Rick Moody - The Diviners

So I give the Maiser girl a call later, and I put on my best office voice, and I say where I’m calling from, I say the magic words that work on any college student, I say that I’m from Means of Production, I say we’re working on a Michel Foucault biopic, and we definitely need more help in the office, and we have heard good things about her short film, and it’s not like she is immediately jumping for joy, which I guess figures since her dad is like the most powerful man on earth, but she agrees to come in around ten the next morning, assuming I can get to the office by then. I tell Annabel that she has to interview her first, and I don’t tell Annabel who she is. I don’t tell anyone who she is, because I want to savor the idea for a little while. It’s worth savoring, because it’s the smartest idea ever.

Oh yeah, other news. It’s in all the papers! I don’t know why this kind of thing should always be in the tabloids first, but you’d have to be an idiot not to read the tabloids. This article says that there was a rumor going around that Samantha Lee was on her cell phone at the time she got hit in the head with the brick. I mean, maybe she got hit because she was on the cell phone and talking really loudly about bloating or something. I’ve wanted to kill a couple of people, especially when they were talking about stuff like that during a movie. I was watching one of those French movies, but you know it had a crazed nymphomaniac in it, and suddenly, right at the big death scene, someone takes a cell phone call. Takes the call and promises to call back but she can’t talk because right now she’s in the theater, and then the person says which theater it is, and how the movie is really great, and it has a crazed nymphomaniac in it, when are they going to get together.

The rumor in the paper says that there’s a cell phone, and that the cell phone will prove that Annabel’s brother, a suspect in the case, was actually calling Samantha at the time of the attack, and so he could not have been the attacker, because he was calling from a land line, and now there are all these police swarming around the spot where it all happened, except that no one can quite find the cell phone, you know, because it got knocked loose when half of her head was crushed by the brick that the psychotic guy hit her with. The weird part is that Annabel doesn’t seem all that surprised by the news. Still, if she planted the story, then I’m pretty proud of her, because that’s a good skill to have at your command, you know? I try to plant things in the press all the time, and if I had better contacts, I’d plant even more stuff, like that Mercurio is definitely going to be in The Diviners and that I am destined to head one of the major studios.

I didn’t go out tonight. I just came home and painted on skin care products. Then I ran around the house terrorizing the dogs. They don’t know it’s me, because my facial mask is purple.

P.S. Still no Lois.

The super went to Lois’s apartment to see if she was dead, Madison writes on Wednesday, after the big party for PussyWhipped, Mercurio’s sportswear line. Because she’s a little drunk, she’s writing in her lingerie, feeling fat, like a porpoise splayed on an expensive mattress. So far all we know is that Lois is not answering the door, and we should probably file a missing persons report, but Vanessa doesn’t want to do it yet, because someone from Lois’s family should do it. As far as I’m concerned the question is whether Lois actually has a family, because I’m betting she was spawned by an adding machine or a calculator or one of those slide rule things. Right from the first second when I got into the office Vanessa was on the rampage, and first it was back to that thing about how we had to get the fuck out of the fucking office because it’s a fucking dump and it depresses the fuck out of her, like I rented the suite or something. I asked where she wanted to move the office, and she says downtown of course, because everyone wants to be downtown, but personally I like the office here. Because my commute is really easy. And if I had time to skate now I would, at the rink, and I would wear a cashmere scarf and I would skate backwards under the big tree, and I would drink hot chocolate and tell some man what a hunk he was.

I pass this kid on the way in, I don’t even know whether it’s a boy kid or a girl kid, it’s just some kind of kid thing, and it’s sitting on the folding chair by the front door, near Jeanine’s desk, and this kid thing is wearing some shredded black stuff that got thrown out in the Dumpster at some heavy metal club, I mean, I guess it’s clothes, but who knows, the fishnets are so full of holes that the net couldn’t catch orca, and she’s got so much metal sticking out of her face that you could hang tinsel on her and stick an angel on top, and the amount of eye makeup, don’t even get me started, and her eyes are totally closed, so it looks like she’s sleeping, in the chair, and I sort of look at Jeanine, and Jeanine looks at the girl, and since the girl is sleeping, no one wants to wake her up. It’s amazing that she’s sleeping, because Vanessa is on the rampage, but she’s definitely asleep, and Vanessa, who doesn’t pay any attention to things if she doesn’t want to, she doesn’t pay attention, and I just go into the office, and Annabel comes in, looking worried and still wearing the Ann Taylor outfit, although she seems to have changed her blouse, and I ask her if things are okay, because now the papers think that there’s some kind of conspiracy between the guy who drove his car into the store in the Diamond District and the Samantha Lee attack and the desecrated temples on Long Island and some one-eye sheik on Atlantic Avenue, there’s headlines about Waves of Hatred, of course, it’s got to be some kind of Islamic thing, like when that guy blew up the building in Oklahoma City it was supposed to be an Islamic thing, but it turned out to be rednecks. But Annabel is not feeling great because the police still want her brother. He was supposed to be at her parents’ house, but then he left or something, and supposedly he’s just moving around, by train or who knows what.

The good news today is that Vanessa thinks UBC is really seriously considering The Diviners. Who knows how they decide this kind of stuff, I guess they talk to advertisers, and they get the poster guy to come up with some kind of poster. Of course, I told her that I have a really good idea for the poster, but she just waved me off. The bad news is that there seems to be like three different people out there claiming to represent the project, and Vanessa has been calling Vic Freese at the Michael Cohen Agency, and I could hear her yelling in my office. Later she comes in and tells me that Vic is representing the writer of the original book, who is named Melody or something, and then there’s another version out there with Leonard Nimoy attached as a director, that version is by Shelley Ralston Havemeyer or somebody, and then there’s our version, which is totally different. Apparently, we have coverage of the Nimoy treatment, and there are no Mongolians in it. How could there be no Mongolians? The whole point was to start with the Huns! I feel like I want to have Huns in the story, and I’m especially happy with that poster that I sketched out. What if they change it and the story winds up being about a dysfunctional family in the suburbs with a misfit kid who gets voted the most likely to succeed at the prom? That would suck. Maybe one diviner is like another, because they’re all in touch with some kind of magical power, and we should just take what we can get, and if that means executive producer credits for Vanessa and me, well, okay, move on.