Jane Mendelsohn - Burning Down the House

Not looking up at all from her book she answered, Because I’m learning. I am actually interested in the classes I’m taking. This is the homework and so I’m doing it.

Cool, he said.

She lifted her eyes from the page to see him. He was too big for the chair he was sitting in and his legs stuck out like a promontory, thick and strong, in their beat-up jeans. He smiled the tiniest microscopic smile with one corner of his mouth. His hood shadowed his face. He dug his fingers into the pocket of his sweatshirt and took out a pill. He slid it across the table to her.

Oh, thanks, but I have plenty of those, she said, going back to her book.

Doubt you have this one. Brand-new. Exceptional. Guarantee it’ll make the story even better.

She eyed the round disk with a slash across its middle, a compacted powder of possibility.

No thanks, she said.

C’mon, he said. It’s a present. Take it whenever you want.

An hour later they were unexpectedly close friends and their hunger had motivated them to stagger out into the cold spring air in search of nourishment. By noon they’d had pounds of sugar and salt in various disguises and they sat on a brownstone stoop studying the stringy abstract shadows cast by trees against the side of a postwar white brick building. A chilly breeze blew down the street. Poppy’s mouth was dry. The city encircling them had sun and oxygen but seemed devoid of some essential element and there was nothing Poppy could do to feel necessary, needed, as if her progress mattered to anyone in any of the thousands of buildings that spiraled out from where she sat. The world fell away from her in volcanic chunks, as if an earthquake were in the process of decluttering the universe, breaking off pieces of New York all around her while she sat, her head on this boy’s shoulder, staring vacantly into the trunk of a tree. The travelers marching along the sidewalk moved erratically, seemed to walk up a steep hill, slid like marbles down a marble chute, flew by like the black-and-white characters that sailed past Dorothy’s window during the tornado in The Wizard of Oz. Consciously she knew that they were walking at a normal pace with an average speed on a flat surface, but she could feel their panic, and their movements appeared to her like a front, and she could see two worlds happening at once: the everyday scene on a side street in Manhattan and also the hallucinatory revolution that registered in her brain. In the moment it seemed to her that every moment existed this way, that this was reality, or a glimpse of it, this multiplicity of viewpoints, interpretations, experiences. As information entered her mind one variable at a time, color, distance, timing, perspective, and her brain reconstructed it along separate pathways to make meaning, she felt as though she were witnessing the process in action, the whole coded miscellany shattered to smithereens and then resurrected by the cells and synapses that each worked separately to create a whole. It was beautiful.

—

We should hide, the boy in the hoodie said to her. She thought his name might be Jasper, but she wasn’t sure. She would just think of him as Jasper.

Why?

Because they’ll find us, Jasper said.

Okay, said Poppy.

Where do you want to hide? asked Jasper.

I don’t know. Where do you think? How about here?

Here? We can’t hide here, he said.

Why not?

He laughed a short, instinctive, smug laugh. Because we’re already here, he said.

Okay, said Poppy. Where then?

My house is kinda nearby.

Can we hide there?

Yes, we can hide there, he said.

—

A spotlight pooled around Ian as the lighting designer played around from the middle of the audience and Ian and one of the producers talked about the show. They were sitting onstage, in a temporary version of the 1980s set, on a Jennifer Convertibles — type leatherette couch in front of a smoky-glass coffee table. A huge boxy television set sat like a vintage black spaceship slightly off center stage. A female dancer stepped nimbly down from the TV and left it alone, one corner illuminated by the outermost rim of the nimbus of white light that held Ian in its center. Ian was handling a legal pad and gesturing with a pen in his fingers. He told the producer that they were rearranging the order of songs. Now the show opened with “And She Was,” a lyrical number in which Jane Eyre was introduced. “And She Was” would be Jane’s theme. Next, “Slippery People” as her awful aunt and nasty cousin entered the story. The numbers “Life During Wartime” and “Wild Wild Life” would cover Jane’s boarding-school experience. “Once in a Lifetime” was Jane and Rochester’s theme. “Girlfriend Is Better” would be Bertha’s, Rochester’s wife’s, theme. “Psycho Killer” was the climactic curtain of act 1, when Jane glimpses Bertha. “Once in a Lifetime” would reprise at the top of act 2, at Jane and Rochester’s wedding. “Road to Nowhere,” when Jane leaves. “Heaven” for the time Jane spends with the missionary St. John and his sisters. “Making Flippy Floppy” as Jane is struggling with whether or not to marry St. John. “Burning Down the House,” of course, when Bertha burns down Thornfield. And “This Must Be the Place” for Jane’s return to Rochester. Reprise of “Burning Down the House” for the finale.

The investor nodded his head. He kept nodding for a few seconds.

So, no “Take Me to the River”? the producer said.

Well, you know, Ian said, shifting on the couch, that’s not really a Talking Heads song. It’s Al Green. It’s a nightmare to get the rights. Also, it doesn’t really fit into the story.

You had it in there before.

Yeah, I know we did, because you wanted it so much so we found a place, but I’m telling you it never worked. I hope you’re okay with that.

The producer nodded his head again. It’s my favorite Talking Heads song, he said.

It’s not really their song.

They recorded it.

True.

The lighting designer began trying something else, and now Ian and the producer sat in darkness. Without the glow of the spotlight Ian’s face looked shadowed and lined. To the producer he appeared to be a hardworking, exhausted director, but Ian knew that he was well past running on fumes, had only caffeine and Ambien and other pharmaceuticals in his veins, and nothing pumping in his heart but guilt and remorse and a terrible feeling like a bad memory, as if every night in his dreams he killed someone, buried them in a field, tried to escape, waited in some lonely farmhouse, and was eventually caught and made to dig up the body. He woke up shaking and terrified in the morning. Only work kept him alive. He was trying to work himself back to life. The producer said:

I invested in the show because of that song.

Because of “Take Me to the River”? That’s the only reason? I hadn’t realized that.

It was in the workshop version, wasn’t it?

No, no, it wasn’t.

Wow, I remember it being in there. You see, I know I’m only one of several producers…

Twelve, at last count.

And I know I’m not the lead producer…

That’s correct.

But that song really means a lot to me.

I understand.

The producer patted his suit pocket as if he were checking for a pack of cigarettes. The fine Italian wool of his jacket rippled in smooth, elegant curves. He blinked as he took out his glossy black leather, extremely thin wallet. Ian noted that it was really just a card case. The producer opened the slim case and took out a card. It was an old driver’s license. He held it up for Ian to see. Can we get a light over here? he shouted into the darkness.

A spotlight appeared.

This, said the producer, is my driver’s license from college. When I first started driving, you know what I played in the car?