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Notes: Happy birthday to the Kov!
Dear annakovsky: happy birthday! In honour of your most special of all days, I offer you a little Lost outtake, from a script that's still sitting on J.J. Abram's desk, next to a mountain of blow and a virgin copy of Character Development: Making it Work For You!
All the returns of the day, chica.
Rock God
The sun was a blinding nickel already, just a few inches over the horizon. Apparently Godforsaken Bloody Island was pretty close to the equator, or maybe it just didn't play by the same rules as the rest of the hemisphere, but either way it seemed to spend most of its time frying like an egg in the middle of the featureless cast-iron skillet of the South Pacific.
Charlie paused, gnawing a thumbnail. That simile didn't really work, and it was hard to think of things to rhyme with "South Pacific."
"Mouth specific?" he muttered, stumbling up the beach toward the shelters. "Soporific? That's terrific? I'm prolific?" Maybe it didn't have to rhyme; maybe it could be the bridge, and the music could tell the story. Yeah, that could work. If he shifted the whole thing into minor, then the bridge could go Em, G, C, D, and it could tell the audience exactly what it was like to be marooned on Godforsaken Bloody Island without even a Valium, all without using words at all.
"Hi Charlie," Claire said, shading her eyes with her hands and peering up at him from her seat on the sand. "How're you?"
"Bloody brilliant! I think I've got it back!" He sat down beside her, well clear of her enormous abdomen, and mimed the chords in sequence. "I'm writing again, Claire! Writing songs again!"
"Are you a... musician?" she asked doubtfully, massaging her distended belly with her free hand. "You seem a little... short for that."
"I'm a bloody rock god! I'm... look, I know you have amnesia, but surely you remember Driveshaft?"
Claire regarded him apologetically. Her gigantor stomach cast a widening shadow on the sand between them.
"Driveshaft?" He dropped his hands in exasperation. "British rock wunderkinds? Rolling Stone called us 'the next best thing to The Strokes'?"
"I remember The Strokes... " Claire looked pensive, as if trying to decide how to say something. Then she jumped. "Ow!" One hand pressed the side of her gargantuan torso. "The baby kicked! Do you want to feel it?"
"Um." Charlie chewed his thumbnail. "Not really, thanks just the same?"
Claire hardly seemed to hear, absorbed in a silent dialogue with her massively gravid uterus. After a minute Charlie nodded. "Right, I'm off then." He stood up and brushed sand off the seat of his jeans, then paused. "By the way, I'm not in love with you anymore. Shooting that bloke point-blank in cold blood... well, it sort of snuffed the whole romance thing for me. Thought you should know."
Stroking her swollen midriff, Claire nodded and half-waved. "Okay, I'll see you at lunch then."
"Sure." He sighed and started up the beach again.
He hadn't gone more than ten meters when he was almost beheaded by a bundle of fuselage trotting by at neck-height. He stumbled back and almost landed on his ass in the sand.
"Whoah - watch it!"
The bundle paused and turned - it was Jack, a little sweaty and red in the face, heading up toward the caves. "Shit, Charlie. I'm sorry, I didn't see you."
"S'all right." Charlie gave the fuselage a skeptical look. "What're you doing?"
"Oh, I was out checking traplines yesterday and I noticed some sulfur and saltpeter deposits a few miles from here, so I got to thinking, if we used some of the salt packets from the plane and some carbon from the fires we've been burning... " Jack grinned and shrugged.
Charlie stood staring at him.
"We could... what?" he asked finally, when it was clear Jack thought he was done.
Jack's face opened into that Oh, shit, sorry, I forgot you were an uneducated drug addict look. "Gunpowder. We could make gunpowder."
Charlie stood staring at him.
"What for?" he asked finally.
Jack let the fuselage slide off his shoulder and rest on the ground. "Well, if we can create a controlled explosion we can create heat, and if we can create heat we can weld."
Charlie stood staring at him. After a minute, he scratched his nose.
"You want to... weld."
"We've got all this metal, all the parts we need... Charlie." Jack got that I'm completely insane look. "We can build a plane."
Charlie looked at the pile of fuselage at their feet, then back up at Jack. "That sounds like a great idea," he said finally. "You let me know if you need a hand with it, right?"
"Will do." Jack hoisted the metal back onto his shoulder, biceps bulging. Nice tats, Charlie thought. "I just have to go tend to a couple of injured passengers, convince Sawyer to give me that welding torch he found in the wreckage, reform Kate, decipher the mystery that is Locke, and learn Korean. We should be off this island within a week."
