Wendy rang me the next evening. Before I could say anything, even a salutation, she had grabbed my ear, as if her lips extruded through the holes in the earpiece.
"Well, I hacked into the library network and pirated a copy of your book. I looked at its records too. Guess how many times it's been accessed in the last year? Can't guess? I'll tell you. Three. And you still think people will flock to see it on film? Anyway I've started reading it. Mildly interesting, I'd call it. What ghostware did you use?"
"I wrote it myself, of course. I didn't need a damn computer."
"Come on Victor. May I call you Victor? For some very strange reason I think you could have done better than this. You had a ghost-writer didn't you."
"The publisher called it an editing machine. As I dictated it contracted 'simultaneously' to 'at the same time', and expanded 'now', to 'at this juncture', and things like that. After that experience I decided to write the screenplay myself."
"You could write the words perhaps, but you can't do the programming yourself can you?" she said, "And I know someone who can. He's a great writer, too."
"I know a zillion people who think they can, and two zillion with an opinion about who else can, and I want none of them."
"Victor if I am to direct this film I insist on having a writer I can respect."
"Well thank you very much. Besides, I don't recall actually accepting you for the job."
"You're old and forgetful, so I'll overlook that omission," she said. "Anyway, I've got just the writer for you."
"It's someone I've never heard of isn't it?"
"He's young."
"Any credits?"
"Some."
"That you haven't yet mentioned so I won't have heard of them. Is he your lover?"
She replied to that with, I think, pretended offence. "Do you really think I'd jeopardise my career for the sake of nepotism."
"Nepotism? Your lover is your family. Incest too. I'll need to write a second volume of my biography."
"Favouritism then. Just shut up about it. Will you meet him?"
"I'll meet him. But only after I've played with some of his work. He is an interactive writer I presume?"
"He's a trained writer-programmer, yes, though he's done a straight film, too. But you won't have heard of it. Give him a couple of days to read your book - he's a slow reader. See you soon. Check your mail in about five minutes."
Sure enough, waiting for me in e-mail were four items from Wendy. This was very impressive, for I insist on the latest and best security screens, otherwise fans would swamp me. If Wendy could break through my fan filter then I could trust her ability with computers, which covers about half the effort of creative film-making these days. I could never have chosen a director who relied solely on available imaging and interactive software. This changed every day, and Wendy was probably right that I couldn't cope with it.
The mail included a straight film, two varivision programs, and some text. The last was a series of short stories that weren't tagged for commercial distribution, so evidently they had never been picked up for promotion. It's pointless trying to sell plain text these days, but people keep writing.
I chose to watch the varivision programs first. One was a popular soap opera. It seems Wendy's friend had a staff programming job with GBS; not very exciting, but you have to start somewhere. The episode she sent me was mildly interesting though, in that the audience were allowed to change the order of each character's marriages, so that although yesterday Bill's first wife was Mary, and Mary's second husband was Toby who had only ever married once - to Gwen, today you could have Toby still married to Gwen while she was still divorcing her first husband, who was Bill, even though he was her second husband before she left town with Mary. I think. As with all soap operas, the producers never saw the need to let the audience change any of the dialogue since the options were so limited.
The second show was slightly more interesting, though there was little content that could be attributed to a writer, and all the programming was standard morphing and mapping of faces and body parts onto characters who didn't own them originally. It was a dating show: three boys were separated by a screen from three girls. The boys first describe the physical characteristics of their perfect woman, and the girls do likewise for their men. The monitors then show the boys to the girls and the girls to the boys, but with the desired attributes mapped onto their real physical features. Then they ask each other questions, and get answers like, "I like having a good time, but responsibly and safely, Brian." Then after three compatible couples have been formed by audience console votes, and the six people have fallen in love with each other through the beautiful images on the monitors that they have been talking to, the screens are lowered, they feign shock, pretend to be satisfied with the standard human they have won in place of the sculptured image they have been talking to, and, holding hands, walk off into a package-holiday sunset. It was entertaining but extremely puerile. I only watched it three times - to study the imaging techniques.
Ready for the film now I poured myself a gin, waved a tonic bottle over the glass and added some more gin before I settled down to watch it. I was relieved to see that it was a movie, and credits were rolling over a scene in the bridge of an interstellar spaceship, with aliens drinking coloured liquid to an accompaniment of some plagiarised symphonic music. "Intergalactic Harpies from NGC 5128" it said, a film written by Lyn Wu. I'd never hear of...
