Episode 48

The four men in black wearing sodden balaclavas are out in the open, closing in. ANNA and FRANCIS are on the terrace of the house, holding guns.

FIRST MAN (shouting)

Come down, Anna, Nobody gonna hurt you. And the other individual we don’t require.

ANNA (shouting back)

Hello, boys! Would you like a refreshing drink?

(They come closer.)

SECOND MAN (also shouting)

Don’t you crack wise now, Anna. No, we do not need no fucking drink. Maybe you didn’t notice it’s wet out.

ANNA (still shouting)

We have towels. You need to dry your hair?

(to FRANCIS)

They are within range now. This is too easy. We can take them all.

FRANCIS

I don’t know, Anna. I can’t do it.

Subscribe now

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Read more

Episode 47

There’s a blackout. The power lines are down. They are in the living room, in the darkness. The eye of the storm is right overhead; there’s not even a beat between the lightning and the thunder. With each flash the dunes appear, then disappear. The sea is huge tonight. The tide is in and the force of the waves is like nothing either of them have seen before. They smash into the house like train crashes. Like an express train crashing into the house over and over again, wrecking itself, getting up off the floor, coming at the house again, and wrecking itself again. The house is shaking. As the minutes go by, and then the hours, the battering of the waves continues, relentless, undiminished. The house may not be able to take a whole night of this. They will just have to hope it can.

The wind shakes the windows. They are kneeling on the floor amid the ruin of the Manhattan jigsaw, holding each other, shivering, lost in fevered madness.

“Who’s out there,” he asks Anna. “Are they out there? Are they coming for us? Who are those guys.”

“I’ll tell you what they aren’t,” she says. “They aren’t sharpshooters. They’re just muscle. Gorillas from the gorilla house.”

“So instead of picking you off from a distance, they come in and beat you to death.”

“Yeah. But there’s something they don’t know.”

“Which is.”

“Which is who they’re dealing with here. Gunslingers. With degrees in gunplay from the fucking MTA. You and me. Butch Cassidy and the fucking Sundance Kid.”

“Did Butch Cassidy love the Sundance Kid?”

“They shared a brass bed in Bolivia,” she says. “With Etta Place in between. And it wasn’t even a queen-sized mattress.”

“And after Etta left it was just the two of them.”

“Yes.”

“So it was love.”

“Until death did them part.”

“Let’s not get parted by death just yet.”

Subscribe now

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Read more

Episode 45

And yes, the storm is coming. The wind is high, the clouds are racing, the beaches are closed, the rain is heavy, the sea is immense. But hurricanes… no need to panic. The last one had hit the city hard, true, but his Manhattan fortress had shrugged it off, and the power outages never got far enough uptown to shut them down, so they were fine, it really wasn’t a problem, except that downtown friends came and slept in their spare bedrooms and on the living-room furniture too. The Korean bodega on the corner hadn’t even closed. The owners had been indignant at the suggestion that they might shutter the store. “Close?” they cried, pronouncing the word as if it was unclean and needed to be held at a distance by the fingertips, like a dead rodent. “Oh, no! We not ‘close’!”

We not “close.” That was the New York way. He staggers out of bed and stands at his window looking out to sea and in his fevered condition he could be Lear mad upon the heath challenging the forces of nature to single combat. Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world. You hear me, storm? We not “close.”

I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

Subscribe now

Her fever is higher than his, her delirium more overwhelming.

If they are going to come, they will come tonight, at the height of the storm, she tells herself. Dirty weather for dirty deeds. As the light fades she stares down the lane, looking for headlights. If they turn the car lights off a hundred yards away and then crawl slowly up, she’ll know who they are. She has loaded the gun.

Who are these people? Big Mama is dead, also the Orphan and Jimmy Two Dinners. Who’s giving the orders? She has no idea. Somebody wants things tidied up.

It’s possible they won’t come. They don’t have the ease of movement, the protection from friendly law enforcement that they once had. She tries to persuade herself of this, but it isn’t working. She knows how this goes.

It isn’t their money, but it’s money.

She has one edge on the men who will come. They will be under instructions to take her alive, otherwise the money disappears for good. So they will be hampered in their efforts. Alive is not their M.O.; dead is preferred. They’re not so good at alive. She, however, faces no such restrictions. She’s free to deliver the kill shots.

