Alien Nation #6 - Passing Fancy (25 page)

PAGE THREE: As she goes for her change, she asks the bus driver a question.

PAGE FOUR: The bus driver answers, trying his sincere best to be polite, but he can’t help recoiling from her breath as he does so, and the look on his face is one of comic revul—

(Huge X marks are drawn through each of the four pages.)

The second draft laid out like this . . .

PAGE ONE: Start with the bus driver, close-up of him at the wheel, his expression turning to one of . . . rueful respect? Yes, try that. (Doesn’t matter if it’s too complicated to get right away, we’ll understand it in about five seconds.) In voice-overs we hear his thoughts. “Oh, no,” goes the first one.

PAGE TWO: His point of view through the windshield, as he comes up on the librarian at the bus stop in front of . . . make it a McDonald’s or some generic fast food place, not a Newcomer specialty joint. Right, better. This is a place where
everybody
eats, but she just happens to be wolfing . . . gracefully eating . . . a McWeasel, say. And the driver’s next thought is: “Gosh, that Ms. Jones—” (Jones? No, Eesana. A nice Tenctonese name. Meaning “giving,” which is what librarians do.) And the driver thinks: “Gosh, that Ms. Eesana is such a sweet, pretty, special lady. Darn shame I just don’t want her on my bus!” (There. Makes it about the individual, not the ethnicity. That way the driver not wanting her on the bus is . . . droll or humorous or something.)

PAGE THREE: Reverse angle as the bus pulls up and Ms. Eesana gets on.

PAGE FOUR: Ms. Eesana greets the bus driver. “Hi!” She puts a lot of air into the
H so
that it travels.

PAGE FIVE: The
H
and the breath that propels it hit the driver’s nose and his voice-over thought, supporting his earlier trepidation, is: “She’s got a
problem!”
And his face assumes an expression of . . . (Well, what kind of face would he make? What kind of face would a
Newcomer
make after a human breathed saltwater seafood in
her
face? Goddess knows, it had happened often enough! Sure, Kent Allman wants to be broadly comic, but you have to wonder . . . what kind of face did
he
make at those poor Koreans on the train? Very likely he made no face at all, at least none that they could see! . . . Hmm . . . Interesting point, maybe that’s an angle.) The breath hits the driver’s nose and we see it in his eyes, but that’s all. Like any polite person in that situation, he tries to cover. Fine. That brings us to—

PAGE SIX: And as Ms. Eesana goes to her seat,
then, then
the driver makes his face, having enough respect for the woman to consider her feelings.

PAGE SEVEN: From the side, we follow Ms. Eesana down the aisle and continue the pattern, people are making faces
as she passes,
it’s all happening
behind her back,
which is
naturally
funny because it
humanizes the conflict
and—

(A huge, squiggly line is scribbled fiercely over the last page.)

The third draft laid out like this.

PAGE ONE: Small letters: “Why do I have to ‘humanize’ anything?”

PAGE TWO: Larger letters: “I DON’T CARE
WHAT
THEY SAY, THIS ISN’T
FUNNY!”

PAGE THREE: The largest letters, dashed off in a furious white heat:
“I HATE THIS!!!”

Susan slammed the sketch pad closed. Then she just sat at the desk in her office cubicle, holding her head in her hands. She had been hoping to meet the assignment by finding a more compassionate, personalized way into it. But no matter how she tried to mitigate it, the basic concept of Kent Allman’s ad campaign was antithetical to compassion
at its very core.
You couldn’t impose dignity upon an idea that was fundamentally undignified. To think otherwise was to operate from a false premise. The sketches in her pad were proof enough of that.

The fact that those same sketches had taken all morning and part of the afternoon to execute was not insignificant either. Good work was never labored. Good work came easily—at
this
stage, in any event.

The wall clock read 2:55.

Allman had arrived ten minutes ago; he was already with Berries, chatting in Berries’ office.

The meeting was supposed to be at three.

“What are you gonna do?”

She swiveled to see Jonathan Besterman at the entrance to her cubicle.

After a long while, she said, “I don’t know . . . What do you suggest?”

Jonathan shook his head sadly. “I don’t know either.” Then he literally
shook off
the melancholy. “All right, wait, enough moping around. We’re two smart people, right?”

