At his seminars, Robert McKee used to say that stories want to be told (a probably borrowed idea); a similar thought was developed into the theory of memes by Richard Dawkins. If so, a scriptwriter's job is a lot like that of a horse breeder from the book eras. You have to search a fearful herd for a specimen showing the signs of the fastest and the most endurant one and then, after making your choice, to create the race for viewer's money winner out of it. What McKee omitted was that this vivid metaphor is not the story's only resemblance to the wild beast. We have felt it with our own skins, and still feel it to the fullest. Yes, the stories do strive to be told; yes, some of them travel an extraordinarily tortuous way in that pursuit; and yes, there are stories you can tame, and bridle, and saddle (this kind makes the majority), and there are others. Others that are totally, entirely different.
At the beginning of the new century, a novel sterilely called Path to Light hung in the incoming mail of all the publishers you can find in both capitals twice, if not thrice. This had no tangible result, though, except for a couple of jaundiced entries in editor blogs. Occasional replies had formal notice about the "sluggish introduction," "flat characters," "overloaded language," and other features of this highly ambiguous text that work against its success—a rather fair notice by the way. The author tried to follow all the recommendations for some time but soon gave it up due to its total futility he had gradually realized. He wrote a letter to us this spring, and of course it ended up in spam. The second letter made it through. The author gave effusive praise to our work, so broad in terms that it felt insincere, and proposed a collaboration; he had the idea of making an eight- or ten-episode TV show out of his Path to Light.
Not a bad one, given the current situation.
Until now, we had no clue why he believed a pair of aspiring science fiction writers from the far reach of the country could make it; even then we hardly shared his confidence at least by a third, but, after a short discussion, we said yes and got to work. It was Veblen, it seems, who said that the "instinct of workmanship" is a thing no less powerful than the "killer instinct" that transfuses the whole world today much to our chagrin and sorrow as its inhabitants.
We were slightly flabbergasted by the twenty-two author's sheet size of the novel; the signed contract was the answer to our cautious inquiries, along with an advanced payment that eased our editorial zeal considerably. The good news was that four story arcs of the novel could be easily cut into episodes, two or three of them per each arc—in a sense, our job turned out to be purely technical. There were two documents in the author's e-mail; the text of the novel itself was accompanied with a huge file of feedback, comments, and critical reviews. As we gathered, he had collected all of it, sedulously concealing the names and pseudonyms of the critics under initials and nicknames of his own invention, like "Translator," "Philosopher," etc. Some were rather entertaining. Critic, for example, defined the novel as a "literary role-playing game the author indulge himself in before the dazed reader while ever-more losing the narrative detachment, and this is fascinating." Philosopher's harsh report was that the power of the novel was never its language, or the plot, both of which the author had borrowed from not even Eco, or Borges, but from the meanest epigoni of theirs, like Brown; what makes the novel stand out is just a few pieces so much more vivid, authentic, and compelling than the rest of the text that he, Philosopher, has doubts as to whether one and the same pen was responsible for the entire text.
We had been trying to guess the alleged pieces at first but never got on the same page. The guessing had a curious effect. Indeed, we started feeling fluctuations in style; we started thinking some chunks were tremendously gripping for the author to write, while others made him push through, as though it was a necessary but tedious job.
