Midmorning on Friday, Vanessa takes a pad from her desk drawer full of skittering pens and paper clips, and begins writing down the list of horrible circumstances: her mother going into detox, dealing with all of that; her mother having fled detox for points unknown; Annabel’s brother, and whether or not he hit some woman on the head with a brick; Lois DiNunzio, missing at first, presumed dead; the fifty thousand dollars that Lois embezzled; how to pay the rent next month because of Lois; the miniseries, the six different versions of the miniseries out there, and the eight different women who supposedly wrote the novel, or play, or whatever, on which the miniseries is supposedly based; all the producers and agents insisting that they came up with the idea or packaged the idea, an idea that now seems to have some kind of buzz attached to it; and that’s just a beginning on the list of horrible circumstances, at least until Annabel knocks on her door, and she waves her in.
“Got a second?”
“Have you and Madison made any headway working on a writer for the . . .”
“Not a problem.”
“Does that mean you have someone? We have to have a writer, that’s the thing. And it can’t be some movie guy. Has to be someone completely uninterested in art. It could be a woman. It could be a woman with no conscience. Someone who lives and eats and breathes the small screen, the social Darwinism of the small screen, the sentimentality of the small screen. Someone really calculating, really heartless, bloodthirsty.”
“We don’t have a particular someone yet, but we have names and we’re working on them. We’re ahead of you, and we’re expecting to, um, have results really soon.”
“Let me know as soon as you —”
“Well, that’s actually why I —”
“What? Are you going to resign?”
“Well, actually —”
A sharp, puncturing wound, here it comes, to go with the others. An awl driven into Vanessa. As if she’s a faux-leather belt being manufactured by some sweatshop preteen in Malaysia. She sets the pen on the pad, gets ready to write down Annabel quits before it even happens.
“A leave of absence, that’s what I want to talk about.”
And then Annabel launches into this explanation about her brother. Something has happened with her brother, a breakdown of some kind. Her brother was abducted, she says. She’s using all this language that you’d hear from cop shows: abduction, deprogramming, secret terrorist cells. Vanessa doesn’t quite get the details. Supposedly Tyrone hit some woman with a brick, as mentioned above, and then maybe he hadn’t hit some woman with a brick, and then he had taken flight, and then, Annabel claims, he was involved with some kind of ecoterrorist organization. Isn’t that just kids from Ithaca or Santa Cruz smoking weed and going without showers? Sort of like that. Not like the Red Brigades or Baader-Meinhof. Has he built himself a tree house and refused to come down? Has he started protesting in favor of hemp? No, this was some dangerous nationwide organization in which discrete cells operated without mutual contact and without any central organizing authority. The organization may have performed some kind of brainwashing on Tyrone. And on her younger brother, too. What is certain is that Annabel needs to go back to Massachusetts and be with her family while they begin the process of healing. This healing process might involve a couple of weeks. Annabel wears this resolve on her pretty face as though she has rarely been as sure of anything. She is already immersed in her journey of healing, and her resolve makes it impossible for Vanessa to complain about the timing and about how the office is shorthanded as it is because of Lois DiNunzio. How is Vanessa going to hire someone to fill Annabel’s spot? The arrangement is that you always have to hire your replacement, but Vanessa can’t say anything about it because of the journey of healing, and she just begins to sweat with anxiety about the whole thing, which is when she remembers another thing that she forgot to put on the list. Her period. She hates getting her period.
“I know you have a lot going on right now,” Annabel continues, “and I know you’re really concerned about your . . . Well, my situation is important, too, otherwise I wouldn’t ask, and I just need to be up in Newton, where I can be closer to what’s going on.”
Vanessa wants to point out that she, Vanessa, is at work, and her mother has escaped from detox, and she is here at her desk while her mother is hiding out with Emilia Commito, matriarch of the Park Slope ravioli empire. Her mother is attempting to punish Vanessa for carting her off to detox in the first place, and so Vanessa’s mother has gone to Emilia’s, where she’s lying on the couch watching talk shows and complaining about Mark Green’s mayoral campaign, and Vanessa feels distraught and awful and has been having Jeanine call the police and the hospitals every few hours.
