the wall. “I mean, look at this: Pierced Duck a L’Orange. Scarified Game Hen. Here’s my favorite: Chicken Breast Tattooed with Squid Ink. Very high concept. A menu like this makes a statement. What was the one she really went off on?”

Cooper squinted as he consulted the rumpled newsprint on the counter top. “The Free Range Baloney Sandwich. Here’s a good quote: ‘The new menu at the Scarf and Bolt exercises all possible meanings of the word tasteless,’ close quote.” He looked up from the paper and added, with gravity, “The Free Range Baloney IS an acquired taste. I only wish she’d had the Corsetted Loin of Pork instead.”

“Pig-in-a-Corset? I like that too,” said Fisher. He hesitated. “Beryl didn’t really say anything rude to that woman, did she?”

“Naah, I don’t think so. But she’s not telling us everything. I think they knew each other. Anyway, it’s just a dumb throw-away rag. Hell, it might even improve business. After a couple martinis, Pascal will be back in high spirits again.”

They both looked up expectantly when they heard Pascal’s office door opening. Beryl walked back slowly, looking shaken. She gave no indication of what she had learned until she sat down next to them.

“She’s dead,” said Beryl finally, still amazed by the news.

“Good lord!” cried Cooper “Was it our food? What happened?”

“No, apparently it was heart failure. That review was the last thing she ever wrote. They found her in her kitchen face down in a plate of Vienna sausages.”

They all stopped and considered the significance of this new development. Fisher gave a low can-you-believe-it whistle and said, sotto voce, “Now THAT’s tacky.”

Moving quickly, Beryl reached into her apron pocket for a lighter and her cherished cigarette. She lit up and took in a long sweet hot pungent drag. The loving white smoke curled through her lungs, warmed her throat. And by god, it satisfied as so few things do. It did just what she asked; it provided just what she needed. It loved and accepted her. It bore her no malice for the long, long wait. How kind and forgiving the first cigarette! The other cigarettes she would come to hate soon enough. But she knew all along she was right to love this one.

Fisher asked, “How long this time?”

She smiled a crooked smile and leaned back against the bar. “Six weeks, three days.”

Welcome to the Star Chamber, a place where much is arbitrary except for the fact that new, tasty content will appear on this page every Monday morning.

Newness is common enough on the web; scarcely a day goes by without hearing of yet another web-based company based on some good idea you had last month. This realization leads us to speculate that you can actually spawn a web company merely by thinking of a good idea for one. In other words, if you suddenly sit up and think “Aha! Web-based video cat-sitting!” some poor grad student in Cupertino will have to start talking to venture capitalists about it. The responsibility this brings is terrifying, particularly when you consider that one day your name will bubble up to the top of the list just as some bozo in Seattle eats a bad curry and dreams up web-based fortune cookies. Next thing you know you’ll be cold-calling Chinese restaurants with laptop in hand.

Our aim here at the Star Chamber is to bring you good old-fashioned, hand-crafted content, not fancy protocols or new products. This week we present a graphical meditation about the Star Chamber and a very short story that hearkens back to the Golden Age of Broadcasting.
Continue reading “Broadcast”

Ransom looked nervously at the coil of rope next to his backpack. His left eye twitched as though to say: get on with it, they’ll be here any second. Daniel and Yvonne would be pulling their beat up Volvo into the driveway, ready to head out to Yosemite, and he was still debating what to pack. Ten minutes later, at precisely 5:40 AM, they had indeed pulled into the driveway, and ten minutes after that Ransom was on highway 24 headed east out of Berkeley, crammed into the back of the old Volvo with three backpacks and enough food for four days. And no rope.

Since he was an infant, Ransom’s mother had been consumed with the fear that her son would float into the sky and disappear. An early visit to an expensive medical specialist brought the news that although Ransom was no floater, he was a spinner. Ransom’s mother took this happily enough, because spinning was not fraught with the life-threatening dangers of floating. Spinning meant nothing more than discomfort and social stigma, whereas a true floater could never be sure of his next footfall.

Ransom’s great uncle Jay had floated out of his own backyard hammock one summer afternoon in 1934 while his horrified family watched from inside the house. By the time they got outside, he was nearly out of sight, though they could see him struggling vainly against the wind as he ascended. Since there was reason to believe that floating was hereditary, Ransom’s mother fretted over each of her children just in case.

