Many blessings upon Newgirl78.
Chapter 3
"Julius, we need to help her! I'm not saying because she's a zombie. And not because she's a woman. But because she needs help and there's nowhere else for her to turn in this damn town," she finished, pink-cheeked with glasses slightly askew.
Julius looked torn, biting on his thumb to keep from having to admit it. Finally, he knew there was only one thing he could say, much as he hated to say it: "Damnit Knight, you're right."
The brought a smile to her face "And you know how much I love to hear it!"
September 6
They were a month and a half into filming before Nick Miller's world really went to shit.
"DRAG you out here? Caroline, you're the one that said I should do the damn movie in the first place!"
"Do you think this is what I wanted? You, moping and sitting around all day? I just want us to be happy. Like we were back in Chicago. Not – "
But Nick didn't want to hear it anymore. He had been hearing it damn near every day for weeks. His fury bubbled up and exploded with a, "FUCK IT. Fuck it. If you don't want to be here, then just leave." He slammed the door on his way out and into the warm early-autumn air of a Los Angeles September Saturday.
He barely just made it out of the apartment when he got a text from Schmidt: My office in twenty? Got bad news.
Schmidt was waiting for him this time, and hardly his jubilant self. In fact, if Nick thought Schmidt could ever be nervous, this was it. Sunglasses off, mouth set in a serious line.
The cast and crew had just spent a month shooting in Vancouver or Toronto or some other Canadian city that, according to Schmidt, looked more like Chicago than Chicago and was cheaper to shoot in. Maybe this morose mood was just the effect Canada had on Schmidt – but more likely, there was a big problem.
"Hey Nick. I'm just gonna be upfront here – I'm just as caught off guard by this as anyone. Take a seat." Nick could feel his stomach drop out from under him. He sat and waited for Schmidt to continue. "There's been an issue on set. While we were in Toronto, a tabloid snapped a picture of our director getting his swerve on with one of the actresses.
Nick's heart stopped for a second before asking, "Which?"
"Our Melanie, the 'damsel in zombie distress'', as played by Kristen Stewart."
Nick released a breath he didn't know he was holding, thankful it was that actress. Admittedly, he knew nothing about Jessica in terms of significant other, but she didn't wear a ring and nobody was ever with her on set. And yes, he did have a significant other. So he didn't exactly have any particular reason to be concerned with Miss Day's love life. But the thoughts hadn't gone away.
"Okay. So… what?" was Nick's delayed reply, wondering where this was going.
"Well, the issue is that Russel has a wife – Ouli Shiller, you may have heard of her, cinematographer, no, ok – and he would very much like to stay married to her. So to appease her, he's agreed to drop the movie," Schmidt disclosed, looking grave as ever but with the slightest deepest sparkle of the joy of spreading gossip, despite the grim news.
On the bright side, it wasn't Jess. On the less bright side, this is the worst news he could have heard, except for, for instance, Jess was caught macking on the director. Russell was one of the bright spots of all of this and now he was out.
"So who the hell is directing our movie now?"
Schmidt smiled for a second, saying, "See! I knew you'd start calling it our movie!" but looked markedly less upbeat at Nick's glare. "Well, to be perfectly honest, I don't know. We have a few candidates, but nobody with his experience or gravitas."
"Shit," was all Nick could utter. He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers into them, having what was just about the worst day since he had come to LA.
Schmidt rushed to re-assure him. "Look, Nick. This is what I do. I make movies. I make magic happen. I'm going to get this settled and we'll have a director and resume filming right here in LA tomorrow. I want you on set to bolster everyone's mood, okay, make sure things look like they're going well?"
Nick nodded, feeling himself shaking a bit. He had to trust in Schmidt. Schmidt had gotten him this far, and, like it or not, he was the expert here. "Okay. I'm gonna… I'm gonna hit the bar. If you need me, call me."
Schmidt nodded, mostly relieved that he didn't have to deal with a Nick Miller freakout. "Cool, cool. Do it up playa, yeah yeah! Go get weird out there. You know what time it is?"
Nick turned around at the door. "What time is it, Schmidt."