“What are you going to do up there? Isn’t it going to be kind of boring?”
Annabel gives her a doe-eyed look, as if Vanessa has said something really awful, and that’s when it strikes Vanessa. Vanessa always forgets that the entire office is and has long been synchronized in this area, the menses. But Annabel doesn’t cry; she shimmies up some metaphorical flagpole of resolve, to rest there pridefully. Where the healing is.
“It doesn’t have that much to do with what I need,” Annabel says. “It has to do with just thinking, like, what’s the best thing for Tyrone? The best thing is if I go up there and help out.”
“I don’t really think it’s that great a thing for your career. I mean, I think if you are expecting to have a long career in independent film, you need to put this organization ahead of everything else. Like Adam Weinstein, who gave up his apartment so he could sleep on the editing-room floor. That’s letting no one come between you and the project. That’s creative control. Or Hope Oliver, maxing out her credit card, persuading her mother and stepfather to take out a second mortgage, you know. Then selling the broadcasting rights for millions. People do what has to be done. That’s the way to do business.”
“We don’t always agree,” Annabel says. She’s standing by the door. She must not be feeling as bad as Vanessa usually feels when the cramps really start roiling in her. Maybe healing and closure are even more powerful than ambition and sentimentality and cramps, and who is Vanessa to criticize closure, although she just hates the fact that anything could be more important than Means of Production. Annabel tells her to take care, and then she’s gone, and Vanessa thinks she’ll probably never be back again.
She puts Annabel’s name down on the list.
The intern comes in. The intern has a bag of doughnuts. The wordless intern, who looks as if she’s about to play the role of victim in a women’s self-defense class, in her torn fishnets, miniskirt, and black long-sleeved rock-and-roll tour T-shirt. The intern has brought the original glazed doughnuts of the Krispy Kreme empire. The intern sets these on Vanessa’s desk and then she stands there digging at a hangnail while Vanessa plunges a hand into the bag of doughnuts and selects one. Nothing could be better at the present stressful moment.
The intern has been associated with Means of Production for a number of days now, despite which Vanessa has not yet thought to ask the intern if she has a name, or any interests, or what she is working on. Yet suddenly she wants to ask the intern this information because the intern has brought doughnuts (the cane, that is, loosens the tongue), and also because it is definitely the case that the intern has not been here long enough to have her period synchronize with everyone else’s. She is therefore the one person who is free of abdominal suffering.
“Hey, so what’s your name?”
The intern gives her first name.
“Do you have a surname, Allison?”
“Maiser.”
Vanessa chews the doughnut in silence, doesn’t let on that she has heard anything out of the ordinary. But she has; she has heard syllables that could change her entire future, that could change everything for Means of Production in this trying organizational moment. Visions of a new office in a hip downtown location again dance in Vanessa’s head, likewise awards speeches, a country house, a personal trainer, cheese of the month.
“Do you want a doughnut, Allison Maiser?”
“I already had two.”
“Where are you from, anyway?”
“Santa Monica.”
“They have Krispy Kreme out there?”
The intern contorts herself into some kind of scorn that Vanessa believes is meant to convey that Allison cannot be bothered to think about doughnuts. However, Vanessa doesn’t want anyone, any staff member, even any intern, demeaning the integrity of the doughnut. Not in a bad-luck environment. Not now. There is bad luck everywhere, there are bad circumstances, and the least the intern could do would be to honor the integrity of the doughnut. However, because Allison Maiser is who she is, Vanessa says nothing. The intern is back to chewing at her hangnail when Thaddeus Griffin sticks his head in the doorway.
“Got a second?”
Griffin has not been around much in a few days, and when he has been around, he has been more than remote. Just another example of the kind of intrigues taking place out in the corridor beyond Vanessa’s control.
“Got something I want to tell you.”
