Peter Howard is Wintermute, mythologist

Raphaël — Origins

12November2007 [directLink] [film]
This item was changed on 13November2007

A train steams through the Alps, its passage barely noticed in the cold, still air.

An old man sits in a near-empty carriage, his battered leather briefcase placed neatly on the seat next to him, his worn felt hat perched atop it. He opens his briefcase, removes a manila envelope, opens it, removes a bound dossier. He opens it, reads the first page, looks around nervously. He closes it and returns it to the briefcase. His eyes wander around the carriage, desperate for something else to grasp his attention, but carefully avoiding looking directly at any other passenger, desperate to maintain some semblance of civility.

Three seats back, in the last row of the carriage, sat facing the man, is Raphaël. The young man still wears his trench coat, his satchel sits within reach. He tries to look inconspicuous, but his eyes keep darting back to the old man.

Suddenly a door slams, at the opposite end of the carriage. The old man’s head jerks up, but he quickly regains composure. Raphaël peers at the end of the carriage, but doesn’t move.

Two dark-uniformed soldiers walk in. The first fires his gun at a window, shattering the glass. The cold mountain wind rushes in. Someone screams, and passengers are ducking behind chairs. Raphaël slides low in his seat. The old man is sweating, breathing rapidly. Raphaël pulls a small gun from his satchel, peers around the edge of his seat and—

A loud CRACK, and the old man is slumped in his seat. Raphaël panics. He vanishes, his body disintegrating into molecules. In that instant we stop moving forward, escaping the train’s inertia. The train speeds forward into the night as we descend lightly to the ground, Raphaël re-forming as he falls.

This scene has been stuck in my head for years now (and I’ve no idea where it came from — did I dream it?). I’ve been struggling with where and how to tell it. There’s a man on a train. But who is he? Where and when is he?

Finally, I’ve got him out on paper. Raphaël. He’s been living on the fringes of my earlier stories. Ariel and Azrael work for him. I’ve a half-written conversation (scribbled down somewhere) between him and Uriel. But this scene is long before that, long before he was a leader. In my head, he’s an amazing leader. But I knew he had to come from somewhere — especially as he’s completely without the scheming ambition that Uriel has. And thinking about it, he’s the kind of leader that times like ours produce — times of turmoil — when things reach a point where you can’t just sit around waiting for someone to do something. One day, Raphaël gets up and does something, despite his past failures.

Walking home yesterday, listening to Massive Attack’s Angel, looped, repeatedly, I realised I had the soundtrack. And I realised, were this scene set in the present, he’d totally be sitting there listening to an iPod. There was something so right about Jessica Biel’s iPod thing in Blade Trinity, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. It’s that listening to music, like that — completely inside one’s head, cuts one off from the rest of the world, but doesn’t dull the mind. It’s perfect for the hunt; it creates a distance from one’s prey but not a distraction. It’s in that amazing place between sacred and profane, the place that all ritual tries to take us to.

Update 13Nov2007: Added link to Angel on iTunes, because it’s a really good song, and because it’s available DRM-free.

Broken Cinema

11November2007 [directLink] [personal]

Saw Lions for Lambs at Greater Union’s George St complex yesterday afternoon. They’re in the middle of renovations — installing a fancy Gold Class cinema or two, and generally cleaning the place up — it was getting pretty bad, some of the chairs you wouldn’t want to sit on.

But it’s still very much a work in progress. Big sections of it are boarded up, and all the cinema numbering has changed, so people are walking around, aimless. The speakers in the cinema I was in weren’t sync’ed up properly — there was an annoying half-second delay whenever people spoke, not unlike being yelled at in an auditorium (which quite suited Tom Cruise’s charmingly fascistic congressman).

They’ve also redone the seating — nice wide, comfortable, clean chairs, which is a good thing. But they’ve implemented allocated seating (mostly so they can charge extra to people wanting to reserve particular seats in advance), and that system seems to have a few kinks in it. It was a massive cinema, and the few dozen people in it ended up cramped in a couple of rows. On top of that, some poor French couple were allocated the seat I was in — we pulled out tickets and they were identical. Fortunately the cinema was empty enough there was still plenty of space. But yeah, I don’t know what a computer’s doing giving away the same seat twice. Presumably it was the same machine playing tricks with the speakers.