How many will they send? She’s guessing four. Not more. Four, plus two drivers who will stay in the cars, ready for the exit. If they park down the lane, they are sitting ducks, even with the lights out. It’s a straight shot. And she can shoot straight.

Fuck them. She’s ready.

*

They are both lost in the movie now.

Subscribe now

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Read more

Episode 44

She Googles the murder. The dead woman was staying with people just four houses down the beach on the other side of Nia Johnson’s house. Here’s a photograph of her. Depending on your tastes and inclinations, you might liken her to Nan, the sister of the painter Grant Wood, who used her as the model for the Iowan woman in American Gothic; or the diminutive Italian actress Giulietta Masina, the star of La Strada and other Fellini movies, who was also the director’s wife; or Granny Moses, the pint-sized matriarch of the Clampett family in the Beverly Hillbillies series on TV long ago. Big Mama is tiny, birdlike, with her silver hair tied behind her head in a neat bun, and wears half-rimmed glasses with thin gold frames, and looks like she might be good at knitting scarves and sweaters; but she is nobody’s sister, nobody’s grandmother, and above all nobody’s wife.

Nobody knows why she was killed. Something about a quarrel with somebody in Florida.

These people don’t like loose ends. They like things to be tidied up. So they will be aware that there are two missing pieces in the jigsaw, and this will feel unsatisfying to them. These are people who like their puzzles completed.

One missing piece is the money. The other is her.

Follow the money. Cherchez la femme.

What’s wrong with me, she thinks. Now I’m doing it. I’m in the screenplay too.

She feels her forehead. She’s burning up. She can’t sleep so she decides to watch Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil on Francis’s laptop. At the end there’s Marlene Dietrich looking down at Welles’s body floating face down in water.

He was some kind of a man, Dietrich says. What does it matter what you say about people.

She loses consciousness with the two weapons in her lap.

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Subscribe now

Episode 43

He comes to Anna in a heightened state.

“Three things,” he says. “In the first place I didn’t tell you that an old lady was murdered near here not so long ago and now I’ve written her into the Orphan screenplay, I made her Angela Santangelo, so maybe the climax will happen right here, it will all go down right here, on the beach, in this house, in this bedroom, here. In the second place, Nia called. She says she’s leaving, everyone’s leaving, and we really should watch the news, or at least the weather report. There’s a storm on its way. At least Category One, but it could go higher. But I say there’s no need to panic, we should just stay.”

“What’s the third thing?”

“I think I have a fever,” he says. “I don’t feel so great.”

Subscribe now

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Read more

Episode 42

It was always Paolo who was the theorist of their trio. That idea about virtue – that vertu was life-giving power – had originally been his, as was its antithesis, that vice is the power that takes away from life, the negative capability that does not add but subtracts. The purpose of the art of the cinema was to give life. Good films did that, they enriched and strengthened the life-force. Bad films were killers. That’s what he called them. Murderers. In the end his own death was like a bad film, too.

When Arkady started out he was interested only in people, emotion, drama, color, music, a rich stew of ingredients, but Paolo explained to him that at the birth of the movies people thought of them as the descendants of the visual arts. They were paintings to which movement had been added – motion pictures - not photographed theatricals. Only with the addition of sound did the dramatic aspects of the new form come to the fore, along with a new term for them: photoplays. “The pure form,” Paolo said, “descends from Leonardo and Michelangelo, not Shakespeare or Molière. If people come out of a movie with five or six images in their heads which they will never forget, then that’s a great movie. The script? That’s just the rack to hang the images off.” After that Arkady became more and more interested in questions of group composition. Da Vinci’s Cenacolo, Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, Delacroix’s Raft of the Medusa, Bosch’s monster-crowded Garden of Earthly Delights, these became some of the images he carried with him into everything he did – paintings in which people were never alone, always among others, in which the group or the crowd served as a metaphor of the world.

As for Francis, what Paolo gave him to think about was the show-versus-tell question. “Show is mimesis,” Paolo said. “It’s what drama does. It enacts. Tell is diegesis. The story is told ­- narrated, recounted – instead of just being acted out. The cinema is a diegetic form that includes mimetic elements. Yes, there are scenes, there’s acting, performance, and event, yes, of course. But always we have the camera guiding the audience, showing them its world, look here!, now look here!, at her! at him!, at the sea!, at this explosion!, and we have montage telling them in what order to do the looking, first this!, then that! then again this! – You understand? In film we tell much more than we show. This is why the cinema is more related to epic poetry than to anything else.”

