Redshirts (32 page)

NICK

Shitty deaths happen all the time, Finn. People accidentally step in front of buses, or slip and crack their head on the toilet, or go jogging and get attacked by mountain lions. That’s life.

FINN

That’s
your
life, Nick. But you don’t have anyone writing you, as far as you know.
We
do. It’s you. And when we die on the show, it’s because
you’ve killed us off
. Everyone dies. But we died how you decided we were going to die. And so far, you’ve decided we’d die because it’s easier than writing a dramatic moment whose response is earned in the writing. And you
know
it, Nick.

NICK

I don’t—

FINN

You do. We’re dead, Nick. We don’t have time for bullshit anymore. So admit it. Admit what’s actually going on in your head.

NICK

(sits down, dazed)

All right. Fine. All right. I wrote my last script, the one we used to send everyone back, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘Wow, we didn’t actually kill anyone off this time.’ And then I started thinking about all the ways we’ve killed off crew on the show. Then I started thinking about the fact that for them, they were real deaths. Real deaths of real people. And then I started thinking of all the stupid ways I’ve killed people off. Not just them being stupid by themselves, but everything around them too. Stupid reasons to get people in a position where I could kill them off. Ridiculous coincidences. Out-of-nowhere plot twists. All the little shitty tricks I and the other writers use because we can and no one calls us on it. Then I went and got drunk—

FINN

(nodding)

And when you woke up you went to do some writing and nothing came out.

NICK

I thought it was about not wanting to kill people. About being responsible for their deaths.

FINN

(kneeling again)

It’s the fact you weren’t acting responsibly when you killed them that’s eating at you. Even if you hadn’t written our deaths, all of us would have died one day. That’s a fact. I think you know it.

NICK

And I gave you bad deaths when I could have given you better ones.

FINN

Yes. You’re not a grim reaper, Nick. You’re a general. Sometimes generals send soldiers to their deaths. Hopefully they don’t do it stupidly.

NICK

(looking back at the crowd)

You want me to write better deaths.

FINN

Yeah. Fewer deaths wouldn’t hurt, either. But better deaths. We’re all already dead. It’s too late for us. But each of us have people we care about who are still alive, who might pass under your pen, if you want to put it that way. We think they deserve better. And now you know you do too.

NICK

You’re assuming I’ll still have a job after all this.

FINN

(standing again)

You’ll be fine. Just tell everyone you were exploring the boundaries between fiction and interactive performance in the online media. It’s a perfectly meta excuse, and anyway, no one’s going to believe your characters actually came to life. At most people will think you were kind of an asshole with this thing. But then some people think you’re kind of an asshole anyway.

NICK

Thanks.

FINN

Hey, I told you, I’m dead. No time for bullshit. Now pass out again and wake up for real this time. Then get over to your computer. Try writing. Try writing better. And stop drinking so much. It does weird things to your head.

NICK nods, then passes out. FINN and his crew of redshirts disappear (I assume).

And then I woke up.

And then I went and powered up my laptop.

And then I wrote thirty pages of the
best goddamned script
I’ve ever written for the show.

And then I collapsed because I was still sort of drunk.

And now I’m awake again, and hung over, and writing this crying because I can write again.

*   *   *

And this is where I end the blog. It did what it was supposed to—it got me over my writer’s block. Now I have scripts to write and writers to supervise and a show to be part of. It’s time for me to get back to that.

Some of you have asked—is it really a hoax? Did I ever really have writer’s block, or was this an exercise in alternate creativity schemes, a weird little side project from someone who writes too many pages about lasers and explosions and aliens? And did my characters ever actually come to life?

Well, think about it. I trade in fiction. I trade in science fiction. I make up weird shit all the time. What’s the most logical explanation in a case like this: more fiction, or everything in the blog being really real, and really happening?

You know what the most logical answer is.

Now you have to ask yourself if you believe it.

Think about it and let me know.

Until then:

Bye, Internet.

Nick Weinstein, Senior Writer,

The Chronicles of the Intrepid

CODA II:

Second Person

CODA II: SECOND PERSON

You’ve heard it said that people who have been in horrific accidents usually don’t remember the accident—the accident knocks their short-term memory right out of them—but you remember your accident well enough. You remember the rain making the roads slick, and you reining yourself in because of it. You remember the BMW running the red and seeing the driver on his cell phone, yelling, and you knew he wasn’t yelling because of you because he never looked in your direction and didn’t see your motorcycle until it crushed itself into his front fender.

You remember taking to the air and for the briefest of seconds enjoying it—the surprising sensation of flight!—until your brain had just enough time to process what had happened and douse you in an ice-cold bath of fear before you hit the pavement helmet first. You felt your body twist in ways human bodies weren’t supposed to twist and heard things inside your body pop and snap in ways you did not imagine they were meant to pop and snap. You felt the visor of your helmet fly off and the pavement skip and scrape off the fiberglass or carbon fiber or whatever it was that your helmet was made of, an inch from your face.

Twist pop snap scrape and then stop, and then your whole world was the little you could see out of the ruined helmet, mostly facing down into the pavement. You had two thoughts at that moment: one, the observation that you must be in shock, because you couldn’t feel any pain; two, that given the crick of your neck, you had a sneaking suspicion that your body had landed in such a way that your legs were bunched up underneath you and your ass was pointing straight up into the sky. The fact that your brain was more concerned about the position of your ass than the overall ability to feel anything only served to confirm your shock theory.