She allowed herself a small smile. “Right . . .”

“We should be able to formulate some kinda plan here, right?”

“Jonathan, you have your own deadlines to—”

“Baloney, you’ll do the same for me sometime, now answer my question. We can formulate a plan here,
right?”

“Right!” Her smile was growing now.

Jonathan clapped his hands together.

“Okay. Here we go. The challenge is—”

And Susan’s intercom buzzed.

Berries’ voice said,
“Susan, we’re ready for you to come in now.”

She exchanged a helpless glance with Jonathan, then replied, “Be right with you, Keith,” and disconnected.

All hope left her. She just threw up her hands, and then quickly gathered up her notes and her sketch pad, and began a brisk, fatalistic walk to Berries’ office. Jonathan was at her heels.

“Susan, slow down, give yourself a minute to—”

She stopped, pivoted on her heel, said firmly, “Jonathan! Thank you, but there’s nothing to be done. I’ve given myself a minute. I’ve given myself every minute I’ve had since yesterday. Whatever happens in there, I have to face it. You’re a lovely man for trying. I appreciate it.”

She turned to finish the walk and behind her, Jonathan barked, “Just hold on!”

She turned again, exasperated, wanting to say
Please
stop, this is torture
enough,
but he had a stern finger wagging at her and a look of utter determination that stilled her.

“You wanted to know what I’d suggest? Here’s what I suggest.” He took a deep breath, then announced, “It’s your party. Don’t blink.”

Whereupon he turned and walked away before she could ask him what he meant. Obviously he was speaking in euphemisms, she knew
that
at least, but she couldn’t decipher them.
Party? Blink?
What—?

No time. She faced about, took the remaining steps, put her hand on the doorknob, and then,
sweet Celine help me,
there she was in the office. Berries and Allman were looking at her expectantly from the same positions they’d occupied yesterday, separated from her by only a few yards of carpet. But the separation felt to her like a chasm.

Widening at that.

With an anticipatory, but typically charmless, smile, Berries said, “Well, what have you got for us?”

Susan took a few steps forward, placed her paraphernalia on the chair in which she would have sat, and folded her arms—not as an act of defiance. She was, it would occur to her later, hugging herself for support.

“Here’s the thing, actually, Keith . . . Mr. Allman . . .”

“Kent, please,” Allman requested. (Great. Thank you so much for making this easier.)

“Kent . . .” Susan amended. “I . . . I need more time.”

Berries leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers together over his chest. “The assignment was fairly straightforward, Suse.”

“Yes, I know, but . . . as I was working on it last night and this morning, a few refinements occurred to me. Rather than show them to you half-formed, I’d really like to develop them for—”

“I can’t say,” Allman interrupted, “that I’m pleased to have made the trip here if there’s no presentation. But”—he held up a conciliatory palm—“I do certainly understand that new ideas need to breathe. Provided we’re all on deadline. Tomorrow, then, same time, same station?”

“In truth,” Susan lied, “I was thinking more like three or four days.”

Allman squinted, as if he hadn’t heard correctly. Donned his hateful “figuring out a problem” expression. Swiveled to face Berries, exchanging a concerned look.

“Three or four
days?”
Berries echoed. “Listen, before we go any further with this, do you suppose you could thumbnail these ‘refinements’ for us?”

Susan looked away, bit her lip.

“I thought you told me she was good,” Allman said ominously.

A dangerous edge crept into Berries’ voice. “Susan, what’s going on?” Emotional mechanic that he was, Berries didn’t “get” angry like most people. He
chose
to be angry, and the control behind the choice made his anger a fearsome weapon.

And it would only be worse if she continued trying to bluff.

So she collected herself and in a very small voice said, “I’m lying.”

“You’re what?” said Allman.

“I was trying to buy more time, but the truth is, the real truth is, I don’t need three or four more days. I don’t need three or four more minutes. The truth is, Mr. Allman, your campaign ideas are . . . are just awful, and they can’t be made to work.”

“Susan,” Berries said quickly, tersely, “I think you’d better leave? We’ll discuss this later.”

“Fine,” she said, picked up her stuff and started to go. But going wasn’t the answer either.