He looks at the intern and then at the decorative palm in the corner, as if the two are equal in his sight.
“Don’t mind her. Have you guys met?”
Allison Maiser will not budge unless ordered. Vanessa points at the vacant chair. Thaddeus, running his hands nervously through his colorist-enhanced movie star hair, slinks across the office, clearing his throat several times. He sits in the empty chair next to the intern. He reaches for a doughnut.
“I’m not supposed to eat these.”
“No one in Hollywood is too smart for doughnuts.”
“But some in Hollywood are too thin.”
“If Atkins said eat doughnuts, people’d eat them by the dozen.”
He looks at the intern again, hoping she will remember some other assigned task. “The thing is, I got an offer for a big film, The Tempest of Sahara.”
“You got what?”
“An offer. The Tempest of Sahara, a big costume picture.”
“That can’t be the title.”
“It used to be called Assassins, but then they changed the title to The Tempest of Sahara.”
“That’s funny because —”
“Filming is in Morocco. Starts in January. Morocco. How often do you get to see Morocco? Yeah, and the wife wants to come. So we’ll be shipping off to Paris in December, for rehearsals, and from there to Morocco. Where we’ll smoke a lot of hashish. Probably be gone for four or five months.”
“I thought I . . .” Is the sinking feeling just a sinking feeling or could it be something worse? There are definitely going to be bad cramps today. Sometimes the cramps are so bad she wants to curl up and die. Is there ibuprofen in the desk drawer, skittering around with the paper clips and half-empty jars of antidepressants?
“It’s a great script. I think there are only three lines in the last half hour, and those are monosyllables. A lot of scantily clad women in their twenties. The ammunition budget exceeds the GDP of some of the African nations where the second unit will be shooting.”
“Are you —”
“I don’t feel like I have that much choice right now. It’s not like much else has been coming from my agent.”
“What about the miniseries?” Vanessa says.
What is it with actors? When a genuine emotion passes through them, a rare enough occurrence, it’s as if it’s a dental emergency. That’s how Thaddeus seems, like the dentist is going to send him out to specialists. He’s going to need implants, and his face is going to swell. But at the mention of the miniseries, he rallies, and the sullenness that perfumes him vanishes. He gathers himself up in the chair and starts riffing on the possibilities.
The networks can’t help but snap it up, he says. One of the cable affiliates, maybe. Lately, the cable networks are taking on a lot of this kind of thing. And Thaddeus says he has some ideas for writers, really great writers. And there are some subplots that she should really be thinking about. He gets so excited that he smacks the intern on the shoulder and then fishes a second doughnut out of the bag.
“The Mormon exodus. Think about it. I mean, they walked across the desert to Salt Lake City, pursued by murderous bands. There was a lot of division in the church at that time. The polygamy thing could play really big on the screen. You could have a strong leading man playing Brigham Young. De Niro. He’d look really good with a beard, a big beard, and he’d have all these wives, and it would sort of be like Charlton Heston not making it into the promised land, right? Brigham Young with his wives, and they’re pursued by murderers, going over the Rocky Mountains. They ring the wagons and they take out their guns. How many of the heads of Mormon households will get murdered? And not just a little bit murdered, but cut up and fed to the wolves out there? How many wives are cut down because the Christian oppressors won’t accept that the polygamous Mormons are God’s chosen people? And there’s never any water, and there’s a day where Brigham Young, he’s just had enough, and maybe he really thinks that Joseph Smith made up the entire business about Moroni, and he just doesn’t know; his faith is weak. He calls up a diviner from his midst! Brigham Young, he’s just always taken these women around him for granted, he’s got all these wives, cousins of his other wives, and he’s just always taken them for granted, and he’s never known that they had special skills, and he retires to his tent to pray to God to ask if this is the right thing to do. And the dowser turns out to be Brigham’s wife Honora, who is played by Susan Sarandon or one of those other beautiful older women! Will the Indians, who are supposed to be the special allies of the Mormons, allow them free passage through the plains? It’s a great story, see, and that would be the way to ensure that Madison’s new boyfriend —”
“Her what?”
