Josh stared at the wall screen of his study. Page after page of the precious manuscript flashed before him, words and letters cascading to form a smoking jumble at the foot of the screen. Small, simulated flames rose from the piles. By the time he realized he was a victim of Writer’s Block, and tried to shut down the muse, it was too late. The image of a fifty ton block flashed on the screen and metallic laughter issued from the speakers.
A cold shiver penetrated him, as he considered the implications: his manuscript of Helicopters and Rushes ripped away from him and shredded without hope of recovery and with it, his first break into the closed world of screen-writing.
Responding to his panicked cry, Linda tore into the study. With a furrowed brow she studied him collapsed in the computer chair.
“It’s hosed,” Josh said with a wave at the blank screen. “Muse’s dead and the manuscript’s gone.”
“Let me try to salvage it.”
He didn’t object while Linda sat by the console. Her fingers fumbled as if they hadn’t seen a keyboard for years. Normally he wouldn’t let her near the muse, but he appreciated her support, even if she couldn’t undo the damage.
Years of work went into programming the muse’s neural pathways, and adapting secret software from other creatives. The best creatives were the best technicians. When he needed to create, he entered the parameters the editor supplied: characters X, Y and Z, personality types, dramatic subject and number of plot turns. The muse produced fifty scenarios. Josh sent forty-nine of them rejection slips and processed the one that made it. In one day, he had what used to take writers months to complete: a finished and polished screenplay acceptable to studios.
With an unruffled calm, Linda tried the obvious tricks of powering the system down and bringing it up, but the wall screen remained blank and red lights continued to blink on the console.
“What were you working on?” she asked.
“Helicopters and Rushes—due on Monday. Today is Saturday.”
“Yes.” Linda struggled with the keyboard; her eyes quiet as if nothing had happened.
“If I miss the deadline, the job’s gone. They can get any creative to compose this one.”
For several months he fed the muse thousands of best-selling action scripts and even hacked into other creatives’ muses looking for their secret software. He probably brought back Writer’s Block on one of those forays.
“Do you have it on backup anywhere?” Linda asked.
“An early version is somewhere on a secure site. If the virus hasn’t hosed that one too.”
“You don’t remember enough to write it down manually?”
“On paper?”
“Using letters like this.” Linda held up the keyboard strip.
“Type it manually? Write by hand?”
Linda’s oval face broke into a faint smile.
“People used to write manually. Put down on paper whatever popped into their heads. They’d look for a story inside them instead of having a computer concoct it.”
“Yes, you did twenty years ago. Studios don’t buy manual products.”
Linda stood up, a cold gleam in her eye. She paused in the doorway. “Is there
anything else you want from me?”
Long tangled hair fell on her shoulders. Her dowdy Caribbean dress from twenty years back fit loosely, unable to disguise her wide girth. He realized he had not enjoyed her for a long time. She could not accept what it took to be a successful creative, and complained every time he bought new hardware or traveled to creative trade shows. She had tried to create long ago, but had no success programming neural software.
“Is your com-screen working?” Josh asked.
Linda walked next door. “Everything’s dead,” she said as if only a light bulb had burned out. “The virus has totaled the network. Cell phone’s out, too.”
No way of communicating with the world except by carrier pigeon.
Josh maneuvered himself out of his chair and shuffled into the brightly lit kitchen. Stacks of dirty dishes stood on the counters as usual. Linda had no time for housework while she worked to prevent her online trading business from going south.
He called to her: “I’m going downtown for help. Expect me when you see me.”
His electric car whined into life and started down the mountain road. A two hour drive would take him to San Jose. He mulled over the names of people who might help him, among them, Robin who had assisted in building his muse. If only he had met her before he had run into Linda. Whenever he was around Robin, new ideas flowed with hardware and software solutions to implement them. Unlike most creatives, she was generous with her muse. However she wanted a relationship that was too close for comfort.
He pulled up to a corner quick stop to use the videophone and saw Gordon blocking the main doorway. The long-haired derelict in the gray coat haunted the parking lot for years. Josh occasionally spoke to him or passed him a dollar.