Truly, the intro didn't have any surprises for a reader, even the unsuspecting one: A provincial city, our time; the heroine, a young female police detective, takes the murder case of a famous anesthesiologist who has come to a scientific conference. Her colleagues, whose field of expertise is murders for profit and domestic stabbing incidents all along, are puzzled by details and circumstances of the crime. The body lay in an empty room, the unnatural pose suggesting crucifixion; the victim's arms and legs were strapped; there were deep symmetrical wounds on his torso and strange signs around him on the floor. As it goes in modern fiction, the young lady detective has a gift, a remarkable intuition, or, rather, an epiphany on a need-to-know basis, which manifests itself in a way that sometimes she just knows what exactly happened, and all what's left for her to do is checking her theory. This talent, clearly, helps her—and the author—a great deal with her job, but not with her career, which is totally within the lines of today's existence paradoxalia. Other than that, the heroine is perfectly normal. Following her epiphanies (that becomes more and more implied as the story unfolds), she comes to an expert on religions, a local university professor, a student of whom she was back in her day. With a bit of spiteful irony, the professor claims it was a suicide, revealing unexpected awareness of crucial details of the crime; in addition, he proved to belong to an occult sect hiding behind the "Rational Meditation Society" facade. These facts and the weight of evidence, like a fingerprint from the apartment the body was found in, make the heroine take him into custody. At the very same time, the dead anesthesiologist body disappears from the morgue, and under mysterious circumstances again: "the door slammed, and he was gone."
Though with some effort, the conversation with the professor, perhaps, more than anything pretends to be one of the gems of the novel Philosopher mentioned. The heroine does a slightly grotesque interrogation given that the professor won't take her seriously despite his shaky position. Instead, he shares with Natalia (that's her name) a rather stale theory that Lucifer, better known as Satan, never stopped being God's number two; his rebellion and overthrow are not even staging (God does not play theater, as Einstein might have said) but a sheer misinterpretation of so-called sacred texts. According to this provincial gnostic, everything the Light-Bringer does ultimately serves the Lord's glory and abets His triumph over the coming forces of true chaos that Lucifer, of course, has nothing to do with, and moreover, is equally hostile to, like the Lord himself. "Consider us performing a selection, that's all," the professor says not too modestly and proves to be right—at least, in being careless. The forensic investigators, who determined the time of death, provided him with a bullet-proof alibi; the fingerprint is explained by the fact (say hi to Stierlitz!) that, shortly before the murder, he has rented this apartment for a short time, and, though reprehensible, his purpose was completely legal. The same forensic investigators (there is a vivid and rather unfriendly description of one of them in the novel) admit the possibility of a "very sophisticated suicide."
The professor walks free, but instead of celebrating freedom and justice, he makes a date with Natalia, promising some information to help her with the case. Backed up by her friend, a former policeman now working for a security agency, the young woman shows up. The professor looks surprised but tells her that the anesthesiologist killed himself to frame and discredit the "Rational Meditation Society." Natalia asks for an exhaustive reasoning behind sacrificing a life for a non-guaranteed charge; the professor gives her no answer and offers a deal: an honest explanation of what is going on in return for her closing the case. The heroine refuses and brings up the body stolen from the morgue. The professor raises the stake, and now it's a dizzying high career growth, "all the way up to Moscow," and financial well-being for the rest of a very long life. No signing anything in blood and "other nonsense credited to us," he points out; with the murder case closed, and the body theft case transferred to another authority as a misdemeanor, it's a win-win situation. Natalia refuses the second time and makes a push herself, threatening the professor to press charges for attempted bribery of an officer on duty. Having gotten even for the failed interrogation, she pressures him into giving her those who might be involved in the abduction of the body. The people also turn out to be a religious organization (as far as the satanists Gnosticism can be called a religion) but more or less Christian this time; this is the end of the fourth chapter of the novel and the second episode of the script.
The first revelation pathos (the author capitalized both words: the "First Revelation"), completely inappropriate in the setting of the former public swimming pool, has been the cause of persistent bemusement for us for a long time. We had to get used to this tile, black-and-white aesthetics. By the way, the author's guess for a satanist meeting place was, in a sense, accurate—there is now a business incubator over there. We had started out energetically, and immersion in the text was, perhaps, the only reason for our double blindness to everything else around, to these strange things that, like a pack of sharks, began circling nearby, and, like a pack of sharks either, grew in both number and size. It would take us too much time to recite all of this multi-genre and rather burdensome series of wonders; we will just mention the ball lightning ("came in, sniffed, and then went away") and the invasion of Madagascar cockroaches that escaped from a pet store terrarium and multiplied in the damp basement of a tower apartment building, violating the laws of ecology with a crunch.