Ready for the film now Victor poured himself a gin, waved a tonic bottle over the glass and added some more gin before he settled down to watch it. He was relieved to see that it was a movie, and credits were rolling over a pastoral scene to an accompaniment of some Spanish guitar music. Happier now, he relaxed and sat to watch the movie. Something was odd about the credits though, and when the title came up he realised what it was - they were in Spanish. The movie was called "En Abril, aguas mil", written by Timothy Pedro O'Laughlin de Gonzales. Victor had had three houses in California where a little Spanish is essential for controlling one's servants, so he knew the title translated as, "In April, it rains a lot." Further, the entire movie was in Castilian Spanish and without subtitles, which was unfortunate since his Mexican command language was not extensive enough to allow him to understand a word of the dialogue.
The movie seemed to be about the happenings in a flood-stranded town near Madrid. Victor was about to request a simultaneous translation from the film player, but instead he just turned down the sound and found he could follow it quite well. Most movies made in the late twentieth century style can be understood this way, since they are essentially a series of still photographs of beautiful people, landscapes mixed with gun-battles and car-chases, and just enough scraps of dialogue intruding into the soundtrack to keep the Writers' Guild happy. By the end of the century, when the variflix were being developed, film-making had completed its revolution to the silent era, that is the time when dialogue was only left out for technical reasons. But the silent Keystone cops were infinitely more exciting than movies about pretty Hollywood stars looking concerned about corruption/betrayal/hypocrisy/other, so the audiences began to fade. Films were a hundred years old, and given that a generous lifetime for an art form is sixty years, times were ripe for change.
So because there was not much dialogue Victor did not request a computer dubbing, or even subtitles. He relaxed into his favourite chair with another gin and set to watching "En Abril, aguas mil." He did not wake up again until the telephone rang, about six hours later.
"Interesting movie Wendy," he told her. "I'm simply amazed that I haven't heard of it until now. Catchy rhyme in the title too."
"It's a brilliant film, Victor," she said rather dryly, "and you probably don't know that it was nominated for best foreign film at the Academy Awards last year. You probably don't know that because most members of the 'Academy' never even see foreign films, let alone vote on them."
"Who wants to join the academy these days? No one interesting still makes straight films," he said. "You don't have to be critical of it just because you've never been invited to join."
"Just hurry up and read the short stories and ring me back," she said and hung up, perhaps to forestall his chance to protest, or tell her she was no longer involved with the project, though he seriously doubted that anything he could have said would have dislodged her from his plans now. He admitted that he was attracted to her, despite the age difference, for he had a strong and ever willing libido - so far, anyway [see, for instance, Chapters 20-24, 38 and all the odd numbered chapters from 7 onwards of Victor: my varied life]. But more than that he was curious to know why she had attacked his project with such determination after her early antagonism and disrespect. He dearly wanted to speak to her again. To give himself the excuse he accessed the short stories immediately, noting with thanks that they were in English since language translation programs were only competent for dialogue, where mistakes are forgiven. Not only were they in English, but to his astonishment and slight disappointment they were very good - some of them anyway. They were still not the sort of thing anyone would publish and expect to turn a profit from, but there were aspects of dialogue and visual imagery that one could imagine would belong to a screen-writer.
Obviously they were never published - I don't think there has been a short story published this century, actually - since the inflexible vignette became impossible to sell in the orgy of technology when computers started to speak and play films on the dining room table, and even the children's crockery spoke - "Eat your dinner and you'll see the bunny try to kill the wolf".
Since he had fallen asleep in the Spanish film, Victor was able to read the English stories late into the night, which gave him a tremendous opportunity to ring Wendy at half past four in the morning.
"Speak!" was the simple, sleepy, angry greeting he heard.
"I'll meet you both. Lunch. Tomorrow. My place," he said, and promptly hung up, gratified that he had annoyed her. As he fell asleep in the chair he resolved to be nice from that moment on, expecting that an amiable working relationship would naturally ensue.
The next day - actually later the same day - Wendy picked me up in a taxi. I was excited, both by the prospect of work and by being alone with her, for I had only met her briefly before and had been enchanted. I had been drilling myself all morning, willing myself to be strong and resist the temptation to be drawn to her in the event that she be irresistibly nice, or beautiful, or held any other charms that might sway me from professional detachment.
I asked, "Why did you ask me to do this?"
