Oliver tried to get back to the romance story, but there was just no way. He couldn’t get past the possibility that someone was playing tricks on him, and Minerva was going along with the gag.
It would have been easier if was just about anybody else. He was sure he saw her talking to the man claiming to be Cant of the Warven tribe, and the ghost story-quoting phone call came from her phone. That was pretty good evidence. Never mind that the charge sounded ridiculous, and would sound no less so if the person he was accusing was someone other than Minerva.
She remained consistently supportive, though, and that really seemed genuine. There were quite a lot of people he could accuse of dissembling, about which he’d be okay. Wilson, for instance. He certainly acted genuinely honest about a lot of things, but there was a “jerk” undercurrent there. If someone wanted to convince Oliver that Wilson was coordinating some kind of involved practical joke, he might believe it.
By morning, Ollie was just about ready to dismiss it as paranoia. He went to work, thought about the story, got home again, sat at the laptop, and started writing that romance for Minerva.
It was four in the morning and Athena was worried.
“Where’s the rest of it?” Wilson asked.
“That’s the whole thing.”
“It was four in the morning and Athena was worried.”
“Yes. I couldn’t get any further. I don’t think outlining is for me.”
“I think you may be right.”
They were in Wilson’s apartment. TAWU was starting in another half an hour. Oliver’s latest story was supposed to be workshopped, but he had a feeling Wilson wouldn’t bother to share his ten-word sentence, however epic that sentence might be.
“Maybe I should have a look at your outline,” Wilson said.
“No! No, that’s… I mean, I’m not used to writing stuff that isn’t meant to be read, but this isn’t meant to be read.”
Wilson nodded. “That might be why the outline exercise didn’t work too well. Do you take notes? Ordinarily, when you write.”
“No, I mostly just write.”
“You don’t write throwaway scenes or character sketches?”
“No. Am I supposed to be doing that? You never said.”
Oliver got the sense that maybe he was supposed to be doing that.
The more time he spent talking to Wilson the more Oliver got the idea that he had a problem and Wilson was trying to fix that problem, and the problem had to do with Ollie’s inability to finish things. He didn’t think he had any such problem; it was only that he never gave himself more than a week.
Although, it was true that for the most part he stopped when he couldn’t think of anything else to write, and that was going to be a problem. Stories should be finished, and one day he would have to figure out what that was like. It just seemed premature to call it a problem.
“Not necessarily,” Wilson said. “Some people do that: full character sketches, backstory scenes that won’t be going in the book, that sort of thing. I knew someone in school who had a whole index card system, and another who used to draw maps of her scenes. It’s different for everyone. I tried it; it didn’t really work for me either. I was just curious if you did it.”
From the kitchen, Minerva asked, “What’s she worried about?”
“Athena? I don’t know,” Oliver said.
“Has to be something.”
She emerged with a bowl of cheese doodles and something that might have been hummus. She put it out for each TAWU, but Ollie had never tried it. He wasn’t sure if he was the kind of person who liked hummus, but felt like this was not the time to find out.
She put the food on the coffee table in the middle of the room and sat on the couch.
“Well, sure, it’s something,” he agreed.
“I mean, you know she’s worried. You said so. Was there a noise in the yard? Does she think her husband’s cheating on her? Maybe she’s late for work. Is there a lump in her breast?”
“Those are all good ideas,” Oliver said. “But I don’t know if they’re right or not. I’m not even sure about the sentence I did write.”
That one sentence had gone through several iterations in order to determine if there was a way to get it to initiate a second sentence, and from thence a third, but nothing helped. There was, Athena was worried and It was four in the morning, and Athena, at four in the morning, was worried.
One he nearly went with was Four in the morning was when the worry got to Athena, and that led to a partial sentence that he couldn’t quite push through. It probed the idea that Athena got worried at four every morning, and this was a notable observation, but then Oliver couldn’t figure out what was causing her to be worried at the same time of day, what even could do that. It would have to be something where the clock turning 4:00 actually triggered concern, and that was just odd. It seemed like something he shouldn’t be getting into right off the bat. Like, a deep childhood trauma or something.
So he went back to It was four in the morning and Athena was worried and that felt like a really solid sentence.
He just didn’t know what happened after that.
“That’s crazy,” Minerva said. “It’s your story, go where you want with it.”
“I know, but… she hasn’t told me what she’s worried about.”
“Athena hasn’t,” Wilson said, for clarification.
“Right.”
Wilson nodded. “I understand.”