“Yeah, you know. He wants to —”
“Oh, yeah. The Interstate Mortuary Services guy.”
“I heard it out in the hall.”
Vanessa asks Thaddeus about his last day, and he says he’ll come in next week to pick up stuff and after that he’s on his way. He stands behind the chair now, drums on its seat back. Thaddeus Griffin, of Single Bullet Theory. A guy who’s no good at saying good-bye, who’s no good at anything except holding steady a firearm full of blanks. Vanessa writes on her pad, Thaddeus goes to Morocco. He comes around the desk to give her a hug.
“I still work here,” he says. “You need help with anything, you know what to do.”
He gives the intern a wary glance and makes for the door.
It’s the sentimentality part that she can’t stand. With the menses. The mother bird feeding the little birds on the nature program. It was a while back, she was flipping around the dial, as if all she ever did was flip around the dial, and whether by chance or design, she landed on this channel, and there was the mother bird feeding the little birds the regurgitated worm or grub or whatever it was, and the little birds were really hungry, edging out one another to be the first chick to devour the regurgitations. What could be more tender on this earth than the little birds and the awful New Age music? The whole phenomenon was so irritating that she took the remote and hid it in the closet with the hardware and the cat litter, and she couldn’t find it for a week.
Maybe Thaddeus would do it, knock her up on a noninterventionist basis if she asked in the right way. She’d have to learn some basic romancing skills. She’d have to ask if he were having a good day and how was his wife, and she’d have to ask if she could help him with the crossword. Whatever that stuff was that people did. He’s fucked everybody else in the office. Nobody has to tell her; she’s not an idiot. Is she that much worse than everyone else? She’s a fashionable dresser, and even if she has not exhibited much interest in men, it’s not that she doesn’t like them —
“Do you want lunch?” the intern breaks in.
“Huh?”
“I thought I’d ask if you wanted lunch, because I’m going to go out and get some lunch.”
“What are you getting?”
“Tofu scramble. A shot of wheatgrass.”
“You just ate three doughnuts.”
“Well, if they’re in front of me —”
“Get me some fried dumplings at the Chinese place.”
The intern stands up and puts out her hand. For the cash.
“No one’s given you the lesson yet?”
Vanessa makes up the lesson on the spot. The lesson is how to extract a free lunch from the good Chinese place by claiming to be part of a movie filming on location in the area. You go into the Chinese place, you say that you are making a movie with the biggest star imaginable. You say you are making a movie with Julia Roberts or you say you are making a movie with Tom Cruise or a movie with Brad Pitt or a movie with Nicole Kidman, whoever. You use the name of the most famous movie star imaginable and you say that you really have to have this order as quickly as possible. The difficulty is that the guys in the Chinese place speak very little English, and they have grown up in some unheated cinder-block project in a city like Shanghai, and they have been beset by graft-addicted informers their whole lives long, and they probably owe some toothless slave trader twenty thousand dollars for getting them out of China, and they don’t give a shit about Ms. Kidman or Ms. Roberts or Mr. Cruise. And therefore you are going to have to start to cry, you will need to produce tears at the Chinese place, and you will have to say that your job is on the line. If you don’t bring these dumplings over to the trailer right now, your job is on the line. You will have to say that you are having a really bad day, and you will have to say that you are getting your period and that you are about to get fired and that you forgot to bring the petty cash from the office, and can’t they just give it to you this one time, you’ll bring the cash tomorrow, and you’ll also bring them the autograph of one of the big stars tomorrow. And you might mention that the movie is being underwritten by some multinational entertainment conglomerate, like, try Universal Beverages, and see if that gets the attention of the heartbroken maître d’, try saying “Steve Case” over and over again and see if that gets their attention, because they understand Steve Case and they understand Bill Gates and Naz Korngold. Tell them that Naz Korngold is underwriting the movie or that Bill Gates will give you the money tomorrow and that you will get the signature of Bill Gates or Naz Korngold, who is definitely making a movie with Thaddeus Griffin, and see if that works. And so your objective is to bring back lunch without taking any money and to do it fast.