"Cool." Charlie started up the beach again. "Keep up the good work you bloody keener toff."
Jack started to stagger off again, then turned back. "Actually, Charlie, you could give me a hand. Go see Sawyer, will you? Tell him if he doesn't bring that torch by my tent by tomorrow afternoon, I'm going to put necrotizing fasciitis in his Dasani."
"Necrotizing fasciitis," Charlie said. "Check."
Jack winked and stumbled away.
"Necrotizing fasciitis," Charlie muttered to himself, veering left toward Sawyer's tent. "What rhymes with 'fasciitis'? Tendonitis? Arthritis? Daughters of Bilitis?" He paused to get his bearings. Sawyer's tent was the black one, up by the treeline. The one with the boar tusk rips, yeah. "What rhymes with 'deluded bastard'?"
The black tarp was flapping in an odd way, he noticed as he drew near. Maybe not so much flapping as... bouncing. Jouncing. In a rhythmic sort of way that, had it been a van, would have been a clear enough request to please piss off for at least another quarter of an hour, and bring a dime bag along when you came back then. Charlie hesitated. He'd seen Kate down by the water, tweezing her eyebrows with a pair of twigs, and Shannon was over by the wreckage, communicating in sign language with Sun about the relative price of Shiseido in Korea and the U.S. He must be imagining the choked-off moans and grunts he could hear from inside Sawyer's tarp.
"Um... " He said it quietly, from about ten feet away, because even if it was his own imagination, it was still disconcerting to hear sounds of grappling and snogging coming from in there. God, maybe he was still having DTs. Did heroin give you flashbacks, like acid?
"Take it, boy." That was Sawyer's voice, rough and low, and Charlie was confused. Boy? "Bet you just love takin' a something something garbled something from a guy who ain't good enough to shine your boots."
There was a strangled gasp, and a renewed frenzy of bouncing. Charlie cleared his throat quietly. "Um...hello?"
"Bastard," someone who wasn't Sawyer wheezed. "Redneck mothersomething something oh God yeah Jesus something something buy the taffeta God yeah, the taffeta, the seafoam taffeta oh god YES - "
On the strength of Sawyer's low, smug chuckle, Charlie backed slowly away.
The jungle was cool and green and probably deadly, but at times like this it was better than the company of the insane people he'd crash-landed with. Charlie walked with a stick in one hand, swiping the grasses around him in case of tarantulas or anacondas or Vincent, popping out when least expected.
"Wishin' for a boar meat and cheese fajita / Getting' weaned off drugs by a fake Pat Morita... " That was genius. God, he was an idiot for throwing the rest of the stuff into the fire. What the fuck was he thinking? Something about pupae and cocoons and all those big knives that wanker Locke carried around. Like there wasn't pretty clear subtext there: Ask me a third time, Charlie, and I'll give them to you. And then I'll gut you, stem to stern, and serve you to the others. Jesus.
"Psycho-killer... qu'est-ce que c'est... " He kept walking and swiping. There was a nice little sitting place up on the cliff top, overlooking the ocean. He had an urge to plant himself there, look down on the rest of them, and pretend he was far, far away. In another world, maybe. Somewhere where the people around him were friends, where they had a mission, something definite to do, a place to go, something about a ring... He shook his head and kept going. "Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa far better."
The rocky outcropping was sun-warmed, and up here there was enough of a breeze to make it comfortable. He sat for a while, knocking the stick against the rocks, just watching the ocean roll over itself in tiny little crinkles. When he heard a wet whuffling sound behind him, he glanced back over his shoulder.
"Oh, hi."
The polar bear stood at the base of the rock, watching him quietly. Charlie gave it a wave, then searched in his pockets. "All I've got is... " He pulled them out and studied the results with a frown. "An apple Jolly Rancher, a worn copy of the Rolling Stone review where Greil Marcus called us 'the next best thing to The Strokes,' and half a sonnet I wrote for Claire." He squinted at the sonnet. "What rhymes with 'non-erotic asphyxiation'?"
The polar bear sniffed, its big black nose flexing. Charlie held up the Jolly Rancher.
"Want this, then?"
He tossed it down, and the bear dropped to all fours to snurfle it up out of the grass and crunch on it.
"Guess I should have taken the wrapping off for you. Sorry."
