Bruce Wagner - The Chrysanthemum Palace

I rushed to help my poor, dear sister, who stood fumbling in her purse for a room key. When she saw me, her eyes welled with tears.

“Please…”

She nearly collapsed in my arms. I half-carried her to my door and, as we staggered, turned to find Miriam — already gone.

Clea was in a state. She smelled rankly of booze, pathetically informing that her boyfriend had thrown a drink on her blouse (still wanting me to believe). She fell directly into bed, letting me strip off her clothes. The moment I lay down beside her, she seized me with agonized, asexual fury; each time the grip became too painful, I relocated those tiny starfish hands. Clea cried and cried, in contorted, schoolgirl plaint—“But why? Why! I’m his friend. ” “I told him I was sorry! I didn’t mean it to happen, but nothing really did, Bertie, nothing really did. ” “He doesn’t care, it doesn’t matter, there’s nothing I can do. ”—while I used my free fingertips to carefully blot away the tears.

I unfurled a reluctant fist with its clutchful of pills. She confessed to having swiped them from Morgana’s medicine cabinet. I was touched because even though she was in terrible pain, Clea knew I’d be proud of her for not having swallowed them. She broke my heart.

I left the bed long enough to flush them down.

When I climbed back in she was fast asleep. Why was that snorish sonata of breath so poignant? I lay on my back, spooning her into me. I put her hands on my chest but they kept slipping off like penguins from an ice shelf.

Then I too slept, and was grateful for it.

1I’d only been to one funeral in my life, which at my age was below quota. It was Brandon Tartikoff’s, a friend of my father’s. The Forest Lawn chapel was SRO — I remember seeing a yarmalke’d Rob Reiner in the distance, arguing with someone over not being let in — with hundreds of folding chairs set out so the crowd could watch the services on some kind of JumboTron screen. I’ll never forget the moment I looked down to see the wooden legs of my seat, and those around it, resting upon humble granite graves.

2Forgive the lapse into pulp. A writer needs to try a bit of everything.

CLEA STAYED ON AT THEVineyard, or thereabouts.

The days passed in a flurry of artistic endeavor. As already mentioned, I was intent on developing a spec series for HBO. I thought the time was ripe for a literate drama about the movie industry (though others before me had tried and failed), and was busy circling an idea I’d christened with the Aaron Spelling — like title Holmby Hills. I didn’t have much more than that — OK, I’ll admit I had casually referred to it among friends as a cross between The Sopranos and Entourage —and while it sounds strange, I did own up to a special feeling about my unwritten saga. Dad always said “the gut” should never be discounted. I met with Dan Fauci, an old-school friend of my father’s who used to run Paramount Television. Dan suggested I get to work on what he called a bible, the guidebook for any projected series. (A perfect word for it: I really had got religion.) Still, it was harder than I thought to let go of the writer/director fantasy. It was one thing to strive toward an Emmy but quite another to envision oneself on the red carpet at Cannes jostling elbows with Lars von Trier. Among activities outside my duties on the Demeter, I’d continued to stockpile ideas in the hope of eventually shoehorning them into script form. The punctilious archives, composed mostly of newspaper and magazine articles, went back years, even including a series of pieces about a traveler who somehow lost his citizenship while in transit and had been forced to live at an airport, improbably marooned without passport or country. I remember the day I read in Variety that Spielberg was going to direct Tom Hanks in that very saga; a movie that’s already come and gone. It was moments like that when, salving my wounds, I shouted from the bridge the reliable, “Warp nine!”—a kinky confirmation that, if nothing else, I had a producer’s instinct for good material.

Predictably, Miriam and I had a phone sex affair though it wasn’t easy keeping up the pace. Pretty soon I was faking orgasm and I suspect she was too. We settled into a comfortable, R-rated hotmail exchange: flirty, dirty, unpressured — anything else seemed like too much work. (Besides, we were time zone challenged.) I dated around, nothing serious. I tried to avoid anyone from production or AA, which pretty much limited me to the gym. The pickings were surprisingly slim. Funny, but if I so much as kissed a girl, it felt like cheating. I kind of hated that.

It was almost a week since Clea and I had spoken (she had time off because she wasn’t in the current Starwatch episode) and I was just starting to worry when without warning she appeared on my doorstep as I left for work. She looked lovely and rejuvenated; all was apparently idyllic with our happy, happily manic-depressive couple. There was a bit of softshoe damage control about the death of Jack Michelet as the Big Event, the tacit implication being that her once and future beau’s abominable wake-side behavior was somehow justified. She was willing to guarantee that while Thad “blew it all out” and had shown the worst of himself, this was the absolute end of it. He was born again, eager to enter the genteel, chivalrous phase expected of him. I didn’t buy a word of it. I wasn’t sure whether to feel sorry for her or admire Clea’s brave-heart tenacity, so wound up doing a bit of both.

Call me codependent (you wouldn’t be the first) but I got nervous whenever Ms. Fremantle had too much time on her hands. One didn’t need to go to Death Valley to find the devil’s playground. Her current Starwatch persona, the polymorphously perverse grease monkey from Albion-12, hadn’t made an appearance in the last few shows and I was concerned the writers were phasing her out. So it was with a mixture of relief and misgivings when, over ritual Sunday morning scrambled eggs and tofu at Hugo’s, she told me the mechanic’s role had been cut, in the service of a greater good — she would soon debut as Ambassador Trothex, the formidable Vorbalidian diplomat featured in none other than “Prodigal Son (Episode 21-417A),” Thad’s upcoming two-part extravaganza. It was a meaty role but one I thought exclusive to that particular story; I had trouble seeing how it would recur. Anyhow, we didn’t get into that. The new makeup, she said, was different enough that audiences wouldn’t recognize her from her previous incarnation. (I wondered how they were going to deal with the complete change of character from a PR standpoint; but again, not my “wheel house.”) I was genuinely happy for her. I saw the hand of Thad Michelet — perhaps even my father’s divine intervention — in her promotion, and was intrigued the three of us would be working together on a more level playing field than I’d anticipated.

COMMANDER WILL KARP HAILED FROM KANSASCity, Missouri (according to the writers, who themselves hailed from Harvard and Yale). A highly decorated gunner, he was a veteran of the Nardian Wars. Ladies man and marginal wit, he retained the chauvinistic whiff and wink of old Star Legion glory days.

Some “bible” backstory: Karp — uh, that would be me — was the son of a legendary warrior who, after a disfiguring battle wound, became the academy professor and beloved mentor of Frederick Ulysses Laughton, current fifty-something African-American captain of the distinctively ellipsoid, overmerchandized Starwatch mothership USS Demeter. Along with Laughton, I joined Lieutenant Commander Iltriko Shazuki (relatively new to the show, she’d been a minor player on Will and Grace and recently staged a satirical one-woman show at a theater on Cahuenga, playing nearly twenty characters); Major Glaston Cabott 7, the captain’s all-purpose android-de-camp (a storied second-generation player in Chicago’s Steppenwolf group, and of H-P mascot fame); and Dr. Phineas Chaldorer a.k.a. X-Ray, the Demeter ’s handlebar-mustachioed Sultan of Sickbay (having made a fortune as the Prius pitchman, he was rumored to own a microbrewery and a vineyard in the Malibu Hills). I was already friendly with our congenial ensemble — most were in AA — but will maintain character names throughout, to avoid confusion.