At the conclusion of these remarks, Vanessa feels better, and there is a poignant light moving through the confines of her office, illuminating bits of dust. The light is moving across the piles of paper, the light is passing. And then the phone rings.
Vic Freese has been promoted this week, that’s the word. He is codirector of the television division and he is brimming with confidence, which is almost impossible to take. Vanessa has felt, in the week of conversations with him, that he is getting closer and closer to edging her out of The Diviners.
He says, “Lacey has definitely signed on to play Nurit in the Hungarian section, and we have been discussing the idea of her playing a second part later in the film, too. You know, maybe an old woman in the . . . uh, Mormon episode.”
“What Mormon episode? I just had Thaddeus in here, and he was making up all this shit about the Mormons; I thought he was just —”
“Van,” he says, “you have to stay up to date. The Mormon section was a condition of sharing expenses with Interstate Mortuary Services.”
“Interstate Mortuary Services?”
“A subsidiary of UBC.”
“I know who they are.”
“They want to get involved in content. Content is the future. For Interstate Mortuary Services and their shareholders. Every consumer that they can get acquainted with the Interstate Mortuary brand is more likely to call on them later, when they are confronting a fatality situation.”
“A fatality situation? Listen, I just want to make sure that we’re . . . that Means of Production is the development arm of the series right now, because we have all our people working on it. We have it out with two writers, and I’m going to see who comes up with the best treatment for the first episode, and then we’re going to move the ball forward.”
“You don’t even have a writer yet? Jesus. We’re talking principal photography no later than September.”
“We have names.”
“Look, I don’t know how long I can hold the place for you. There are other parties interested. Big names, names I’m not at liberty to reveal. There are people who think there’s theme park potential here. Everybody loves a water ride. There’s cross-marketing potential with the divining rods. The toy companies have been contacted. And did I tell you about the really great product placement underwriting agreement we have right now?”
“Uh, don’t tell me . . . doughnuts.”
“Exactly!”
“My people secured that Krispy Kreme financing.”
“Vanessa, don’t bullshit me. My assistant here is in close touch with the chairman at Krispy Kreme. . . . Hang on. Gretchen? Gretchen? How many calls have we made to the guys at Krispy Kreme on the thing? The thing! Hang on. Vanessa, did you hear that? Did you hear what she just said? She says we’ve made at least twenty calls this week to the Krispy Kreme guys alone. In the last two weeks. Their involvement was a prerequisite for all the talks with UBC.”
“You didn’t talk to UBC, Vic. I talked to UBC. I talked to Maiser right after I talked to you . . . what day was that? Saturday? I talked with him right after that. He didn’t mention talking to you. It was all me. I did the pitch, and I’m in touch with the guy. Don’t mess with my contacts.”
“How long can I hold the spot for you? Can I hold it forever for you? Vanessa, I can’t. I would like to, but I can’t. That’s all. Get your story together. Tell me who’s attached, and as long as they’re clients of this agency, we’re in business. I think I can get you the line producer job on the actual filming if you want it.”
“Line producer, my ass. How many days do I have?”
“You have a few days.”
“Because you have no idea —”
“I don’t care what’s been going on.”
“Okay, okay. Judy Davis for Brigham Young’s wife . . .”
“Are you crazy? Can you say the word? The word is Australian.”
“She’s not Australian.”
“She’s Australian as puddles of beer vomit.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Gotta go!”
The intern appears with the dumplings. She pulls her chair up right next to Vanessa’s desk and she spreads wide the plastic trays. She arranges the little pools of dunking sauces. She makes her preparations with a minimum of conversation. She holds up chopsticks in one hand and in the other she holds a plastic fork. Vanessa wants the plastic fork but takes the chopsticks.
