All he wanted was a simple life.

“I could sit here forever, just watching the foam on the river.”

“Don’t you think the rooftops look like a string of jewels spread across the city?”

But they had other plans . . .

“Honey, wake up.  Do you hear that?”

“Sounds like . . . wind?”

They took everything from him.

“So many homes . . . so many people . . . all gone.”

“God only knows how many horses and cattle we lost.”

“They say it wiped out a third of the city!”

“How can a man be expected to stay sane in the midst of all this?”

Driven into exile . . .

“They threw me in a hut, ten-foot square . . .”

. . . one thought, one hope, one truth kept him going:

The knowledge that nothing lasts forever.

“I don’t know where people come from when they’re born,

And I don’t know where they go when they die.

But I do know this: you’re just like the morning dew:

You’re not gonna make it ‘til nightfall.”

This summer, Jason Statham is Kamo no Chōmei in . . .

HOJOKI

Because the only constant in this world . . . is Revenge!

Perhaps afraid that her brother might seize this opening to take the conversation off on a pointless philosophical tangent about the all-encompassing nature of the “mind,” she made a tiny concession.  “But we’ll worry about that in a bit.  Before we can work on how you say it, we need to take care of what you say.  Do you really think you’re here to read my musical résumé?”

Peter had very little idea why he was there at all, but admitting so would be showing a sign of weakness, so he fell back on the oldest weapon in the sibling warfare arsenal.  “I just read what Mom wrote.”

The girl was well on her way to becoming a great filmmaker, for it was clear she thought no better of screenwriters than she did of actors.  “There’s your problem.  Mom’s just playing the proud parent.  They don’t need to know that I won that award, or this trophy, or that I’ve been first chair since I was a freshman.  The music has to speak for itself.”

“So let it.”  Peter was new to the biz as well, but he still knew the first truth of the actor: always pretend you have something more important to do.  “Just say your name and start playing.  You don’t need me.”

“Okay, so it’s not just about the music.”  Then, because letting the talent think that they may have been right about something is often fatal, she added, “And thanks for reminding me that you got my name wrong.  This is for a jazz combo, not an orchestra.  I need to show them that I have character.  Give the genius talent a human side.”

Peter looked at his watch.  His interview wasn’t for a little while, but he didn’t want to have to dash over there because he had wasted time on this introduction.  He needed time to settle into the interview mood.  Ironically, it is this process of “getting in the mood” that causes many people to blow the interview, but Peter, like most people, did not know this.  “And Mom can’t do this because . . .?”

“You’ve already proven that Mom can’t do it by reading her script.  If I do it, it sounds unnatural, and if I get a friend, I’m trying too hard to seem cool.  Older brother is just about right.  A cousin might be better, but you’ve got to work with the tools you’re given.”

“This is the only tool I was given,” Peter said, raising the “script” unenergetically into the air.  He wondered if three barely legible sentences written on the back of a used envelope could really be called a script.

The director considered this.  She had not had time to vet the script; it had taken her most of the morning just to figure out how to get the camera to turn on.  As they say in the movie biz, and various other businesses, “You can’t get blood from a stone.”  You can, however, get blood with a stone, which is why the director must be prepared to play the role of peacemaker, especially when filming scenes on rocky seashores.

“Tell you what.  I’ll provide a sample, and then you can copy it.  But first you’ve got to do something for me.”

“And that is?”  Peter was the kind of guy who actually read the Terms and Conditions that popped up on his computer screen before clicking “I Agree.”

“Lose the suit.”

A new character appeared on screen, her back facing the lens.  From that angle all that could be seen was a tremendous mass of curly red hair, hair so extensive it had not only its own personality but its own culture as well.  It resisted attempts to tame it like a cat resists being put in bath water.  It had been so long since this hair had felt the touch of scissors that it had forgotten what they were.

Other than that, this low-budget film’s leading lady was much shorter than her co-star, and while her clothes were more casual, her attitude was not.