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Subscribe now

Read more

 Episode 41

BIG MAMA’S FUNERAL, PART TWO. [TREATMENT.]

The funeral events held to mark the burial of Big Mama Angela Santangelo are not on the scale that would be normal in a normal time. Among those who are unable to attend because of the limitations of the moment are one of the state’s two Senators, a host of boldface names from New York City’s wealthy élite, an Oscar-worthy list of movie stars along with an Emmy-heavy list of television figures and mega-Grammy winners who performed at the Holy Angel over the years. The Cardinal Archbishop sends his best. The heads of the Five Families send flowers, which is to say flowers are sent by no-name individuals who can never be linked to the said families. The funeral itself is streamed from a respected local funeral home, on its Facebook Live page. An open casket is unfortunately deemed inadvisable. Therefore to the great regret of the few permitted attendees and the many watching on Facebook Live, Big Mama is not able to say farewell to her family and friends in person. The closed golden casket inspires a beautiful sadness.

There are speeches from relatives who all draw attention to Big Mama’s deep religious beliefs and lament the fact that the abruptness of her ending denied her the opportunity to make her soul’s peace with the Almighty, so that she will arrive at the gates of heaven with incomplete papers and will need to throw herself at the feet of Saint Peter and weep for her misdeeds. These speeches cause an uproar in the comments section and the speakers are spoken of disrespectfully because of their suggestion that Big Mama will not easily pass into eternal bliss. Then there are speeches from representative of charitable organizations caring for young kids in need, who contradict the earlier speakers by pointing out that the officers of Paradise will be fully cognizant of Big Mama’s generosity to those less fortunate than herself, and that her lifetime of giving will surely cause the pearly gates to swing open as soon as she rises through the clouds. This argument reassures viewers and the comments section calms down.

A renowned soprano sings Amazing Grace. The number of people logging in to watch and pay their respects in the comments section would have gratified the old lady. Some of the comments have to be deleted by the funeral home employee given the task of running the livestream page. These are the comments stating that the names of the killers are already known. Small-town players coming for a lady of quality who was held in universal high regard need to be put in their place without delay. These remarks are made out of the strong emotion of the commenters, that cannot be denied. But they strike the wrong note for a ceremony of respect.

Within the next twenty-four hours, however, Giambattista Pappalardo a.k.a. Jimmy Two Dinners is dead from eating a bucket-load of machine-gun bullets at the end of a large crab feast in Miami Beach: his last double-entrée night. At almost exactly the same moment Richard Huérfano falls face downwards into the same inlet of water into which he had consigned the two Guidos (minus their heads), with his throat cut so badly his own head is barely attached to his body anymore.

*

He stops writing. His head hurts. He doesn’t feel well.

Subscribe now

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Episode 40.

He’s writing.

BIG MAMA’S FUNERAL, PART 1. [TREATMENT.]

Angie Santangelo receives the two refrigerated boxes from Miami. It is careless of her not to recognize it as a warning, and develop some useful fear for her safety, a fear that might make her more careful, but she believes herself to be untouchable, and the Orphan to be nothing, and in the end such vanity will guarantee her death.

The boxes are delivered to the Holy Angel Casino & Resort by two men in FedEx uniforms in a liveried van, but afterwards no records of such a delivery will be found in the account books of the Federal Express Corporation. The van does not stop at the loading bay, as is normal, but draws up to the main entrance of the facility, and the two fake delivery men haul the boxes right up to the front reception desk, saying they have been told this is a personal express delivery for Ms Angela Santangelo. The receptionist, Shanelle, calls security to have the boxes examined before they are sent upstairs. When they are opened, each box is found to contain a severed human head and a printed note reading No deal.

After Big Mama sent her offer to the Orphan she had been peeved not to receive a courteous reply and had used her friendly connections to the Pappalardo family in New Jersey to send Jimmy Two Dinners a second message requesting a proper response. That this is the answer – the heads of the two Guidos, over ice – proves to her only one thing, that this Florida member of the well-known old Jersey family is a person without breeding or respect. The Orphan, she already knows to be a goon. Too bad about Jimmy. His parents should be embarrassed their kid turns out so poorly. But, guess what, fuck him.

