Investigating Inception

I watched Inception for the second time a few days ago (the first was in the theater), and I’ve been mulling it over ever since. I love a story with some depth, a story that you can go back to over and over and always come away with something new. I feel as if this is one of those stories. And since I’m a giant geek, I like to spend time on the data. I like to let it marinate. Like Cobb, I like to see how deep I can go. I’m not saying I’ve got everything figured out—far from it. And I’m sure there are areas where I’ve missed something or misinterpreted a bit of datum. So join me as I offer my impressions and insight, and let’s see where it leads, shall we?

But before we do, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say “SPOILER ALERT!” I’m about to spoil the shit out of the entire movie, so if you haven’t seen it please do yourself the courtesy of not reading on. Watch the movie first. To do otherwise would be a mistake.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s start by taking the movie at face value. On the surface, the movie is actually pretty simple. Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) has learned to manipulate dreams—to become an Architect—and he’s fallen in love, with both the god-like wonder of creating a world and Mal (played by the entrancing Marion Cotillard), the woman with whom he plays God. It’s revealed over the course of the film that Cobb and Mal essentially experimented on themselves. They trudged deep into their own minds, into Limbo, and created their own personal world.

The problem, of course, is that they got lost in it. They became unable to discern fantasy from reality, and spent a lifetime in Limbo growing old together. Hardly the worst fate one can imagine—oh bummer, you spent a lifetime with someone you love—but Cobb somehow became aware of the unreality of their situation and tried to convince Mal of it. When she resisted the truth, Cobb planted an idea—that their shared world wasn’t real—in her mind. Inception. The idea took root, and she was finally prepared to take the leap of faith with him. They killed themselves (Rather gruesomely I might add. Death by train? Yuck.), awakening in the real world.

Unfortunately for both of them, they didn’t live happily ever after. The idea that Cobb planted in Mal’s mind bled into reality. It had become so deeply rooted in her mind that she couldn’t shake it. Reality became unreality. She was convinced that they were still asleep, that their real lives—their real children—were waiting for them above, in the real world. Cobb did his best to convince her otherwise, but he had done his job too well. She knew she was asleep.

And so, one fateful night, she forced his hand. She wanted him to take the same leap of faith that he had once asked of her. She was so sure of herself that she had written a letter to the authorities claiming that Cobb was unstable, and that if she died it was at his hands. She wanted to be sure that he’d join her, but, try as she might, she was unable to convince him that she was right. And try as he might, Cobb was unable to convince her that she was wrong.

And so she leapt to her death, turning Cobb into a man on the run, estranged from the family he loved.

Plotlines aside, think about the psychological ramifications of that for a moment. Imagine being trapped in Limbo. Imagine becoming aware of it, and having to resort to subterfuge to convince the one you love that the world around you is an illusion. Imagine winning free of that illusion, only to watch your wife go mad because of what you’ve done. That, my friends, is the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory.

And now the love of your life is gone, and it eats at you. You know she was wrong. You know that you’re in the real world—that death in this world is truly Death—but it doesn’t matter. She was so sure. She asked you to take the very same leap of faith that you once asked of her, and you failed to believe in her the way that she once believed in you. Even though you know she was wrong, you can’t help but feel that you’ve failed her on a number of levels.

And now her steadfast belief sits in a corner of your mind, rotting. Just how sure are you, anyway? What if she was right? Is she waiting for you a level above? She and the children you miss so dearly? You miss them all with every fiber of your being, and even though you know you’re right—even though you know this is the real world—the delusion of your dead wife haunts you. Every day the pain of loss and guilt grows, and every day the delusion becomes more attractive. It pulls at you. One simple action—the pull of a trigger or a leap from a ledge—and you could regain the woman you love. You could regain your family.

This is the burden that Cobb deals with. This, more than anything, is his reality. This is why Mal keeps showing up while Cobb and his cohorts are on the job. His subconscious has spun this aching need into a self-destructive Projection with an angelic face. The greater Cobb’s pain grows, the stronger “Mal” becomes, until she begins to endanger not just Cobb, but the jobs that he and Arthur (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are doing. He tries to sate her by spending time in dreams—in memories—with her, but this only makes matters worse. She wants him dead.

Or rather, he wants to die.

