Beginning of No Romance
By NEAL SILVESTER
Chapter 1. “This is a sequel, isn’t it?”
The gods of pulp fiction smiled down upon the sea-colored seaplane as it floated over the jungle, for their will was about to be brought to pass. The plane itself---a rather large model, as seaplanes go---would soon be gone, of course, its purpose as vessel sated, its very existence consummated, but we follow it now nonetheless, and our focus falls on those inside.
There were several occupants inside the plane. Some of them weren’t real people, but they were necessary to fill the plane and complete an image. Rest assured, they won’t actually perish when what has to happen happens. Rather, they do a spectacular disappearing act, worthy of the great illusionists. You can completely forget about them outside of their place in the background. There are five of them, or maybe six. It all depends on the angle we’re seeing the other, more important occupants from.
The relevant players, well, there are four of them. Two are sitting next to each other on the first row, only two seats wide. Next to the window sits a ruggedly handsome man defined by the stubble on his face and the graceful arcs of the few hairs hanging down over his forehead. The sun shining through the window illuminates his face insomuch that we can see the fine, attractive texture of his unshaven cheek. He wears a button-down shirt, open up near his neck and sleeves rolled up. You can practically see him ordering bourbon.
Just to his left is a short-haired brunette, young, perhaps in her twenties or so, professional-looking in a long beige raincoat and matching hat. Her lips are the color of strawberries and a lock of brown hair dangles down from the hat. She is making frequent furtive glances at the man and occasionally jotting some things down in pen on a notepad in her hand. An old-fashioned one, with the spiral binding at the top of the page like a sketchpad.
Across the aisle, slouching in his window seat is an older man, not quite silver-haired but getting there. He looks precisely like the first man but twenty years older. He, however, is snoozing, an iconic tan safari hat covering his eyes and a black leather jacket on his shoulders.
Our fourth relevant character has not made an appearance yet. He will soon enough. He’s quite distinctive; you’ll recognize him with little trouble.
Right now we need some time to pass. Let’s take a look out the window. The plane is nearing its destination; we can almost see it in the distance. Currently we’re out above a jungle in some exotic country. The canopy top below is the kind of green you can see from space, and the sea the sea-colored seaplane will be landing on is the green’s companionable blue: the two colors that stand out the most from astronomical distances—though there’s no sign of the white clouds in the sky that normally marble the planet’s pattern.
Let’s now zoom in. Down from the exosphere, into the thermosphere, then the mesosphere, where earth glows blue, and into the stratosphere, above where the clouds would be, finally sliding down into the troposphere at 1500 feet, right up alongside the whirring propellers of the sea-colored seaplane, christened Ad Nihilum. Before we return to the cabin, however, let’s move on ahead of the plane to see exactly where she’s headed. (Latin phrases are typically given feminine roles these days, are they not?)
The Ad Nihilum is flying to a tropical isle off the coast of the jungle peninsula it is currently floating over, somewhere in the southeastern seas. It is connected to the mainland by two distinct railroad tracks, one used to enter the isle, the other to leave it. The track vanishes from view as it zooms into the jungle; like much on the isle it is kept hidden from view, its shady purposes veiled by the canopy top.
The shape of the isle might be imagined as a cyclone, or better yet, a curved-blade ninja star. Looking at it from the mesosphere (which unfortunately we just left, though through the glorious powers of omniscient narration we can return to it quite easily), one might see the isle and its proximity to the mainland as a ninja star being hurled at an unsuspecting giraffe. The ninja is strangely missing, but over thousands, perhaps millions of years the ninja star has been hurtling straight at this giraffe at approximately one one-hundredth of a centimeter per day. Out of respect for God’s creatures, we should hope the giraffe comes to its senses by then and realizes that its coastal artery is about to be sliced open by a fellow coast. Although one positive side to this would be that the train tracks are no longer needed to travel to this tropical isle.
Hmm…
Pardon me; let’s return to the plane, and take a casual dip right through a small dirty window and again into the presence of our characters. Now we’ve got the right perspective, so we can settle down and observe properly as our story begins.
