Anytime Minutes

Lisa makes sure that her cell phone plan has plenty of anytime minutes because, she told me, most of the time she is unhappy with the people of the present.

Last Tuesday she thought it would be a good idea to call her grandmother's Great Aunt Ida, who lived on a farm in 1863. Lisa had first heard about Aunt Ida in bedtime stories and she showed such fascination with the ancestor that she was presented with Ida’s diary on the eve of her sixteenth birthday. Aunt Ida had been the first woman elected to city council in the state of Wyoming. Even though women could not vote in 1863, there was no law prohibiting them from running for office, and also no law prohibiting women from refusing to sleep with their husbands if they did not vote for Mrs. Ida Mae Hopkins. Unfortunately the telephone was not invented until 1873 and poor Aunt Ida had to spend a week in bed because of the horrible ringing in her ears. Lisa stopped calling when she read about this in the diary.

Over the weekend she called her great grand daughter's best friend. Her name will be Lupita and, in the year 2102, she will be 12 years old. Lisa, not wanting Lupita to know she was from the past, pretended to be doing a survey about drug use in twenty-second century adolescents. It sounded like Lisa's great granddaughter will already be smoking a half a pack a day by the time she is thirteen. This worried Lisa for most of the afternoon but at dinner she decided that if cigarettes are still around one hundred years in the future then they must have found a cure for cancer.

Last night Lisa called the Lisa she had been when she was in high school. The phone contract had strict warnings against calling one's past, but Lisa knew that the sixteen-year-old Lisa, who aspired to be a state representative, would never recognize the soap-opera-addicted, furniture-polishing, wife of a youth-pastor-who-did-not-believe-in-birth-control and consequently mother of six, she would become. Old Lisa did not talk to young Lisa very long. Not wanting to risk changing history she tried the drug survey act again, and was surprised to discover that she had been a terrible liar.

This morning, Lisa called me. I am actually a caveman named Pelto. A few years before I wrote this, I found a rock that was making a ringing noise. A noise I would later learn was a ringtone of "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" from the musical Showboat. I picked up the rock and when I put it up to my ears I heard someone speaking a language that I would also later learn was English. I know that may be hard to believe, but I have a lot of spare time as my wife does most of the hunting. Anyways, I first started talking to Lisa a few weeks back. She called me by accident, (This happens a lot--my phone number is 3.) but we hit it off. She calls me now almost every day, tells me about her life, and keeps me up to date on all of my favorite soap operas. Yesterday she told me about a doctor on a talk show who stressed the importance of keeping a journal and I thought I'd try it. This is my first journal entry. Come to think of it, it's probably the first journal entry. I promise to write in it every day.

Pooh Sticks - an attempt at a poem

Pooh Sticks

The equidistant pines are
more conjured than those
of the second growth.
Rows for running down
and proof of endlessness
while tennis shoes, red that year
or black, not quite touching
the needle sponge.

And the hill. What grass
would be if we let it
and always wet. Tumbles taken
here and here and back
in the woods. Abrasions
often showing under the hems
or as bridges over tan lines
will be gone by September

Then where the horse bridge was
but isn't now but still where
where a girl, haircut crooked,
crooked teeth, father
with a forest beard and the son
who will not describe himself
dropped sticks into the river
and watched them come out on the other side.

Thrive - Part 10

INT. CAFETERIA - DAY

Bill sits at a table by himself. He has a newspaper and a plate with scrambled eggs, toast and a slice of cantaloupe.

The headline of the newspaper says: "Hospital Director Resigns."

Bill looks down to his plate and picks up the cantaloupe. He takes a bite.
The headline of the newspaper now reads: "CDC: "Aluminum not responsible for memory loss."

Bill is holding a honeydew, there is a bite taken out of it. He takes another.
The headline of the newspaper says: "Bill Janus indicted in hospital scandal."

Bill puts down the paper and uses a knife and fork to cut his steak. Someone coughs behind him. He turns his head and June is standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes. She wipes the back of her hand on a dish towel.

Bill picks up the copy of Gray's Anatomy he has been reading. He looks at a picture of the liver.

Bill cuts the liver and onions on his plate. The sound of people clicking knives on water glasses makes him look over.

Janice sits next to him, she is wearing a wedding dress, he is wearing a tuxedo, he leans over and kisses her. He closes his eyes. When he opens them, he is kissing June, she is wearing a negligee.

Bill is in bed with June, he is wearing purple satin pajama bottoms. June is asleep. Bill gets out of bed and sits down on the floor Indian-style.

Bill plays with legos wearing purple flannel pajamas on the floor of the hospital room. A very old man sits on the bed watching him.

OLD MAN: Do you love me Solomon?
BILL: Is that my name?

Bill looks at the old man for a response. The old man looks confused, he is trying to find words to say.

OLD MAN: Well...um...ummm.

The left side of the screen starts to turn blue in an irregular moving patch. The patch consumes the old man and becomes a vaguely human shaped patch of blue.