Ironically, it was the text of the novel that brought us back (not immediately though, but still) to this reality. One of us belatedly noticed that places and landmarks, like the Lenin head monument, the public swimming-pool, and the building gracelessly called "the toilet bowl by the market," familiar to each Ulan-Udenian, should have long ago made us suspect the author was local. We asked him. No, he was native of St. Pete; he chose our city as a typical province and did some research. Another time we argued the likelihood of events in the novel; feeling in charge of everything provincial in the script and having concurred that a violent death of an anesthesiologist in our city was something we had never heard about, we have hypothesized quite plausible chains of circumstances that could lead to that, for example, because of drugs. The news of a decent, state hospital anesthesiologist's murder tragically put an end to this argument; it passed as a domestic homicide on the Internet and television, and our blindness stayed with us that time.
(One of the first chapters had the image, striking to both of us, of a dressed-up girl playing with a new doll in the ruins of a war-time hospital; to capture the impression in the script, we even went to the street where we thought the episode took place, but a couple of new buildings was all we found).
We would get together every three or four days to talk through the key points, and then go home, each to his own computer, to chew on his chunk of text; not a hint of what is called inspiration was in this working mode. I remember one of those many meetings. "A phantasmagoria," my partner says. I look at him; he looks out the window. Outside is gray—it's gray the fifth day in a row—and inside is stuffy, but you can't open the windows for once you do, a faint but obvious smell of smoke fills the apartment. The woods are burning around the city, tens of thousands of hectares of woods, and the heaven's gloom is the smoke, and the smoke, and the smoke. "A quarter," my partner says; it means we have reached the page one hundred. I look up, feeling an issue there to discuss. "That character in the bar," the partner says reluctantly. "It's like he was based on Sanjik." "Sanjik is a classmate of mine from high-school," he promptly replies to the unspoken question. "Don't know any Sanjik," I mumble grimly, not in a sense that I supposed to know his classmates but meaning I'm busy. I'm shortening the unthinkably long lines to TV-showy size, flagging the questionable episodes, and only partly hearing his estranged voice, saying: "Den doesn't know any Sanjik, either." "And who’s Den?" I ask in the same spirit of detachment. "Another classmate of mine," he replies and goes back to proofreading.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
With us starting the fifth episode, our folks began to dream at night. For a whole week, the partner's youngest son was seeing black birds flying over the city, searching for someone, as he thought; the birds had no eyes and were bigger than humans. The last dream had them walking around the streets, asking questions; the partner's wife assumed it was reaction to the smoke and took the children to the countryside for a month. The wife of the second co-writer had visions of people standing in the evening darkness, peering in the windows of their apartment; each day the people multiplied and got closer, but then a business trip came up, and she also left (ran away) for a couple of weeks. Rivers were drying up. Fish was throwing itself on the shore. All-over fire was frolicking in the crowns. Ash was coming down to the sacred lake from the skies. Baikal was vomiting spirogyra; all beaches, all the coastline from north to south were covered in a disgusting browny green mass fattening on phosphates from laundry detergent and industrial waste. And Natalia, the detective with a gift, was adamantly untangling the knot of cults and superstitions, authority and adultery, and also nephrite, and family ties, and sorcerers, and shamans, while threads were going higher, with glow of the mystery growing brighter, beckoning unbearably.
