#but please enjoy or dismiss as overweeningly self-indulgent

[apparitionism]

Smoke

Here are some of the “Alarm” story outtakes I mentioned. I’m calling them “Smoke,” both because I can and because that’s all they are—evidence/traces of something, rather than the thing itself. I’ve tried to give a sense of where they were intended to fit, and why they didn’t... I do get explainy about process, but I hope it all at least suggests the shaping that (I think) is important for even a trifle such as “Alarm.” Format-wise, I’ve put my extratextual thinking in brackets, and I’ve left the “story” bits pretty rough. So without further ado...

Smoke

[In one of my stabs at the ending, the alarms went off not when Myka and Helena were on the elevator, but rather in the middle of the night, after they’d already sealed the deal:]

As Myka wrenched to consciousness, she recognized one element of the situation immediately: no smoke. Thus this was another malfunction, unless electricity, and walls... not quite as immediately, she registered another extremely salient element of the situation: she wasn’t alone. Rather than being able to revel in that astonishing new fact, she had to struggle to get out of bed and deal with the situation.

Helena sprang up as well—clearly disoriented for a moment—but then she too realized. She flung herself from the bed.

Myka: You aren’t wearing anything!

Helena: What does that have to do with smoke alarms!

Myka: I’m guessing that’s what set them off!

Helena: Flattery does not remove batteries! And you aren’t wearing anything either!

[I probably should apologize for being in love with the flattery/battery rhyme, but I have to admit I would totally have shoehorned it into the final version if I’d got the line itself right. Which I didn’t manage to do: what comes between “flattery” and “batteries” really ought to be another dactyl, and nothing I came up with worked at all in Helena’s voice. Anyway, after battery removal:]

Myka: Well, that was exhausting.

Helena: I thought you said I exhausted you earlier.

Of course, in response to the alarms, there came a banging on the door.

Helena moved as if she might be about to answer that door.

Myka: You don’t even have your dressing gown! Clothes—I have them! (This she said as she pulled on T-shirt and shorts, trying to ignore how inaccurate the term “clothes” was, given the inadequate coverage they provided.)

“I have them.” Helena said. She gestured vaguely around the bedroom, where it was true her clothes were. Most of them.

Myka: Okay, great. Put them on. You answering the door fully dressed at this time of night? What would that say about the masquerade?

Helena: Perhaps that we play particular roles at this time of night.

Myka: File that under ‘things I don’t want anybody thinking about me—or knowing, even it turns out to be true.’

That prompted a raised eyebrow from Helena, and how did Myka manage to notice that in the continued absence of clothes?

Myka: Just let me deal with this.

[Which she would have done, and Helena would have found Myka’s dismissal of Nate impressively emphatic. (I wrote her telling him off at least three different ways, and it refused to sound anything other than clichéd—one of several reasons I backtracked and had the alarms go off while they were on the elevator.) Myka would then have cautioned Helena thusly:]

Myka: I’m sure he can make our lives miserable.

Helena: If we’re truly together? I don’t see how. Won’t we be deliriously happy?

“Measures,” Myka reminded her, even as she was transported by “deliriously happy.”

Helena: (suddenly vicious) I’ll measure him right back. We’ll see who’s more persuasive in conversation with the super. We’ll see who, that is, might bring to any such conversation a professionally executed oatmeal scotchie. Of which I’ve been reliably informed the super is fond.

Myka: You seem alarmingly well prepared for this conflict. Armed for it, even.

Helena: Nate’s been pursuing me for some time, but your arrival intensified the situation. (Pause, clearly intended to recast what “the situation” actually meant.) The masquerade. I so wanted it—subtle as it was—to become real.

Myka: I have to push back a little on ‘subtle.’ Given the initial dressing-gown event.

Helena: Subtle between us.

[Something something something here. The conversation wasn’t working, but eventually:]

Myka: I wanted that too. For it to be real. For just about the whole time.

Helena: I hope we continue wanting the same things.

Myka: I hope we get better about showing it.

Helena: These hopes seem productive. And I know you have an affinity for the productive.

****

[Another version: in the kitchen, after Myka asks if they’re really talking about chairs, Helena initially gives no answer (just like in the “real” version), but then she’s the one who speaks into the silence, like so:]

Helena said, “I might be...” She winced. “Afraid.”

“Of?” Myka asked, as she prayed to the universe, Don’t let her say “you.”

What Helena did say, eventually, was, “Fire.”

Myka had never heard that strong word said so tentatively. An unexpected boon: it relieved her own fears of how differently she and Helena might be feeling, relieved her additional fears of how differently they might be weighting their feelings. She said, “Somebody told me ‘where there is no smoke there is no fire unless it is electrical,’ and while I’m not real clear on how the metaphor works here, I’m pretty sure you said you were going to hold your thought.”

“I intended to,” Helena said. Her fingers were fidgeting... a tell? “But circumstances change, and so does mood, and one begins to...”

“Lose hold?” said Myka, to which Helena nodded. “Okay. If we have to get back in the elevator for you to talk yourself back into something, then let’s go.” Myka took a step toward the door, but Helena didn’t respond.

[To which non-response Myka in turn responds with the suggestion that they bake cookies, and Helena has the same reaction to the expensive chocolate as she does in the “real” version. The bedroom conversation then had Helena rethinking, saying that “afraid” had been the wrong word for the moment. Myka counters with how she (Helena) had come up with the right word, before—“midnight” for the cookies—and Helena goes on to say that no, “afraid” really had been wrong; she should have spoken not about fear but about obstacles, e.g., time. My margin notes there were mostly just frustrated reiterations of “This is not right!” But in any case, there was never a version in which I didn’t call back to the “where there is no smoke” line.]

