dvd commentary: Alive in the Wings
Probably my favourite of everything that I've written. "Alive in the Wings" is a Firefly/Alias crossover which I wrote for sarkastic's awesome multi-fandom crossover ficathon last year. This time, the characters and fandoms were both at the writer's discretion, although each request came with a list of fandoms we could choose from. I was writing for miladygrey, who'd requested "someone being nuzzled, and a sparkly sequined article of clothing." rez_lo was my wonderful beta for this story; she grasped onto my idea immediately and made it shine.
This was the second story I'd written in the Firefly fandom. "Aetiology" was posted publicly at about the same time as "Alive in the Wings" because of ficathon requirements, but by that time this had already been finished for over a month. My first Firefly fic was also a River POV, "Uncensored", but I was never happy with it. I was experimenting with her voice, and I hadn't found it yet; instead what you got was my voice, my views on history and empire, coming out as River.
I've managed to lose the notebook which had my initial jottings about this story in it, so I can't remember how I decided on Firefly and on putting Irina of Alias onto the ship. I think I might have been at first just plain amused at the idea of calling her "The Passenger" all the way through, and making her an actual passenger. Anyway, it probably wasn't terrible interesting and you're better off not hearing about it.
The prompts started out being a bit of a challenge: a "sparkly sequined article of clothing"? How was I going to constuct a story around a random item like that, without going into crack!fic territory? But then I started thinking about dancing costumes and recitals - a classic mother-daughter activity - and of course River was a dancer too. So in that way it began to become about River and her parents, and Irina and her daughters. I started writing in my notebook the beginning of a confrontation between River and Irina: all the pain of River's own abandonment in her voice when she asks Irina, How could you, how you could have left them? Don't you know how much they needed you?
At some point I hit upon the title, "Alive in the Wings," and like most of my titles, I liked it because of the double meaning it contained - both the wings of a spaceship, and the wings of an auditorium stage. It's like the chicken and the egg; I don't know which came first, the title, or the main theme of the story. It's about River in the process of healing, of going from object-hood back to being a person again, from being concealed "in the wings" to becoming solid, beautiful, animated before her new family. Meeting Irina is just the catalyst, something that forces her to confront her own memories of her mother.
/end boring over-long credits.
Alive in the Wings
The dying sometimes speak of themselves in the third person.
-- Susanna Moore, In The Cut
"In The Cut" is a novel about words, sex, and crime. It's the words part that gets to me the most; the main character is an English teacher, and the novel is written in the first person, so she is forever thinking about words and language, the colloquial tongue. This quotation is from the ending of the book, and it lies behind my decision to write River's voice as I did - a changing monologue of first- and third-person POV. At the start, River is "dead" to herself. She is questioning her senses, her separateness from the objects which she touches, sees, smells, and tastes; touches too with her mind, her "sight." (Although I had not yet seen the movie when I wrote this, I'd decided that River was indeed deeply intuitive, bordering on psychic.) She is struggling, moment by moment, to assert her Descartean existence: I am here, I exist. Clinging like a barnacle to the ship, clinging to life.
Here I am River.
The river Tam. I touch - am touched at shores where imaginary me roughly ends: I exist, on this Firefly. Mu-qian. Ten skinny fingers and ten toes. You see me, I see you. I know of the distinction. All the jigsaw bits splinted together, even the crying hollow that remembers it used to be a piece of my brain - this too is rivertam. All me still. Simon recognises; is not afraid of it. Me and the in-between: wakefulness, love, chaos.
Mu-qian means "here, in this moment" in Chinese.
Outside of this metal eggshell, surface doesn't glue; reality dissolves with no buoyant wreckage dispersing, not a single light-blink resonance of meaning. Nothing out there defines you.