A dark-gray-suited man rang the doorbell in the middle of our deconstructing of chapter twelve, in which the action takes place in the dusky luxurious sanatorium of Ministry of Internal Affairs; at this point the heroine is coming to realize that her insights she takes for granted cannot be incidental and moreover, never have been. The man showed us his ID and asked some questions about a movie that a guy we knew produced, and that was considered rather successful—for provincial cinema, of course. He asked if the film had a distribution certificate, who was the script's real author, and a lot of other things we couldn't possibly know having had nothing to do with the shooting. Nonetheless, it was a sticky, drawn-out, two-hour conversation that subtly moved to our work; after some unexpectedly precise questions about the novel and the script, the dark gray suited man gave a sniff of something vague, and disappeared from our lives—forever, we suppose. We did some cautious asking in our circle to find out we were the only ones these people talked to about the movie, ignoring the shooting crew as well. He wasn't our last unusual visitor.
(The day of another encounter was pretty memorable; however, we are divided, which is a normal thing for this whole story, over some petty but colorful details. For instance, one of us is recalling a scarf, a bloody ribbon around the neck of our guest, while the other doesn't remember any).
The doorbell ringing was eager and persistent; later, talking about it, we realized that seeing her felt the same for both of us—like she was an old acquaintance, but her showing up was unwelcome. Strictly speaking, there is something wrong in this. Time tends to numb the harshness of experience, and usually, if your perception of the world is still somewhat fresh, you have nice feelings toward old acquaintances. We also felt kind of shocked—we both had pictured the heroine of the novel exactly that way. Though the visitor's name was Anastasia and not Natalia, the fact didn't change a bit.
Now we realize she acted extremely strange, coming in, giving her name, telling that she would be waiting for us in the car, and walking out. After a short conversation, we followed, slightly deafened by such correlation between the events of the novel we were working on and our own lives. The tactic flashlight we brought along (a rather long and heavy object) indicates we still had a certain level of judgment.
We barely spoke in the car; as to the actions needed from us, we were briefly told just to be present. That answer, though, was pretty much ruined by a swift additional "in case of anything" remark. We were given some startling details as well. The anesthesiologist was killed in a bizarre way, meaning it was not a domestic violence case; Anastasia Natalia had never heard of a novel called Path to Light, nor had she any idea it was the third revelation we were going to (we guessed it; she herself said something like "it's not the first meeting of that kind").
We were going south, to where the steppe adjoined our city, and everything around us was dull yellow from the light of the dull yellow sky, more apt for a made-up story, evoking a vague longing for a bright, succulent, and truly colorful world. Anastasia Natalia stopped the car at the foot of a hill and walked up to the top; she told us to wait. We had missed the exact moment her counterpart appeared. He was rather unconventionally dressed; the chlamys of some kind looked black in that lighting—a more than mysterious choice for the July heat and Buryatia. The odd thing was the feeling that it was we who looked inappropriate in our shorts and T-shirts.
Though deserted, the place was chosen wrong, we thought, because anyone who had happened to be in line of sight could easily see them; on the other hand, this could be exactly what one of the parties wanted as an extra safety guarantee. The young woman and her vis-à-vis stood sharply visible against the yellow sky; perhaps (for sure) they were talking, but they stood engravingly still, so we didn't hear words, and we didn't see gestures, just the beautiful clean silhouettes of Anastasia Natalia and the chlamys-wearing stranger. And then it suddenly ended. The stranger disappeared again; she came down from the hill; and we left.
The days were clear and full of blue skies.