“I don’t,” Minerva said.
“It’s his first female main character, and she’s not talking to him right now,” Wilson said. “It happens.”
“So if you made the male character—”
“Otis,” Oliver said.
“Otis! Perfect. If you made Otis the main character you’d have more?”
“Probably, yes. I don’t really know.”
Minerva got up from the couch, shaking her head as she walked away.
“Writers,” she muttered under her breath.
“Well, I get it,” Wilson said. “You may not be ready to work the point-of-view of someone who’s that different from you. It’s okay. It’ll come with time. And outlining? That’s something you need to figure out for yourself if it’s right or not.”
“I lost interest in the story before I even started writing.”
“That could also be why you don’t know what Athena’s worried about. You just don’t care.”
Outlining ended up being the theme of the day. Nobody had a piece to work on for the TAWU meeting, so it became an open discussion that was a lot more interesting than the usual workshop breakdown. Oliver secretly preferred these kinds of meetings, because it meant he didn’t have to come up with something nice to say about someone else’s stuff. He even preferred it to the weeks when his own stories were getting dissected, because that was more nerve-wracking than anything.
Then Wilson gave a new letter—W—and they were about to break up, when Ivor brought up his piece from the prior week.
“I wanted to know what Oliver thought of it,” Ivor said.
At that particular moment, Oliver was working on his thriller idea, which he was coupling with the letter W, because that letter seemed to make all the difference. Someday he would have to figure out why Wilson’s prompts worked so well, hopefully before they ran out of letters.
He was thus unaware that he’d been spoken to, at first. W was for Weapon, and the weapon was a dangerous compound developed in a secret lab, and the hero—Orson—was going to have to face off with his arch enemy, a Russian spy-turned-mercenary-for-hire named…
“Ollie,” Tandy said, snapping him out of it.
“Sorry,” he said, “there was a…” There was a crash landing, and there was a fight, and a last-minute switch…
“What was the question?” Oliver asked.
“I wanted to know what you thought of What’s the Matter With Matteo,” Ivor said. “You recall, my story.”
“Didn’t I give notes? I thought I gave notes.”
“You did, yes, but I got the sense that you were holding back.”
Oliver looked around at the members of TAWU, not quite sure what was happening. The truth was, they all held back when a “just okay” story came from one of them. It was sort of an unspoken understanding, to be gentle with someone who couldn’t do all that much better. They applauded incremental improvement.
Nobody ever really wanted honesty. And if they did, wanting it specifically from Oliver—rather than Wilson, or just about anyone else—didn’t make any sense to him.
He looked at Wilson, who shrugged, and gave a little nod. Go ahead, he seemed to be saying.
“I thought it was pretty cliché,” Ollie said.
There was a pause. People nodded, and waited for him to continue. He thought maybe part of the weirdness came from the fact that these people legitimately valued his opinion.
“Go on,” Ivor said.
“I mean, it’s obvious from the outset that this isn’t… I have a problem with these kinds of stories, because I can’t believe anyone would really be fooled.”
“Do you mean cliché or trope?” Wilson asked.
“I don’t even know. This is a certain kind of story, and Ivor is hitting all the plot points. Maybe that’s the problem, or… not problem, that’s the wrong word. Maybe the difference between a trope and a cliché is that a trope is a plot point, a cliché is hitting that plot point exactly when the reader is expecting it.”
“Your issue is that you expected it,” Ivor said.
“You telegraphed everything. Foreshadowing is great, but it can’t be obvious. And when you’re foreshadowing something that’s not just a trope, but a trope that’s going to manifest exactly when the reader expects it to just makes it that much harder to tolerate. Now you have a cliché that’s being heralded in advance by another cliché, the ‘obvious foreshadowing’.”
“You make a lot of great points,” Wilson said. “How can we tell a story that has been told a hundred times before, give readers who like that story what they want, and at the same time surprise them with something new? Is there a way to do that? What do you think, Oliver?”
“In the context of dream sequence stories?” Ollie asked.
“Just in general. You’re becoming our expert on genre writing, and God only knows genre writing is stacked up with this kind of issue.”
“Well…” Oliver’s voice was drowned out by the WHUP-WHUP-WHUP sound of a helicopter.
It wasn’t the kind of sound he expected to hear while sitting in a condo on the seventh floor of a building in the middle of a city.
Everyone in TAWU looked up, first, in the event the ceiling had either vanished or grown a particularly large ceiling fan in the past few seconds. Then Minerva ran from the kitchen.