Spinning was a more mundane affliction by far; more common and less dangerous. The tingling along the scalp and blurring vision gave enough warning to most victims to prevent accidents. Ransom was unusual in that most people don’t discover that they are spinners until adulthood. His first episode occurred during a stressful midterms week in graduate school. It was almost a relief when it finally happened, because Ransom had spent his entire life agonizing over the diagnosis he had received as a child. While walking back to his dorm room after a wretched fluid dynamics exam, he was overcome by a disconnected dizziness and a profound spastic twitching in his neck. He made it back to his room just in time to see the world lurch and spin steadily around, clockwise in his case, for twenty minutes straight. The first episode didn’t last long, but being the first it was by far the most miserable he ever experienced.

After several years, it was just another fact of life, sometimes even a good excuse to miss a boring party. The attacks occurred infrequently, maybe once or twice a year, and they never lasted more than a half hour. Furthermore, many of his closest friends were also spinners, most of them clockwise, that he had met at the Rotational Disorders Clinic in Menlo Park. Ransom discovered that spinners shared many common traits, being clever and creative as a rule, though plagued by a strong sense of dislocation. Spinning gave them a bond and a closeness that, paradoxically, tended to lessen the severity of the condition.

In fact, all would have been well with Ransom if not for the fact that yesterday morning he had started awake from a dream about Yosemite valley and dropped with a thump approximately eighteen inches onto his bed. He was unaware of anyone in the world who suffered from both spinning and floating, but he was terrified enough to rush out and buy some rope and several books on floating. Floating was extremely rare, though well-documented, and it had the reputation as an artists’ affliction, an almost romantic way to fall off the world. Generally the attacks came while the victim slept, though in some extreme cases heavy weights were worn literally around the clock.

Anxiety kept Ransom up the night before his camping trip. The anxiety made him light-headed, which only served to make him more anxious still. He debated calling his mother. He debated cancelling the trip. But in the end he kept his mouth shut, stayed up all night reading and then buckled himself into the back seat of a crowded Volvo. Without his rope. Perhaps it had just been a bad dream, he reasoned, and besides, how could he possibly explain the rope to his friend Daniel?

Predictably, he was stumbling and exhausted by the time they set up camp that night. Being low on sleep and extraordinarily anxious, he was concerned he might touch off a spinning episode on top of everything else. Daniel, in a misguided attempt to soothe, tried to talk Ransom into sleeping under the stars, but Ransom insisted on sleeping in the tent, the tent that was staked securely to the ground, and weighted down with his entire backpack and a half dozen good-sized rocks.

So it was that he awoke from a disturbing dream of drifting past Nevada Falls and found his whole world distorted and misshapen. The tent was wobbling wildly, and he heard through his grogginess Daniel’s voice yelling: “Yvonne, where are you? Run up the hill! Ransom, don’t move!” An instant later, he heard the sound of shredding nylon just as he realized a black bear was pulling his tent apart. Several things occurred to him at more or less the same time: he was terribly terribly frightened, he had left all his food in the heavy backpack, and Daniel was trying to yell something very important from far away. “Ransom, play dead! RANSOM, listen to me! I’m trying to scare him away, but for now, stay still!” The bear ripped into the backpack, flinging food across the ruined tent floor. This is how Ransom came to find himself under the large paw of an American Black Bear. His heart rate skyrocketed, something shifted quickly inside his body, and suddenly he knew he was losing his grip on the earth.

“Ransom! Play dead!” shouted Daniel, hurling rocks toward the bear. The bear snuffled around Ransom, then looked him in the face with a queer and knowing look. At that moment a rock struck the bear squarely on the side of the head and he lurched, removing his paw from Ransom’s chest. The next twenty seconds were a sheer panic of vertigo and disorientation. To his great surprise, this panic was replaced by total calmness. End over end over end; Ransom was amazed how much the twinkling fires in the valley looked like the burning stars in the sky.

By any measure, it was a sleek and fabulously expensive computer. Over his video link, the journalist inspected it carefully: a compact black tower covered with tiny blinking diodes.

“Aren’t those a little melodramatic?” asked the journalist, indicating the colorful lights. He checked to make sure the recorder was working properly. The link sounded good, but the video signal was surprisingly noisy.

