John Domini - Movieola!

Then the man had the mockups open, the claws and wings and the wings with claws, plus the beaks and tentacles, and besides that a no-neck head on which, above a boxer’s flattened nose, there bulged a single red-veined eye—and with all that popping open, on the biggest screen in the room, Alya left off fretting over the state of the guy’s marriage or the degree of his Asperger’s. This was about the work. About facing off against a critter as if you knew where the killing blow could come from, and she made a point of getting the names straight; you couldn’t very well develop a decent choreography if you didn’t know the enemy’s name. Kharybdis, kay- RIB -dis, was that it, and what did you call this hulking one-eye over here? Pah, Polly, Polyphemus? One hellacious beastie by any name, that one, and she did wish she could see it move, she told her CGI guy, meantime indulging in feminine wiles, a dimpling, a simpering. She came up with a name for him, “Zak-Man,” and with that he worked up further animation. She got to see how the wings would unfold from the shoulders, the claws unfold from the wings, and when one troll unleashed its triple-spiked tail, whipping it around a horned carapace, Alya tried out a bit of Thai mixed martial, maneuvers she’d picked up two or three projects back.

She came nowhere near her chaperone, but he was startled off his stool.

See but…, he said then, see but, I won, I wonder about a movie like this as a career move.

A movie like this? 3-D, CGI, FX? Cartoon action-adventure?

On the level of the career, see. I wonder, an actress of your caliber…

Don’t you remember Meryl working with special effects? She did a whole scene with her neck in a spiral like Rubber Woman. Didn’t you see that?

Meryl was Rubber Woman?

They’ve all got a movie like this. Meryl, Sissy, Uma. Cher, Goldie, Sigourney.

See but, the Aliens thing…

That was Sigourney, her franchise, totally.

I, I do get how this project is special. It’s only part 3-D nanotech…

I know, right? Because has anyone done a movie like this? Think about it. Has any actress gotten a stretch like this?

The woman who wrote the Odyssey. The Awe, Authoress of the Odyssey .

The authoress of the Odyssey. Her secret has lasted a thousand years, three thousand, but now at last the truth comes out. We rip away her disguise.

Alya’s one-man Geek Squad, averting his eyes, clambered back on his stool. She bit back a smirk: Rip away her disguise?

Aloud, she went on: Plus there’s a mystery, right, a natural MacGuffin.

See but, that you even know that expression, “MacGuffin,” see…

Who wrote the greatest poem in history? Who’s the blind old cripple? Turns out it was a young Greek noblewoman!

Zachary kept his eyes on the screen, the latest hellspawn. You, you’ve read the book?

The two of them had met hardly half an hour ago, and already he sat there telling her about his dyslexia. Zachary could never make his way through a text so slow and antique, with words like “authoress”—but he assured her he was long familiar with the monsters, he wasn’t that weird, and, see, hadn’t Alya said something about getting a stretch? See, how about his stretch? His team was on board for the full gig, right through to any pickup scenes post-production, because in their corner of the industry, who wouldn’t want to romp with terrors that were part of the, see, the cultural inheritance ? Bad craziness, out of the pre-rational originally, yet now, like, cardinal freaks?

Plus a project like this, like action-tech, you, you know how they pay…

Yet to bring up the money sent him into diminuendo. Alya’s new friend dipped his head, frowning, silent, and he twisted and twisted his ring.

She could suss things out. Behind her stork-like companion she could spy the room’s eight-hundred-pound gorilla. The man was thinking of her divorce, to bring up the money brought up the divorce, the irreconcilable differences, everybody on the lot had heard, and on the next lot too, and the next and the next, and anywhere the news spread, anyone with half a brain could figure it was costing a bundle. Simply to return to her own home, this evening—that cost a bundle . That made a role as action-tech eye candy look like a career move.

Now Alya could soft-pedal her goodbyes, dimpling again for the Monster Wrangler. She could text her assistant a bland reminder about morning makeup. But both these people, like most of the players in town, kept the same gorilla on a leash. They knew what it cost to maintain a spread-wing home while at the same time grappling in the mud pit of child custody. The ex too could throw around some power. Nevertheless, once she got home, she enjoyed again the melody of the new security code. She could find the zen in throwing dinner together (tonight, pasta primavera) and eyeballing her pour (Falanghina), keeping it under six ounces. So too she got her warm’n’fuzzies with the kid, though tonight they only spoke via FaceTime. At least with Caller ID the ex didn’t butt in, and afterward Alya crossed the house to the gym, thinking yoga but slipping, instead, into mixed martial. You go, girl. You got some moves , for those homunculi. Scaly old homunculi, they can’t handle your moves. By the time the actress tottered back into her office, she might plop down at her desk and pull out some financials, she really needed to check those financials, but she couldn’t make her way through a single transaction. She couldn’t handle any computations more difficult than the pros and cons of sleeping in yoga wear. As for her pour of Grey Goose, the shot was a tad enhanced, the glass a gift from On the Rox, and later on, thinking back, trying to make sense, Alya understood she’d drifted off before her papers and laptop, there in the Aeron, before the monster hopped up onto her desk. She’d woken to find the creature scrabbling through a couple of quarterly statements.

Later on, thinking back, she recalled the vague notion that this must be a prank—sophisticated as all get-out and vicious beyond belief, a prank cooked up south of Satan—and yet she’d had that notion, a flicker of false illumination: this bastard on her desk could only be someone’s idea of a joke. A rat-tailed, hook-nailed bastard, also mantis-armed, plate-faced, terrier-toothed, all no more than a foot high and scrabbling through her papers. One good eyeful and any better thinking was out the window, off along the migration lanes, and Alya was left with vague and impossible notions, or flashes of indignant aggro (those papers were private …), nothing in her head so potent as her screams, an office-full of screams, a double-wing-full, so that if she were getting punk’d she gave the joker just what he wanted, the total scaredy cat, though nothing so nimble as a cat, rather maybe a marionette in the hands of an epileptic. Her top rode up, her pants slipped down. If this were all a mean trick (and she wouldn’t put it past her baby-faced lead, he’d never seen a piece of scenery he couldn’t chew…), then Alya gave them such a bellowing funkadelic hopscotch, with so much skin showing, that the video would go viral before the echoes faded. At some point her screams cohered into threats: she’d call 911, she’d call the service , she had Mace, she had a hammer, a poker from the fireplace, and then her head cleared enough for her to find the biggest kitchen knife, a cleaver longer than the critter itself. Her panic relented enough for her to throw in a couple of moves—if she were on video she might as well show some moves—roundhouse from the left, from the right, not too shabby, at least it got the attention of the ogre nosing through her stuff. The little abortion hunkered down, there on the latest bank statement, you might even say it cowered, ducking behind its claws with its tail coiling around its, its ankles or whatever they were. Ugly little animule. Still it waited out her threats, her Thai aggro, it squatted over deposits and withdrawals like the worst nightmare of an audit, and finally Alya returned to her right mind, more or less. She could recognize the notion of a prank as insipid, totally, another insipid dream of how your real life must be elsewhere. The dream in which you’re under observation and earning good grades.