Gordon’s red eyes stared out of his wrinkled face. He shoved a pink sheet of paper at Josh. “You take this. Cleaning service.”
“Excuse me.”
Gordon thrust his face up close; his breath stank.
“Cleaning service. Take it. You want maid service?” He laughed showing several yellow teeth.
Josh took the flyer, an ad for a cleaning service, and thrust it into his pocket.
He’d show it to Linda, and would offer to pay for three months of help around the house. The derelict moved aside with a ceremonious bow and laughed again.
“Call the maids. They’re pretty.”
The video call went through. Robin’s lean face appeared on the small screen, and immediately broke into a smile. After an awkward greeting, Josh told her he wanted to stop by.
“I’ll be here as always,” Robin said. “Bring some wine.”
Placing a call with Network Repair Service brought him to a generic help screen. He typed in his ID. For “Description of Problem” he put down “Writer’s Block.” The computer voice promised to send a repairman later in the day. With luck, they’d revive the network, but he doubted they could bring up the muse. He bought a bottle of vintage wine and left the store.
Gordon stood in front of Josh’s car but let him open the door. “Call for maids in a row,” Gordon shouted through the closed window. “Pretty maids.”
***
Robin had not wanted to break up, and wouldn’t hear of his creative concerns until she had dragged him into her bedroom. She was a tall slender woman, wearing a flowery top and loose black pants. Her broad smile disarmed him, and he did not refuse her advances. As they kissed, his brain spun in circles about the disaster at the mountain ranch. After a while Robin withdrew, her hazel eyes searching him. When he told her what had happened, she turned away and stared at the wall.
“I suppose you want my muse,” she remarked with a toss of her curly head.
“You feel I’m just using you?”
“Yes.”
“I should go. This isn’t right. We agreed before that this relationship isn’t good for either of us. I’ve always been honest with you and that will never change.”
Robin smiled. “You’ve driven a long way, and the script is important for you.
Try out my muse but make sure no one hears of it. I don’t want to be busted and expelled from the guild for loaning out my muse.”
Passing into her attic studio, they sat before Robin’s muse, a large glowing cube in the center of the room. Robin’s long fingers drifted over its surface, and writing sprang to life inside the cube. She entered his story’s parameters and then helped him study the submissions.
“Those won’t work,” Josh said. “Your muse isn’t set up for action stories. I need people swinging from cables, gunfire, explosions and one short romance. All your stories are inside people’s heads, analyzing their thoughts. The studio will kill me if I give them character driven trash.”
Robin stroked his arm. “It’s what your story needs, and you need it too.”
To please her, Josh copied one script onto laserdisk. As he placed it in his pocket his hand encountered paper, and he drew out a crumpled sheet.
CALL TODAY—Pretty Maids All In A Row
Electrostatic Dust Cleaning
A Net address followed, and a cartoon of girls in bikinis making up a bed. He turned the paper over and saw lines of neat longhand writing. He hadn’t read cursive for many years but found the letters quite legible.
“Watch out! Tree on your right.”
“Cable’s about to break. Need some height.”
“Not this much.”
(Explosion)
“What was that?”
“We’re falling.”
“Never mind. Lots of girls on the beach down there.”
Robin rested her head on his shoulder. “Where did that come from? Now that looks like the script you’re trying to create. Just mindless drivel.”
“I suppose so. Isn’t it dreadful?”
“Find the creative who composed it and pay him for the story.”
“Gordon the hobo? He can’t produce a coherent thought, never mind trying to write it down longhand. He couldn’t have written this.”
Robin smiled. “Your problem is that you’re too smart to produce the junk that studios want. Your hobo is much better at it.”
***
Back home Josh found a vehicle from Network Repair in the driveway. A kid who looked barely twenty was rattling away at Linda’s keyboard. Her com-screen swirled with undecipherable writing. The muse was still dark. After a while, familiar menus popped up on Linda’s com-screen.