He turned back to the ocean, his chin planted on his fist, his mind on other things. The polar bear snuffled around a little more in case there were other Jolly Ranchers to be had, then, finding none, sank down against the base of the rock with a loud, beary sigh.
"The thing is," Charlie said after a while, "I don't actually like most of them. I mean, Jack's all right, he's a total lunatic, but he tries. And Kate's... well, frankly, I think she's aa sociopath but the view's all right, so no complaints, know what I mean?" He glanced down; the polar bear seemed to give him a look that said yes, it knew very well indeed. "Claire. I could have loved her, I think. But then she got kidnapped and I got killed and I killed Ethan and everything went all to hell although if we ever make it back to civilization these rope burns are going to make me one sexy and mysterious package, I'll tell you that much." He fingered his neck and fell silent for a while. The polar bear started licking between its toes.
"Sawyer's a racist hick, Sayid's a black box, Jin and Sun have that whole Korean daytime melodrama thing going on. Well, she's all right, but how much can you like someone who doesn't speak a word of English?" He looked down guiltily into the polar bear's calm black eyes. "Sorry. It's just... you know."
The polar bear licked its nose.
"Boone and Shannon are rich fuckwits, pardon my French, and Locke, oh Locke's a complete nutter. Loves it here, totally in his element. Probably kill us all with poisoned Kool-Aid the minute the rescue chopper shows up." There was thumbnail caught in his molar; he took a moment to tongue it out and spit it into the void. "What kind of freak gets off on living on a desert island full of snakes and boars and polar b - " He looked down again. "Sorry."
The polar bear grunted and rolled onto its back, paws in the air.
"The thing is," Charlie said, turning and scooting down the side of the rock, "I'm actually famous, and none of them know who I am. Do you know how frustrating that is? To have to keep saying the name 'Driveshaft' to all these halfwit Yanni fans, only to see their eyes light up with nothing at all? I was a bloody rock god. I was Driveshaft."
He made it down off the rock in one piece, and stood next to the bear, contemplating its expanse of soft white belly. It peered at him from under one of its paws. Probably just a bear thing, probably not supposed to be coquettish. For all he knew it was a boy bear anyway.
"Just for one minute," he said, using the stick to scritch the bear's belly in lazy circles, "I'd like to spend time with someone who knows who I am. Who appreciates me. Who can hum the chorus to You All Everybody." The bear rumbled, and he smiled ruefully. "Nice try."
They stayed there a while, scritching and being scritched, while the sun climbed the blue bowl of the sky and continued roasting them all like a hundred-watt bulb inside the EZ-Bake of the antipodean region. That didn't really work either. Dammit, all his metaphors were off and he couldn't rhyme for shit. Must be the malnutrition.
"Don't you get hot?" he asked, sinking down into the shade of the rock and prodding the bear's belly.
The bear blinked out of its half-doze, yawned (lots of teeth, Charlie noticed, with a twinge of nervousness), then rolled over onto all four paws and shook itself. It gave off a heavy, peltish smell, like a great-uncle's coat stored too long in a basement, next to the forced air. Charlie sneezed, and the bear put its massive snout under his ankle and shoved gently.
He regarded it, blinking sneeze tears from his eyes. "What - back to your place?"
The bear lowered its shoulders invitingly.
"You don't live with that crazy French bint, do you?"
It reared back, gave him a disdainful look, then bowed again. Charlie clambered to his feet and peered down over the edge of the cliff. Down there, presumably, tiny little ant people were fishing and building shelters and shaving their legs and welding. From up here, you really couldn't tell.
The bear whuffed, and a cold nose dampened Charlie's palm.
"I'm not going to be your pirate bride or anything."
The bear's fur was soft and smooth, and its skull felt enormous. Charlie's hand was tiny between its ears.
"Wouldn't happen to have TiVo, would you?" The bear stamped impatiently, and Charlie took a last look over the cliff's edge. "All right, yeah. Why not?"
He slung a leg over the bear's neck and flung the stick out into space, where it cartwheeled all the way down through the blue air and the green treetops and the startled javelinas and the moist black jungle soil and the buried, mouldering pages of all the excellent proposals for television shows submitted to ABC this season that didn't get made because J.J. Abrams had this crazy notion about a bunch of people on this plane. But Charlie didn't see that, because by then he was no more than a warm spot on the shady side of a big rock in the sun.
