Script:
It turned out that servants from nearly all noble houses frequented Maria's establishment, and many of them enjoyed chatting. They likely assumed they were revealing nothing significant, merely engaging in idle banter with the charming staff while being measured or selecting fabrics. However, under the shop's roof, no conversation escaped Maria's notice. Half a hint was enough for her to deduce the true state of affairs. Behind her friendly façade as the owner of a modest business lay a sharp, cunning, and ambitious woman deeply interested in the dealings of the upper echelons of society. Although officially, she wasn't part of that world. Maria had once confided, during a previous visit, that she'd dreamed of marrying an aristocrat and joining the noble circle since childhood. Fate, however, had taken her down a different path, and now she lived out her dream vicariously by observing, eavesdropping, and occasionally meddling. Her boutique sold elite wedding dresses, providing ample opportunities for interacting with the upper class, and like any woman who once aspired to marry into wealth, she had a strong appreciation for money. The outcome of our brief but productive meeting boiled down to three key points. First, I confirmed that the princes wouldn't return to the capital before Monday, leaving me free to focus on other matters. Second, questions about my incident had come not only from the Empire, the Nature Clan, and the Metal Clan. While I'd expected attention from those parties, the interest from the Light Clan puzzled me, especially since, according to Maria, they'd been the most persistent in their inquiries. Lastly, as my reason for visiting, Maria took my damaged suit and promised to have a replacement ready by evening, free of charge, no less.
Script:
He had never set foot in the city of Zondrel, had never even had the desire, despite the wonders it was said to hold. Poised on the edge of the cliffs overlooking the Sea of Stars to the west, many great warriors, explorers, architects, and scholars had left their mark there over its long history. So far he was neither impressed nor happy to be anywhere near it. He had but one purpose and one destination within those grand walls, and that was all. Yet he did not fail to notice the budding grasses and flowers of the spring, a much more colorful and pleasant sight than springtime in his homeland. Really not so far away, and yet so very different of a place. The smells were bright and fresh and airy, reminding him of some of the distant lands traveled in his youth. Levanse's white sands and green hills, Dracania's fiery red foliage, these were the things that flashed through his mind as he approached the entrance to Zondrel. Memories of days gone by, not necessarily better or stranger or even worse, just days that added up into weeks, that added up into months and years. There were twenty of them now, by his count, since the last time he had laid eyes on the person he was on his way to visit. "'Nation of origin, sir?' asked the gruff little armed man, barring his entry into the bustling streets. Even from the gates the city was loud, almost deafening, amazing how the walls could hold in the sound. Did he really have to tell this stupid, dark-headed Cretan where he was from? On further consideration he decided that yes, he did, because the man was truly that dense. "'Iceland.'
Script:
Both Andela and Alex had listened very patiently the entire time, never interrupting, hardly even stirring. She was, in fact, riveted. Alex, maybe less so. His expression was grave and almost bereft of emotion. Was it the things being said, or just a lack of sleep I couldn't tell? Nor that I'm a master storyteller by any means, quite the opposite. At first I could barely speak in coherent sentences, but as the events grew sharper in my mind's eye, the words started to tumble forth, sometimes with awkward pauses from one thought to the next, but it was all there, every detail, for better or worse. I didn't want to tell this story, didn't have any desire to revisit the memories that lay in the darker recesses of my mind. Saying it all out loud made it that much more real. At the same time, it also felt, somehow, liberating. I didn't want to give a voice to this tale, eating its way through my heart and mind. I especially never wanted Andela to have to hear all this, but at the same time, I did need to let it out. Eventually though, Andela took advantage of a break in my carrying on. So, she said, did they, did you keep looking? For the Caterin, I mean. I nodded. We did the same thing over and over again for months. They made you do that every day? Just from the way she said it, I knew how she felt, and I couldn't blame her. I was just as disgusted with myself. Not every day. A few times a week, maybe. Sometimes even less when the snow was heavy. Didn't always amount to much more than a stroll through the woods. Sometimes though. For the first time in several hours, I looked away from the floor and up at her, her incandescent eyes seeming even brighter in the evening's darkness and glistening with moisture. But we never learned anything new, never found anything. I studied the Caterin, read everything I could get my hands on, never got me anywhere. I doubt it even exists at all.
