The Lion King

Today, I finished my rewrite of p. 4 of chapter 1 and it's only 1:45. I still need to write my daily poem for today, but after that I'll begin work on p. 5, which was my goal for tomorrow. There's a great feeling in being ahead of schedule, though the catch is that p. 5 is as far as I got on my original stab at this novel. After that, I have my notes, but the real work of creating from scratch will begin. My method so far has been to print out everything I have for a section and lay it out all over the floor, looking at it from a bird's eye view with a correcting pen in my hand. After p. 5, I have nothing to lay out, so I will return to drawing diagrams of the development of the section, dancing the voices that I've set out to establish and meditating on the best course of execution to follow.

In the meantime, here's the super super intense first draft of p. 4. My new draft is totally toned down from this, but I need somewhere to deposit all the original prose poetry that composed it, most of which is only to be found on the editing floor and in the recycling bin at this point.



Jean didn't want to be Nala but it seemed there were few other options. Milos had suggested Zazu, but Zazu was bossy and even a seven year old could tell that nobody liked him, so Jean rejected the idea out of hand, and Jamie had whispered while the other boys giggled that Ginny was best to play Zazu anyway. Then, giving it some thought, Jamie had, with some hesitation, suggested Mufasa, for he was certainly a prominent character in the early part of the story, and besides, he argued, Jean had a quiet way of talking that reminded them all of Mufasa anyway. But Jean said no, feeling somehow that it would be presumptuous of him to play such a grown up character. He didn't know how to be that grown up, plus (though he wasn't actively cognizant of the fact) he instinctively felt in his heart, a fundamental aversion to the idea, as if playing the role would be a kind of transgression against an authority that, without having the slightest clue what it was, he felt a natural respect for. Mr. Rostau, Jean declared, had to play Mufasa, even if he was busy working upstairs, and even if it meant he had to die halfway through the game. It was only right. Jamie flinched at the suggestion of his father's death and reminded Jean that his babba had to play Rafiki, for he was the only one wise enough.
So Nala it was. Though it meant playing a girl, Jean took consolation in the fact that, gender handicap aside, she somehow seemed to be tougher and more adventurous than Simba, for after all, it's she who inspires Simba to enter the elephant graveyard, not the other way around. This point he kept to himself, though, for the odds were, if he said it out loud, Jamie and Milos would jump on it as fuel for another argument.
Meanwhile, Jamie and Milos were in the thick of another argument. Jamie argued that he should play Simba because they were at his house, and the movie, at least the first part, took place at Pride Rock, which was Simba's house. Milos claimed the point was irrelevant because they had never given homefield advantage to anyone in their games in the past and when they had played Aladdin the week before, he had let Jamie be Aladdin, even though they were at his house and he had wanted to be Aladdin. Jamie didn't buy it and pointed out how at the time, Milos had insisted, in fact on being Abu because, he had claimed, Abu is the real hero of the story. Not only that, but he had also played the Genie because his songs were the best. And anyway, everyone knew Jamie had to play Aladdin because he was Arab - his mom had told him - and therefore, he was practically born for the role. Milos was dubious and asked if that meant that Jean had played the Magic Carpet because that was the role that Haitians were born for. Jamie said no, that only certain people were born for certain roles and everyone else could play whoever they wanted to play, but Jean was born to play the Magic Carpet because he was so smart and he didn't say much. Jean blushed but didn't say anything.
"If you play Simba, then I have to play Scar again. I hate playing Scar!" Milos whined.
"It's only until we get to Timon and Pumbaa! After that, you can be Timon if you want…and next time we play Donkey Kong, I'll let you be Diddy Kong. Ok?"
Milos groaned and swung his head in an exaggerated show of acquiescence, but finally accepted (it was Jamie's house after all and if they fought any more, Mrs. Rostau, who was watching them from the loft like Sarabi on top of Pride Rock, would probably intervene on Jamie's behalf and so the whole thing was probably a lost cause anyway).