****

[There was also a draft that went on for longer—it didn’t cohere with the rest of the story at all, but in possibly positive news it did involve a bit more Claudia, and also some Pete, at various stages:]

They weren’t too busy, or too sleep-deprived, when it mattered.

They managed to find time to insinuate themselves into each other’s worlds.

Myka said to Claudia, in a moment of unusual candor, “She’s so important to me. I want to impress her—daily, hourly, minute-ly—but I don’t know how.”

Claudia: You could try to talk her into publishing her cookbook.

Myka: How do you know she has a cookbook?

Claudia: First, every chef has a cookbook. But second, even if she pretends she doesn’t, she’ll be impressed that you think she does.

This turned out to be true. All of it.

It led to Myka and Helena talking, seriously and not, about what such a tome should be titled. “How Not to Set Off Smoke Alarms,” Myka suggested.

“How to Repurpose Recipes As Attempts at Seduction,” Helena countered.

They eventually agreed on “The Midnight Baker.”

In lieu of immediately publishing said cookbook, Claudia booked Helena on one of her podcasts; giving Myka the scoop afterward, all she could say was, “She. Is. A. Smoke. Show.”

“I know,” Myka said, keeping to herself her many and varied feelings about, and theories of, smoke.

****

[As for the Pete-involved version: he works with Helena at the restaurant. He does the fancy chocolate work, sculpting and decorating and whatnot, at which he’s surprisingly talented, and he’s not allowed to touch anything else. On Myka’s first visit to the restaurant, I wanted Helena to introduce them, and for things to proceed kind of like so:]

Pete: So how did you two meet?

Myka: The smoke alarms in my apartment went off.

Pete (to Helena): Because she’s so hot, right?

Helena: I’m embarrassed to admit that didn’t immediately occur to me. It should have. (to Myka:) You in those quite-short shorts. (fanning herself)

Pete: Shorts? Quite short shorts?

Helena: Eyes up, reprobate.

“Does that mean ‘leg man’? Because I am definitely a leg man. Also”—he gestured at his chest—“a you-know man. Basically an all-parts man.”

Helena (to Myka): I’m incredibly sorry. All I can do is repeat that he’s brilliant with chocolate.

Pete said to Myka, “Here, I just made these.” He presented her with a small perfect sphere of a truffle. “It’s Mars,” he said, and it... was. Realistic rusty-red swirls decorated its surface, and it was so beautiful, so Mars, that she immediately forgave “you-know.” And everything else. In perpetuity.

She couldn’t imagine damaging its perfection by biting into it.

Pete said, as if concerned by her reticence, “I’ve got little model Oppys too, if that’s more your thing. They’re crunchy.”

[And then I have a note about how Myka would probably have remarked on how Oppy couldn’t possibly have been to scale, which... who cares, right? I had the Mars thing in there in the first place because I thought it was cool—who wouldn’t want a perfect chocolate Mars?—but of course it had nothing to do with the story. So then I wondered if he could have made something that would be germane in context... like maybe Myka’s Yellowstone-adjacent rock? But that would’ve required a lot of intentionality and surreptitious planning on Helena’s part, which I wouldn’t put past her, in a “Come to the restaurant because I have something special for you” sense, but that would probably have to have been a later visit, not the first.

However, if there had been such a chocolate replica-rock, somebody would have needed to note that it wouldn’t survive a fire unscathed.

The Pete part continued:]

Pete: So is the smoke alarm thing a joke or what?

Myka: No. Literally. Smoke alarms in my apartment, shrieking at four in the morning. Waking Helena up, across the hall in her apartment... but there wasn’t any smoke.

Helena: They were malfunctioning, and I reset them for her. The alarms. Because as Myka mentioned, there was no smoke.

Pete: But I guess there was a fire though.

Myka: I guess there was.

Helena: I’m glad it caught.

[That might have been an okay line to end it on, but that’s all it was: just okay, not particularly resonant. Also if they were going to retell their meeting to Pete, it would have needed to be more interesting. Why recap it unless it adds something?

In the ultimate end of the lengthier version, maybe everybody would’ve met everybody (except Nate), and they would have formed a restaurant and/or podcasting and/or publishing collective that had “13” in its name. But that would’ve been exhausting, and it wouldn’t have had anything to do with the story’s premise.

There was also a really boring ending where I punted and had Myka and Helena just shrug and say “Well, it wouldn’t take much more time to actually date than the masquerade takes, so hey, let’s go for it.”

And finally, I tried to make them go chair shopping for Myka (Helena continuing her insistence on the point), with the idea that it would start to seem obvious that they’d be sharing the chairs—the furniture salesperson would assume they were a couple and treat them accordingly, and it would essentially have been another case of a masquerade becoming real.

And so ends this excursion through some wisps of smoke...]

Oh, one last thing: If these were real outtakes, in the blooper-reel sense, I would hope they’d include somebody, or a couple of somebodies, coming real close to falling off folding chairs. (I had to restrain myself mightily to keep from knocking them off chairs in the actual story; I’ve had occasion to refamiliarize myself with some of Buster Keaton’s work recently, and it reminded me of the abject delight I take in slapstick. Not that I ever really need reminding, but even so.) Or somebody would be completely incapable of unfolding such a chair, and that would probably have been whichever random actor happened to be playing Helena—far be it from me to speculate about casting—when she’s supposed to be impressing Myka with how smooth and competent she is during the first alarm incident.