3AM Exercise 5: Journalism

Write part of a story in the form of journal entries. Everything that happens in the story most likely happens between the entries. Make sure your readers can see the events offstage, but also present your journalist's blind spots--she will not present the whole story, just parts of it. Your journal writer may not even understand the significance of the events until a few entries later--if ever. Keep all the entries close together in time (within a week or two). This exercise will challenge those writers who think there is no limit to realism: Make sure that the journal writer is still telling a story--showing as often as telling, revealing things about herself. In other words, you have to work just as hard in this exercise to choose the words of this narrator. Writers will tend to think that this journalist can say anything and not look outside of herself. Avoid completely self-absorbed narrators here--and everywhere. (700 words)

Back in 1995, I produced a multimedia presentation combining, maps, photography, and text for my Photography class in Paris. The project was called "A Map of Absence". It told the story of an un-named Event, a plague of disappearance that happened on a Spring day in 1996 effecting much of Western Europe. With a little nod of the hat to "The 4400", here's a fragment of the sequel.

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A Partial Map of Presence

2006-05-23: Harrison wouldn’t shut up today. After ten years, they’re finally pulling the plug on the project and the old man kept going on and on about how it was the right thing to do and how he’d wasted his life watching empty rooms and graveyards in the quarantine zone. “My life disappeared with everything else in ’96,” he said. Bullshit. They start pulling hardware on Thursday – and they’ve already shutdown most of the network in Holland, France, and here in Belgium. I’ve started querying Universities back in the States. I’m thinking I’ll move back to Boston and get work where I can – but what I really want is to be here. To find out what the hell happened. Ten years. Shit.

2006-05-24: Chloe didn’t come back to the apartment tonight. I’ve been trying to call her but there’s no answer on her cell and I’m getting worried. I take that back – I’m not worried, I’m freaking out. I keep thinking back to ’96 and what I’d do if she just went away like that. No saying good bye, just *poof*. Gone. I can’t sit here and write – I’m going to look for her.

I hit all the usual spots. Jerome, the concierge at La Chaloupe D’Or, said she’d been in a few hours before but she’d left with some people. “Some people”. Average, descriptionless. I wandered the GP for almost an hour and then came back here, thinking she might have come back while I was out. Can’t sleep, so I’ll sit here and surf the web and hope I hear the keys in the door soon.

2006-05-25: Chloe’s gone. I filed a missing persons report with the Brussels police a little while ago and they said they’d look into it. Calls to her cell go immediately to voicemail. Gonna try to concentrate on work. Focus. Gotta keep my head together. I keep replaying the ending of “the Vanishing” in my head. Trapped in a box in the ground, slowly suffocating. I miss being able to tell her about my day. I miss *her*.

Work: I’ll be heading out to the Oostende site tomorrow to pack up the cameras, sensors, and NAS boxes. I wonder if they’ll lift the quarantine as well, actually let folks back into the buildings and other places.

Harrison called in sick today. Right. There’s no cure for short-timer’s disease.

2006-05-26: This has been a weird fucking day. I got to the Oostende Zone around 7:00-ish and started loading equipment. Then I hit the residence on Muscarstraate and things got really weird.

The equipment was still out and recording to the NAS box. And there were notes – all dated the last few days. Hand-written notes. Like someone had been sitting here observing. I recognized Harrison’s handwriting, dates and times of “manifestations”. I flipped through to the last pages -- they were in Chloe’s handwriting. WTF?

So I watched the most recent surveillance.

I saw ghosts. Flickers of people sitting down for dinner, drinking wine, watching TV, washing dishes. Flashes of some argument. An afterimage of a couple having sex. Like the people never left but had been hidden for ten years. The last note was in Chloe’s handwriting. “They’re back.” Why wouldn’t they bring this to the Committee? The entire project could be saved. *I* could bring it to the Committee.

I’m staying here tonight.

2006-05-27: I met Louisa last night. She appeared around 2:00-ish while I was sleeping on the couch. She shook me awake, almost frantic. “What are you doing in my house? Who are you? Where is everyone else?” She just kept asking question after question. We talked for a couple of hours. She knew Chloe. She said that Chloe and two of her friends had gone to Brussels on Tuesday and hadn’t come back.

I took the notebook and the NAS and told Louisa to come back to Brussels with me. We met with Winters and the rest of the group. They said they’d keep Louisa for observation and would review the notes and video. Before I left, I caught Louisa looking in the observation room mirror with the strangest look on her face, like she didn’t recognize herself. It scared the hell out of me.

Harrison called my cell on the way home. His voice faded in and out, plagued with static, and the only thing I caught was “They’re not the *something* people. Tell them, the ones coming back, they’re-“ and then the call dropped. I tried calling back but it went straight to voice mail. Tomorrow I’ll talk to Louisa. She’ll help me find Chloe. I know it.