five arias
You Are Here
Character sketches, as per this challenge. 250 words each (no fudging).
1.
The midlife crisis hit with surgical precision, wasting no time on metaphors or self-delusion. No waking up one morning to find yourself in hell, no, you were aware every step of the way, noted each slip downward and knew it would get worse and did nothing, nothing to stop it. Your mother, your brother, your father(s), the suspension, Eames, everything you had disappearing and you saw it all coming. Everything hurting a little more, everything piling on until you realized you couldn’t control it anymore. Your definition of okay getting broader with each disaster until you don’t even recognize yourself in the mirror, this fat slob two steps from a header off the roof of 1PP. There’s one positive that you can see and that’s your partner, that’s Eames, who is tired of giving you second chances, tired of how you never give her anything back, how even after all these years you can’t even call her by her first name; Eames who moves something deep inside you that you thought had died. And at each moment your mind going like a car crash, even when you can’t make the words come out, can’t move anything more than the most basic muscles; this constant turning and turning again, everything the job, these murderers, these people and their mistakes and egos and weaknesses and all you can do is figure them out, break them down, understand every detail, because you can uncover their sins but never absolve your own.
2.
Sometimes your life feels so spare. You imagine it in concentric circles. This big sadness, the comfortable sorrow, sitting in the middle; your job; your family; the smaller, less comfortable sorrow which is your partner and every event he represents. Even the people you have you don’t really have at all; Joe, Nathan, your job, your partner, the crux of each just slightly past your reach. And this is not something you'll complain about, you’re not looking to replace the quiet bruise of the widow, the cop’s brusque ennui. A close-kept, neat sort of unhappiness. The biweekly hair appointments, the considered makeup, jogging every morning, dressing well, eating right. The senior partner, the respected, respectful voice of reason to Goren’s sustained and varied bullshit. The curled fist to his sprawling breakdowns. Level-headed. (Except, of course, when you’re not.) Digging into the mountain of rich privilege gone criminal with all the rage and schadenfreude of the working-class, and a little extra for Joe. The things people do to each other, all the strutting and fucking around, failing in repeating patterns, and you don’t know if you’re better than them. Your life calculated and predictable and the universe even arranges so any disruption still leads back to the old hurts. To Joe, to the ways your life fell apart when he died, to Goren and his own melodrama and to the unwanted, desperate, awkward love you have for him. Your life just these touchstones and the spaces in between.
3.
Your detectives look at you like where the hell is Deakins, and who do you think you are? Your ex-wife doesn’t look at you at all anymore. Your kids, you wonder if you’ve become another vague father-figure showing up for weekend trips and quick life lessons squeezed between the video games and ice cream. Liz seems like she might always be angry, always impatient, even rolls her eyes at you during sex, because she just wants to fuck and you want to make love. The endless drag of divorce and lawyers in suits that cost more than your entire wardrobe and your wife cringing like it hurts her to remember you’re even alive, and this is what your life has become. Staying later and later in the squad room where they, yeah, cringe at everything you do, look at you like this is a brotherhood, sisterhood, a family and you are not part of it, and where is Deakins? Sigh and avoid you and act like your boys act, like you’re handing down some terrible punishment, and don’t they get what you do for them? The shit you take to save their goddamn jobs? Looking at you like you’re a cartoon villain, the dastardly Jew. "He’s good at the politics of the job," they say. As if Deakins somehow did the job by charm and Everyman aggression alone, a simple fighter for simple justice, any failures or frailties smoothed out into the sainted captain, martyred by a politician.
4.
The thing is, you’re not sure that extended vacation made any difference. Oh, you’re good at the job. You’re clever, charming. You still close cases with a quick definitive snap, still run rings mentally around authority. You’re that guy who thinks he can grin and quick-wit his way into friendships and out of bad situations, aren’t you? The guy who thinks no one notices how surface-slick he is, but they do. You know how quick the flippancy grates, how the perpetual ironic quirk just gets tired. And you still believe the lie your parents told you, that people can be understood as the sum of their disorders, that to name the disease is to name them. These Latin phrases like fragments of a liturgy. Except deep down, you know the complexities of humanity go beyond your cheap, borrowed diagnoses, and you know that it is the voice of your father that says the words, not you, and you know you are missing something important, and it scares you. The chaos that people are, the raw unexplainable emotion, the trips and triggers, the messiness, you understand it as sort of an abstract thing, this textbook fact. You’ll make a mistake again, and you won’t be able to run off or brush it off or do any one of a dozen cop-outs, and that’s the worst part, that this is it, really it, last chance, and you’re still acting like this is a game with a do-over button.
5.
History is repeating itself. Your father disappearing and your mother raising you alone; your husband arrested and your daughter never knowing him. Two generations of women left behind by men too busy with their hidden lives to bother with family, slipping away so easily, with so little fuss, that you wonder if it ever meant to them what it meant to the two of you. You’re a detective, you should’ve known. So here you are, divorced before the marriage even started, with this beautiful child who inspires so much love and sadness and resentment in you that you wonder if you’re going crazy. You should’ve known it was too good to be true. Someone like him and someone like you, because you’re one of those women who will still be girlish when you’re grey and wrinkled, taking this confusion and uncertainty with you to the grave; never worldly, never sophisticated; good enough but then you think about Logan’s experience and Nichols’ brilliance and you don’t have that, you’ve got nothing but a good work ethic and a willingness to try and a wobbling chin. You’re here because Ross wanted a familiar face and you are painfully aware of that, every day, how you can never think quick enough or be tough enough, how you’re always either holding back or going too far, the effort it takes just to keep from running away. MCS another thing you don’t deserve, and how long will it be before it gets taken away too?