But enough of his sanity remains. He wants to go home. He wants to be a father to his motherless children. And so he takes the job offered by Saito (played by Ken Watanabe). He will lead a raid into the mind of Saito’s business rival, Robert Fischer (played by Cillian Murphy), with the purpose of planting the idea of breaking up his father’s business empire. In return, Saito will make Cobb’s legal problems disappear, allowing Cobb to reunite with his children and ensure that they have at least one parent to raise them.

Glossing over large chunks of the movie (not to mention the scene-stealing acting of Tom Hardy, who played Eames), Cobb and Co. succeed in their attempts at inception, and Cobb is finally reunited with his family. The last thing we see is the top spinning, about to fall over, thus proving that he is, in fact, in the real world.

Or is he? Maybe that top wasn’t about to fall over. Maybe it would have just kept on going, proving that Mal was right all along. And so begins the fun of not taking the movie at face value. There’s certainly evidence to lend credence to Mal’s idea that they were not, after all, in the real world.

Why is Cobb being chased across the globe by mysterious men? Doesn’t that seem eerily similar to the way a Dreamer’s Projections end up chasing intruding minds? Is the name of Cobb’s newfound Architect, Ariadne (played by Ellen Page), irrelevant, or a bit of symbolism on the part of writer/director Christopher Nolan? Why does Cobb have Mal’s totem? Where is his own? So many questions, so little brainpower with which to answer them.

But I’ll take a stab at it.

I think Cobb was right. I think Mal killed herself, albeit unintentionally. Why is Cobb being chased? Because of a job gone wrong, that’s why. To believe otherwise—that these “men” chasing him are, in fact, Projections—is to believe that he is not only asleep, but in someone else’s mind. After all, projections don’t attack the Dreamer, only those who don’t belong. Presumably the “someone else” is Mal. But that doesn’t seem right, because Mal killed herself. If the world Cobb now inhabits isn’t the real world, if it’s been created by Mal, then why is it still there after she’s gone? Does the movie ever address what happens to the others—the invaders—if the Dreamer wakes up first? Not that I recall. My assumption would be that everyone else would wake as well, that the effect would be similar to a mental version of having the rug pulled out from under you. You end up on your ass, back in the real world.

But then again, maybe the result is madness. Maybe you get trapped down there. Who’s to say?

Regardless, I’m inclined to believe that his world is the real world, because the alternative hurts my brain. And I think that Page’s character’s name, Ariadne, is a hint. Ariadne is a character from Greek mythology, the daughter of King Minos. King Minos occasionally sacrificed young men and women to the Minotaur lurking in the labyrinth of Crete. One day, Theseus was to be the sacrifice. Ariadne, however, fell in love with Theseus, and provided him with a ball of thread, allowing him to lay the thread down as he walked the labyrinth, and giving him a clear way out.

In other words, Ariadne provided Theseus’s path out of the labyrinth and back to the larger world. And I believe that she provided the same function for Cobb. Ariadne followed Cobb into Limbo in search of Saito and Fischer. (Note that his name is “Robert Fischer,” so they were “searching for Bobby Fischer.” And Ariadne’s totem is a chess piece. Not sure if that’s just a joke or has some deeper meaning.) Ariadne found her way out, and so did everyone else down there at the time. Coincidence? Perhaps. But the fact that Mal’s very name is derived from the Latin for “bad” seems to lend credence to the idea that, at this stage in the game, Ariadne is the reality, and Mal is the fantasy.

But even if this is incorrect, would staying in the “un-real world” really be so bad? Let’s assume that they’d been trapped in the fist level down. According to the movie, 5 minutes in the real world is an hour in the dream world. Assuming my math is correct (if you know me then you know that this isn’t exactly a safe assumption), that means one could live out 60 years on Level 1 in just a month’s time in the real world (and the further you go down, the less real world time it would take). Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. Sure, your kids would miss you for a while, but you’d be back soon enough. It’s surely not something to kill yourself over, because the alternative—that you’re wrong and dying really would mean Dying—is rather permanent. As such, the entire movie could be seen as suggesting that, real world or dream, we should make the most of what we’ve got. “Real” is irrelevant. “Real” is what we perceive.

And then there’s the confusing business of the totems. Cobb uses a spinning top as a totem, and at one point mentions that it used to be Mal’s. But he also notes that a totem is personal to you and that you should allow no one else to touch it, lest you be fooled into believing that the dream is reality. The totem is supposed to be your sure-fire way of telling dream from reality. So why did this suddenly fail Mal? Shouldn’t she have been able to spin the top, watch it fall, and be reassured that she was in the real world? Was the idea planted in her mind so powerful that it was able to overcome this simple and elegant solution to recognizing reality?