The intern says, “I told them we were in discussions about a reality show called Take-Out. Who can deliver the items the fastest, that kind of thing. They knew all about reality television. They kept repeating Regis Philbin’s name in the form of a question.”
The intern has one expression and the expression is boredom. And the question is, in this time of unprecedented prosperity and budget surplus, why all the boredom? The intern eats a dumpling. And then, in a ruminative spirit, she offers the following: “My father is ready to give you the green light, but you have to tell him that I’m here. And you have to tell him that I’m going to do the location scouting. That’s what I want to do first. My career trajectory is up the production side. In this case, I want to be able to drive around the Southwest for a few weeks, looking for the right locations.”
Never once does a flicker of interest pass across her vampirically pale features.
“How do you know that he’s ready to give us the green light?”
“He’s embarrassed by my mom. By the divorce settlement. By his stupid girlfriend. He’s looking for a place where he can make a stand. And he’s embarrassed about the news division. He’s going to have staff reductions in the news division, and he’s going to have to do more tabloid television type of stuff, and he doesn’t want to, because the news guys are the only guys he likes. He’d rather do anything than have more reality programs, but he has to do it. And when he has to do stuff like that he’s always looking for something else. What’s the thing he can do that’s completely different from whatever everyone else is doing? A miniseries. Why would he want to do that? It’s stupid. A miniseries is just a bad idea. Who actually watches these things? Nobody watches them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some Civil War thing with Robert Duvall in a hairpiece? Nobody watches that except your grandparents and the Civil War reenacters. Get drunk and eat a lot of fried chicken out of buckets and then pretend to fire your musket at your neighbor the muffler repairman. Then you pretend to have your leg cut off by the Walt Whitman character. That’s who watches the miniseries. Nobody wants to do them, and that’s exactly why my father will want to. He’s going to want to look like he’s a man of principle.”
“You think I should call him?” Vanessa nervously wipes off her lips with a take-out napkin for the fifth time.
“He’s going to call you. But you have to be completely ready. If you don’t have a writer, lie about having a writer. If you don’t have directors lined up, lie about having directors. And when he says to fly out there, don’t take any meetings with anyone from the network where he’s not present. By the way, my scouting ticket has to be business class.”
Then they go back to the dumplings. After that, a couple more doughnuts. The intern gives Vanessa a disquisition on her interests. The intern likes Antonioni, the intern likes Tarkovsky, the intern likes Fassbinder, the intern likes Sirk, the intern likes Kurosawa, the intern likes Ozu, the intern likes Wenders, the intern likes Herzog, especially the Kinski films. She wrote her senior thesis on Kinski. And Vanessa makes up a list of movies that the intern should watch that she hasn’t yet seen, and she does it with zest, even if her stomach suddenly feels as if something is inside her, intent on gnawing its way out. When the intern finally goes back out to her desk to chew on her hangnail some more, Ranjeet and Jeanine peer into the office as if they’ve been waiting.
“Got a second?” Jeanine says.
Vanessa looks for her pen and her list of problems.
Jeanine wears an expression of forced joviality. Ranjeet is dressed in an expensive suit, and he wears a matching tie and pocket square, and he has removed his turban and shaved his beard. Ranjeet is beaming. He has been living in the office, Vanessa knows, because the kitchenette has become a chaotic scene. It smells like vindaloo in there. Vanessa should feel concerned. She’s sure he once mentioned a family. Maybe he’s not in close contact with his family this week. What she likes is that she has an employee who stays long after she has left for the night and who is there before she gets into the office in the morning. If he has to shave in the kitchenette, fine. He’s out there trying to meet with the big agents, and he’s talking to casting directors about the miniseries, and he’s going over the treatment, sentence by sentence. He’s a postcolonial onslaught.
“I am here,” he says, “to make a presentation. My assistant, Jeanine, has helped me in the matter of this presentation.”