Taking my cue again from Descartes' Meditations, I thought about what the Black means. The total absense of material, of sensation, of opposition. And without opposition, there is no motion. Just a vacuum. Your whole universe would become your mind because there would be nothing else. If there is nothing to see, nothing to feel, then wouldn't your eyes, your skin, every faculty of perception, become redundant? As if they didn't exist. And if River is at this point struggling to define her separateness from everything she feels, the confusion of stimuli, then that emptiness - that physical death - must symbolise an almost welcome release.
Then River-girl is only the Black. A derelict memory of speaking. She is star. She is bubble, totally herself.
That sentence, "A derelict memory of speaking," was running through my head all through the University Union election week, every time I saw a chalked slogan on concrete or loud campaign poster. When one has become so used to not raising one's voice that the faculty for speaking shrivels up and becomes useless from neglect; you do not miss it, because you cannot even remember a time when you still have a voice.
She is space.
She is silent.
Look with my eyes, with not my eyes. I have a way with the 'verse. Fingers combing like dragnets. Feeling ripples in flux, in hiding schools, and from them the invisible epicentre can be inferred. Knowing without seeing; it's all particles in the end.
A pithy physics reference. "Particles" being what makes up the universe - particles and waves. River's "sight" comes from being able to sense the fabric of reality in a way normal humans can't.
There are ten aboard Serenity, leaving Coeus. Ten beating hearts (not dead): the others, Simon and I - and the Passenger. Nine and one. She does not give her real name. Like the other woman, the captain's wife - been lying for so long, does not know how to stop. She is exhausted with lying, but not brittle. Not weak. Notices dents from bullets past dotting the walls, even the ones Zoe's never found; she does not blink. The Shepherd is nervous around her. Chides himself a litte. Jayne stiffens, seeing woman two-fold with animal blinkers. Jump, it tells him; run, it tells him. Opposing forces cancel, and he stays - glowers.
I added the last three sentences, the crack about Jayne, after Rez's comments about what was there before - and I can't remember what that was. (And "opposing forces cancel" is another in-joke from high school physics.) But I thought that out of all of them, River aside, it would be Shepherd (the former Alliance's man) and Jayne with his brute instincts who would sense something off about their harmless-seeming passenger. Mal especially - as YoSaffBridge showed - was a total sucker for a pretty woman, and Irina's charms and talents are considerably greater than YoSaffBridge's.
She's booked to be dropped at Passena, has a family there. Tells this over main meal, smiling so warmly even the captain pays her full attention. (Ain't sore on the eyes, that's fer sure.) Her work as a surveyor has been keeping her to the border planets, away for a long while. Too long. She misses them, her daughter especially.
I really, really like using parentheses, if you hadn't noticed from "Deep Play." I think this was the story where they first played an important role, instead of being just for the hell of it, because I was too lazy to construct better sentences. The sentences, fragments in the parentheses are what River intuits. Sometimes it contains thoughts that she picks up from the others (like here, from Mal). Other times they're just asides that add another layer to River's consciousness.
Many lies, but this is not one of them.
Captain, Zoe and Simon soften at her telling - thinking about children.
Think about dirty overalls and blue eyes deepening into brown, burbling baby mouth sweetened by a breast. Think about little sisters who could not be protected, lost and so close. So close to never being saved.
The abrupt transition from the others "thinking" to the "I think" of River is deliberate. While I wrote this, I was thinking of that scene in "Objects in Space" where River had so submerged herself in the others - Zoe and Wash's lovemaking, Simon's laughter and pain - that when she breaks away from them, it's an almost physical shock to her body. A rush of ice water down her backbone.
Opaque.
Hard edges.
Sharp frame, stuck to its narrow track: features for structural practicality within vessel of limited space. Little asymmetric hole off-centre at distance from the lower-deck floor equivalent to one-point-two-eight mi. Ratio scale.
More River-babble. Surprisingly, that was the easiest stuff to write. The disjointed mishmash of physics, Chinese, and faux-philosophy. Although I do think that I've made River more coherent than she actually is in the show.
This might even be the first section that I wrote. The rest all grew up around this scene.
Locked: keep out. Locked in.
A memory intruding: Imprisonment.