And one must assume that both Cobb and Mal both had their own totems while they were together, so what happened to his totem? Why is he using Mal’s? Is using someone else’s totem just as foolproof, so long as you don’t let anyone touch it once you’ve started using it? Is Cobb’s use of the top merely his way of honoring Mal, of being close to her, or is it some form of self-deception? This line of thinking seems to be the clearest path to believing that Mal was right all along. But most of the evidence seems to indicate that she was in error.

And so, in the end, I’m left in a position eerily similar to Cobb’s: being nearly certain that he’s in the real world, but with nagging doubts that maybe—just maybe—his “crazy” wife wasn’t so crazy. What fun!

And now I must know! What do you think? What did I leave out? What did I get wrong? I’d love nothing more than to hear your take on things.


--Gryffindork

The Eye-Opener

It all starts with a bowl of soup.

I’ve spent the better part of the last three or four years being bitter. I’ve been bitter about work, bitter about life, and bitter about myself. I’m not sure where this bitterness has come from.

I have my theories. Thousands upon thousands of hours of dealing with drunks is a likely source. Thousands upon thousands of hours of being, not necessarily smarter than, but, certainly, significantly more aware of everything around me than the vast majority of my co-workers and supervisors is another factor. Constant frustration can certainly wear on you. Who knew?

I’ve been given the gift, maybe the curse, of a very acute power of observation. When I bitch to my mom about the things I see at work, she sees it in me. When I talk to my best friends about my frustrations with the public, they see it in me.

But what do I really have to be bitter about? I make good money doing a job that I’m good at and that most people actually have a generous respect for. If you don’t believe me, why don’t you try talking to people in a mostly genial manner for nine hours a day, five days a week? But remember, the people you already know want to be treated like you’ve never met them before and the people you don’t know want to be treated like you’ve been friends for years. Every time you see them. Every week. Every day. Go ahead, give it a try.

I pay my bills, I put some money into savings, and, to a certain extent, I have the freedom to do whatever I want with the rest of my time.

Maybe my bitterness comes from the tediousness. Tenacity? Tenaciousness. Tedinacitiousness? Whatever. I’ve been doing this a long time. And as much as the bar business changes from day to day, in a sick, inversely-exponential kind of way, it stays the same. Yes, I see new faces every day. But at the same time, I clean the same bottles, I make the same drinks, I shake the same hands, I pour the same beer for the same regular like I have four days a week for the last year just to have him tell me that today was the day he was going to try something new but that it’s MY fault that I didn’t wait ask him what he wanted to drink before I poured it, and I deal with the same people who ask for their drinks with “light ice” because they somehow think their drink will be stronger if they get it like that.

Here’s a quick lesson in physics and displacement: Fill one glass full of ice and fill a similar glass halfway with ice. Pour one and a half ounces of rum into both glasses. Now, without adding anything else, you get to fill both glasses the rest of the way with coke. Just by looking at both glasses, which one would you choose? Good. I didn’t graduate college and I can figure that one out. Go tell all your friends.

So there’s this bitterness. It’s quite possible that it exists because I can’t control what other people do and, apparently, I really need to. Strike that. I don’t NEED to. I feel this urge to because I see how things can be done in a good way, the appropriate way, in a bar, but nobody else seems to think that way. Again, it’s the power of observation.

I don’t want to be bitter. I was unemployed (under-employed, to be completely truthful) for five months. That was awful. I was getting unemployment benefits. That was awful. That was bitter. I could be forced to have a job cleaning urinals at the local biker bar. That would be even more awful. Like I said before, I make good money at a good job that I’m really, really good at. So why is there this bitterness?

Before I move on, I’d like to get back to that bowl of soup. Wait, much like Willy Wonka, I have to go back before I can move forward. So I’d better move along.

I used to be cheerful. Like, all the time cheerful. I’d smile and laugh and nothing could bother me. I went through a phase where I literally was saying to my mom, as she ranted about something in her life, “Let it go.” Over and over and over again, I said it to her: “Let it go.” Somewhere along the way, I stopped being able to let it go.