Subscribe now

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Read more

Episode 39

The night visitors won’t let her rest. Even stranger tonight than the night before. Here is bird-headed Thoth, the Egyptian deity of gambling and magic, accusing her of abandoning him.

“As punishment for this act of desertion, your gambler’s luck is revoked.”

 And she, in the dream, begs for mercy. “What will I do without my luck?”

Thoth responds with an ibis-shriek which she imagines to be his heartless divine laughter. “Try to survive,” he says. “Everything is coming for you. All four elements. Fire and flood, earth and wind. The betrayals of the land, the venom of the air, the unquenchable flames, and the anger of the sea. Also, by the way, the weaknesses of your pathetic human bodies. All of it is coming at you at the same time. Beware the seventh wave.”

Her dream-self finds the courage to stand up to the god. “You can’t tell me anything,” she says. “You may have been the god of wisdom once, but you’ve been dead for thousands of years.” She feels like Alice in the courtroom of the Queen of Hearts. You’re nothing but a pack of cards. No sooner has she rejected him thanThoth crumbles into dust until there’s nothing left of him. But even his dust has a parting message for her before it’s blown away by a gust of wind.

“I’m from Egypt.” His last words hang in the air. “I know a lot about plagues.”

Anna has had enough of ghosts. She opens her eyes, gets out of bed, goes into Francis’s room, slips in beside him, then climbs on top of him and insists. He reaches up for her, and things get better. The rider and the horse are one.

Subscribe now

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Episode 38

There is nothing to do except to take the days as they come and get through them in the best way possible. They have coffee together every morning and discuss their food for the day. Then they separate. She runs on the beach, meditates, works on the jigsaw, and is beset by terrors, fears that there may never be another movie made in the history of the world. He goes into his work room and writes, coming out around noon to prepare lunch and again around five to make dinner. They eat early and in the evenings there are old movies to re-watch. She can’t understand how he manages to shut the news out of his awareness so completely. While she is beset by insomniac hallucinations, ghost fires, helicopters, and the warnings, as the air thickens, of a gathering storm - the weather reports speak of a tropical storm in the Atlantic that may strengthen in a day or so into a hurricane - he goes about his day as if nothing was the matter with anything, as if the idea of the real, the solid foundation upon which our sense of reality stands, is still an unshakable rock, whereas she knows that it has fractured and crumbled and may never be rebuilt. Right now, when everyone is lost in their own kind of forced privacy, this probably doesn’t matter. But in the end it will. The house of their renewed relationship is built on this weak foundation. The knowledge makes her sad, but she keeps her sadness to herself.

Subscribe now

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Read more

Episode 37

Anna is lying in the dark, alone, trying to discover how to arrange her body in such a way that it will let her sleep. On her back is impossible. On her left side with her right knee pulled up, or on her right side with the left knee bent, both seem good at first but her body tires of them before very long. On her stomach is best but even then her mind won’t stop. The mind is the problem. She can feel the stress, the clenching, all over her body, in the muscles of her neck and shoulders, in her aching lower back, but it all comes from her mind which she has never been able to switch off at bedtime. Her thoughts race like sprinters, rushing forth as if to break records, then falling spent and gasping to the floor. But there are always new sprinters to take the place of the fallen ones. Zoom! Zoom! How can she sleep when there’s this track meet taking place in her head?

Here, unbidden, is Dostoevsky materializing by her bed in the dark wearing the cheap frock-coat which seems to have been borrowed from the Wizard of Oz. “The whole world was doomed to fall victim to some terrible, as yet unknown and unseen pestilence spreading to Europe from the depths of Asia,” he recites. “Everyone was to perish, except for certain, very few, chosen ones.” She sits up straight in bed. “What are you saying?” she says. ”Who says that?”

“Not I,” he replies, “but a poor creature of my invention. The pawnbroker’s killer. Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov.”

Subscribe now

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Read more

Nobody can remember the name of the genius who thought of the word which allowed us to believe that this periodic unconsciousness was normal. That was another new word, “normal.” The idea behind that word, the idea that there were norms, yardsticks against which things could be measured, was also new.