Script:
I'm delighted to see the decades of thoughtful work of Dr. Alec Pollard and his colleagues come to fruition in this book for families whose loved one has been avoiding working on their mental health problems. Dr. Pollard has been a wonderful colleague to many of us clinicians and researchers who work with obsessive-compulsive and related disorders. He is a consummate clinician and outstanding trainer and coordinator of things in obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD, and other mental health problems. Over the years, Pollard and his interdisciplinary team of dedicated collaborators, including Melanie Van Dyke, his wife, Heidi Pollard, Gary Mitchell, and Gloria Mathis, have helped the families of loved ones evading recovery from a variety of mental health conditions. Recognition of the need to help these families developed directly from the team's clinical work. We who work in similar clinical mental health fields understood the challenge all too well, as we received calls from family members seeking referrals and asking how they could convince their loved one to make the call and attend treatment sessions. Family members had done their homework. They knew there were well-established, effective treatments for their relative's condition. Why wouldn't their loved one agree to engage in therapy that would surely help? Understandably, family members were frustrated and often angry that their loved one would not take the basic steps needed to resolve their own problem. Unfortunately, many family members had been accommodating their loved one's unreasonable requests, further worsening the family situation. The effort to find an answer gained steam when Pollard and his colleagues received a competitive grant from the International OCD Foundation to develop and test an intervention program aimed at helping families in this situation. The research that evolved, spearheaded by Dr. Melanie Van Dyke, provided the foundation for development of the family well-being approach and the writing of this important book. The book's definition of recovery avoidance—recurrent failure to explore, pursue, or take advantage of resources and opportunities available for resolving problems or improving health or functioning—captures a range of problems that frustrate family members, including outright denial, insistence that the problem isn't their own, failure to seek help, seeking the wrong kind of help, and or finding help but not doing the work. What might help ease the family burden and corresponding family conflict over these issues?
Script:
All of these essays first appeared as columns in my monthly series, This View of Life, in Natural History magazine. I regard this volume as a true natural selection, since many have been dumped and the others improved and then organized into a sensible and coherent sequence, more organic than linear in its webs of cross-referencing. The many that I now dislike or regard as substandard are on the scrap-heap, so I will stand by all items in the present winnowing and reshaping. But some, inevitably, please me more than others, or at least serve as better exemplars of my chosen style. I think that I am condemned to like best the essays that are most difficult or most focused on particulars of little public knowledge or approbation. I am not hopelessly rarefied or ethereal, and I do feel quite warmly towards some of the most evident, if vital, themes and homely illustrations, as in musings on distortions of memory and myths of past golden ages. But I do so wish that some of the more complex pieces could receive some share of attention. I especially like Essay 29 because focusing on specimens rather than scientists so well highlights the crucial duality of all scientific activity, tension between the necessary social embeddedness of all scientific thinking and progress towards more adequate factual knowledge of an external reality, by pathways often tortuous and circuitous.