When I worked downtown, I would take the same route to work every day. And every day I saw the same homeless lady with her dog on the same corner. I thought to myself, more than once, “I could do something for them.” I was thinking that more for the dog’s sake than the woman’s. I had this grand plan of getting a few cans of dog food for the dog and a few cans of ravioli for the woman, then delivering them and wishing her and the dog my best. But it never happened. To this day, I still think about them and wish that I’d done something. I couldn’t let it go.

I’d become bitter. Why should I spend my hard-earned money on something for a beggar? I worked hard for my money. It’s MY money.

Yes, it is my money. But I have a lot of it. I have more than a lot of people could hope for. And yes, I have a tendency to spend my expendable income rather frivolously. And yes, it’s my right to do with it what I please.

But why couldn’t I do something for someone like that woman? Why couldn’t I take ten bucks a week and deliver some canned and ready to eat, albeit cold, ravioli to a homeless person? Why not?

And now I’ll get back to the soup.

Two nights ago an older homeless gentleman came in and sat in the middle of my mostly empty bar. How did I know he was homeless? Well, his missing teeth, scraggily clothes, and general lack of good hygiene were three sure signs. I eyed him suspiciously as I approached him, as I’d removed homeless guys from my bar and seen homeless guys removed from bars in which I frequent, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.

He calmly and quietly asked if he could have a glass of water, as he was waiting to meet someone. I obliged, as he didn’t seem to be much of a trouble maker, although I did doubt his assertion that he was meeting another person. He sat there for about fifteen minutes and drank his water and watched the game that was on tv. I went to ask him if he would like some more water when he leaned over a little and humbly asked me if we needed any kitchen help that night. I told him I was sorry, but that we were fully staffed for the evening. He thanked me and started to gather himself together to leave. I abruptly told him to wait and he got this worried look in his face. I smiled and said it was nothing bad, just that I wanted him to wait.

And that’s when the cheerful, non-bitter Kevin in me came out. I went in the back and poured a bowl of soup into a to-go container. That night we happened to be serving New England clam chowder with a garnish of bacon. If you know me, then you know my love for bacon. I put extra bacon in his soup.

I went out to the front and gave him his soup and wished him the best, just like I wish I’d done for that homeless woman and her dog. He didn’t ask for anything else. He didn’t say he’d be back. He didn’t try and bless me with God’s love. He simply said thank you and walked out the door. And for the simplicity of his gratitude, I will be eternally grateful.

It made me realize this: I have no reason to be bitter. I have a good life that I get to enjoy the way I want to.

And I want to say that I didn’t write this for me. Well, maybe a little, I did. But I didn’t write this to receive praise from you. I wrote this FOR you.

Don’t forget what makes you happy. Don’t forget the people that make you happy. Don’t be bitter about the things you can’t control. Laugh about them, instead. Give what you can, if you want. But things could be worse and there’s really no reason to be miserable in our good fortune.

I liked that the “old Kevin” came out for a little bit. I hope that homeless man comes back. I’d like to know his name. I’d like to buy him another bowl of soup. But mostly, and a little selfishly, I like what he brought out in me, and I’d like to see that again.

--TheKevin--

The Genius of David Foster Wallace

I am not an envious person. When I come across someone doing something extraordinary--a football player throwing a perfectly-placed spiral 50 yards downfield, a comic book artist whose artwork moves something deep and reptilian within me--I may think to myself, "It would be cool to be able to do that." But I almost never feel this thought in the tiny little hematocyte-spewing depths of my bones; sure, it would be cool to be able to do those things, but it's not a powerful desire.
This is not the case with the work of David Foster Wallace. I truly wish I could write like DFW. He was, quite simply, an unparalleled genius. We throw that word around these days, and it's pretty well devalued at this point, but I mean it in the literal sense. He was a man with a profound intellect, as well as an ultimately fatal sense of the human condition (borne, if you ask me, out of the curse/gift that is depression). He made a habit of explaining the ebb and flow of life in an extraordinary way, in a way that seemed both profoundly revelatory and, once you'd read his take on it, exceedingly obvious. He was a master wordsmith.
I'm finishing up his book, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which is a collection of essays and arguments. I'm currently reading the titular essay, about a 7-day cruise he took at the behest of the magazine Harper's (this is a perfect example of what I meant in the last paragraph about being a genius; he got paid to go on a luxury cruise because just his take on the entire affair would be fascinating enough to justify the expense--he was that good). 
About 35 pages into the essay, I ran across a section that--to my mind--is one of the greatest things ever written. It's not flashy. It's not pretentious. It's not even particularly deep, in the "what does it all mean" sense. It's simply quintessential DFW; effortlessly witty, penetrating, and, somehow, gloriously innocent. I've copied it below so that you may experience DFW in all his glory.
I hope you enjoy it.