“Holy crap, you guys, look!”
She pointed to, and then headed for, the windows facing Tenth Avenue.
There were five big bay windows with tastefully chosen curtains and shades, which were mostly closed at the moment to keep the midday sun from overheating the place. There was plenty of space for each of them to get a decent view of what was transpiring outside.
A helicopter was crashing, was the essence of it, but that simple explanation didn’t come close to adequately capturing the experience of witnessing this happen. The rotor blades were incredibly loud at this point, because the chopper was essentially at eye level with them. Black smoke was gushing out of the top, and there was evidence of an impact on the side of it.
The tail of the helicopter appeared to be having a disagreement with the pilot, as it kept swinging about left and right, twice coming within feet of the windows, or so it seemed. Oliver thought there probably should have been a moment there when one of them realized their lives were in danger, but nobody said so and nobody moved.
Still, one bad twitch, and that tail would be aggressively joining TAWU’s membership roster.
The helicopter continued in a downward direction, at roughly elevator speed, threatening to completely lose control and veer into the side of one of the buildings right up until it hit the ground. There, the rotors had a disagreement with a few of the trees, resulting in a new, different kind of horrible noise.
They didn’t see the crash. The angle of their view of the street was such that the only way to get a better perspective was to open a window and look down, and nobody was willing to do that, perhaps out of fear that additional helicopters would be falling from the sky shortly.
“I don’t know about you guys,” Wilson said, “but I want to go see a helicopter crash up close.”
They opted for the stairs. That just seemed like a logical choice given the circumstances, even though there was no problem with the power and the building hadn’t been touched by the crash, so far as they knew. Take the stairs in an emergency: that was the rule. This certainly looked like an emergency.
The scene on the street was one of stunned silence, at least at first. There was the mangled crash of a helicopter sitting in the middle of the vertical park not far from the statue of a long-dead general and his horse. The stallion was up on hind legs, as if it too was alarmed by what just happened.
Smoke continued to billow from the top of the chopper, which was around where Oliver imagined the engine was probably located. The smoke smelled like motor oil, and also the odor a car gives off when it overheats. Every time the wind blew—which was often on Tenth Avenue—the smoke was forced down and the crash scene disappeared into it.
The damage to the park, immediately around the crash, was pretty bad. Trees had been chopped down, and dirt had been kicked up. Ollie began to wonder if the helicopter landed on anyone. It was, to this point, something that had only occurred in the abstract, despite his proximity to it. The sound of the rotors was real, and the smoke was definitely real, but it still felt like an especially vivid movie special effect.
But the next thing that would happen if this were a film was that the wreckage would explode, and that hadn’t transpired. Everyone was expecting it to, though, because nobody was moving. Cars had all stopped in the street. Some hadn’t moved since the crash, evidently, since they were covered in dirt. People came out of buildings on both sides, and the already-outside pedestrians were frozen in place. About the only thing all of them had decided to do—aside from not move—was to broadcast as much of this as they could on social media: cell phones were in almost everyone’s hands.
Oliver could hear sirens in the distance, which served as an auditory reminder that someone was probably in trouble within the wreck.
It was Minerva, of all people, who decided to do something.
The members of TAWU—there were eight of them on this day—and Minerva had gotten as far as the stoop leading up to the building before spreading out on the sidewalk, where they joined the growing crowd of onlookers and amateur cell phone cinematographers. Minnie didn’t have her phone out. She was polling the bystanders.
“Did anyone see the pilot?” she was asking.
Nobody had, apparently.
“Someone should help him,” she said, to Wilson, but loud enough for everyone to think maybe she was either talking to or about them.
“He’s probably… he probably didn’t make it,” Wilson said. “The fire department’s on the way, hear the sirens?”
“That was a controlled landing, Wilson. He made it to the ground. If he’s stuck, he’ll suffocate before the trucks make it through the traffic.”
“I don’t know what you expect anyone to do. That thing’s going to explode any second now.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Minerva…”
They had a silent glare argument for a few seconds, and then she stepped away.
“Ollie, come with me,” she said.
“What?”
“It’ll be fine, come with me.”
“I agree with Wilson,” he said. “You should stay here.”
“Fine, I’ll go in myself.”
Without any further preamble, Minerva took off her T-shirt. She had a bra on underneath, so it wasn’t entirely scandalous, but it was still an extremely unexpected gesture. Then, holding the shirt up to her face, she dashed across the street and disappeared into the smoke.