"It's Miller time!" He looked so damn impressed with himself for that one.
"Never again, Schmidt."
Micky's South Side would be a pathetic excuse for a sports bar in Chicago, but here in LA it passed muster with flying colors. It was a little too cramped from every side, a too many stools at the bar kind of deal, but Nick always looked surly enough to drive away people looking to strike up conversation. And sure, the bar occasionally committed a cardinal bar sin by playing Blame it on the Alcohol or something to try being cute, but it was a pretty low-key place overall.
On this particular night, however, Nick couldn't even muster up the will to look surly. Russel Shiller was one of the best parts of this movie, taking the book and adapting it into on-screen gold. He refined Thresh into something even Nick feared. He made fake Chicago come to after-life with the same vision that guided Nick. But apparently, he couldn't keep it in his pants. A damn shame all around.
After an hour or so of two beers, his dark corner at the end of the bar got a visitor. Nick Miller wasn't hit on very often, mostly thanks to his view of shaving as "fancy-schmancy" rather than "basic grooming". Caroline's position had evolved from finding him ruggedly handsome to irritatingly stubbly of late, but she didn't nag him enough to inspire him to shave (despite her best efforts).
The woman pulled up a bar stool next to him and ordered a beer before turning to him. "You look familiar. I've seen that face before."
Nick, though, wasn't in the mood for conversation, so he shrugged it off by saying, "My condolences."
"Ha ha. Funny guy. Comedian?"
"Nah, writer."
She hmmed at that and paid for her beer, taking back a first sip. "A writer? Sad, in the corner of a bar? I can see it. Written anything good?"
"Pepperwood," he grunted out, still not feeling like conversation. "I was on the dust jacket, maybe that's where you saw me."
"Yeah! The grizzly one! I remember your picture. Pretty okay book. Heard they're making a movie."
Nick snorted at her assessment of his novel. Even people who weren't into it usually lied- it wasn't often that someone had the balls to call your work of art "pretty okay". He looked at her then, interested in seeing what this woman was like. At first glance, she looked a lot like Jess, big eyes and bangs and pale skin, dressed kinda funny. Everything was off though, as if making Jess required some previous practice, like this girl was some kinda prototype.
They pair fell into easy conversation, Nick feeling different than the depressed lump he had been in Los Angeles or the bashful schoolboy he found himself acting like around Jess. She was fun, dynamic, a little Jessica Knight, a little Jessica Day. She swore up and down that she just came to talk to him because he looked sad on his own, but they had fallen into comfortable flirting when she told him, "Y'know, I'd have figured you'd be asking me for my number by now."
Nick looked her in the eyes, a deep blue, but not sparkling, and could only keep thinking about how she was almost Jessica. She was a little bit like Jessica Knight, and a little bit like the Jessica Day that had invaded his head lately. And from somewhere deep in his psyche, he realized that Jessica Day herself may not be the Jessica Day from his head, and that maybe the real, living Jessica Day was just as far from his fantasy as the girl sitting before him now.
It was a sobering thought, and the only thought more sobering than that was that he had a girl to get home to that was none of those Jessicas at all. And now, it was time he headed home. He stuttered out a, "Uhh, I'm sorry, I have to get going. I'll see you around sometime," and left the woman rolling her eyes at his abrupt exit.
Writers, man.
Nick got back from the bar late. Very late. Caroline would probably be pissed, but he was three drinks past caring about the shit she gave him.
He stumbled into the apartment at two am and the goddamn cat was up, scratching at the floorboards outside of their bedroom. The room was blurry before him, but everything looked right and wrong at the same time, like breaking into your high school ten years later and finding out they added a wing and re-did all the labs.
The furniture was moved and stuff seemed… missing. It seemed empty. Then, he noticed, a lot of stuff was missing. Her coffee table books. Her rack of knives in the kitchen, her throw pillows on the couch, her television. Had they been robbed?
He burst into the bedroom and found his antique typewriter sitting on his desk, tauntingly waiting for him, but her desk cleared off. She was absent in the bathroom, her four bottles of conditioner MIA, the countertop around the sink conspicuously bare. She was cleared out from ceiling to carpet. If not for the cat, he would be wondering by now if she ever existed at all.