I touch one finger against it, thinking. Privacy is as privacy does on the ship. The captain never had detector locks, but the Passenger has rigged one up all the same: electromagnetic web interloping on tumblers of centuries-old design. Subtle, can't see or hear it, but try to open the door and she will know.
In my hand: a slender retractor from the infirmary. Simon is in the kitchen with Kaylee and did not see me take it. Not stealing when it belongs to Serenity. Serenity does not take offence. I picture the lock in my mind, the exact heft and position of each lever and pin, the release of the bolt snagging the detector fields. Secrets guarding secrets. I close my eyes. Count to ten.
She is like a magician, nothing is closed to her. She can be everywhere, get inside anyone. Did she go to Irina's room intending to force entry? She had the retractor ready. But I think it was seeing the invisible alarm Irina had set on the door that decided her - the Passenger has something to hide.
Door slides open and I take a step inside.
This is not what River is thinking: this is a suitcase; here are her clothes, her gun in its holster (spotless as a surgical instrument), her book with its printed pages filled with Pre-modern Russian words…
There is a purpose; she is not aiming at dust clouds. I am familiar with the procedures.
At the moment when she is acting on training - the "procedures" of searching a room that the Academy drilled into her - River reverts temporarily back to third-person, back to thinking of herself as a "thing."
I am aware that I am looking for something. I forget momentarily that the Tall Card game will be over soon, and that she will be back. Interrupting. From the suitcase: a platinum shimmer winks like a puddle of mirrors, playful as a nebula of butterflies. I pull it out, the strip of fabric, preciously folded. A skin-tight garment delicately sequined with green, and so small, it would only fit a girl-child. Years and years since it was worn.
Hurrah! One requested item down. One more to go. :)
A surveyor then, for the Independents during the war. But not right up till the end. Otherwise she would not be drifting, alone, carrying this child's costume like this.
Like this... Secreted away, but obviously precious.
And "surveyor" is THE euphemism for spy-who-married-the-enemy.
Like this. Necessary sweet painful reminder of the girl (brown-haired, like her mother) who disappeared behind stage curtains, then to reappear - fly straight into mother's embrace. Still flying as mother hoisted her up. “Did you see me?” Their faces close, mother said, “Zui mei-li'de little caterpillar I've ever seen.” Daughter wiggled her nose against mother's neck in tickling response. Seven or eight years since spy-mommy left her on Passena: girl must be almost fifteen now.
Is River actually getting all this from touching the garment, or is she transfering her own longed-for, but never received, affectionate relationship with her mother onto Irina? The disappearance/reappearance was my nod to River too so she could be simply imagining a tender reunion of her own. It's ambiguous. I wasn't decided. Maybe ambiguity is always the best way to handle River.
What the mother says is, "The most beautiful little caterpillar I've ever seen."
Caterpillar. Butterflies. Growth. Flight.
And like Rez said: this is where it is affirmed who the Passenger is. Spy-mommy. God, we love her.
“River, bie wang'le, your dance recital is tomorrow.”
Memories are flooding back, hurtful, unwanted. Getting confused with what's in front of her.
I am out, running, in a second. Momentum springing up my ankles and feet; I accelerate. I excel.
I love listening for the sound of words, and although I was shoddy at drama I used to be quite good at speech, reading aloud for an audience. These word games are one of the best things about writing River. I also love repetition; using the same words or phrase, but finding a different meaning in the word each time you encounter it. It is, somehow, intensely personal. I love the subjectiveness to it. Because, in the end, I'm all about restraint - everything is open to interpretation, modulation - the key to other things I do not touch directly, but you can go there if you like. I'm not going bludgeon you over the head with my take on the characters. That's what the commentaries are for. :)
“Mei-mei?” Simon catches me. He never catches me: I was always faster, nimbler, eager to be somewhere. Me out in front, he scrambling behind, steadily but always behind. I would not let him win for appearances; he would have still called me a little brat (my little brat of a sister), but in a different sort of voice, hurt-like, if I had. Perhaps I have stopped on my own, gone backwards. Negative instead of positive. Would I confuse something as physically rudimentary as that?