Wendy said, "Because I've seen your work and I think you can do it, and you're the only such person I could think of that Victor would not have heard of."
That was hardly encouraging, but I needed the work and was desperate enough to come along, though she made me feel like I would be abandoning her in the desert if I didn't. I'm surly now because I think she knew from the beginning that things would go wrong during this project, and it would have taken little generosity to tell me that.
We turned up at Victor's at two o'clock, the time Wendy calculated would make him irritated at our lateness, but not enough to dismiss us altogether - or to miss out on the food. She was dressed again in jeans and t-shirt, though this time the dishevelled mess was replaced by careful attention to choice and application of clothing, specks of make-up, perfume, and dazzlingly clean, light, floating hair. I could see I shattered any of his preconceptions of Tim Gonzales de O'Laughlin. I should have gone as a swarthy Catalan waiter or a Guinness-pickled Irish poet longing for a beach to be maudlin on, but I'm pure jackaroo, and I talk like I come from way way away beyond the farthest point of the back of Burke. A tall, sun-browned cowboy in moleskins and plaited belt who says, "G'day Chine, goin' orright?". Aware of the image I stood away from him like a country grazier and shook his hand like a gorilla swinging through the treetops.
He shook his head in disbelief and his hand in pain, then said to Wendy, "This is the man that wrote an award-winning screenplay in Spanish?"
"It was nominated for an award", she said. "It should have won but didn't, because nobody with any taste got to vote. You'd better get him a beer before he shakes your hand again," she said, leading me through to the balcony as if I were a tame bear. "And I'll have some champagne," she added.
Amused, he obeyed and fetched some drinks, then took them to the balcony where he found that we had started on the food. Uselessly he said "Bon appetit," as sardonically as his sixty-year training in theatre would allow, but we took no notice, clearly engrossed in a repast of unfamiliar bounty. One day writers will be appreciated, but not this century I suspect, so they will always jump on a freebie.
"Wendy said you wouldn't mind," I said, trying to look like a vulnerable and sensitive writer, though the effect was soon dissipated by Wendy's aggression. I suppose that to this day Victor does not know me, yet I was with him from beginning to end, watching and helping as his life was threatened and saved several times. I was always there, but always so exposed that suspicion never rested its disfiguring hand on me - at least not until the very end. It is not until now, as I set down these words, that I realised the source of his mistrust, which is that I don't carry well the subdued, statuesque honorability found wherever country people have not been too poisoned by inbreeding or commerce, and honour guests who may be strangers, while treating intimates worse than their pigs.
I told him of my childhood - half in Walgett and half in Spain - a life even more perverse than his own, which was passed half in Hollywood, half in Sydney and two thirds in make-believe. He looked at me, my rabbit-fur hat removed to reveal straight black Iberian hair, leaning back with my riding boots perched on the balcony rail and staring at the harbour as if it was nothing and everything at once. I tried to look the very picture of the country boy despising the city, and the very picture of "maņana". He could hardly imagine a person he would be less likely to choose to write a screenplay of Victor: my life variations and said as much, as bluntly and rudely as he could. I just laughed and reached for another beer while Wendy rode to my defence.
Contrary to her vulgar, hostile approach to himself, she defended me very well using my own merits as evidence. At first I thought this change in attitude was calculated and false, but it seems on reflection that she genuinely enjoyed my talents, and wished to further them, more than (at that time anyway!) she wanted to deride Victor's. Wendy did all the talking, and I spent the afternoon drinking beer and laughing a lot, enjoying nearly anything as Wendy and Victor sparred. So that with his own champagne, a lovely sunset, and her beautiful voice and eyes she coerced him into letting me read the script to give an opinion - as if I was doing him favour!
Some days later we met him again. We found him dozing in the sun on his balcony, and he told us he had been thinking deeply all morning, musing on life.
"I am an old man," he said, "though fortunately not yet struck down by the myriad dementias forced on many of my associates. These diseases are endemic in the general population over 70 years old, but in show business, and art in general, they don't even wait until the late teens, and rarely are we sensible. We live out false lives on the screens and stages, and we are made to feel beautiful and important, and rich enough to be invulnerable. Kingdoms handed to seven-year-old boys are but dust compared to the follies of the vain who have never earned an honest cent, controlled by unseen, hardly understood currents of greed and the power-lust it brings."
I said nothing. Wendy raised a finger, paused, then said, "Victor!"
"Yes?"
"You make good coffee."
