Ad Hoc
Ad hoc - Improvised, impromptu
Claire Kincaid is dreaming. She is dreaming but now she knows what the dreams are; she is dreaming but now she knows that sometimes she can change the dreams.
It isn't easy. The narrative wants to carry her along no matter how hard she resists, and Claire often finds words coming out of her mouth that she would never willingly say. Once she calls Jack 'snookums' and she isn't joking.
"Oh, jeez, I gotta brush my teeth," she blurts when she hears the words coming out of her mouth. Suddenly solid, Jack raises his eyebrows. "I'm not surprised," he says.
In the moment when he is clear and solid Claire grabs hold of him and kisses him hard, pressing up against him to feel the whole length of his body against hers, to remember every inch of him. He is surprised but enthusiastically co-operative, finding the spot in the small of her back that has always short-circuited her brain.
"Oh god Jack," Claire groans against his mouth. "Oh god, fuck me now."
"I don't write pornography," says a voice in the air, and Jack goes fuzzy and indistinct and starts stroking her hair and crying.
Claire bats his hands away and wakes up.
"So I can control what happens?" she asks Lennie next time she sees him. "I can make it different?"
"If the writers let you," Lennie says, and shrugs. "But, you know, they have their own ideas."
"Let's see…" Claire says, setting her jaw.
She spends an uncountable period of time skipping from fiction to fiction, ad libbing her own lines, forcing the narrative off the track. She learns it's hard work to keep the story going in a new direction. She learns that the sharper the story is originally, the longer she can keep it hard-edged and tangible when she starts changing the plot. The ones that blur in with her own memories are clearest, overlapping with court cases and remembered arguments with Jack.
But she can never make it last. Sooner or later she has to wake up, and eat cornflakes.
"It's all happening in the past," Lennie tells her. "The story moved on without you. There's nowhere for these stories to go."
The story moved on.
"What happened?" Claire asks. "In the story. When it moved on."
"We caught a lot of bad guys," Lennie says. "Jack prosecuted them. Some went to jail, some didn't. I got a new partner. Then he got a new partner. Jack had a few new assistants. We went through a coupla DAs. You know, stuff."
"And I was dead," Claire says. She tries to say it bravely but her voice still quivers.
"I'm sorry, honey," Lennie says. "I'm really sorry."
"What about Jack?" Claire asks. "Did he – what happened? To Jack? When I died?"
"Are you sure you want to know, kiddo?" Lennie asks gently. Claire nods and he sighs heavily. "Okay. Jack took it hard. He blamed himself. He hit the bottle pretty hard and he came close to going off the rails, but in the end he held it together."
"Did he – is he – will he - " Claire can't keep her tenses straight. "Meet someone?"
"It's hard to know," Lennie says. "After a while, all the personal stuff just kinda drifted out of the story. I think he was seeing someone. He seemed happier."
Claire tries to smile through the tears streaming down her cheeks. "That's good. I'm glad. It's good he can be happy. Even if I – well. I'm glad. Really."
"It's just how it goes," Lennie says gently. "The story keeps going, even though we stop. The story moved on. Jack moved on. It's how it goes."
"Well, then," Claire says, lifting her chin to pretend she's not terrified, "Maybe I should move on, too."
.oOo.