Sharp, sharp things. Dangerous. No running with scissors. Both retractor and shining costume are snatched out of my hands.
“What are you doing with that?”
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Simon didn't catch me. It isn't Simon at all. Mother has a pretty accent. Voice for speaking comforts, tenderness, levity. Cuts me. Tiny needles.
“She's not a bit like Simon. She talks to me, Gabriel, like she knows everything I'm thinking. Her teachers come complaining to me, they don't want her in their classes. This is my daughter… I don't know what to do with her.”
I'm one of those people who believe that River must have been a very difficult child, and that would have distanced her from her parents. Genius, like Simon's, is a gift to a parent. But River must have been something of an alien being, incomprehendable to her mother and father, and a constant threat to their (and her teachers') authority. What can you do with a child like her? Love her without reservation, like Simon, or you can start to fear her; fear that manifests as patronising tones, designed to put her in her place, remind her that she is a child still, like we saw in "Safe" when Gabriel spoke to her.
“It is River, isn't it? River, how did you get this?”
I make myself frightened, recoil from her. Say nothing. The Passenger is good at hiding her anger. Right now she is furious.
“Dong bu dong? Do you understand what I'm saying?”
Then others come. It is a small ship. In the corridor are two and two. Quadrilateral: highly unstable. Simon, jumping down the stairs from the kitchen, Kaylee following him; he takes my right elbow. I fold my head around him. Kaylee chimes in, half an octave higher: “Is something the matter, Lena?”
“No… No, nothing is the matter.” Irrational to make a fuss. Suspicious, even. She is thinking she made a mistake saying anything - the sister clearly isn't right in the head - should have said she left her door ajar. The Passenger is going to let this go.
Do I understand?
I do. Pin-doll with moving parts, all cells and gases; a special brain but no soul that they could measure. Home is where folks take care of one another. Her parents forgot her when she went away.
Perhaps the Tam elders did not know what a hell their daughter was being sent to; but I think they must have been not a little relieved to have her off their hands at last. To move on, to start to heal, River has to accept this. Like Simon already did when he left his whole life behind, River has to burn her bridges. She is not the same person she once was, and to try to crawl back to somewhere you can never return to is ineffectual, self-harming.
I understand.
Between mu-qian A and mu-qian B, between this River and the other, the River before the Academy - bridging them - is Simon. The rest she wants to forget. Home is here, not on Osiris. River was born on Serenity, gulped her first breath in Serenity's hull. Dropped wet shaking naked onto her filthy cargo-bay grills; was wrapped the next instant in softest silk and her brother's arms. She is shaking now.
I was rewatching Serenity the Pilot a few nights ago, incidentally, and noticed that the doorways are the shape of wombs. Which is quite lovely, really.
I am shaking.
They are all looking, eyes and lips frozen comically - all staring at me. So I say it again:
“She understands. It was open. Couldn't help it. She understands everything.”
Everything.
The engine room is so quiet. Warm like the earth after a long day of sun-soaking. The heart hums and the day is glad. I lay myself down, sink into the mineral warmth. Skirts a pink blossom half-furled. Spreading around me. Over bowing iron-bark: wall ceiling floor continuous. Uneven, gritty when palms and fingers roam lightly across it; the selfsame rust coloured terrain against calves’ underlyings is smooth as creek stones. Outside there is space in every direction. Infinite number of vectors. Planets, asteroids, stars. Only one direction matters. Serenity goes to; she goes forward. Keeps flying. Ten souls, one big ‘verse. (Passena is along her way.)
Final section is meant to echo the first, but also stand in contrast to it. All of it in first-person. River is solid, her shape is defined - she knows where she ends, and where she begins. And the Black, once just a void, is now full of objects: "Planets, asteroids, stars." She is one with the ship, but separate from it, also. The desperation, the uncertainty, is gone.