She turned back, clutching her stuff to her chest protectively. Her voice was a little shaky, and she couldn’t steady it.

“But not until I tell you . . . this is wrong. I don’t care about my idea not being to your liking. I mean, I do, but . . . it’s different. Um . . .” She said “um” not because she was groping for words, but because she was terrified of the words that were, in fact, cascading out of her mouth, and she didn’t want to cry. “And Kent, the fact that you can’t envision things beyond your own life experience, um, um, that’s limiting, not only to people like me, but to you. Um, your choice, though.”

“I won’t say it again,” Berries warned. “Susan. Out. Now.”

“What’s important, um,” Susan continued, the tears starting to form, her jaw trembling, “is that if you were doing a spot about Koreans instead of Newcomers and, um, they had eaten this kat-choo—”

“Kimchee,” Allman corrected reflexively.

“Yes! Thank you! Kimchee!” and that was the burst of healthy resentment she needed to get her past the tears flowing freely now and the nervous shivers she no longer cared to control. “If you were doing
that
commercial and you did it the same way, made fun of their culture like you’ve tried to make fun of mine, how much mouthwash do you think you’d sell? Do you think the networks and pressure groups would even
let you get away with it?”

And in the silence that followed, she added, “That was not a rhetorical question. You know?”

And now it was Allman’s turn to say “um,” albeit for entirely different reasons.

“So, if they wouldn’t let you get away with it, why should I—or any Newcomer? Even the name of the product: Tencton-ease? By
itself
it’s an insult.”

Berries rose, his anger rising with him.

“I’ve warned you twice. You don’t get a thir—”

Allman cut in. “Keith, let me handle this.” The smaller man stood, flexed a bit within his jacket, as if about to enter the ring, and approached Susan. When he was nearly nose to nose with her, he said, “I . . . don’t . . . insult . . . people. I’ve been in this business a long time, and I value my customers. Newcomer and human alike.”

Wiping her eyes with a palm, Susan said, “Does your company manufacture a hair restorative?”

“You picked a poor time to make a joke.” She held his gaze. Finally, he relented. “Yes, we’ve pioneered a mass market formula more effective than Minoxydil. It wouldn’t work for you.”

“As long as it works for humans.”

“It works fine.”

“And do you have a special formula for black people?”

“A minor variant. But we market it very differently.”

“One moment.”

She opened her large sketch pad, flipped to a blank page, produced a charcoal pencil from a small case and proceeded to execute a series of furious strokes that seemed to attack the page upon contact and fly off the surface upon completion. The strokes got smaller—she was writing something now—and then she was done, tapping the pencil point upon the page for punctuation.

“Now, then,” she said. “Your hair restorative for blacks. In your wildest dreams, would you market it like this?”

She turned the pad around to face him.

It showed a rough sketch of a box. On it, was the happy, smiling, comic book face of a black man, exclamation points rising from the fine Afro on his head. Above him, the name of the product:

NE-GROWS

Allman laughed, a short, sharp bark, but it was the laughter of shock. And then his face went red with embarrassment.

“Which one of us is the most naive, Ke—Mr. Allman? I know what you’re after. And I could have been your best friend.” She looked over at Berries, who was looking out of his office window, his body tense, the symbolism evident: He had—metaphorically
and
literally—turned his back on her. She said to him what she had to say anyway. “Mr. Allman’s all but a stranger to me. But I thought I knew you. You’re smart. You should know better. You should have known before I did.”

She left her pad in Allman’s hands, crossed to the door. Didn’t turn back as her hand touched the knob.

“A little sensitivity goes a long way, you know,” she said huskily, her voice thick now for having tried to speak through her tears.

Then she was out of the office and moving.
Down the hall.
But she wanted her sketch pad back. Those terrible rough sketches were in it. All Kent had to do was flip a page to see them.
Past her desk, her pace increasing.
Didn’t matter, she was done here, she had finished herself but good.
Past Jonathan, racing past, did that mean she was running, when had she started running, and was he calling her name?
Let them keep the stupid pad, let it be her stupid legacy in this stupid place.
Slamming the elevator button with both hands, just wanting out, just out, just air and
—