Script:
She's nice for the most part, Grayson thought, glancing over at Dawn in the passenger seat, but... As always, he struggled to extract the right words from his psychic lagoon, but still recognized their ideas by the outlines below the murky surface. She's just not the one. He reflexively smiled at his girlfriend, and she reciprocated with her own easy curl of the mouth. Turn here, she said in her soft spoken voice, a voice not unpleasant to Grayson, but also too ordinary to spark much, if any, fondness of its own accord. He decelerated and spun the steering wheel to the right, bringing his teal Land Rover from a relatively even dirt road onto one more rutted. The party-colored leaves, which he thought seemed sparser than they'd been just recently, reminded him of the encroaching winter. He rolled his window down to enjoy the autumnal warmth. Babe, would ya? He turned away from her and rolled his eyes. Please close your window. I can't take the dust. He did as she asked, and then forced a smile in her direction, which she again returned. How much farther is it? He asked, somewhat modulating his tone. About a mile, she replied, seemingly oblivious to the tinge of annoyance in his voice. An old cemetery out in the middle of a forest. It's beautiful, hun. You're gonna love it. Through a threadbare canopy, a waning sun suddenly shone in Grayson's eyes, and he adjusted his visor to block the glare. Silence pervaded the vehicle. Traveling wordlessly for a couple minutes, Dawn broke the silence with an abrupt, I love you. In the last couple weeks of their months-long relationship, this three-word declaration, second in importance to few other phrases spoken between a couple, had become increasingly more prevalent during their time together. And without exception, Dawn had always been the one to say, I love you. Whereas Grayson had always been the one to answer, sometimes less hesitantly than others, I love you, too. You're a coward if you say it, he thought. As though glutted with tar, the gears of time suddenly revolved at a languid pace, not only allowing Grayson to appreciate the pursing of Dawn's lips and slight lowering of her brow, but also allowing the water in his well of anxiety to rise considerably. I love you, too, sweet. Like an incantation, these words brought her face back into a mask of contentedness.
Script:
Bravo!" shouted Julian, clapping loudly as Chaz wrapped up an impressive performance of Billy Joel's Uptown Girl. They were nearing the agreed-upon minimum number of songs for the set, but the bar was filling up and Chaz was finally losing himself in the adoration of his growing audience again. They wouldn't make a ton of money tonight, but Julian needed Chaz to give every show the same energy and enthusiasm he would give a Super Bowl halftime show if they were ever going to book comparable venues. The sooner they paid back Akane, the sooner they could get back to the task of helping their friends. "'What is an Uptown Girl?' asked Akane when the applause died down. Rather than try to explain the complexities of class struggles in his world, when she wasn't exactly tuned in to the cosmopolitan norms of her own, Julian made up an easier answer he hoped would satisfy her. "'An elf!' he said, hoping that didn't come off as arrogant. "'Female, of course!' Akane looked like she might ask him to elaborate, but then Chaz began playing Journey's eternal barroom favorite, Don't Stop Believin'. Julian was happy to see him expanding his repertoire from strictly Neil Diamond songs. It was healthy for him and good for the show, especially at small venues where he could test the crowd's reactions to new songs before attempting them for larger audiences. "'What kind of music is this?' asked a middle-aged elf who had squirmed his way through the crowd to stand next to Julian. At least he looked middle-aged. Julian had no idea what that might be in elf years. He might have been seven or eight hundred years old. His bright orange tunic and the way he kept his long, slightly graying black hair back in a ponytail suggested that he was still trying to hang on to his youth, but that might have just been the style among elves in this part of the world. "'Classic rock anthem!' Julian responded before considering how that might lead to a further series of questions that he had neither the time nor the patience to get into with a complete stranger.
Script:
She'd insisted the boys go without her. George, his idle chatter all week returning to the topic of mesmerism, would have been particularly disheartened to miss the show. And while she knew she should be resting in bed, she was not yet able to sleep and, rather than lie awake, had decided to pass some time wrapped up in an Afghan blanket, sitting in her treasured armchair, listening to the radio. Three yet familiar music began to play. Ashford cigarettes bring you the hobo's campfire, a man's voice announced over the music. The music faded, replaced by the sound of a crackling fire. Welcome, stranger, another man said, his voice amiable yet vaguely sinister. Take a place by my fire and warm up while I tell you a story. Deidre took her teacup from the end table next to her armchair and sipped some hot chamomile tea. Tonight's tale, the hobo continued, concerns Aidan Burns, a prodigal son come home who's not quite the same affable young man his family remembers. At this remark, Deidre reflexively frowned, unable to help but think of her and Danny's younger son, Rufus. Flashing before her mind's eye was the image of her estranged son rifling through her bedroom dresser with one hand, wadded bills and her jewelry in the other. She placed her teacup back atop the end table. No, she thought, I'm already feeling poorly. I refuse to add to my misery by dwelling on the sins of my poor lost son. She tried to push Rufus from her thoughts and focus on the radio drama instead. As his family is soon to discover, the hobo said, young Mr. Burns has not only been a spendthrift with his money, but also his soul. The hobo cackled, his laughter drowned out by a musical flourish that indicated the start of the narrative. The flourish, which Deidre had heard many times before, had sounded off somehow. A notion occurred to her, an idea that left her feeling as though someone had just walked over her grave. Did the flourish sound odd because it wasn't the only sound I heard? Was that a noise from somewhere in the house?