It's not often that I am completely happy with something I've written. This is one of those times. The language is straightforward, as with all the stories I write, but everything I wanted to get across is there, when I look.
Keep flying. I am flying too.
The End
31 August 2005
~
Want to hear me ramble on about some other story? Just go here.
This was the second story I'd written in the Firefly fandom. "Aetiology" was posted publicly at about the same time as "Alive in the Wings" because of ficathon requirements, but by that time this had already been finished for over a month. My first Firefly fic was also a River POV, "Uncensored", but I was never happy with it. I was experimenting with her voice, and I hadn't found it yet; instead what you got was my voice, my views on history and empire, coming out as River.
I've managed to lose the notebook which had my initial jottings about this story in it, so I can't remember how I decided on Firefly and on putting Irina of Alias onto the ship. I think I might have been at first just plain amused at the idea of calling her "The Passenger" all the way through, and making her an actual passenger. Anyway, it probably wasn't terrible interesting and you're better off not hearing about it.
The prompts started out being a bit of a challenge: a "sparkly sequined article of clothing"? How was I going to constuct a story around a random item like that, without going into crack!fic territory? But then I started thinking about dancing costumes and recitals - a classic mother-daughter activity - and of course River was a dancer too. So in that way it began to become about River and her parents, and Irina and her daughters. I started writing in my notebook the beginning of a confrontation between River and Irina: all the pain of River's own abandonment in her voice when she asks Irina, How could you, how you could have left them? Don't you know how much they needed you?
At some point I hit upon the title, "Alive in the Wings," and like most of my titles, I liked it because of the double meaning it contained - both the wings of a spaceship, and the wings of an auditorium stage. It's like the chicken and the egg; I don't know which came first, the title, or the main theme of the story. It's about River in the process of healing, of going from object-hood back to being a person again, from being concealed "in the wings" to becoming solid, beautiful, animated before her new family. Meeting Irina is just the catalyst, something that forces her to confront her own memories of her mother.
/end boring over-long credits.
Alive in the Wings
The dying sometimes speak of themselves in the third person.
-- Susanna Moore, In The Cut
"In The Cut" is a novel about words, sex, and crime. It's the words part that gets to me the most; the main character is an English teacher, and the novel is written in the first person, so she is forever thinking about words and language, the colloquial tongue. This quotation is from the ending of the book, and it lies behind my decision to write River's voice as I did - a changing monologue of first- and third-person POV. At the start, River is "dead" to herself. She is questioning her senses, her separateness from the objects which she touches, sees, smells, and tastes; touches too with her mind, her "sight." (Although I had not yet seen the movie when I wrote this, I'd decided that River was indeed deeply intuitive, bordering on psychic.) She is struggling, moment by moment, to assert her Descartean existence: I am here, I exist. Clinging like a barnacle to the ship, clinging to life.
Here I am River.
The river Tam. I touch - am touched at shores where imaginary me roughly ends: I exist, on this Firefly. Mu-qian. Ten skinny fingers and ten toes. You see me, I see you. I know of the distinction. All the jigsaw bits splinted together, even the crying hollow that remembers it used to be a piece of my brain - this too is rivertam. All me still. Simon recognises; is not afraid of it. Me and the in-between: wakefulness, love, chaos.
Mu-qian means "here, in this moment" in Chinese.
Outside of this metal eggshell, surface doesn't glue; reality dissolves with no buoyant wreckage dispersing, not a single light-blink resonance of meaning. Nothing out there defines you.
Taking my cue again from Descartes' Meditations, I thought about what the Black means. The total absense of material, of sensation, of opposition. And without opposition, there is no motion. Just a vacuum. Your whole universe would become your mind because there would be nothing else. If there is nothing to see, nothing to feel, then wouldn't your eyes, your skin, every faculty of perception, become redundant? As if they didn't exist. And if River is at this point struggling to define her separateness from everything she feels, the confusion of stimuli, then that emptiness - that physical death - must symbolise an almost welcome release.