What he does is stretch wide his arms, as though he’s doing some kind of special Sikh dance or something, and he says that the prologue to the miniseries must begin with the four fundamental elements, these elements being earth, air, fire, and water. Remember, he says, that when the Hun sweeps down from the plains, what the Hun brings is fire. Remember that the dawn of civilization is a moment of much fire. The hunters and gatherers, Ranjeet says, shiver in the dark on the plains until they remember that the fire can be fed. The fire can be fed with sticks and branches and it will continue to warm them. Turn toward the fire! This is how it is with the Hun, sweeping down from the plains, bringing conflagration to the decadent civilization of the Romans and the Saxons and the Gauls. So the miniseries itself, Ranjeet says, begins with fire, and the first image is of fire, and the camera sweeps through the forest at the moment when three separate fires are about to converge on a fourth, a moment of pure immolation, the kind that firefighters dread more than all else. And, yes, this fire could be anywhere, this fire could be in forests of the United States or it could be in Siberia; the audience doesn’t know at first, Ranjeet says. We know only that it is fire. And what feeds the fire? What feeds the fire is wind. And so in the midst of these fires, we feel the gusts blowing, we feel the flaming trees swaying in the gales, and then there is a shot from a helicopter, sweeping along the treetops as they burst into spectacular combustion, as if the conflagration is gobbling up trees by the hectare. And now we come to the edge of the wood, and the camera is actually dollying backward, down a hillside, a hillside already scorched, left with nothing but blackened stumps, as a cavalry of Huns flees out of the forest before the massing of the three fires, north, east, and west, before the windswept conflagration, Ranjeet says. They sweep down the hillside, and now the camera pivots as the cavalry of Huns goes past, and it gallops with them farther down, where, ahead, we can see a village of farmers and traders, and we can see now that the Huns are intent on descending into the village, and once the marauders have rushed past the camera, we see a last straggling pair of Huns, one with a crutch, and his companion, a Moor. Clots of dirt are flung up by the hooves of horses, Ranjeet says, fouling the surface of the lens, and into this hillside of ash and dirt plunges the man on crutches, falling to his knees and then onto his side. When he rises up slowly, he looks at the dirt in his hands. The fire is behind him and around him. The wind has changed direction, violently, and now the fire is flanking the little town of farmers and traders of the Silk Road, and the man knows, the man on crutches knows this, and he looks at his companion, the Moor. No words are exchanged between these devoted friends, but the sentiment is clear.
Only the pure of heart, only the humble of intent, the look seems to say, only the faithful, only the believers, can rise to a moment so fraught with peril. And then the man, Ranjeet says, lifts up his crutch, and what the camera sees, Ranjeet says, is the crutch against the flaming sky, here are the flames, and here are the black clouds and flames so hot that you would throw yourself on poison-tipped pikes to escape them, the flames on all sides, and I promise you this part could all be done with models and with found footage of American fires, but against all this is the crutch, and suddenly we find our hero, because that’s who he is, a hero, seizing the crutch in the forked V where he has placed his arm all these many years that he has been lame, and it’s like he has been healed in this moment of peril, healed by his need to do the thing that must be done, and he is holding the crutch aloft and he is saying these words, with all the anguish and grandiosity of a man who is saving an entire civilization from itself: “The innocents of this town shall not perish for want of rain!”
The Moor raises up his cloak over his head against another gust of the wind that is controlling the events of this storied day, and above him we see the great black clouds that have been gathering, the clouds that we have not been able to make out because of the smoke from the forests, but now we can see, because the camera is level with the clouds scudding over the scenery; yes, there are great black clouds that are heavy with rain, that are pregnant with the possibility of rain. And this is the moment, the moment of the pronouncement of our hero, when the rains begin. In a tempest. Again, Ranjeet observes, this could all be done with models and digital enhancements. There will be no need to actually film these storms.
“I tell you these things,” Ranjeet says, “because I want to say to you that I am the man who must direct the miniseries. At the very least I must direct the first episode, and also the episode which concerns the founding of Las Vegas. I am the man because I have the vision. I must direct.”