Character sketches, as per this challenge. 250 words each (no fudging).
1.
The midlife crisis hit with surgical precision, wasting no time on metaphors or self-delusion. No waking up one morning to find yourself in hell, no, you were aware every step of the way, noted each slip downward and knew it would get worse and did nothing, nothing to stop it. Your mother, your brother, your father(s), the suspension, Eames, everything you had disappearing and you saw it all coming. Everything hurting a little more, everything piling on until you realized you couldn’t control it anymore. Your definition of okay getting broader with each disaster until you don’t even recognize yourself in the mirror, this fat slob two steps from a header off the roof of 1PP. There’s one positive that you can see and that’s your partner, that’s Eames, who is tired of giving you second chances, tired of how you never give her anything back, how even after all these years you can’t even call her by her first name; Eames who moves something deep inside you that you thought had died. And at each moment your mind going like a car crash, even when you can’t make the words come out, can’t move anything more than the most basic muscles; this constant turning and turning again, everything the job, these murderers, these people and their mistakes and egos and weaknesses and all you can do is figure them out, break them down, understand every detail, because you can uncover their sins but never absolve your own.
2.
Sometimes your life feels so spare. You imagine it in concentric circles. This big sadness, the comfortable sorrow, sitting in the middle; your job; your family; the smaller, less comfortable sorrow which is your partner and every event he represents. Even the people you have you don’t really have at all; Joe, Nathan, your job, your partner, the crux of each just slightly past your reach. And this is not something you'll complain about, you’re not looking to replace the quiet bruise of the widow, the cop’s brusque ennui. A close-kept, neat sort of unhappiness. The biweekly hair appointments, the considered makeup, jogging every morning, dressing well, eating right. The senior partner, the respected, respectful voice of reason to Goren’s sustained and varied bullshit. The curled fist to his sprawling breakdowns. Level-headed. (Except, of course, when you’re not.) Digging into the mountain of rich privilege gone criminal with all the rage and schadenfreude of the working-class, and a little extra for Joe. The things people do to each other, all the strutting and fucking around, failing in repeating patterns, and you don’t know if you’re better than them. Your life calculated and predictable and the universe even arranges so any disruption still leads back to the old hurts. To Joe, to the ways your life fell apart when he died, to Goren and his own melodrama and to the unwanted, desperate, awkward love you have for him. Your life just these touchstones and the spaces in between.
3.
Your detectives look at you like where the hell is Deakins, and who do you think you are? Your ex-wife doesn’t look at you at all anymore. Your kids, you wonder if you’ve become another vague father-figure showing up for weekend trips and quick life lessons squeezed between the video games and ice cream. Liz seems like she might always be angry, always impatient, even rolls her eyes at you during sex, because she just wants to fuck and you want to make love. The endless drag of divorce and lawyers in suits that cost more than your entire wardrobe and your wife cringing like it hurts her to remember you’re even alive, and this is what your life has become. Staying later and later in the squad room where they, yeah, cringe at everything you do, look at you like this is a brotherhood, sisterhood, a family and you are not part of it, and where is Deakins? Sigh and avoid you and act like your boys act, like you’re handing down some terrible punishment, and don’t they get what you do for them? The shit you take to save their goddamn jobs? Looking at you like you’re a cartoon villain, the dastardly Jew. "He’s good at the politics of the job," they say. As if Deakins somehow did the job by charm and Everyman aggression alone, a simple fighter for simple justice, any failures or frailties smoothed out into the sainted captain, martyred by a politician.
4.
The thing is, you’re not sure that extended vacation made any difference. Oh, you’re good at the job. You’re clever, charming. You still close cases with a quick definitive snap, still run rings mentally around authority. You’re that guy who thinks he can grin and quick-wit his way into friendships and out of bad situations, aren’t you? The guy who thinks no one notices how surface-slick he is, but they do. You know how quick the flippancy grates, how the perpetual ironic quirk just gets tired. And you still believe the lie your parents told you, that people can be understood as the sum of their disorders, that to name the disease is to name them. These Latin phrases like fragments of a liturgy. Except deep down, you know the complexities of humanity go beyond your cheap, borrowed diagnoses, and you know that it is the voice of your father that says the words, not you, and you know you are missing something important, and it scares you. The chaos that people are, the raw unexplainable emotion, the trips and triggers, the messiness, you understand it as sort of an abstract thing, this textbook fact. You’ll make a mistake again, and you won’t be able to run off or brush it off or do any one of a dozen cop-outs, and that’s the worst part, that this is it, really it, last chance, and you’re still acting like this is a game with a do-over button.
5.
History is repeating itself. Your father disappearing and your mother raising you alone; your husband arrested and your daughter never knowing him. Two generations of women left behind by men too busy with their hidden lives to bother with family, slipping away so easily, with so little fuss, that you wonder if it ever meant to them what it meant to the two of you. You’re a detective, you should’ve known. So here you are, divorced before the marriage even started, with this beautiful child who inspires so much love and sadness and resentment in you that you wonder if you’re going crazy. You should’ve known it was too good to be true. Someone like him and someone like you, because you’re one of those women who will still be girlish when you’re grey and wrinkled, taking this confusion and uncertainty with you to the grave; never worldly, never sophisticated; good enough but then you think about Logan’s experience and Nichols’ brilliance and you don’t have that, you’ve got nothing but a good work ethic and a willingness to try and a wobbling chin. You’re here because Ross wanted a familiar face and you are painfully aware of that, every day, how you can never think quick enough or be tough enough, how you’re always either holding back or going too far, the effort it takes just to keep from running away. MCS another thing you don’t deserve, and how long will it be before it gets taken away too?