“I’ve reloaded the system,” the specialist told Joe with a wry smile. “But I can’t get to your backup copies. The backup site isn’t responding.” He zipped over to a new site, scanned what appeared to be a bulletin, and then laughed noisily.
“They’ve been hit by Writer’s Block too. You exported it to them.”
“Can you bring up the muse?” Josh asked.
“I wouldn’t go near it. You creatives know more than anyone about muses. I’d call the Bay Area Creatives League.”
“What are you going to do?” Linda asked after the kid slammed the front door. She stood beside him, a faraway look in her eyes. He took her hand and felt its reassuring pressure.
“Thanks for sticking with me,” he said. “But I need to be alone to figure out how to solve this.”
Unlike Gordon, he could not hand-write commercial dialog, and without the muse he was nothing.
***
The derelict sat against the dingy store wall under a yellow streetlight. Arms wrapped about his knees, he shivered feverishly in the night breeze and did not look up. Josh could scarcely believe that he, a creative, was approaching the smelly hobo for help, but such was his need. He pulled out the pink paper, took a breath and started to read:
“Helicopter crashes into the tree-tops.
A ball of fire.
Burning trees.
Arnold flies out of the side window and into the blue.”
Gordon’s bloodshot eyes looked up at Josh and his cracked lips parted in a smile.
“Do you have more of this?” Josh asked.
“Pages and pages. All mine.” Gordon limped to a rusty shopping cart and rummaged through its contents. Josh retreated to his car and looked around for anyone who might see him with the derelict. Luckily only several unfamiliar cars sat in the parking lot.
Gordon returned with a black leaf-sack jammed full of flyers and handed it to Josh. Each sheet was covered with handwritten text, pages headed and numbered: clean copies without corrections. Josh laid out several on the hood of the car and studied them under the yellow streetlight. They contained straightforward dialog with good sound bites. Unfortunately, the characters resembled ordinary people of no interest to studios or movie-going kids who demanded the larger-than life. But with some work, he could make the story work.
Josh took out a wad of bills. “Can I buy all these from you?”
Gordon scowled, drew himself up and clenched his fists. Josh stepped back wondering if the vagrant was offended by the offer of a few dollars for a best seller. Gordon snatched up the sheets and stuffed them back into the bag.
“Really, how much do you want for them?” Josh ventured. “I’ll give you a lot.”
Gordon thrust the bag at Josh. “They’re yours. You folk are always taking stuff from us.”
“Let me pay you.”
“Gimme five dollar for some coffee.”
“I’ll give you fifty dollars.”
Gordon laughed. “Fifty dollar? Coffee cost five.”
The gold coin hardly weighed anything as Josh dropped it into the dirty palm.
***
After dinner, Josh shut himself in his darkened study and sifted through the stack. Many pages were water-damaged and scarcely legible. He found military stories in unfamiliar settings, science fiction and even a couple of romances. The helicopter story appeared usable, though he would have to change its downbeat ending. He started reading another but found it excessively gloomy. Unproducible. The romance kept his attention and contained commercially viable erotica.
Linda appeared in the doorway wearing a nightgown. He threw her a sharp glance to show his exasperation. Ignoring him, she stared at the yellow sheets on the table.
“I’m sorry, but I’m busy,” Josh said.
Linda picked up a sheet. A cloud grew over her forehead.
“Where did this come from?” she asked in a voice like a tense string about to break.
“Gordon the hobo. He’s a closet hand-writer. He just sold me his entire life’s work.”
“How much?”
“Five dollars.”
“You gave him five dollars for all that?”
“He wouldn’t take more. Take a look at it. You can tell he’s had a rough life on the streets.”
“I suppose you’ll copy it and pass it off as your own.”
“I bought it.”
“Right.”
“I’m very busy and have to pull together a manuscript.” He started to pace up and down the small room, hoping she would take the hint and leave. With lips drawn tight, her unyielding eyes followed him. “It’s all legal,” Josh said “It’s not plagiarism if you pay some creative to ghost-write for you. You don’t even need to acknowledge him. What use to Gordon are all those sheets anyway?”