"Celebrity's fiendish brochure does not lie or exaggerate, however, in the luxury department. I now confront the journalistic problem of not being sure how many examples I need to list in order to communicate the atmosphere of sybaritic and nearly insanity-producing pampering on board the m.v. Nadir.

How about for just one example Saturday 11 March, right after sailing but before the North Sea weather hits, when I want to go out to Deck 10's port rail for some introductory vista-gazing and thus decide I need some zinc oxide for my peel-prone nose. My zinc oxide's still in my big duffel bag, which at that point is piled with all of Deck 10's other luggage in the little area between the 10-Fore elevator and the 10-Fore staircase while little men in cadet-blue Celebrity jumpsuits, porters—-entirely Lebanese, this squad seems to be—-are cross-checking the luggage tags with the Nadir's passenger list Lot #s and organizing the luggage and taking it all up the Port and Starboard halls to people's cabins.

And but so I come out and spot my duffel among the luggage, and I start to grab and haul it out of the towering pile of leather and nylon, with the idea that I can just whisk the bag back to Cabin 1009 myself and root through it and find my good old ZnO; and one of the porters sees me starting to grab the bag, and he dumps all four of the massive pieces of luggage he's staggering with and leaps to intercept me. At first I'm afraid he thinks I'm some kind of baggage thief and wants to see my claim check or something. But it turns out that what he wants is my duffel: he wants to carry it to 1009 for me. And I, who am about half again this poor little herniated guy's size (as is the duffel bag itself), protest politely, trying to be considerate, saying Don't Fret, Not a Big Deal, Just Need My Good Old ZnO. I indicate to the porter that I can see they have some sort of incredibly organized ordinal luggage-dispersal system under way here and that I don’t mean to disrupt it or make him carry a Lot #7 bag before a Lot #2 bag or anything, and no I’ll just get the big old heavy weatherstained sucker out of here myself and give the little guy that much less work to do.

And then now a very strange argument indeed ensues, me v. the Lebanese porter, because it turns out I am putting this guy, who barely speaks English, in a terrible kind of sedulous-service double-bind, a paradox of pampering: viz. the The-Passenger's-Always-Right-versus-Never-Let-A-Passenger-Carry-His-Own-Bag paradox. Clueless at the time about what this poor little Lebanese man is going through, I wave off both his high-pitched protests and his agonized expression as mere servile courtesy, and I extract the duffel and lug it up the hall to 1009 and slather the old beak with ZnO and go outside to watch Florida recede cinematically a la F. Conroy.

     Only later did I understand what I'd done. Only later did I learn that that little Lebanese Deck 10 porter had his head just about chewed off by the (also Lebanese) Deck 10 Head Porter, who’d had his own head chewed off by the Austrian Chief Steward, who received confirmed reports that a Deck 10 passenger had been seen carrying his own bag up the Port hallway of Deck 10 and now demanded rolling Lebanese heads for this clear indication of porterly dereliction, and had reported (the Austrian Chief Steward did) the incident (as is apparently SOP) to an officer in the Guest Relations Dept., a Greek officer with Revo shades and a walkie-talkie and officerial epaulets so complex I never did figure out what his rank was; and this high-ranking Greek guy actually came around to 1009 after Saturday's supper to apologize on behalf of practically the entire Chandris shipping line and to assure me that ragged-necked Lebanese heads were even at that moment rolling down various corridors in piacular recompense for my having had to carry my own bag. And even though this Greek officer's English was in lots of ways better than mine, it took me no less than ten minutes to express my own horror and to claim responsibility and to detail the double bind I'd put the porter in—-brandishing at relevant moments the actual tube of ZnO that had caused the whole snafu—-ten or more minutes before I could get enough of a promise from the Greek officer that various chewed-off heads would be reattached and employee records unbesmirched to feel comfortable enough to allow the officer to leave; and the whole incident was incredibly frazzling and angst-fraught and filled almost a whole Mead notebook and is here recounted in only its barest psychoskeletal outline."




--Gryffindork (all rights belonging to Harper's, DFW's estate, whatevs)

Ode To Halle's Funbags

This is a poem inspired by a question in last night's Geeks Who Drink pub quiz about the movies Halle Berry has shown her ta-tas in. I wrote this for the accompanying blog.