She unsympathetically examined her brother.  Peter stared defiantly back.  You could see that already the healthy bond of mistrust that characterizes any great actor-director relationship was forming.  If the girl had been a more experienced director, she might have known that she would get much more natural speech out of the talent in this pose than when she stood him up like a condemned man in front of a firing squad.  Sadly, though the camera had been left on, it was out of negligence rather than as a cleverly candid approach to filming.

“First issue: wardrobe.  Who told you to wear a suit?”

As a man who hoped one day to be the one doing the asking, he took pride in his ability to hold his own under harsh questioning.  “A man doesn’t need to be told to wear a suit.”

“Translation: Mom said you should put it on.”

Peter skillfully dodged the question a second time.  “I have my interview this afternoon.  That’s why I’m wearing it.  Besides, suits look cool.”

Though she was facing away from the camera, you could still somehow feel the director roll her eyes.  “Suits look cool on some people, in some situations.  For example, they never look cool when the person wearing them is the son of the person they originally belonged to.  And since, unlike you, I’m not applying to be a bank manager—”

“I’d correct you, but . . . why?”

“—we’re going to go for a different look.  Lose the tie, lose the jacket.”  Peter did not make the demanded adjustments, though his facial expression left open the possibility that they would be carried out later.  “Unfortunately, the biggest problem isn’t how you look; it’s how you sound.”

“You do realize that people train for years in order to be able to sound normal on film, right?”

“Hmm.  If only there were someone in this house who had been practicing to be a public speaker since he was in elementary school.  Oh wait it’s you.”

“This is different.”

The girl shook her head, a dangerous maneuver.  The camera, fearsome though it was, narrowly avoided being struck down to the ground.  “Only different in your mind.”  The young director had already learned the first truth of her profession: actors know nothing.

He coughed into his fist, an awkward, contrived gesture that he had never before used in a public speaking situation.  “Good morning.  Or, um, if you’re watching this in the afternoon, then good afternoon, I guess.  And if you’re watching it at night . . . no, why would you be watching it at night?”  A not-so-faint groan could be heard coming from somewhere off-camera.

The cough was repeated.  “In any case, my name is Peter Hamlin, and I am here today to introduce my sister, Louisa.  She has been playing the trumpet since she was eight years—”

“Seven,” said the off-screen voice.  The number was delivered in a tone of exceeding obviousness; it was not the “seven” that was the answer to “In what year was Publius Quinctilius Varus appointed governor of Germania?” but rather the one that follows “What comes after six?”

“Right.  Seven.”  At this point the actor became flustered—well, even more flustered—and wondered if perhaps he should have spent more time—any time—memorizing his lines.  A more expensive camera (this one had been purchased for $35 at a garage sale) might have picked up the cold front of sweat that was forming along his forehead and preparing to rain into his eyes.  But Peter Hamlin was a fighter, so he continued his valiant but ill-advised struggle against the evil red light.

“She has performed in the Laragheny County Youth Band for four years, and was recently awarded the Most Promising Musician, uh, award.”  He looked up hopefully, but the light refused to wink out, meaning his trial was not yet done.  His script, however, was.  Peter Hamlin, who had once come up with a ten-minute speech on financial deregulation off the top of his head, improvised.  “Um, her parents are Paul and Joan Hamlin . . . her grandparents are—”

If this had been a full-scale feature film production, he might have heard a “CUT!”  Instead he got, “I don’t know what to do with you.”

Peter took the opportunity to collapse on a nearby ancient couch beyond the bounds of the impromptu film studio.  Free from the camera’s terrible gaze, he could relax, at least as far as a man in a suit and tie can relax.  “Let me go?”

“Oh no.  You’re not getting away until we finish this.”

The lead actor turned away from the director, got into his poorly defined character, and turned his gaze toward the camera.  In physical terms, this change of eye angle was very slight, but the psychological ramifications were huge.  Before, he was merely standing in the vicinity of filming.  Now he was on film.