“Dammit,” Oliver said, because for whatever reason, her doing that meant he had to do it too. He would have to assess the soundness of this logic later, but all he knew in the moment was that as soon as Minnie ran in, he was going to have to do the same thing.
Wilson didn’t, which was another thing Ollie would be reviewing later.
He took off his shirt and held it up to his face. According to the safety videos of his childhood, the shirt was supposed to be a towel and it was supposed to be wet, so he didn’t know what good it was really going to do, but it had to be better than nothing.
The smoke burned his eyes, and the motor oil smell cut right through the shirt and stung his nose. His vision was thick with tears well before he reached the impact point in the middle of it all.
“Minerva!” he called out. That close to the crash, he couldn’t see much more than a meter in any direction, which was fine for avoiding obstacles but not so good if he’s looking for someone who’s moving. He discovered a miraculously undamaged park bench, and a lot of bits of helicopter wreckage, but no girl.
“Over here!”
He headed for her voice.
“Be careful,” she shouted. “There’s debris all over the place.”
“I noticed.”
She’d found the cockpit. The ground had crushed the helicopter’s nose. The pilot was inside, looking mostly undamaged, but not apparently conscious. Minerva was struggling to widen a tear in the hull to get to him. This meant using her shirt against the edge of the torn metal, so as not to cut her hands.
“Help me pull this open.”
Using his shirt the same way, Oliver wrapped his fingers around the lip of the tear, and they pulled on a succession of three-counts.
“Thanks for coming,” she said, between pulls.
“Sure.”
“Hey, this is military, did you notice?”
He hadn’t. He didn’t know if he would recognize a military helicopter over a non-military one, and didn’t really know how she could but that would have to be brought up later.
“It’s not budging,” he said.
“Keep trying.”
“Is he even breathing?”
“He’s breathing. Pull!”
They pulled some more. It wasn’t working.
“Here,” someone behind them said, “let me help.”
The voice should have belonged to Wilson, because any reasonable person would expect Wilson to eventually throw in with his girlfriend on something like this, if only to save face. But it wasn’t Wilson.
It was the giant bearded man from before.
“Oh, good,” Minerva said. “Get over here.”
“Stand aside,” he growled, to both of them. They did so. Minerva handed him her shirt.
The man crouched down, fixed his hands against the breach in the hull, braced himself properly, and then pulled. The steel screamed, but surrendered.
“That’s good!” Minnie said. She jumped through the breach and disappeared. The man pulled some more, and opened up a wider hole, in the meantime, which was useful a few seconds later.
Minvera’s head popped out of the opening.
“A little help!” She said, pushing a semiconscious pilot through. She got the head and shoulders out, and then the large man had him by the collar. Ollie jumped in and helped, or tried to.
“I have him, sorcerer,” the man who claimed to be Cant said.
“Why are you calling me that?”
He looked bewildered at the question.
“I can carry him out,” he said, rather than answering. “You two, get out of this smoke. It isn’t safe.”
He was large enough to cradle the pilot like a child, and so obviously needed no assistance. Oliver decided to save his many additional questions for a time when he wasn’t in the middle of permanently damaging his lungs.
“Minnie, he’s clear, let’s go,” he said, through the hole.
“Find the door,” she said. He couldn’t see her; it sounded like she’d gone deeper into the helicopter.
“We have to get out of here.”
Already, the large man and the pilot were out of view, and the sirens sounded very nearby.
“There might be someone else inside,” she said, somewhat more distantly.
Dammit, he thought, before starting in on an uncontrollable coughing fit. He held the shirt up to his face. He’d been right; it didn’t help at all. If anything, it made the smell of the burning motor oil something he could also taste.
Oliver felt his way around the side of the aircraft until he found one of the doors. While not fully on its side, the helicopter hadn’t landed flat, and it was leaning in the direction of the door.
He worked his way back around to the front, then along the other side until he reached the opposite door. It was pointing toward the sky at a twenty-degree angle, but it could be opened.
He had his hand on the door, when it flew open from the inside.
“There you are,” Minerva said.
“Anyone else in there?”
“Nobody breathing,” she said, matter-of-factly. Ollie was pretty sure she was saying there were dead bodies inside and she was cool with that, which was alarming on many levels, but since he could barely see or breathe, he just added it to the list of issues requiring unpacking in the near future, and proceeded from there.
“Let’s get out of this smoke,” he said.
“Yeah. Take this.”