“I admit, it is an indulgence,” replied Alex Dimedici. “There was a time when I pretended those lights were useful, but really it’s just stagecraft. I love blinking lights.”

“And this is where Bobo lives?” continued the journalist, indicating the black box as though he expected to see the little man pop out of the machine.

“Yes, well certainly he spends a great deal of time in there.”

The journalist looked at Alex and paused.

“I would say that Bobo lives here,” continued Alex, lightly tapping his forehead and giving a shallow smile. He hesitated and pursed his lips slightly. “Sometimes I think we are changing places.” He looked vaguely out of sorts for a moment.

Another pause. The journalist was hoping that Alex would follow this up without prompting. Sometimes the best way to get answers is to not ask questions at all.

“When I first created Bobo, I was doing anything I could to get recognition. None of the studios wanted him. I was working twenty hour days for months on end, my marriage fell apart. And still no response from the big networks. So I struggled for years making these independent shows for kids, you know, and when they finally caught on, well it went from nothing to piles of money overnight. Amazing really. But still too many hours of work.”

“So you traded one kind of trouble for another?” A shrug, a nod. “But you could have sold to the studios then, and never worked another day in your life. Were you bitter, too proud to sell out?”

“Well, this was my life. This is my life.”

“Is it true that the whole show is a one man effort? You’ve never had any assistance with the music, the artwork, the animation, the writing?”

“At first. But now I have plenty of help.”

Aside from the electronic clutter of cables, keyboards, and high-resolution screens in the studio, what the journalist could see of Alex’s house looked quite comfortable. This setting was at odds with his reputation as a brilliant recluse, an eccentric innovator who never spoke to anyone, never gave interviews.

“We’ve assumed for a long time that you farm work out all over the net. Is that how it works?”

“No. My assistants live in here.” He patted the side of the machine. “For instance, Bud now writes most of the music.” This was an allusion to another one of the characters on the show. A joke, maybe? “And I don’t ever worry about my mail.”

“You have an agent of some kind read it? But not all of it, certainly.”

“All of it, including our mail that set up this interview.” This came as a surprise to the journalist, the kind of visible, obvious surprise that gratifies the teller. “Yes, when the show became really popular, the mail came pouring in. Gigabytes of it every day, disk-clogging piles of it. I made a business decision that this mail should be answered: too many fad shows these days disappear quickly. The idea was for Bobo to answer his own mail – simple enough, you see? I already had the personality codes from the show. Let him read and respond, and I don’t have to bother with the rendering.”

The journalist was smiling warmly to himself, contemplating his editor’s amazed reaction, when he suddenly noticed that the tiny red light on his video recorder was off. Something was wrong. He fumbled with it. No luck. Fighting off panic, he unplugged some wires, rubbed the metal contacts, reconnected the jacks, and finally picked up a pen and a notebook and began scribbling. The flow had continued unabated.

“…of course you have to remember that these were children for the most part, so I had a good audience for tuning my codes. All the time I was training ‘Bobo’ to respond like me. And after a while it occurred to me to do the same thing with my own mail. In other words, my years of experience with Bobo’s Land showed me I could train the machine to respond like me. Well, I can tell you that by now the ‘me’ code has gotten very good, so I have to intervene very little. Bobo answers his own mail, and I have come to believe I answer my own mail, too. So I can spend all my time working in the Land.”

“Is that what you meant about switching places? You’re in the machine?”

“Perhaps that is too strong a statement. But I prefer Bobo’s Land, his town, his friends. And if someone else can be me in my absence, so much the better. Bobo and I are one, but I have left behind a kind of vestigial self to deal with the world.” Silence.

“So you can relax more now?”

“Yes, I would say. The show runs itself now. You might say I have retired into my own creation, and if I weren’t telling you right now, no one would ever know the difference.”

“Then… why are you telling me right now?”

There was a slight pause. “Because I think someone should know what’s happened.”

Something odd quickened the journalist’s pulse. He leaned in toward the monitor and stared hard. Alex suddenly looked uncomfortable; he shifted his weight and swallowed. “What’s happened?” asked the journalist, finally.

“I think there’s been an accident,” said Alex slowly, and he stepped aside to reveal his own decaying body on the floor.