People have many difference reactions to being on camera.  Some love it.  They live for it.  They feed off the energy of an imagined audience and become incandescent, transforming into someone they’d never before dreamed.  A recording device grants quickness to their words, grace to their feet, and a variety of mystical qualities to their hair.  They say the camera adds ten pounds—and for the true actor, it’s ten pounds of confidence.

Of course, there are others who do their best impression of Flick, the kid in A Christmas Story who got his tongue stuck to a light pole.

The camera is fickle.  It chooses the targets of its awful awkwardness-inducing powers at random.  The semi-willing lead in this production, for example, seemed competent enough.  He wore a suit, which—though slightly too broad at the shoulders and much too broad around the waist—had recently been ironed to within a thread of its existence.  His tie was done up in the rare Atlantic knot, which looks so silly that people only tie it to show off that they can.  Before he opened his mouth, at least, he appeared perfectly comfortable with a script in his hand.

There were other factors that didn’t show up on camera as well.  As captain of his high school debate team, he had gotten first place in both the Policy and Lincoln-Douglas Debate categories at the NFL (National Forensics League) National Tournament.  As valedictorian, he had given a graduation speech that a number of adults called the best they’d ever heard—to be fair, most of them saw his mother on a regular basis, and may not have been able to afford to say otherwise.  In college, he had stood up to present issues before the student congress so many times that he had been unofficially banned from their meetings.

In short, this kid was no stranger to the spoken word.  But in front of the camera, he delivered his lines with all the elegance of a man with a mouthful of ice cubes who was getting over a hangover while trying to impress a woman and learning to ride a unicycle.

No KYPC this week. The Wordsman is wrestling with computer difficulties. Sorry.

Some people think cinema is an exclusive domain.  If it’s not filmed on a Hollywood sound stage, if it’s not based on a bestselling novel, if it doesn’t have a special effects budget with at least seven zeroes and star actors you can read about in magazines, then it’s not a real movie.  For the purpose of determining punishments, however, the Universal Court of Good Taste has decided to adopt the broad definition: any clip recorded on a camera is a movie.  Any movie that someone else has to watch is cinema.

Much of it is awful.

The fancy trappings of a “real” movie, while not required, certainly do help.  Your chances of producing something watchable are much better on a soundstage than they are in, say, your basement.  It’s considered good practice to hire some actual screenwriters instead of having your mom write the whole thing.  You’re much more likely to impress with CGI than by throwing a faded old bedsheet over an even older bookcase.  And, while you don’t have to go to the A-list, you’re always better off not using an actor just because he has some spare time on his hands.

“And . . . action!”

Unfortunately, most directors disregard this helpful advice.  Fortunately for them, the Cinema Bureau of the UCGT can’t keep up with the pace of new productions any more than an aged tortoise with a broken leg has a shot at catching a bullet train.  In fact, they’re so busy recording crimes that they never get around to enforcement.  They work 90-hour weeks, spend their brief breaks staring at the wall because at least it doesn’t move, and liken the coming of YouTube to the Ten Plagues of Egypt.

“You don’t have to say ‘action.’  I can see the red light go on.”

“Apparently I do, because you’re still not in character.”

“Character?  I have a character?”

“A character that’s in danger of being killed off if he doesn’t show up soon.”

“Sorry.  He’s distracted, wondering why he keeps talking to some mysterious off-camera voice.”

“Oh, I’ll edit this out later.”

“Are you sure you can do that?”

“Just . . . read.”

Day 61:

Officer Escobar didn’t go back into Simon Park Station after that day.  Now that his colleague was back on the job, the subway tunnels were as safe as they needed to be.  Maybe too safe.  Anyway, for all he knew the woman had finally accomplished whatever the hell it was she was trying to do and was no longer there.  He could almost believe that (Escobar had once witnessed a starving man breaking a window to go into a house and take a loaf of bread.  When the man said he lived there, Escobar took him at his word, but this was just too much for him to swallow).

So Escobar, who got impatient on public transportation anyway, took the subway out off his regular route.