BILL: Is that my name?
PATCH OF BLUE: Do you love me Bill?
BILL: Do you love me Solomon?

The patch of blue is now green.

PATCH OF GREEN: Kilimanjaro

Bill sits next to Solomon, everything else is white.

BILL AND SOLOMON: (simultaneously) It's hyphenated.

The patch is now a circle, the color shifts from blue to green and changes in diameter.

CIRCLE: Willy-um-Janus. Solly-mun-Janus

Solomon's face is very big. His lips don't move, his eyes blink rapidly.

SOLOMON: Butler-Janus. It's hyphenated.
CIRCLE: Solly-um-but-ler-willy-mun.

Bill and Solomon's heads are fused together at the back, Bill's face on the right, Solomon's on the left.

BILL AND SOLOMON: Janus.

Absolute Chaos. Several bits of the film overlapping each other, in increasing states of digital decay. Sounds from before, sometimes lines said by the wrong people, nothing disctinctly audible though. Everything progresses toward absolute white which is achieved about thirty seconds before absolute silence.
Credits come out of the white in a neutral gray and scroll to both sides of the frame from the center.

THE END

Thrive - Part 9

INT. BILL AND JUNE'S KITCHEN - DAY

JANUS: Happy Anniversary.
JUNE: What?
JANUS: Thirteen years right?
JUNE: Thirteen years?
JANUS: January 17th.
JUNE: Thirteen years since what, Bill?
JANUS: Since we've been married.
JUNE: Two years, Bill. Three next June.

Thrive - Part 8

INT. JANICE AND BILL'S BEDROOM - DAY

Janice and Bill come into the bedroom, it's nine o'clock in the morning and they have just returned from staying up all night in the hospital. Janice goes to the closet and starts to undress. Bill stands in the doorway and looks at her.

JANUS: I can't do this anymore.
JANICE: I know how you feel. It seems impossible that this is happening.
JANUS: No, you don't. You don't know how I feel. This isn't an expression of frustration. I seriously cannot do this any more.
JANICE: What choice do we have?
JANUS: There are some people who are able to do things like this, there are people who can suffer through tragedy and feel like it makes them stronger. I'm not one of them.
JANICE: How do you know? How have you suffered before this?
JANUS: You, I think, are one of those people. You can be the hero in this, the patient one, the longsuffering one. I'm the villain here, I know it. I am designed to be the asshole.
JANICE: You need to go to sleep Bill, we have to go back in four hours.
JANUS: I am the weak one, the one to hate. The one that had to be lost. You can be the one who was somehow able to make it. The woman who's only son is in the hospital, who's husband left her, just when she needed him--
JANICE: What?
JANUS: Who's husband left when things started to look bad, he just dropped her, left everything there his son, his house, and found another life, another woman to live with.
JANICE: Stop it. Bill. Stop it.
JANUS: Who never saw him again.

Janice picks up a shoe from the ground and throws it at him.

JANICE: Quit it right now. How can you say those things?
JANUS: Who fought against him, begged him to stay but he wouldn't listen. When she held onto his feet when she punched him as hard as she could-- which is not very hard, she's a small woman--he pushed her away, he ran, he literally ran out the door, slammed the car door as she stood on the steps crying until she collapsed.
JANICE: Why are you doing this to me now. Stop. Please stop, I can't take this.
JANUS: You can. It's me who can't take it-- and he backed out of the driveway looking her in the eyes the whole time. You see he never had a soul, never really loved her, or his son, and he had to get out.
JANICE: Get out!

Thrive - Part 7

INT - JANICE'S KITCHEN - DAY

Bill and Janice are preparing food for Solomon's birthday party. Solomon, now fourteen years old is in the dining room, he has a basket of crayons in front of him. He is coloring pages in a coloring book. He draws overlapping squares of color, disregarding the lines on the pages..

Bill cuts beef and chicken into chunks for shish-kabobs, Janice is cutting the vegetables.

JANUS: It was two days late, they don't even charge a late fee for five.
JANICE: You think it's late fees I'm worried about? Bill, that was two days thinking that you had abandoned us, or that you had died, or worse.
JANUS: What's worse than that?
JANICE: There are things worse then death.
JANUS" Yeah, I've heard that before, but nobody can ever tell me what they are. I don't think there's anything worse than that. No matter how much you've accomplished…
JANICE: Don't try to change the subject.
JANUS: No, Janice, this is the problem, no matter how much you've planned and prepared, when you go, there will be something you never did, some part of being alive that you have never experienced. While you're alive there's at least the possibility that some day you'll do it, but when you're dead, you're nothing but a list of what you didn't do.
JANICE: (sarcastic) You know what, you're right, every time I think of Martin Luther King I think of all the things he didn't do.
JANUS: He doesn't think at all any more, he doesn't exist; everything we know about him is made up--what someone else thought about him. Even stuff he wrote down, we only know what it means based on what we think ourselves.