The word we made up for the nightly unconsciousness was this: ù. Once we started calling it the ù, it began to feel comforting, even something to look forward to.

Subscribe now

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

But we noticed that during the ù we weren’t absolutely absent; there were things happening, sometimes to “us,” sometimes us as we were and at other times us at different ages or in different circumstances or with totally different characters – “us” but unlike ourselves… or, alternatively, things might be happening to complete strangers about whom we knew nothing. These things that happened were usually not sequential and frequently made no sense, except that sometimes they were sequential and made a kind of sense, although we only remembered a few of them, and not in full. Only fragments remained after we awoke.  

We wondered if we were all living two lives, a day life and a night life, and we thought that each life might be the ù of the other one. Maybe our ù-selves remembered only fragments of our waking lives and tried to make sense of them, too.

In the end we needed two words to describe the things that happened during the ù, one word for the meaningless things and another for the seemingly meaningful.

We called the meaningless things mamu. “Dreams.” We called the meaningful things mashngi, “visions,” and we also used that word to mean “omens.” Every day at breakfast we revealed our latest mamu and argued about whether or not it was really a mashngi. Nobody knew how to win these arguments at first, and so we had to agree temporarily that the words “win” and “lose” did not apply to a discussion of mamu and mashngi.

Then we invented the idea of translators, who would interpret the mamu and mashngi so that we would know what they meant. We do not now remember why certain persons were thought to have the power of interpretation, or on what basis they made their judgments, but we all accepted what they said, however crazy it sounded. 

If the interpreter said, the mashngi says you’re in love with your sister, we said, uh-huh, okay.

If the interpreter said, the mashngi says you hate your father, we said, yeah, probably.

If the interpreter said, the mashngi wants you to break up with your partner, we did that, and if we were told that the mashngi wanted us to kill our neighbor, we did that too.

If the interpreter said, the mashngi wants you to build the E-ninnu temple to the glory of the god Ningirsu, and the presence in your mashngi of those noisy tigidlu birds twittering in the ildag trees means that they will not let you sleep, that there will be no ù for you until you have built it… well, then, we said, we’ll get right on it, just watch us get that temple built.

After a time there was a new development. This took the form of a rebellion against the translators.

It turned out that many people did not want to break up with their partners or kill their neighbors or build temples, and these rebels came up with the idea that there was no such thing as a mashngi, that the gods would not communicate with us in a manner that was so difficult to understand, and so it followed that there were only mamu, meaningless things, that happened during the nightly unconsciousness, the ù, and that we didn’t need to pay any attention to these mamu or their interpreters.

From there it was a short step to the next idea, which was that there were no gods anyway, that even Ningirsu didn’t exist, but was just a figment of the dream-world, the mamu-world, which wasn’t real either; and that meant we were on our own, without mighty invisible beings to guide us, and therefore we were obliged to make our choices without omens or visions or meaning instructors. The universe was unexplainable, it was simply there, and didn’t have to be explained – it didn’t have to mean anything. And all human life, waking or sleeping, was a kind of absurd mamu.

When that appalling idea was born, it split us into two camps, and a great civil war began,  which has never ceased to this day.

We need somebody to come up with a word that persuades us that the idea of gods and the idea of no gods are both norms. That if some people think of life as mamu, and others want it to be filled with mashngi, well, that’s pretty normal.

If we had such a word we could agree to differ and our endless civil war would end. We could shake hands and accept the idea that the world of E-ninnu temples built to glorify the god Ningirsu and the world of no temples at all could exist simultaneously, side by side, without a problem.

We are sorry to report that as yet nobody has come up with that useful word.

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Subscribe now

These are inscribed cylinders from the time of the Sumerian ruler Gudea, c.2120 BC - that is, well over four thousand years ago. In the cuneiform inscription on the cylinders, which tells of the building of the temple of Ningirsu, we find perhaps the earliest, perhaps the first-ever-recorded descriptions of dreams.

In Venice, Italy, right now, the Fondazione Prada is hosting an exhibition about the Human Brain. As part of the exhibition, a number of powerful objects are being exhibited, accompanied by stories written by a wide range of writers.

I was asked to write a story inspired by the Gudea cylinders.

I wrote a story about dreams.

I’ll post it tomorrow, free for everyone to read.