Are you black or are you white?

Who gives a crap? Your breasts are tight.

Firm and supple, oh my Lord;

I think I might go overboard.

Wanking can be fun and all,

But not when it makes your wang all raw.

Thankfully the way to see

Your boobies, which have enchanted me

Is watching movies, bad trips like acid

That always make my knob grow flaccid.


--Gryffindork

Fictional Flotsam: The Walk*

* For those of you who can read and listen to music at the same time, I suggest using this link for added effect.

“That was a lovely walk we had this afternoon,” Mary Yangherkin said. She rested her open book on her lap and shifted position in the loveseat just enough to face her husband, Woody.

He blinked absently and turned toward her, pushing his glasses until they rested firmly on the bridge of his nose. He set his book down in a motion nearly identical to hers. The lamp on the end table beside the loveseat backlit her, bringing flyaway strands of her graying hair into stark and shadowy relief. Mary wore a faint half-smile, a faraway look in her unfocused eyes. She looked towards him but not at him, her head cocked slightly to the right. She saw through him—him and everything else.

Woody loved that look. It meant that she was casting her mind back, reliving their walk as fully as human memory allowed. He’d seen the look a thousand times—more—and knew that it meant that she was happy. She always said, “any moment lived in happiness is worth reliving.”

He called the look her McFly Look. The name didn’t really fit, she unfailingly protested, because Marty McFly had been trying to get Back to the Future and she was trying to revisit the past, but Woody always waved off the criticism. It didn’t matter which way you went; time travel was time travel, and that made it her McFly look.

“It was,” Woody said, smiling. He took Mary’s hand and squeezed it, then leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. Mary returned to the present and smiled. They picked their books up, settled themselves comfortably once again, and went back to reading.

They’d ventured out into the cold winter afternoon on a whim, heading into the woods behind their property. The forest was quiet, muffled by the previous night’s snow. That still, pristine world was theirs and theirs alone, an intimate secret just for them.

Woody loved venturing into unmarred snow; he sometimes felt that it erased all the footsteps that had come before his, allowing him the opportunity to be the First, allowing him to Discover that small section of the world. It was a behavior Woody had first displayed as a boy. He’d trek off into the snow on his own, discovering new lands, battling goblins and frost imps. It was as if the snow-white world before him was a blank canvas, his imagination the brush and paint. He’d continued this habit until he’d had kids of his own. Giving it up had been hard for Woody, but he felt it necessary; his kids had deserved their own blank canvas.

But the kids were gone now, busy with the Real World, and so this frozen world belonged to him. To him and his wife. His partner. His Mary.

Mary, for her part, marveled at this side of him and reveled in it. Woody was by no means a stoic man, but seeing this side of him made it child’s play to imagine what he had been like in the naïve days of his youth. This never failed to elicit a smile from her.

On this particular jaunt they’d walked for perhaps fifteen minutes when they’d happened across a buck. Busy rubbing it’s antlers on a tree, it had failed to hear them approach. It froze upon realizing its mistake, muscles tensed, sizing them up. It stared at them, and they at it, for what felt like an eternity, until, with a twitch of its ears and a cloud of breath, it bounded off, zig-zagging through the trees. They’d headed back to the house after that, giddy with their good luck, as snow began to fall again in earnest and the sky grew dark.

Now they sat together in front of the fireplace, reading, a light blanket thrown over their laps. They sat together but apart, seated next to each other while simultaneously in their own private worlds. Their time together was demarcated only by the tick of the clock on the mantle and the crackling of the fire, their time apart by the events in the stories that had enveloped them.

Duke Ellington’s “Prelude To a Kiss” broke suddenly into the silence. Woody found his bookmark and inserted it into his book. He set it on the end table, and picked up his phone, turning off the customized alarm. He stretched enthusiastically, removed his side of the blanket from the top of his lap and stood up. He stretched again for good measure.
"8 o'clock already?" asked Mary.
"Mm-hmmm," replied Woody.

“I love you,” Mary said. She looked up at him with a smile, her book momentarily opened upon her lap once more.

“And I love you,” Woody replied. He bent over and kissed her on the forehead. “Now I’m off for a wank.”

Mary leaned into the kiss. “Have fun,” she said, and playfully swatted his backside as he walked away.

The End

--Gryffindork