Then River-girl is only the Black. A derelict memory of speaking. She is star. She is bubble, totally herself.
That sentence, "A derelict memory of speaking," was running through my head all through the University Union election week, every time I saw a chalked slogan on concrete or loud campaign poster. When one has become so used to not raising one's voice that the faculty for speaking shrivels up and becomes useless from neglect; you do not miss it, because you cannot even remember a time when you still have a voice.
She is space.
She is silent.
Look with my eyes, with not my eyes. I have a way with the 'verse. Fingers combing like dragnets. Feeling ripples in flux, in hiding schools, and from them the invisible epicentre can be inferred. Knowing without seeing; it's all particles in the end.
A pithy physics reference. "Particles" being what makes up the universe - particles and waves. River's "sight" comes from being able to sense the fabric of reality in a way normal humans can't.
There are ten aboard Serenity, leaving Coeus. Ten beating hearts (not dead): the others, Simon and I - and the Passenger. Nine and one. She does not give her real name. Like the other woman, the captain's wife - been lying for so long, does not know how to stop. She is exhausted with lying, but not brittle. Not weak. Notices dents from bullets past dotting the walls, even the ones Zoe's never found; she does not blink. The Shepherd is nervous around her. Chides himself a litte. Jayne stiffens, seeing woman two-fold with animal blinkers. Jump, it tells him; run, it tells him. Opposing forces cancel, and he stays - glowers.
I added the last three sentences, the crack about Jayne, after Rez's comments about what was there before - and I can't remember what that was. (And "opposing forces cancel" is another in-joke from high school physics.) But I thought that out of all of them, River aside, it would be Shepherd (the former Alliance's man) and Jayne with his brute instincts who would sense something off about their harmless-seeming passenger. Mal especially - as YoSaffBridge showed - was a total sucker for a pretty woman, and Irina's charms and talents are considerably greater than YoSaffBridge's.
She's booked to be dropped at Passena, has a family there. Tells this over main meal, smiling so warmly even the captain pays her full attention. (Ain't sore on the eyes, that's fer sure.) Her work as a surveyor has been keeping her to the border planets, away for a long while. Too long. She misses them, her daughter especially.
I really, really like using parentheses, if you hadn't noticed from "Deep Play." I think this was the story where they first played an important role, instead of being just for the hell of it, because I was too lazy to construct better sentences. The sentences, fragments in the parentheses are what River intuits. Sometimes it contains thoughts that she picks up from the others (like here, from Mal). Other times they're just asides that add another layer to River's consciousness.
Many lies, but this is not one of them.
Captain, Zoe and Simon soften at her telling - thinking about children.
Think about dirty overalls and blue eyes deepening into brown, burbling baby mouth sweetened by a breast. Think about little sisters who could not be protected, lost and so close. So close to never being saved.
The abrupt transition from the others "thinking" to the "I think" of River is deliberate. While I wrote this, I was thinking of that scene in "Objects in Space" where River had so submerged herself in the others - Zoe and Wash's lovemaking, Simon's laughter and pain - that when she breaks away from them, it's an almost physical shock to her body. A rush of ice water down her backbone.
Opaque.
Hard edges.
Sharp frame, stuck to its narrow track: features for structural practicality within vessel of limited space. Little asymmetric hole off-centre at distance from the lower-deck floor equivalent to one-point-two-eight mi. Ratio scale.
More River-babble. Surprisingly, that was the easiest stuff to write. The disjointed mishmash of physics, Chinese, and faux-philosophy. Although I do think that I've made River more coherent than she actually is in the show.
This might even be the first section that I wrote. The rest all grew up around this scene.
Locked: keep out. Locked in.
A memory intruding: Imprisonment.
I touch one finger against it, thinking. Privacy is as privacy does on the ship. The captain never had detector locks, but the Passenger has rigged one up all the same: electromagnetic web interloping on tumblers of centuries-old design. Subtle, can't see or hear it, but try to open the door and she will know.