He laughed. "And I would talk less while drinking it! Don't worry. If I let this boy be my writer now I'll stick to what he says. Mostly," he added with a wink.
It didn't take us long to settle into work, and before the first cup of coffee was down we were arguing about the content of the film. Naturally such a thick and comprehensive volume as Victor: my varied life [143 Chapters; 565,802 words; nearly 3 megabytes in the ASCII Historical Storage Edition] is difficult to compress into a film that could be viewed in one sitting.
Victor's emphasis, in his original version of the screenplay, had been on the development of his career. I thought that his treatment was too detailed at the expense of the considerable "real-life drama" that had enlivened his personal relationships, and which he had largely glossed over.
"For example," I said, "there is a scene with your second wife Vivian."
"Vivian was my third wife," he corrected, grimacing as if the very name was distasteful. "It confuses me sometimes, too."
"Second, third, doesn't matter. Here is what you said in Chapter 89 of Victor: my varied life:
Vivian was self-obsessed, chiefly with her figure and her beautiful face. Anything that was likely to blemish that lovely facade was excluded from her life. She would not even play tennis for fear of bruises and scratches. On one occasion she even refused a game of chess because it might cause her to break a fingernail. It was more likely to damage her brain, since she couldn't understand the difference between black and white, let alone the effort it would have taken for me to explain the rules governing the movement of the pieces. The jumping knights would have fried her brain - that would make a calorie-free fried meal! At the end of our marriage she admitted to me that she had had two abortions, and tried to convince me that her doctor recommended them for medical reasons, but I researched the timing and they coincided with films in which she appeared in swimsuits. Everything she did was governed by her obsession with gaining weight. I've only seen her once since our divorce, and she hasn't gained anything. She's put on quite a bit of weight though."
I put the book down and flicked the screenplay to a passage I had marked (we were working from smart-paper copies that could pass scribbled corrections to the computer), and said to Victor, "You don't mention in the screenplay that she had two abortions. Don't you think that might have an impact on an audience? Surely that must have been emotional for you."
He said, "I was busy filming at the time. It didn't really worry me, and, as I said, she never told me about them."
"And is it true, since it's not really clear to me, that you actually expect this woman to play herself in the filmed version of your life?"
"Of course."
"After what you've said about her?"
"Have you read her autobiography? You know what she says about me?"
"No, what?"
"Well I can't quote it exactly but it's something to do with me being a no good lousy two-timing - no, three-timing, ignorant, impotent, mannerless, faithless, brainless, smelly piece of dogshit stuck in the tread of her shoe. I think she'd be delighted to call me that on film, and she'd probably even act out the happy part of our marriage if we paid her properly. But the abortions are her story."
"Not yours?"
"No. Besides, I already had two children."
"Three," I said.
"Three?" Victor looked genuinely surprised by the correction.
"Yes. That was another passage I was going to ask about. You were married the first time during the war weren't you? Where is it..." and I jumped to a passage I had marked earlier.
"During a two-week leave in 2015 I was married. During 2016 I was divorced, and promised to help the child financially when I could - a promise I could not honour for some years.
"That first wife doesn't appear at all in the screenplay. Why not? She must have been important to you once."
"That was fifty years ago," he said.
Wendy added, not hiding her sarcasm, "You mean out of your entire autobiography she and the child get one sentence each? From three megabytes they get about 15 bytes. Two hundred bit gratitude. Did they mean so little? We don't even know if it was a boy or a girl."
"Actually, I can't remember," said Victor, "but it's not important."
"It probably is for them," she said.
Victor sighed. "But we're not making a film of their lives, are we? People read autobiographies of the famous to find out what they did or said to other famous people: how they did it, where they did it, when they did it. I know this is a fairly common and dismissive view of the public that reads, but what other view can one hold? Even though the lives of the famous are no more dramatic than those of the unknown, you expect us to provide visible drama in our lives to repay you for your envy. You keep us rich, but we are prepared to give up our privacy. Forty years ago I became so well known that I could no longer go into the street to buy an ice cream by myself. I was faced with the choice of riding that fame or giving it up for anonymity, and it'll be no surprise to you that I never considered obscurity seriously. I was high on fame in those days, and later I realised that I loved acting, partly because it brought me fame, and partly because I was very good at it. But also it was the fame that made me miserable, and in this business you need misery to remain the best. The singers from the south used to say that you don't have to have the blues to sing the them, but you have to had them at least once, and the deeper blue the better. So it is with all great artists. Fame was my saviour and my bane."