Tara, who was indeed perched atop her own Pride Rock, sat sewing disinterestedly golden thread into black cloth, and kept shifting her view from the art on the walls around her - mostly abstract impressionist pieces done in acrylics that she had collected while living in New York - to the cubs singing and playing a half story below on her expensive Moroccan rug. She regarded her son with a peaceful, satisfied grin. Got the makings of lawyer. A politician. Speaks like King David. Authority. Gets what he wants. Dreams up the rest. When I grow up, I'm going to invent a money machine and buy everything in the world! Better get started, kid. Need it now. And all of his questions! All the time. About everything. Driving home from school: What if we got a flat tire right now? Who knows, buddy. What if? Could Superman run faster than our car? Why don't rocks grow? Who would win in a fight, Babba or a tymanisoreus rex? Why is Dracula so mean? What if I turned into a vacuum and ate the whole world?
Creative. No doubt about that. Milos saying bang! bang! I shot you twice, you're dead now! Jamie, for whom, of course, it is impossible to die, shakes his head, nope, I'm a robot now. Milos, So my gun is a wrench and I'll unscrew your head off! Jamie But my hands are lasers and they melted your wrench! Meanwhile Ginny playing like a normal kid, cooking up big stews in empty pots in the backyard. Jamie jumping in and splashing around, Ginny wailing No! no! no! Get out of the soup! Wow, that's been awhile already. Seems her games stay indoors now: dolls and horses, watching TV. Not Jamie. He likes movies, but he's happiest when building legos, making up stories, giving cars voices instead of rolling them around, taking stuffed animals on journeys to the end of the world. Always talking. You'd think he's already got all of history down in his head. Intimidates some. But he's cute. Already tell he'll be good looking. Skin and eyes like his father. Lips like his mother. Fair hair, too. For a dark boy. Advantages. Baby fat sticking around, but baseball will fix that. He's got the tools to. Weapons too.

"And vultures are flying around him and landing to eat him up when EEEEEEEE-YAAAAA Pumbaa and Timon come running in and they beat them all up and Pumbaa says I love bowling for buzzards ha ha ha and he sees Simba lying there and says I think he's still alive so Timon lifts up his paw and gets scared saying it's a lion and jumps on Pumbaa's back and tells him to run but he isn't scared and says he's just a little lion can we keep him but Timon says he'll get bigger and Pumbaa says but then he'll be on our side and Timon says that's stupid but then he thinks it's a great idea that he thought of himself and Pumbaa picks up Simba with his nose and they carry him to water and shade and wake-"
Milos cut Jamie off, "And I say, you ok, kid? and Simba starts to-"
"What do you mean you say?"
"I'm Timon and I say-"
"No I'm Timon! And Jean is Pumbaa!"
"What?! That's not fair! I had to play Scar! I get to play Timon!"
"But you wanted to play Simba, now it's your turn to play Simba!"
"I don't want to be Simba, I want to be Timon!
"I want to be Timon!"
Jean rolled his eyes then suggested, timidly, "Why don't I play Simba and Jamie can be Pumbaa so you both can sing Hakuna Matata?" From the loft, Tara heard his idea. Quite the diplomat. Reasonable head on his shoulders. Too young to see what it's about. Not the song. It's power, desire, will. Over others. Over your self: what you become.
Jean's compromise did not strike either of the other boys as reasonable. Nor did his subsequent suggestion that they forget the story and all just sing Hakuna Matata together.
Jamie groaned and replied, perhaps a bit sharply, that Hakuna Matata was only fun when sang within the context Simba's metajourney over the course of the film: Without the contrast of his upbringing, which instills in him predominantly, a filial reverence for his responsibility to his royal bloodline (and a loyalty to his late father), a song like Hakuna Matata (which provides a glimpse into the possibility of an ideologically alternative lifestyle geared ostensibly towards the gratification of hedonistic desires, and lacking that sense of responsibility), proves to be little more than empty rhetoric.
Jamie lifted from the floor a marker used earlier in the evening for drawing characters from The Land Before Time, and rose it over his head, a magic wand, then with a violent jerk, hacked it down, a machete, hard in front of him, as if to sever all possible continuation of the argument. There was something in this movement, something detached from the moment, timeless, that reminded the boy's mother of a young painter she had known in New York when she was only nineteen or twenty years old and a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology: The Factory. How they would all be. For fifteen minutes. Dressing folk singers and revolutionaries. Giving life and voice to the inanimate. Mass. Old awe to new names. New eyes to old objects. Production. Together for them. He lifts his arm in birth: Be you! Express yourself! You've got a million dollar idea in that heart; let it free! Let your style carry you to the top!