He did not, however, put the woman out of his mind.  Mrs. Escobar, whenever she would see his eyes glaze over, simply assumed he was daydreaming about baked goods again.  And, often, she was correct: though the images changed as the weeks went by—from Leftover-Halloween-Candy Bars to Cranberry Chutney Strudel and Pumpkin Pie Profiteroles to the incomparable Bûche de Noël—her husband’s thoughts never went long before wandering back to the Dough-Re-Mi.  But a man’s mind cannot live on cake alone, and so, every now and then, he semi-voluntarily turned his mind to the woman in Simon Park Station.

She was still there.  He knew this, and grew more certain with every passing day.  Until he saw her outside with his own eyes (even though they had once been called “the least reliable pair of eyes in the Crescenton Police Department”), he would remain sure that she was still underground, still leaning against her concrete pillar, still addressing her pleas to whoever happened to walk by.  He was also fairly confident that the pedestrians she spoke to were continuing to give her a variety of responses ranging from mild curiosity to just short of physical violence.

Because picturing her failing over and over again was almost as depressing as watching her do so, Escobar often switched to imagining what the person who finally answered her call would be like.  He had several competing theories.  Rescuer Mark I, the first to surface, was essentially a younger version of Escobar himself.  In addition to being in better shape than the policeman had ever been he was also a world-renowned pastry chef and had a considerably smoother way with words, but other than that they were very much alike.  Mark I played the French horn, because he had always thought they looked cool.

Rescuer Mark II was her knight in shining armor.  Literally.  The lance was a safety hazard, and the logistics of getting the horse through the turnstiles were nothing short of a nightmare, but hey, the classics are classics for a reason.  Mark II, who had a flair for the dramatic, was most often pictured charging down the entryway steps, knocking over at least one watery coffee stand, picking up the old woman and lifting her onto the horse in one smooth motion, and riding off into the sunset without even pausing to catch his breath.  The knight was too busy jousting to learn to play an instrument, but he had a squire who accompanied him everywhere he went and who performed regularly on the coconuts.  Coconuts are an instrument, right?

But it was the third iteration that became his favorite.  Mark III—whom, in a burst of creativity, he had decided to name “Mark”—was an older gentleman, but not too old, perhaps halfway between Escobar and the woman.  He always dressed stylishly but subtly, and his silvery black hair looked like the work of a laser-guided comb.  Mark was a man of the world in every sense; there was no great city he’d never visited, no notable figure he’d never met, no country in which he’d never narrowly avoided being deported.  He could talk for weeks about all the things he had seen and done, but mostly he preferred to listen.  Mark was proficient in any number of instruments, but his signature sound was playing soft, jazzy riffs on the clarinet.

The woman in Simon Park Station had considerably more free time to devote to this problem, so it should come as no surprise that she developed designs for dozens if not hundreds of potential saviors (she lost count after Mark XXVI).  Still, none of these prototypes bore much resemblance to the man who ended up responding to her plea—though, like all of Escobar’s inventions and the majority of the woman’s, he was indeed a man.  He was no master baker, wore no armor, and his range of life experience was about as broad as the latest cell phone model.  He did have one thing in common with the woman, which was that he also lived in a place where Officer Escobar never went: the suburbs.

At first glance it might seem that the suburbs would have been an ideal posting for the man who prefers to police areas in little need of policing.  True, the crime rates did tend to be lower outside the Crescenton city limits.  However, this was not due to there being fewer crimes committed but rather to their being less obvious.  The crimes of the suburbs are harder to define, harder to prove, and much harder to stamp out, but that does not make them any less wrong.

On this particular day, a crime against cinema was being perpetrated.

Day 7:

The Week of the Swapped Shift was over.  Officer Escobar was free to return to his usual beat.  He had no work-related reason to visit Simon Park Station.  None at all.

To celebrate, he decided to mix up his routine a bit.  Rather than drive to work as he always did, he took the subway.  Because of his lack of familiarity with LCTA (Laragheny County Transit Authority) schedules, he chose to leave extra time for his commute.  Then, partway there, when he realized that he was on pace to arrive obnoxiously early, he got off the train to walk around.  The stop at which he happened to do so was Simon Park.