Subscribe now

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Episode 36

INT. LATE NIGHT. CAGE FIGHTERS SPORTS BAR, LITTLE HAVANA. THE MEET.

(The venue is in darkness. In a booth, RICHARD HUÉRFANO, GIAMBATTISTA PAPPALARDO a.k.a. JIMMY TWO DINNERS, GUIDO ONE, GUIDO TWO. The ORPHAN and JIMMY are dressed in expensive suits. The other two wear Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts. All around them, above their heads, are TV screens, all turned off.  In the shadows, at a little distance, THREE SILENT MEN in less expensive suits, standing at ease. The Orphan’s troops.)

ORPHAN

These dark screens. A fucking tragedy. Sports is what unites us as Americans. It’s our language. Our common fucking denominator. Football, basketball, baseball, hockey. Touchdown, slam dunk, perfect game, puck. This is what we speak. These cancellations are fucking calamitous. I hate to see it. This is an un-American thing.

[He turns to the TWO GUIDOS.]

ORPHAN, continued

I will not be staying in this meeting for the duration. You gentlemen will converse with my good friend Signor Pappalardo here. In your conversation the topic will be a certain lady of your former acquaintance. I will not say her name. You will fill Signor Pappalardo in regarding this lady. Known addresses, family members, favorite haunts, daily routines, where she likes to go for walks, what coffee she likes, who calls her, who comes and goes. It’s like you’re painting a portrait. You do a good job, I will be grateful. A bad job, I will be fucking ungrateful. Do I make myself understood?

The TWO GUIDOS nod, dumbly. HUÉRFANO gets to his feet.

ORPHAN (continued)

Good talk.

Subscribe now

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Read more

Episode 35

MIAMI. A PHONE CALL. JIMMY TWO DINNERS AND THE ORPHAN. PART THREE. SPLIT SCREEN.  

Tell me, Orphan. The issue.

You recall the two Guidos.

Sure. Guido One and Guido Two. They were Big Mama’s guys.  They moved south.

They robbed from her. I took them in.

That was ill-advised, Orphan. To my mind. I said so at the time. It was impolitic.

I was pissed at her. I didn’t give a rat’s ass about impolitic.

She didn’t retaliate.

She did not

That was big of her. It was the deed of good people.

She didn’t want to start a fucking war with me. That was smart. She’d fucking lose.

But now there’s an issue?

The issue concerns her.

Angie?

Not Angie. Fucking Anna.

Anna’s with Angie?

You see? You’re not so slow. When they say to me, Jimmy Two Dinners, he’s so slow, he makes a snail look like fucking Flo-Jo, you know what I say?

What do you say, Orphan?

I say, Flo-Jo, she’s fucking dead. Jimmy’s a whole lot fucking faster than her now.

Subscribe now

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Read more

Episode 34

MIAMI. A PHONE CALL. JIMMY TWO DINNERS AND THE ORPHAN. PART TWO. SPLIT SCREEN.  

You want to talk about the second thing, Orphan?

What.

You said there was two things. We covered business.

It ain’t pleasure. You called it pleasure. It ain’t a fucking pleasure.

Call it what you want, Orphan.

But it is personal. No woman walks out on me. No fucking ho walks out on Richard Huérfano, you understand me.

I hear you. She got under your skin pretty good.

Richard Huérfano, All-Star.

I mean, how dare she, right. A price must be paid.

Well said, Jimmy. A price must be paid.

We can find her. I can talk to some friends. Friends of the family, in a manner of speaking. How far can she run. In a manner of speaking.

There’s an issue, Jimmy. An issue has arisen.

I’m all ears.

It concerns Angela Santangelo.

The Holy Angel? Big Mama?

It’s what I’m telling you.

She’s good people, Angie. She’s a diamond. She’s one of a kind. On the other hand. Having said which. Be that as it may. I’m aware the two of you had a difficulty.

A falling out, Jimmy.

An altercation.

We didn’t see eye to eye.

You rubbed each other the wrong way.

We butted heads. We went nine rounds. I wanted her fucking head on a fucking stick.

Regrettably.

Could be. Yeah. Could be fucking regrettably.

But that issue is in the past.

An issue has arisen. This is what I’m saying to you.

A new issue?

New, old, who fucking cares. An issue.