Then you heard a voice screaming at you; it was the driver of the BMW, outraged at the condition of his fender. You tried to glance over at him, but without being able to move your head, you were only able to get a look at his shoes. They were of the sort of striving, status-conscious black leather that told you that the guy had to work in the entertainment industry. Although truth be told it wasn’t just the shoes that told you that; there was also the thing about the asshole blowing through a red light in his BMW because he was bellowing into his phone and being gasket-blowing mad at you because you had the gall to hurt his car.

You wondered briefly if the jerk might know your dad before your injuries finally got the best of you and everything went out of focus, the screaming agent or entertainment lawyer or whoever he was softening out to a buzzy murmur that became more relaxing and gentle as you went along.

So that was your accident, which you remember in what you now consider absolutely terrifying detail. It’s as clear in your head as a back episode of one of your father’s television shows, preserved in high definition on a Blu-ray Disc. At this point you’ve even added a commentary track to it, making asides to yourself as you review it in your head, about your motorcycle, the BMW, the driver (who as it turns out was an entertainment lawyer, and who was sentenced to two weeks in county jail and three hundred hours of community service for his third violation of California law banning driving while holding a cell phone) and your brief, arcing flight from bike to pavement. You couldn’t remember it more clearly.

What you can’t remember is what came after, and how you woke up, lying on your bed, fully clothed, without a scratch on you, a few weeks later.

It’s beginning to bother you.

*   *   *

“You have amnesia,” your father said, when you first spoke to him about it. “It’s not that unusual after an accident. When I was seven I was in a car accident. I don’t remember anything about it. One minute I was in the car going to see your great-grandmother and the next I was in a hospital bed with a cast and my mother standing over me with a gallon of ice cream.”

“You woke up the next day,” you said to your father. “I had the accident weeks ago. But I only woke up a few days ago.”

“That’s not true,” your father said. “You were awake before that. Awake and talking and having conversations. You just don’t remember that you did it.”

“That’s my point,” you said. “This isn’t like blacking out after an accident. This is losing memory several weeks after the fact.”

“You
did
land on your head,” your father said. “You landed on your head after sailing through the air at forty-five miles an hour. Even in the best-case scenario, like yours was, that’s going to leave some lingering trauma, Matthew. It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve lost some memories.”

“Not
some,
Dad,” you said. “All of them. Everything from the accident until when I woke up with you and Mom and Candace and Rennie standing over me.”

“I told you, you fainted,” your dad said. “We were concerned.”

“So I faint and then wake up without a single memory of the last few weeks,” you said. “You understand why I might be concerned about this.”

“Do you want me to schedule you for an MRI?” your dad asked. “I can do that. Have the doctors look around for any additional signs of brain trauma.”

“I think that might be a smart thing to do, don’t you?” you said. “Look, Dad, I don’t want to come across as overly paranoid about this, but losing weeks of my life bothers me. I want to be sure I’m not going to lose any more of it. It’s not a comfortable feeling to wake up and have a big hole in your memory.”

“No, Matt, I get it,” your dad said. “I’ll get Brenda to schedule it as quickly as she can. Fair enough?”

“Okay,” you said.

“But in the meantime I don’t want you to worry about it too much,” your father said. “The doctors told us you would probably have at least a couple of episodes like this. So this is normal.”

“‘Normal’ isn’t what I would call it,” you said.

“Normal in the context of a motorcycle accident,” your dad said. “Normal such as it is.”

“I don’t like this new ‘normal,’” you said.

“I can think of worse ones,” your father said, and did that thing he’s been doing the last couple of days, where he looks like he’s about to lose it and start weeping all over you.

*   *   *

While you’re waiting for your MRI, you go over the script you’ve been given for an episode of
The Chronicles of the Intrepid
. The good news for you is that your character plays a central role in the events. The bad news is that you don’t have any lines, and you spend the entire episode lying on a gurney pretending to be unconscious.

“That’s not true,” Nick Weinstein said, after you pointed out these facts to him. He had stopped by the house with revisions, which was a service you suspected other extras did not get from the head writer of the series. “Look”—he flipped to the final pages of the script—“you’re conscious here.”

“‘Crewman Hester opens his eyes, looks around,’” you said, reading the script direction.

“That’s consciousness,” Weinstein said.

“If you say so,” you said.

“I know it’s not a lot,” Weinstein said. “But I didn’t want to overtax you on your first episode back.”

You achieved that,
you said to yourself, flipping through the script in the MRI waiting room and rereading the scenes where you don’t do much but lie there. The episode is action-packed—Lieutenant Kerensky in particular gets a lot of screen time piloting shuttles and running through exploding corridors while redshirts get impaled by falling scenery all around him—but it’s even less coherent than usual for
Intrepid,
which is really saying something. Weinstein isn’t bad with dialogue and keeping things moving, but neither him nor anyone on his writing staff seems overly invested in plotting. You strongly suspected that if you knew more about the science fiction television genre, you could probably call out all the scenes Weinstein and pals lifted from other shows.