It does so now.
The girl, after taking a few deep breaths, interspersed with bites and purses of her strawberry-colored lips—
“I’m Annie,” she said to her seatmate, holding out her hand.
The man arched one eyebrow, but did not turn. Not a word had passed between them the entire two-hour plane ride, and now she felt like talking? Well, just let her try!
“Not interested,” grumbled the man without looking at her. He found it easier to say no to girls when he wasn’t looking at them. Sometimes it was hard for him to stick to his principles.
“Well excuse me!” she said. She was obviously offended and clearly intended to say a lot more to him about presumption and cockiness and male ego and all that nonsense, but…
Unfortunately, she barely even got out the “excuse me.” And it came out sounding more apologetic than indignant, as if she really had done something to offend him. She tried to get out more, but it came across as her just being flustered, with several stops, starts, and stutters.
“Don’t worry about it,” said the man in a deadpan voice, still not looking at her. In actuality, he was grateful she hadn’t said anything the entire trip, and had been hoping that in the end she wouldn’t say anything at all. It was so hard to reject them sometimes…
The woman, Annie, sank into her seat and blushed intensely, so much that she was embarrassed by it, and blushed some more. This pattern continued for a while, but no one was looking at her, so it didn’t really matter.
She finally worked up enough courage to try again. She had a job to do, after all.
“You could at least tell me your name,” she said, trying to sound coy and sounding like she was trying.
The man glanced at her once. That was the mistake.
Damb it, he thought. She was an adorable little thing.
“Ruggles,” he said with a sigh as he stared out the window. “Ruggles Smith.”
She let forth a mighty snort and started giggling, then tried to stop herself. She could stop the laughs, but not the smile. He glanced at her again.
“Sorry, I’m sorry,” she said. “But…what kind of parents would name their son—”
“Mine, clearly,” he said. “But not really. No true parent ever would.”
She blushed all the more, and didn’t know what to say. So she scribbled something on her notepad.
“Well, Mr. Smith, what are you going out to Rainswept Isle for?” she said, adding a period with a flourish.
He arched an eyebrow. “Are you taking notes?”
“Um!” she said, losing the grace she had shown in her punctuation skills and gaining the klutziness that was inherent in her very soul. “I just do that, I just do that. I’m writing a piece r-right now. For a journal. Big piece. Very important piece.”
“That’s what you do, I suppose? You’re a journalist?”
“I’m an investigative reporter,” she said.
“Don’t investigative reporters have to be bold? Don’t they have to ignore social boundaries in their search for justice or truth or whatever it is pretentious journalists claim to value?”
“I guess that half of me isn’t here in this plane right now,” she said, laughing nervously.
Ruggles smiled without really smiling. “So is there something worth investigating on this island, then?” he asked.
“There always is in places like these,” she said.
In response he leaked a long sigh.
“Jungles,” he muttered under his breath. “Breeding grounds for corruption.”
“Well yes, that’s the idea,” said Annie, a little confused. “So what are you…”
She trailed off as just then a man dressed in a khaki shirt and rather short khaki shorts entered the cabin from the cockpit. He had a head full of black wavy, spiky, fiery hair and wore rectangular, wide, thick-rimmed glasses. Mid-thirties, probably. Unusual-looking. Distinctive.
He sat down next to the sleeping man, across the aisle from Ruggles and Annie, and looked at them, because they were looking at him.
“Go ahead. Keep talking,” he said, revealing a New Zealand accent.
Ruggles nodded at him once. Annie tried to do as he said and keep talking, but Ruggles wasn’t listening. Not to her, anyway. Her babbling became background to him as he kept an eye on the two men across the aisle. The khaki-wearer was talking into the ear of the man in the hat, who had woken up but without much movement. Ruggles could tell he was awake by the drum of his fingers on the armrest. He watched this a little while, until a point came when the drumming stopped cold. Something was going on.
“Looks like a movie scene playing out over there,” Ruggles smirked ruefully to Annie, who was in mid-sentence but wasn’t sure herself what she was saying. “I think you’re going to get some good material to write about pretty soon.”