He almost paused before calling her, but then went ahead with it anyway, reasoning, If she didn't want a call at two in the morning, she probably shouldn't have packed up all of her stuff and left with it.
It rang four times before she picked up. "What the hell is this, Caroline. What the fuck is going on."
The first thing he heard on the other line was a heavy sigh. "Nick," was all she muttered for a few seconds. "I had to go, Nick."
"What do you mean, you had to go. Where are you? Where are you going?"
"Back to Chicago, Nicholas. I'm going back home."
This stunned him for a moment. "What?" he asked, blankly, before, again, "What the fuck does that mean?"
"I'm going home Nick, I can't do this anymore!" came her yell from the other side. She caught him off guard with that. He could hear her sobbing now, cracked by her own outburst. "I can't do this."
"Caroline, honey, let's talk this out," he offered, suddenly feeling a panic set in.
"There's nothing to say, Nick," came her resigned response. "We've already said all there is to say."
Nick was undeterred. "What are you doing this for?"
"I told you! I told you a goddamn hundred times! You aren't the same Nick you were back in Chicago!"
"The hell does that mean?" he roared back.
"You're always drinking, you never write, you haven't made friends! You just mope around the apartment and stare at your typewriter and you're wasting everything and I can't just sit there and watch you do this to yourself anymore!"
"Oh, what, you want me to write more? You're pissed I haven't written? What I've done isn't enough for you, you're some kind of golddigger now?"
"Fuck you." She could feel herself this close to hanging up. He was, again, stunned by her boldness. "I was there for you, Nick, I was there for you for years." She was crying even harder now. "Don't you remember the three years we spent living in my parent's basement and calling it an apartment and eating ramen three days a week? Did you think I was a golddigger then? Did you think I didn't love you then?"
"I'm trying to get better!" he countered, just as aggressive as she was. "I need you now, and now is when you choose to leave me!"
Now she was just full-on sobbing on the other side of the line. The cat cowered in a corner, knowing well enough to be put off by Nick's fury. He felt the blood pumping through his head, every ache of his heaving body. He sat down, feeling his legs give out beneath him, listening to his lover sob from O'Hare airport. He had sobered up quick and just wanted all of this to be over. He came home looking for a fight, but not this fight.
But Caroline wasn't on the same page as him there. "I'm not going to pretend this is working anymore, Nick. I'm sorry, but I'm not discussing this. I know where you are, and where I am, and it isn't working anymore. It's over." And a click. An it's over and a click and he could already feel his one silent candle being blown into blackness.
He stared at the phone, only seeing his reflection in the void of the screen. He hated it. He threw it, never wanting to see the phone or his face again, not caring that it busted open on the shitty painting of some bridge in Italy she had hung. Of course she left that. The cat was freaked out by the battery that went flying but Nick was already throwing open the door to his bedroom and flopping onto the bed.
It took a minute, but he started to cry into the bare mattress, devoid of her high thread count sheets. Of course she took those. The only sheets he had were back in Chicago, printed with a faded Cubs logo and packed away in his childhood home's crawlspace attic. As a writer, he appreciated how his heart felt buried like those sheets, in some dark dingy little space under layers of the past.
As a person, he hated how he could feel his sadness inflaming his eyes and stuffing his nose. He hated that the only thing he had to hold on to was a cat he didn't like and a fast-fading dream. He hated feeling like the only living boy in this city.
"Nobody gives a damn in this city!" Pepperwood yelled, banging his fist into his desk.
"We give a damn. We're the best chance this lady has."
He nodded in agreement. "Everyone seems to forget that the zombies were human before. They were brothers and sisters and shopkeepers and mistresses. All they see is the bad, and bam, they cast 'em off. But they could turn. We could turn. Tell me, Knight, what would you do if you became a zombie?"
She gave him a resigned half-smile. "You know what I'd do, J. I'd be here every morning at 8 am, ready to make coffee and clean up your messes." Pepperwood tried to glare, but couldn't help but grin.