No one but an omniscient narrator could ever know that he had planned the detour all along.

Despite coming from a different direction than usual, he found the mystery woman’s pillar with ease.  For a moment he thought that, seeing him as a normal commuter rather than an observer in the shadows—in other words, seeing him at all—she would walk up and deliver her trademark line.  But it seemed she was dormant that day.  He found her with her heard drooped, as unaware of the world around her as she had been when he heard her working on her sales pitch.

As he leaned down to check on her, Escobar thought he heard something.  It sounded like, “Guess I’d better get used to being stuck here forever,” but that didn’t make any sense.  Surely no one outside of a folk song could get trapped in the subway.

A little later, the woman opened her eyes, looked around, and spotted a paper bag on the ground next to her.  An understated logo featuring a couple musical notes and some scent lines was printed under the words, “Dough-Re-Mi Café.”  Inside was a muffin.  Officer Escobar did not eat muffins; he considered them health food.  Since this muffin was the size of a boxer’s fist and covered in chocolate chips, caramel, and walnuts, it was about as healthy as cheesecake, but he believed she would appreciate it anyway.  No matter how good they are for you, broccoli and lettuce will not cheer you up.

Like most people who aren’t named Alice and don’t fall down rabbit holes, the woman knew better than to eat food that appears mysteriously.  After all that she had been through, however, something like that hardly qualified as mysterious.  And a hungry person will eat just about anything, even if it says “EAT ME” on it.  So she scarfed it down and was reminded that there is good in the world.

“It’s still too early to give up.”

Days 4-6:

A sharply-dressed woman with a sharper eye: “I think the real question is: don’t you feel that something’s missing from your life?  See?  Now we’re getting to the heart of the matter.”

Officer Escobar had originally planned to take notes on all the old woman’s conversations, with the idea that he might puzzle over them during his off-duty hours while savoring a cream-filled something.  But it turned out that he was no better at taking notes than he had been in school.  Besides, the kinds of clues he worked best with usually had less to do with the subtleties of language and more to do with people’s hands being a striking shade of scarlet.  So instead he just wrote down some of the more interesting responses.

A series of people carrying a variety of brightly-colored pamphlets and dressed in a variety of New Age garments: “No, but have you heard the good news of Althena/Farore/Yevon?”

He did manage to discover one thing, namely, why the woman fascinated him.  It was not sexual attraction, not that sexual attraction had ever been high on his suspects list.  Escobar was a happily married man, as happy as the next, which is to say that he could not imagine a reality without Mrs. Escobar.  He could come up with plenty of fantasies, but none of them ever felt remotely real.  In any case, if he was going to have an affair, it would be with a woman ten years younger, not thirty years older.

A desperate but seemingly harmless man: “I—I think my wife might be cheating on me . . . with my other personality!”

It was her voice.  He had picked up on it the first time he saw her; he just hadn’t attached much importance to it.  She spoke with a sweet clarity that you would normally expect from a singer or professional speaker.  You might think such a tone would feel out of place in normal conversation, but somehow everything that came from her mouth sounded perfectly natural (or it would have, if she weren’t talking about some magic quest).  All he wanted was to continue listening.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t the one doing most of the talking.

One of King Larry’s free people: “No, no, you’re doing it all wrong.  First of all, you want to avoid the subway.  People are in a hurry.  They don’t want to stop for anything.  Second, don’t try to persuade them.  When people plan to be charitable, they do it with an organization so they can deduct from their taxes.  You want to appeal to their most primal sense of pity.  Don’t ask questions; don’t give them a chance to say no; don’t speak.  Just look.”

Whatever power her words may have had over Escobar, they were ineffective in convincing anyone else to stick around.  As they days went by the woman appeared more and more depressed, and Escobar, feeling sorry for her, fell into a funk as well.  He had two options: step in to save her by answering her call or stop watching her.

Officer Escobar, the man in blue, one of Crescenton’s finest, chose the latter.

In his defense, he couldn’t play a musical instrument either.