Linda had grown quite pale. “Why did he give them to you?”
“Hell if I know. Look, it’s a solution to the immediate crisis. I can adapt this story and have a trial script out in almost no time.”
Linda slammed the paper down on the table. “You don’t know anything about those pages. You don’t even know if he wrote them. Did he tell you he wrote them?”
“No, I guess not.”
“It’d be a good thing to find out.” She stalked off, letting the door slam.
He placed a video call to the corner store, so he could later tell Linda that he had asked about the papers. Greg, the storeowner, picked up.
“Gordon a writer?” Greg roared in answer to Josh’s question. “Well, it is possible, but the guy’s mind is fried.”
“I heard a crazy rumor, so I’m following up.”
He picked up a sheet. The cursive slanted uniformly to the right, the lines straight, evenly spaced, and each “I” dotted. Not what he would expect from a vagrant, but no one knew anything about Gordon. Like most street people, he appeared from nowhere, a man without a history. He owned nothing except for the name that people gave him. Did he write stories each night under a bright streetlight?
More likely, Gordon had written the pages long before he lost his mind and took to wandering the streets. Josh scanned in several sheets and began to cut and paste passages. After a couple of hours the body of the script was in place, but needed editing. He hadn’t written anything for years and scrambled to find appropriate words and phrases, normally the muse’s job. He stuck in lines he remembered from old scripts. Awkward constructions appeared but he let them be. He plugged in his proofreader and processed the manuscript. The dialog didn’t sound too bad. The editor would find some problems, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed.
The front door slammed, and he heard the whine of Linda’s car as it backed out of the driveway. He had to have really annoyed her, to make her get dressed to go commiserate with a friend. He hoped she wouldn’t spread the story that he had stolen a hobo’s life-work.
He flipped on a wall screen, put on his 3-D glasses and tuned into a rerun of a SF sitcom. Spaceships through starry clouds, making him dizzy. Young crewmen raced to and fro, and decorated captains yelled out “Red alert!” Not unlike some scenes from Gordon’s pages. With each frame his uneasiness grew, a feeling that he was missing something important. That he had just read the script for the show. Returning to his desk, he rummaged through the pile of multicolored flyers. Sure enough, he found a page with characters “Xero, Zeno and Yato, just like in the sitcom. The same fast-paced action and recognizable dialog. Gordon had to have seen the program and then ripped off the plot. Josh put the stack aside and turned on the word processor to review his manuscript, but he could not focus on the text. Questions kept churning inside him. How could Gordon have seen a sitcom only a year old, when he had been on the streets for years with no access to television or net?
As he flipped through the soiled pages, a line caught his eye.
“Joshua and George got into the boat. Josh grabbed the oar and pushed off.”
Josh stared at the familiar name, and a cold shiver ran down his spine. Turning the sheet over, he found a small grocery list scribbled in the right hand corner.
Linda did not return until after midnight. She strode into the living room and saw him collapsed on the couch. Her face was frozen white, an impassive mask. After everything he had said, he wasn’t surprised.
He looked up at her but was scarcely able to meet her probing eyes.
“This is yours, isn’t it?” Josh said, nodding at the pile of paper on the coffee table. “I don’t know what to say. Some of it is very good.”
Linda slumped into the arm chair opposite him, and picked up a sheet. A bitter smile broke from her as she scanned it.
“And you thought a homeless vagrant could write better than I?” Her thin lips
trembled and she let the sheet drop.
“You threw it all into a dumpster, didn’t you,” Josh said, trying not to stammer. “I am so sorry. We live separate lives and don’t see each other long enough to talk about anything important. I never know what you’re doing while I’m in there creating. Will you let me read this now?”
“You won’t like it. I’m no creative,” Linda said wiping a tear from her face.
“You creatives produce what the world wants and can sell, but I write when I’m alone, only because I have to.”
She drew herself up, looked at him coldly, and added, “I don’t want you reading my stuff.”
She swept up the pile and retreated with it to her room.
The End
The Creative
Copyright © 2004 by Paul Kieniewicz