After that rendezvous, our correspondence with the author of Path to Light started fading away by the minute. He responded more and more reluctantly until finally flat out said he had lost interest in turning the novel into a movie. Responding to our bewilderment about such stupid behavior (we called it strange in the letter), he offered that we keep the advanced money. We continue the work on the script. It's not inertia—we do it because we know, and this knowledge is like the epiphanies that lead the heroine who is now ours (we would like to believe that.) The story still wants to be told and still doesn't want to help us. The author's design was to let the reader start realizing what is going on and whose body it is that all these cult members, Satan worshipers, and righteous people are going after just in the end of the second third of the novel. The few real readers, however, either knew this from the very beginning, or had no idea until the end—it would be a death sentence for a book of Christie or Doyle, but today's tolerance has also put down its roots in reading fiction, albeit in the form of apathy. We have spent hours, rearranging the scenes one way and another, moving the lines and descriptions with hints up and down, hoping to get the realization grow gradually, and yet we can't say for sure we succeeded, or rather, can say we did not. The name of Christ is directly spoken four chapters before the end of the novel, which is relatively early; in the script, we have decided to only reveal it in the opening scene of the last episode by putting the particular monologue in the professor's mouth speaking the voice of the highest hierarch of his impious organization (which, by the way, meant the professor's inevitable death right after). As usual, the Satanarch offers Natalia everything she was offered before—well-being, career, knowledge—and throws in a little something from him personally: a happy motherhood and blissful marriage. No more than a second she hesitates, for her friend is dead, killed. Forestalling her question, the satanist says that he can't get the former policeman back, but meeting another, a ten thousand times better one, is sealed for her; you see, the devil's man says, I am honest with you. Moreover, goes on the Satanarch, I'll tell you that you're right. Yes, it's His body that people you're looking for are moving and hiding; yes, He Has Come again, but no, the world is not finished yet; no, He's alive but in an induced coma—that's why they needed the anesthesiologist and refrigerators. The young woman listens to herself, begging for an epiphany, but her gift is silent.
We saw a rainbow yesterday.
Our letters contain a thorough discussion of whether we should retain the description of ideas of all the forces represented in the novel: the piecewise farcical, buffoonish and, in a way, charming, dark cynicism of Coma Satanists; the straightforward self-sacrifice of the Righteous Men of Awakening with a clear shadow of resentment toward Him; the shudder-inducing power of Real Satanists (we have no idea how the director is going to show it; the soul selling is highly possible); the Righteous Men of Coma perseverance and their ever-burning, furious faith in humanity. We will expound their ideas at the minimum so as not to contribute to the spread of anyone's views, given that it is something the story does not even want from us; it just needs to be told, and we harbor the hope that all these wonders around will stop when it finds that we have done everything we could for it. You can trace the moment in our letters when we realized the full gravity of this whole situation; it happened when we, as well, started dreaming.
In a dream, you are going up a high mountain; the road is sparkling with white. The mountain seems to be of snow-white limestone entirely, and the sea waves crash against its foot with silent rumble.
There is a house on the mountain.
Time is ripped in the dream, and now you are already in the house, on the terrace. It is beautiful over here: the white mountain, the sea, bright blue in the sun, the lush greenery with meek eyes of flowers. You talk to a man, and the man is beautiful, and you know you are going to be tormented not being able to describe him when you wake up; it's the knowing we don't have words for, the memory you don't get to keep. He tells you that you are not mistaken, that he truly came here on his own, having concurred with those of the disciples who want to give time to humanity. He does not mind the other interpretations, both from the satanists and the righteous. Your knowledge, he says, is just the circles on the surface, while what causes them lies either in depths or heights, beyond your reach. You are silent and hopeful it's only for now.
I'm waiting, he says. Loneliness is a nasty thing, but it's the sister of hope. I believe you and I are going to have decent company.
But it's not the talking that bothers you, it's what you see.
You see the dark prides dashing through the world's networks lines, tearing the CPUs bowels into billions of glistering shards. You see the lattice black bomber swarms ruling the bottomless sky with contrails. You feel the earth quivering under the heft of alien legions. The snow-white jet fighter armadas are sweeping toward them, but you are not under any of those transparent canopies. Once again soldiers in bleached gymnastyorkas are standing upright in the full profile trenches, and the sun is shining on tips of their bayonets, but you are not among them. My sword, give me my sword! But nobody gives it to you, and you wake up—wake up in your own bed, to your own scream—and you read, again and again, the last chapter that goes:
"The young woman is going up a high mountain. The road is sparkling with white. The mountain seems to be of snow-white limestone entirely, and the sea waves crash against its foot with silent rumble."