Wendy said, "I've heard that other interactive actors got annoyed with you because the speeches you made up were always too long and incoherent."
"Shall we get back to work?" was his reply.
Victor's idea was that his famous friends and enemies would relish the chance to play themselves as they once were, as if telling stories of their youth, rather than seeing some look-alike young starlet pretending to be them, or a computer simulation. He claimed as his motto: "When acting strays from fiction, it strays also from truth."
"What about those who refuse?" I asked.
"I don't care about them. I had no intention of getting other actors to play their role - I simply meant to act as if they were there, and carry on regardless."
I liked the idea, though Wendy thought it a bit "stagey" for the varifilm medium. "Why don't we get the computer to fill them in," she asked. "We have footage of all them, don't we?"
"This is my movie, not the bloody computer's. I want to do it for once."
"Don't you want any interactivity at all?"
"Not in the plot, dialogue or characterisation. Maybe point of view, but nothing else."
"We don't want you killed in the first five minutes I suppose, which might happen if we allowed plot-interactivity. It would shorten your biography considerably if we strangled you at birth."
Victor said, "Besides, I have already applied for a Class 3 Historical Record Licence."
"Class 3? Then it'll be audited and verified. What a pain! Can't you go with Class 4?"
"No! The audience would be allowed to change my name. It's supposed to be an autobiography."
I said, "You can apply for specific overrides, Victor." He would have known that, and so would Wendy, but they were happy getting each other cranky. I didn't know why. But I needed this job, so I tried to look like I was on Victor's side when they argued. She continued smirking but stopped questioning him about petty details. He should have thrown us out then, I suppose, but it was plain that he was beguiled by her, either by some beauty he saw, or the need to disprove what he perceived as her mistrust of him.
Victor took a deep breath. We were all quiet, thinking of the discomfort between us, and perhaps the physical fun of bruising the air with our words. He said, "I'll hire you both, then. But I insist that you, Tim, keep her under control when she annoys me too much."
"Will you give me a signal?" I asked, not at all sure I could have any effect on Wendy.
She said, "Don't worry. It'll be obvious."
Victor ignored her and said to me, "And I want you to shorten your name." I laughed, and threatened to use my full name instead: Miguel-Angel Timothy Patrick O'Laughlin de Gonzales Fitzpatrick de Fernandez O'Rourke y Velazquez etc. etc.
He said nothing, so I knew I was in. From the tension between Wendy and Victor I suspected there might be rough days ahead. But it was a job, and you have to take what comes your way these days. What was more interesting, though, is that for six months or more I would be seeing Wendy every day. I accepted the offer, tilted my hat back and asked, "Get us another beer would you China?" He refused to move until I smiled and added "Por favor, Seņor."
"I'll get you some coffee and we can start work," he said.
Once he was gone Wendy said, "This should be fun. But we have to be careful."
"Of what?"
"Just things." She opened her computer and said, "Script Writer," to it. To me she said, "We're filming his life, and not everyone he met along the way still loves him."
She tapped on the keyboard of the computer and we said nothing more until Victor returned with three cups of coffee. Wendy refused. Opening another beer she said, "I don't have to start work until you've finished the script."
Victor looked harshly at her, gave me my coffee, and leaned back with his. We both sipped at the same time, then together we spat the coffee back out - over the table and over each other. It tasted like poison - vile, bitter and vicious. In the bottom of the cups was a layer of greyish powder.
"That bloody machine. It's trying to poison me," said Victor. "That caterer interrogates it every day, and they brag about how often they update its bloody software."
"I'm sure glad I didn't have any," said Wendy. As she spoke she turned her computer screen away, closing it as if hiding something. Something in her tone made Victor stop and look at her with raised eyebrows.
"I'll make some more with the old Atomic," he said. He took the cups, including the one that Wendy had refused, back to the kitchen, but soon reappeared.
"Curious. My coffee machine tells me it is currently cleaning its plumbing with a caustic product. Even curiouser is that there was none of the white powder in the coffee I gave to you, Wendy. Why is that?"
"I don't know. Maybe your coffee machine likes me. Or your catering software."
Victor was not yet feeling persecuted, for it was only the first offensive incident of the film. But from then on, acting on instinct I suppose, he always insisted that his coffee be served in a transparent mug. If there really was an enemy, Victor would not be burned twice by the same match.
