May 07, 2003
It Could Have Been a Really Interesting Story
There would have been a character who was blind to something right before his eyes. There would have been double meanings and unreliable narrators and betrayals. It would have involved a duel maybe, or a horse chase, or a balloon running out of air on a transatlantic journey.
An interesting story might have involved a torrential rain storm that shut the city down for a month and left everybody waterlogged and exhausted. It might have included a secret wedding, a missing relative (twins maybe?) and a lion loose on the grounds. It would have involved a late-night break in, a famous musician, an unexpected inheritance, an explosion in the middle of the night.
But even though the story is there, like a big empty manor, there are no characters. There is a dagger in the roll-top desk, but no one there to use it. There is a bucket on the stairs that no one will trip on. There is a letter, unopened, sitting between the pages of a book that nothing will touch, not even the dust.
This house is really there, as much as you are, out somewhere in the distance, but nothing will ever happen there save for the wind blowing through the curtains.
Meanwhile, the murderer, the butler, the musician and the lion tamer sit around waiting for instructions.
When none come, they go out to dinner.
“Well how are you?” the lion tamer begins.
“Just fine and you?”
“Fantastic.”
“Did we ever catch the lion?
“Is he loose yet? I haven’t heard him roar.”
“The baby has gone missing, doesn’t that require the lion?”
“The lion or the nanny, it depends on the instructions.”
“We never got that far. The book fell into the bathwater.”
“This was after you were identified?”
“I haven’t been identified. Even when I am identified, there’s a passport with another name hidden in my bedroll that no one knows about.”
When they are finished with dinner they all go home. They won’t talk again. The lion tamer will become a fighter pilot and die in the first world war. The murderer will never murder anyone, she’ll become a nurse and will appear years later as the scent of perfume in a story told by a boy describing a visit with his grandmother at the hospital. The musician will come home to find that he can’t read music anymore. The butler will discover that the house he used to work in has disappeared altogether.
None of them will have anything interesting to say about one another.