She handed over a large backpack.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Help me out.”
She took his hand and extricated herself from the craft, which was almost more effort than getting her into it in the first place, as she had the additional weight of a second bag on her back, and the angle of the doorway to the ground made it all that much more awkward.
“What are we doing with these bags?” he asked again.
“Grab yours, let’s go find some air.”
“Minnie…”
“I’m just saving their gear, I figure it’s important. Come on, this thing’s gonna blow any minute.”
The helicopter never did blow up, which was equal parts good news and disappointing. In the real world, a large metal craft blowing up would likely create a number of projectiles, and that would be bad for everyone around it. It was good that it didn’t do that, then.
Alternatively, it would have been pretty cool. Oliver would have enjoyed seeing it, from a safe distance.
What did happen was that fire trucks arrived and began hosing down the wreckage, the street got buttoned up by the police, and that was about all.
Oliver was told the pilot made it to an ambulance, which drove off before he and Minnie emerged from the smoke. He wanted to know more about the pilot and what could have caused the crash, but he suspected he’d have to wait for the news to uncover that information.
He also wanted to know what happened to the man who got the pilot to the ambulance, but nobody seemed to have that answer. Oliver talked to several people before heading back upstairs, and half of them didn’t remember the man at all. The other half did, but couldn’t say where he went.
“So who was that guy?” he asked Minerva, after they relocated to the condo and got a change of clothes. Ollie didn’t have any clothing stored there, but he was essentially the same size as Wilson, so there were options. Wilson certainly had no objections, although that may have stemmed from some form of guilt for not having accompanied his own girlfriend into danger. It was hard to tell, because nobody was talking about it.
Oliver thought that was probably for the best. If there was going to be an argument about it—and how could there not be?—he’d rather not be there when it happened.
“I dunno, some rando,” Minerva said with a shrug.
“You didn’t know him?”
“No, didn’t you?”
“No,” Ollie said. He was pretty positive he didn’t believe her, but had no idea how to go about challenging her.
“Thought you did. Huh. Well, cool for him, showing up like that. We weren’t getting that hull cracked. Maybe he was an angel or something. That’d make a good story, wouldn’t it? Big guy going around town, saving people.”
Wilson came in with tea. They were in the living room, Ollie in borrowed clothes and still smelling like smoke, and Minerva in a bathrobe and wet hair, having taken a shower as soon as it was convenient to do so.
“Here you go,” Wilson said, proffering Ollie a cup. “This should help your throat.”
He handed a second cup to Minnie without comment. They shared a look that could have meant anything.
“For the record, I didn’t even see the man, so I can’t tell you if I knew him or not,” Wilson said. “Hell of a day, though, huh? This thing’ll probably be national news by morning.”
“Probably,” Oliver said. “I wonder what a military helicopter was even doing over the city?”
“Was it military?” Wilson asked.
“I think so, yeah.”
Ollie looked at Minerva, who shrugged but didn’t contribute.
“Hey, what happened to those bags?” he asked her.
“The what?”
“The backpacks. From the wreckage. Did you turn them over?”
Minerva appeared confused. She looked at Wilson, then back at Oliver.
“What bags?”
“The ones…” he laughed. “You know, the ones you went in and got from the middle of the helicopter.”
“Sorry, Oliver, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Minerva was either an extraordinarily good liar or she legitimately had no clue what he was talking about. He wondered if she hit her head at some point.
Maybe I hit my head, he thought. It was a slightly more likely explanation, because the man who might be Cant was beginning to make him question himself in the kind of way people question themselves before seeking psychiatric help. Or so he assumed.
Ollie was pretty positive Minerva knew the large man, and he was very, very positive she emerged from the smoke with two army-issue backpacks containing who-knows-what. That she was now pretending neither of those things were true could really only mean one thing: she was lying for some reason.
Since she was doing it in front of Wilson, he could only conclude she was hiding established facts from him specifically. If Oliver wanted to know why, he’d have to get her alone.
But that wasn’t going to happen on this day.
“Oh hey,” Minerva said, “you haven’t forgotten, right?”
“Forgotten what?”
“Pallas! Two days, buddy, you better make it this time.”
“Right,” he said. “Haven’t forgotten.”
Although he had.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll be here. Looking forward to it.”
He wasn’t, and he was pretty sure when the time came he still had every intention of ultimately bailing. Only now he thought he probably wasn’t going to. It could be the only chance he had to get Minerva alone and find out why she was lying.