In my hand: a slender retractor from the infirmary. Simon is in the kitchen with Kaylee and did not see me take it. Not stealing when it belongs to Serenity. Serenity does not take offence. I picture the lock in my mind, the exact heft and position of each lever and pin, the release of the bolt snagging the detector fields. Secrets guarding secrets. I close my eyes. Count to ten.
She is like a magician, nothing is closed to her. She can be everywhere, get inside anyone. Did she go to Irina's room intending to force entry? She had the retractor ready. But I think it was seeing the invisible alarm Irina had set on the door that decided her - the Passenger has something to hide.
Door slides open and I take a step inside.
This is not what River is thinking: this is a suitcase; here are her clothes, her gun in its holster (spotless as a surgical instrument), her book with its printed pages filled with Pre-modern Russian words…
There is a purpose; she is not aiming at dust clouds. I am familiar with the procedures.
At the moment when she is acting on training - the "procedures" of searching a room that the Academy drilled into her - River reverts temporarily back to third-person, back to thinking of herself as a "thing."
I am aware that I am looking for something. I forget momentarily that the Tall Card game will be over soon, and that she will be back. Interrupting. From the suitcase: a platinum shimmer winks like a puddle of mirrors, playful as a nebula of butterflies. I pull it out, the strip of fabric, preciously folded. A skin-tight garment delicately sequined with green, and so small, it would only fit a girl-child. Years and years since it was worn.
Hurrah! One requested item down. One more to go. :)
A surveyor then, for the Independents during the war. But not right up till the end. Otherwise she would not be drifting, alone, carrying this child's costume like this.
Like this... Secreted away, but obviously precious.
And "surveyor" is THE euphemism for spy-who-married-the-enemy.
Like this. Necessary sweet painful reminder of the girl (brown-haired, like her mother) who disappeared behind stage curtains, then to reappear - fly straight into mother's embrace. Still flying as mother hoisted her up. “Did you see me?” Their faces close, mother said, “Zui mei-li'de little caterpillar I've ever seen.” Daughter wiggled her nose against mother's neck in tickling response. Seven or eight years since spy-mommy left her on Passena: girl must be almost fifteen now.
Is River actually getting all this from touching the garment, or is she transfering her own longed-for, but never received, affectionate relationship with her mother onto Irina? The disappearance/reappearance was my nod to River too so she could be simply imagining a tender reunion of her own. It's ambiguous. I wasn't decided. Maybe ambiguity is always the best way to handle River.
What the mother says is, "The most beautiful little caterpillar I've ever seen."
Caterpillar. Butterflies. Growth. Flight.
And like Rez said: this is where it is affirmed who the Passenger is. Spy-mommy. God, we love her.
“River, bie wang'le, your dance recital is tomorrow.”
Memories are flooding back, hurtful, unwanted. Getting confused with what's in front of her.
I am out, running, in a second. Momentum springing up my ankles and feet; I accelerate. I excel.
I love listening for the sound of words, and although I was shoddy at drama I used to be quite good at speech, reading aloud for an audience. These word games are one of the best things about writing River. I also love repetition; using the same words or phrase, but finding a different meaning in the word each time you encounter it. It is, somehow, intensely personal. I love the subjectiveness to it. Because, in the end, I'm all about restraint - everything is open to interpretation, modulation - the key to other things I do not touch directly, but you can go there if you like. I'm not going bludgeon you over the head with my take on the characters. That's what the commentaries are for. :)
“Mei-mei?” Simon catches me. He never catches me: I was always faster, nimbler, eager to be somewhere. Me out in front, he scrambling behind, steadily but always behind. I would not let him win for appearances; he would have still called me a little brat (my little brat of a sister), but in a different sort of voice, hurt-like, if I had. Perhaps I have stopped on my own, gone backwards. Negative instead of positive. Would I confuse something as physically rudimentary as that?
Sharp, sharp things. Dangerous. No running with scissors. Both retractor and shining costume are snatched out of my hands.