"And besides, if I play Simba, then I have to return to Pride Rock and kill Scar. I don't want to fight Scar! I want to stay in the jungle with Jean and go swimming. That's why Milos has to be Simba because he likes to kill!"
Whoa, easy now, tiger. Stand up for yourself but don't get misquoted. They'll eat you alive. In this together until a little appetite. Give you all they can to fatten you. Until the day. Peering through your eyes. Through your work. So beautiful. Brilliant and the like. Come to coffee to pick your brain. Or a show. Apartment: dinner with us where. Like to introduce you all, the terribly talented: good company. Fascinating, up and coming: Woman. Designer. Cough behind a fist. Fishing for keys to the chapel. The spirit of sanctity. Oh Lord, let me profane. Tell me what you really feel. Not bad for a woman. Model. For me. In the name of art. What you really feel. You understand: an artist too. Good stuff. Your clothes. Close. Vestments. Beneath the smock. Walking into my room just so. You understand. Close the door. Behind the clergy. Scrubs the chapel with holy water. What's that sound? Tara listened up the stairs. Virginia whining. Talking to Khalil. Probably wants something.
"I do not!" Milos protested.
Touched him wrong it seems. One and all of us. Stand up for yourself. If it's a game you must play, play to win. They'll shit on you when you're small, so grow. They'll look at you the same one way or another. To fuck you. So scare 'um. Nothing more powerful than an intimidating woman. Fierce. Body and mind. Still see the body. Climb into my, to climb up the. Compromise. Actors, all of them. Performing art. Faint thoughts. A pretense. I'd love to see your portfolio. But would you like a backrub first? Play by the rules. Go far. But where's that? Dime a dozen like cans of soup. On the rise. On your knees. Strategy. Scripted words. Worked though: Like a charm.
"Oh yeah, then why are you a war then?"
Who was a war? They were all a war: Handguns in New York. Graffiti in the subways. Man clubbed to death this morning in SoHo. Over the news, napalm dropped in Vietnam. And us too, all of us, drinking wine and name dropping. Fireplace lit in flames of false sophistication. The newest work of Pat Myback. Oh yeah, brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And have you met my friend: a great admirer. My clothes? Naw, something deeper. But what about your friend, the songwriter? Didn't you hear?
Upstairs, Virginia's whining was getting louder.
"Mommy told me that Bosnia is a war and you are from Bosnia so you are a war!"
Alright now, back off. He is what he is. Leave the boy alone. If he's a war then so's your mother. Every body a battlefield. Trench warfare as shells scream over all and nothing. Heart beating on the line, in throat. Rainforest hillside, all those trees. Vietnam. Images of the dead. Pieces blown out of heads, arms missing. A threshing machine, chopping people as fuel into pulp. On TV. Now Sarajevo. Concrete block buildings crumbling into piles of rubble, fingers sticking out. Bits of hair, melted flesh. Ethnic cleansing. Must have been real dirty. Stoic empty faces: the dead. Rifles in hand. Sunglasses, to shield their eyes. All of our eyes. The streets of New York. Behind concrete walls. Steel cages. My chapel. Lead me not into temptation. But deliver me: a child. Wasteland full of predators. Consumption. Only chance is to learn-
"I am not!"
She said no, and she refused to be like that. Live your own damn life and feed your own damn belly! Away. Escape the lions to face the wolves. No. Not like that. Create yourself. Change yourself. Fuck their fangs and their appetites. Be, on your own damn terms. Shift like seasoned fashions. One step ahead of the game. This body. This weapon and piece of meat. Pound it like it is. Reform, restructure. Cut back pounds here so they want to stick it in there. Paint over, dye, accessorize: suicide to whet a tongue. And the words. Choose right, learn. Talk an expert. Infiltrate the cogs. With boiling blood. A stand. Wail wafting through walls and slamming feet on floorboards. Virginia was howling now: an all out tantrum.
"Yes you are! Yes you are! You are a Bosnia War!"
Leave him alone! Can't help where he comes from. No one can. All in bunkers or looking for refuge. Dodging Gatlin gun deaths by the thousands. Street scrapping to claw bloody into her pulpit. Mind and mark on which she stood. Her body. Chelsea generals and gratification pegged status. Level over level. Haunting eyes of ghosts, the footpaths of the rising. For yourself. Poison destroying the weak nourishes the. Success is the only fucking option. To lose is to die. Starve in the gaunt face, cold and hungry culture of vultures. No warthog salvation to the cool of water. Carry me alone, daddy. Lost. Picked dry in the boneyard. While bullets smashed the jaws of neighbors and carbombs. The Television. The paper. Deliver us from evil. Our own recesses. All a war.