Script:
You there the guard demanded the grunting and moaning from further in immediately came to a halt Hello was all Dave could think to say in response. What are you doing in there? What was all that noise the half-elven guard sniffed the air then scowled at Dave were you? Defecating in the alley that was as good as an explanation as Dave could have possibly hoped for Yes, the guard scowled at him Disgusting Dave wasn't about to try to argue that point, but he had a more pressing concern Is that a crime? The king spares no expense to keep the streets of this great city as beautiful as they are When a filthy lowlife such as yourself shits upon these streets. It is the same as shitting upon the king's very face What an unnecessarily long-winded way to not answer his question so Do you know what it costs the city every time a vagrant shits in an alley? No five silver pieces Dave nodded he was impressed that this guy could pull that sort of statistic right off the top of his head Did you hear what I said? Yes, said Dave to the guard who was still staring expectantly at him I did it cost the city five silver pieces every time a vagrant shits in an alley He clearly meant for Dave to be impressed by that figure maybe there was some wastefulness in the bureaucracy somewhere Street cleaners unions perhaps whatever it was. The guy was still waiting for Dave to respond Dave thought up the most non-specific agreement he could come up with that does seem excessive The guard let out a shallow laugh Oh Does it the sarcastic tone really wasn't necessary? What the hell does this guy want from him he decided to try again a little more specific this time Smells like corruption to me the guards eyes widened then narrowed as he sneered down at Dave He rested his hand on the hilt of the sword on his belt. Are you quite sure this is the path? You want to travel down dwarf? What the fuck did that mean Dave shook his head? No, he answered very honestly He had no idea what he'd done to make this guy accelerate from boring to violent so quickly Good said the guard as I was saying it costs the city Seven silver pieces every time a vagrant shits in an alley Jesus Christ this guy was a fucking broken record Not only had he gone back to square one with his boring rant about city finances, but he wasn't even keeping his statistics consistent That's really something said Dave He wanted to say that it might be better spent on education or providing shelter for the homeless or something But talking to this guy was like walking through a minefield
Script:
Edwin stepped to the machine and sat in the chair. From stolen glimpses of the control panel and from what he'd observed of Professor Noguchi at work, he'd been able to determine how to operate the machine. Following this procedure, he pressed the on button and entered his destination from the year down to the exact second. Pausing to reflect on his plan, he thought to double check the contents of the envelope that rested in his chest pocket. His life savings were still inside, just enough to place a decent bet on the cockfight he'd lost twenty dollars to two weekends earlier. Taking a deep breath, he pressed the green button labeled activate. The console began to vibrate and hum as the blue light that peeked from behind the vents grew brighter and brighter. Arcs of what appeared to be electricity shot out from the vents and danced along the surface of the console. As Edwin watched, transfixed, the arc seemed to calm before bursting into a brilliance that enveloped him. I've done it, sir, Noguchi said to the man in the blue suit. Leaning forward and lowering his voice under the chatter and clatter of the other diners, he added. I've cracked time travel, the man in the blue suit chortled. We've made, he raised his brow knowingly, and have gained access to history, Noguchi. I always knew you were worth the investment, he said beaming. A waitress approached the table. Just a coffee for my friend, the man in the blue suit said and then waved the waitress off. But as I mentioned before, Noguchi said, watching the waitress huff away. The project is not finished, the man in the blue suit nodded. Your colleague, yes, I remember, I understand the issue, but I'm sure my associate, Mr. Ludlow, he gestured toward the man in the grey suit, would appreciate an explanation since he's helping to fund the next phase. Ludlow nodded. And in simple terms, professor, if you don't mind.