“What are you doing with that?”
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Simon didn't catch me. It isn't Simon at all. Mother has a pretty accent. Voice for speaking comforts, tenderness, levity. Cuts me. Tiny needles.
“She's not a bit like Simon. She talks to me, Gabriel, like she knows everything I'm thinking. Her teachers come complaining to me, they don't want her in their classes. This is my daughter… I don't know what to do with her.”
I'm one of those people who believe that River must have been a very difficult child, and that would have distanced her from her parents. Genius, like Simon's, is a gift to a parent. But River must have been something of an alien being, incomprehendable to her mother and father, and a constant threat to their (and her teachers') authority. What can you do with a child like her? Love her without reservation, like Simon, or you can start to fear her; fear that manifests as patronising tones, designed to put her in her place, remind her that she is a child still, like we saw in "Safe" when Gabriel spoke to her.
“It is River, isn't it? River, how did you get this?”
I make myself frightened, recoil from her. Say nothing. The Passenger is good at hiding her anger. Right now she is furious.
“Dong bu dong? Do you understand what I'm saying?”
Then others come. It is a small ship. In the corridor are two and two. Quadrilateral: highly unstable. Simon, jumping down the stairs from the kitchen, Kaylee following him; he takes my right elbow. I fold my head around him. Kaylee chimes in, half an octave higher: “Is something the matter, Lena?”
“No… No, nothing is the matter.” Irrational to make a fuss. Suspicious, even. She is thinking she made a mistake saying anything - the sister clearly isn't right in the head - should have said she left her door ajar. The Passenger is going to let this go.
Do I understand?
I do. Pin-doll with moving parts, all cells and gases; a special brain but no soul that they could measure. Home is where folks take care of one another. Her parents forgot her when she went away.
Perhaps the Tam elders did not know what a hell their daughter was being sent to; but I think they must have been not a little relieved to have her off their hands at last. To move on, to start to heal, River has to accept this. Like Simon already did when he left his whole life behind, River has to burn her bridges. She is not the same person she once was, and to try to crawl back to somewhere you can never return to is ineffectual, self-harming.
I understand.
Between mu-qian A and mu-qian B, between this River and the other, the River before the Academy - bridging them - is Simon. The rest she wants to forget. Home is here, not on Osiris. River was born on Serenity, gulped her first breath in Serenity's hull. Dropped wet shaking naked onto her filthy cargo-bay grills; was wrapped the next instant in softest silk and her brother's arms. She is shaking now.
I was rewatching Serenity the Pilot a few nights ago, incidentally, and noticed that the doorways are the shape of wombs. Which is quite lovely, really.
I am shaking.
They are all looking, eyes and lips frozen comically - all staring at me. So I say it again:
“She understands. It was open. Couldn't help it. She understands everything.”
Everything.
The engine room is so quiet. Warm like the earth after a long day of sun-soaking. The heart hums and the day is glad. I lay myself down, sink into the mineral warmth. Skirts a pink blossom half-furled. Spreading around me. Over bowing iron-bark: wall ceiling floor continuous. Uneven, gritty when palms and fingers roam lightly across it; the selfsame rust coloured terrain against calves’ underlyings is smooth as creek stones. Outside there is space in every direction. Infinite number of vectors. Planets, asteroids, stars. Only one direction matters. Serenity goes to; she goes forward. Keeps flying. Ten souls, one big ‘verse. (Passena is along her way.)
Final section is meant to echo the first, but also stand in contrast to it. All of it in first-person. River is solid, her shape is defined - she knows where she ends, and where she begins. And the Black, once just a void, is now full of objects: "Planets, asteroids, stars." She is one with the ship, but separate from it, also. The desperation, the uncertainty, is gone.
It's not often that I am completely happy with something I've written. This is one of those times. The language is straightforward, as with all the stories I write, but everything I wanted to get across is there, when I look.
Keep flying. I am flying too.
The End
31 August 2005
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