"But I'm American!"
All too American! Iron fucking erections. Financial District. Monuments standing stark naked over a foundation of…like the Chinese buried under the wall. To progress! And women. Forced entry not as a trauma but as a way of life. A hundred million hungry voices howling out their needs. Sucking cocks like rungs up the ladder of. Massacres. Slavs. Vietnamese. Our might is right. America the grand! America the erect! Jacking it into the melting pot where she might sooner drown than. No more! No fucking more! What the fuck is Virginia fucking screaming about?! Stop it! Tara leapt to her feet. Have to stop it. Stop the boys! Do something!
"Why are you killing people?!" Jamie, breathless, screamed out.
"Shut your God damned mouth you stupid spoiled little girl!"
The answer came not from crying, quivering Milos, but booming down through the floor like a voice atop Mount Sinai, tinted faintly with an aging Brooklyn accent:
And then there was Silence .

Wind could be heard breathing softly against the rotting boards that held the house together. Outside, crickets panted steadily in a perfect, unbroken rhythm. Inside, the first noise to break the silence was a barely audible sob wafting gently through the halls and dancing in light pirouettes down the staircase. The sobs were soon accompanied by the pitter-patter of eight year old feet, bound up in thick wool socks, scurrying across a carpet, then the slam of a door.
Tara looked from one face, frozen in confusion and fear, to the next of three six year old boys, then immediately began speaking, stuttering, explaining. She didn't know what there was to explain for she herself had almost no idea about what had just happened, but her motherly instinct told her it was now her job to explain the ways of the world to the boys, explain why the sky is blue and all the other things that usually can be tabled with the platitude, "you'll understand when you're older." In that moment, older no longer seemed a deferral but now an immediacy, a confrontation starkly present that somehow seemed in its very essence to be a judgment of character. A shift had occurred in the world her children had been inhabiting. Something in the air made it excruciatingly clear that in the real world, animals didn't talk and sing and if Mufasa died, he sure as shit wouldn't appear, drawn out in the stars, in your time of need, to tell you he loved you.
"Everything is OK. Everything is going to be fine. Babba's only lost himself for a moment, but Mommy's here. You're OK. You're safe here with Mommy. Everything will be fine."
Will be.
Jamie looked into his mother's face. There was something harsh and determined about it, as though she were midway through seizing a moment she knew might never come again. The boy recoiled from her outstretched arms and folded back instead into the unsteady hands of Jean and Milos, who, not expecting his weight to be thrown at them so suddenly, fell backwards - falling, dropping bodies, back, words, fallen - to the ground in a tangled pile.
As they struggled to recover from their fall, Jamie's inexhaustible tongue was finally loosed and he began explaining to his friends in terms that did more to add to their confusion than assuage it that his father was, as they knew, the gentlest, wisest father in all the world, and that something must be terribly wrong for him to have yelled as he had.
Tara failed to catch the end of Jamie's apology, for, having finally come to her senses, she took off running up the stairs to find and to hold her paralyzed daughter.
You son of a bitch. You son of a bitch. You will not treat my daughter like that. You will not talk to my children like that. I swear to God, on my dead mother's Bible, that you will pay for this.
Virginia's door was locked. Tara knocked and pleaded soft words through the wood, but the sobbing girl refused to open up. Tara relented and marched instead into her husband's study, where her eyes caught, not the man she had married, but strangely, a painting on the wall, hanging over his desk: the only piece the professor had ever painted himself, as far as she knew. It was done in heavy layers of oil, wild thickstacked strokes, and depicted a snowy forest scene behind which was barely discernable a small cabin, lost and buried, with only the faintest hint of light seeping out through the trees. Tara, entranced, studied this painting for perhaps the first time in her life, losing momentarily, all sense of her purpose in entering the professor's study.
Hours later, reflecting on the one-sided argument that had followed, Tara could only recall two aspects of it: the image of Khalil Rostau's face, grave and humiliated, and herself, shivering, walking lost and alone between trees, through the snow.