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10. reacclimate
[Public video, but filtered away from Harvey, David, and Iris]
[It might not be immediately obvious, between the low light and the strange angle, but Mira is lying on top of the unadorned altar in the nondenominational chapel on deck, some of her hair hanging over the side, comm held above her.]
Do you ever feel like you aren't real?
[Private to David 8]
How long was I asleep?
[Text private to Cassel]
Thank you again for the journal. It helped.
[She doesn't say with what.]
[Private to Harvey]
How was death?
[Private to Helena]
Iris says you watched me.
[Spam for Iris]
[One of so many pieces of paper Iris left in Mira's room, is slipped back under her door. It was disorienting at first, the colors and obtrusive scatter of trinkets, the scalding proof that time lost her for a little while, changed around her. She thought, of course she thought, it was her own memory that had failed, that had lost its mess of contents at least, but the notes, pieced together, gradually righted her assumption, twisting it upside-down like a flipped kayak. The page she returns is a poem, one of many Iris left in between more informative updates and sentimental messages. Beneath the attribution, Mira has scrawled in rough, childlike handwriting - the mark of a post-penmanship age - This one is my favorite.]
[It might not be immediately obvious, between the low light and the strange angle, but Mira is lying on top of the unadorned altar in the nondenominational chapel on deck, some of her hair hanging over the side, comm held above her.]
Do you ever feel like you aren't real?
[Private to David 8]
How long was I asleep?
[Text private to Cassel]
Thank you again for the journal. It helped.
[She doesn't say with what.]
[Private to Harvey]
How was death?
[Private to Helena]
Iris says you watched me.
[Spam for Iris]
[One of so many pieces of paper Iris left in Mira's room, is slipped back under her door. It was disorienting at first, the colors and obtrusive scatter of trinkets, the scalding proof that time lost her for a little while, changed around her. She thought, of course she thought, it was her own memory that had failed, that had lost its mess of contents at least, but the notes, pieced together, gradually righted her assumption, twisting it upside-down like a flipped kayak. The page she returns is a poem, one of many Iris left in between more informative updates and sentimental messages. Beneath the attribution, Mira has scrawled in rough, childlike handwriting - the mark of a post-penmanship age - This one is my favorite.]
[private] I put on a bruce springsteen/john mellancamp station, suddenly story.
[ His eyes close, briefly-- working up puzzle pieces and thoughts and curiousness, and he wants to know who he is today-- it's not hard to remember pieces of the truth -- things he thinks are real. But they're held together with a thick ganache of fantasy, to balance the bitter bite of loss. ]
So -- I went to school and dropped a ton of money into debt I probably couldn't afford, to get an education that should have put me into research. Gotham's a hotbed for chemical companies. It used to be thick with steelworkers, but when the ore ran out, people found other things to do.
My Da was a steelworker. I take after my mamma; Papa Napier was a big, thewy red-headed Scot [ he holds up his hands as if to demonstrate ] and I was not. But I was clever and that was alright by him, so we saved up and I went to school because the steel was gone but there were jobs to have if you were clever -- plastics and computers and things like that. I was born sometime in the late sixties, and in the eighties when I was in school, everything was just starting to get it's feet under itself.
So I got a degree in chemistry and I was going to work with plastics or medicines, and make a better world. Only a lot of people were doing the same thing, rushing into new fields, trying to find work in a place that was closing down one industry and starting up another. I was one of a hundred, a thousand young men who wanted to break in, make it -- to discover the next kevlar, the next nomex, the next-- anything.
...so I ended up teaching high school chemistry instead. A real kick in the jimmy -- all that trouble and I can't even find work in my field. I married a pretty girl right out of school, and we're in a tiny apartment just like-- well, this [ he jerked this thumb over his shoulder at his cabin ] and so I took the job I could get because we were trying for a baby like young, crazy, kids do.
Well, there I am in my threadbare suit and my bad tie and my hair brushed back, and I'm the very picture of proper. I go in, I wrangle teenagers for eight hours a day, and I come home and I cry. I wasn't a big bad Scot like my Da, and that's fine. My lady, she liked me sensitive. [ he chuckles ] So I cry to my wife because they don't respect me and how am I going to get these little monsters to even look at me straight, give me an ounce of their consideration! How can I teach them about anything if they're too busy making out in the back row, if they're passing notes?
A week of this goes by, and I went to the Laff Factory on the weekend -- I'm not so great on stage, but I still feel better in front of boozing twenty-somethings than I do all the little pirahnas in teenage form that I'm teaching, and Jeanie, she says to me after, she says, "Jack, love, you need to marry what you learned to what you know. Give it another shot. Next week, be the man I know you are, not the man you think they want in front of the class."
So Monday, I went back, and I thought to myself: so how do I get their attention? With a bang.
When the little snots wouldn't even answer for roll, I took off my jacket, I loosed my tie, and I set something on fire. Chemistry and comedy are both about reactions, the change from one state to another, and with a little of this and a little of that, I had made an explosion big enough to sear my eyebrows and get their attention.
Pratfalls get 'em every time. Never know what's real and what's planned, eh? Suddenly, I had changed those bored little brains into very attentive, eager minds, wanting to know how I did that.
Had to perfect the routine over time, but... It wasn't too hard. Did better at it than I ever did in comedy, which wounds my pride a little, but... it's not so bad, eh? The indirect path is sometimes the best.
[private]
[A little distant, but sincere - she isn't drowsy, but there's something calming about listening.]
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I'm just trying to figure out where to go.
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I don't know. I can't see the beginning or the end.
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Well, if you want-- to talk to anyone who... doesn't quite know who they were, or just-- tell stories, I'm a communicator away.
It was nice to talk to you, Mira.
[private]
[Better than I'll remember it.]
[private]