Subscribe now

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Episode 33

MIAMI. PHONE CALL. SPLIT SCREEN. ORPHAN AND JIMMY TWO DINNERS.         

Jimmy.

Orphan.

Got a minute?

Always.

A thing I don’t get.

About her. This is about her, am I right.

It still bugs me.

The business thing?

Pause.

It’s more than one thing, Jimmy.

So it’s two things.

Yeah. Two things.

Business and personal.

Right.

You wanna talk about the business thing?

Right. Business first, Jimmy.

Business before pleasure.

So. Here’s the thing. How’d she do it?

The heist?

That’s right, Jimmy. Yes, the fucking heist. Not her fucking hard-core Pilates routine. Not her fucking highly-regarded b.j. technique. Not her fucking freakishly skilled aptitude for fucking jigsaw puzzles. Not those things, Jimmy. Jesus. The fucking heist.

Okay. Take it easy, Orphan.

Palming the chips I can follow.

Sure.

She’s got crazy hand skills.

She’s an artist at the card table. She’s the Donatello of blackjack. She’s the Leonardo of the roulette wheel.

Jimmy, for fuck’s sake.

Okay. Okay. I like the Ninja Turtles. Sue me.

Subscribe now

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Read more

Episode 32

“Tell me more,” he says, lying in bed. “The word is you were quite the gambling-hall star in your early days, the croupier deluxe. Tell me about palming a card, about weighting a roulette wheel. These places are all rackets, right? They must have loved you. He must have loved you while you were on his team, the big man, Huérfano. Orphan. Interesting.”

“I worked out how to steal from him,” she says. “I never did it, but I made the plan.”

“Tell me,” he says. “Then I can write it.”

So she tells him. His eyes widen.

“Tell me again. How much money could you have taken?”

Anna tells him precisely how much. Francis begins to giggle. Really: to giggle like a child.

“Yes, darling,” she confirms.

“But you never did it.”

“Of course not, darling.”

Francis is thinking. Anna waits.

“What I think,” he says at last, “is that this is definitely a movie.”

“In the movie he’d come after me,” she says. “He’d never give up. In the end he would find me and come for me with his guys. That’s the climax. We just need to think of an ending, in which, preferably, you and I both come out alive.”

Subscribe now

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Episode 31

It is necessary to begin with the small details. To start again from the beginning, to rebuild the jigsaw of the real, to reassemble the difficult puzzle of their lost (and now perhaps regained) love, with one of the billion shattered pieces at a time.

There is the question of the arch of her back. This is the curve he loves most. It seems to him like the bridge of human desire, the bridge across which all things are possible. They are still not sleeping together on account of her insomnia, and his unconscious flailings and kicks, but when she wakes up in the morning in the other bed she comes to him and asks him to stroke her back and scratch it a little too and she responds to his touch with shudders of joy, and arches like a cat. One morning during these caresses the house itself shakes for a moment, as if the power of her feelings can make it shudder too.

“What was that,” she asks.

“Maybe a small earthquake,” he says. “They aren’t frequent here but sometimes you feel them. Or maybe it’s just the old house, settling.” He doesn’t tell her what he fears: that the foundations are weak and growing weaker as the high tides continue their implacable, destructive work. He reassures himself that the expensive repairs that have been done will hold. Maybe the day will come when more expensive structural restoration will be needed. All the houses on this strand require such attention. They all go on standing. Everything will be fine.

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Subscribe now

Read more

Episode 29

In Limbo there are no movies. Nothing can be done. It’s all talk until things start moving again. He is in touch with his finance people. He made six films with these people and he knows the magic figure. If he brings the picture in under that number he will retain creative control. The magic figure changes with time but there’s always a number that works and he knows what it is. But right now, there’s no money available for anything.  Limbo’s a waiting game.

“Thank you for today,” he tells Anna.

“It was fun,” she says. “Dreaming your dreams and mine. The dream of pain. The dream of chocolate. The dream of a billion shattered pieces. The dream of an open door. The dream of an eyeball sliced by a cloud. The dream of perfume. The dream of a future. The dream of floods. The dream of love and death.”

Episode 30

That night she can’t sleep and goes to the window and sees the flickering glow on the horizon and smells the fire on the breeze.

Subscribe now

Share Salman's Sea of Stories

Read more