She looked across the aisle, looked back at Ruggles, blinked, and looked across the aisle again, then blinked again. She leaned in close to Ruggles, subtly took in his manly scent, and whispered conspiratorially, “What do you mean?”
He slowly exhaled through his nose before answering.
“We’ve all seen this scene a thousand times before, haven’t we? I’ve even lived it a couple times myself.”
Her face remained blank.
“His gun,” he said a little louder, more forcefully, impatiently. “Did you notice he had a gun?”
“No…”
“Reporters are supposed to notice odd details, are they not?”
“I—I don’t see a gun…”
“You will in a moment. They’re keeping it subtle right now. The gun is ensuring a nice, quiet dialogue. Whatever they’re saying, it’s fraught with tension. And it’s important. Well, not really. Nothing’s ever really important. But to them it is. Hm. I always wondered what it would be like to see a scene like this from one of the background characters. The nameless guys never seem to notice anything in the movies.”
“But…where was he carrying the gun? I didn’t see him bring one from the cockpit, and it didn’t look like he had a holster or anything—”
“Doesn’t matter. Hang on, listen…”
The conversation stopped, the whirring stopped, the wind stopped, and all they heard in that near deafening silence was…
A click.
“That’s the hammer,” Ruggles whispered. “Okay, get ready for some good material, Ms…Annie, you said?”
“Annie, yes, I—“
But suddenly the khaki-wearer swept himself up to his feet, and pointed the shiny black pistol straight at the heart of the man with the hat.
“Give it to me, Noyce!” he shouted in his rather adorable New Zealander accent. “Give me the map!”
Annie let out a tiny scream and cupped her hands over her mouth, her writing materials falling to the floor. Ruggles just watched the scene play out in fascination.
“No,” said Noyce, the man in the hat, in a predictably gravelly voice. “Go ahead and shoot, Hilti. Make my day. You’ll be doing me a favor.”
Hilti, still holding the gun on the other man, shook with frustration, and a guttural growl was turning into a scream.
“Why won’t you, then? You’ll give your life for the X on that map?”
Noyce chuckled humorlessly and shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand. I’m finally giving up. This is the only way I’ll win in the end.”
Hilti glanced at Ruggles and Annie and gave them a shrug of his shoulder.
“And what about them? You’d have their deaths on your hands?”
Ruggles perked up his head at this. Then, hand to his chin like a model for Rodin, did some quick mental detective work.
“That means…” Ruggles said, raising his hand halfway up in politeness, “that you are, or were, the pilot of this plane?”
“’Were’ is closer,” Hilti said contemptuously. With his New Zealand accent, however, it sounded more adorable than anything.
“And you’re going to kill him and jump out of the plane with the only parachute?”
Hilti looked a bit irritated at having his plan figured out so quickly.
“Yes.” (It sounded more like “Yis.”) “Thanks for reminding me though. I almost forgot about the whole parachute thing.”
Still holding the gun on the three relevant characters, he went to the back of the plane to fetch one of the emergency backpacks. All the other occupants of the plane had, by this point, vanished. They weren’t necessary anymore.
Ruggles leaned across Annie, directing his words to Noyce.
“Why is there only one parachute?” Ruggles asked as Hilti rummaged in the back of the plane.
“I was asking that myself,” said Noyce, leaning too. “If there’s only one, then that means…”
Then he sat up in his chair, staring straight ahead of him, eyes as open as a tennis championship. Annie was still as white as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and had not said a single word after initially covering her mouth. But it looked like Noyce had had some epiphany, and looked more closely at Ruggles.
“Your name is Smith?”
“Not really.”
“But yes, now I understand!”
And he grinned. Ruggles, in return, frowned.
Hilti, having achieved his objective, came back to the three wearing a chute on his back.
“There really is just the one,” he remarked. “Now I just have to wait till we’re close enough to the island, and…”
Then he seemed to notice Noyce again and remember something.
“Time to die, my old friend,” said Hilti, once more raising the pistol to Noyce’s chest.
“The trick’s on you, Hilti,” said Noyce. “If you destroy me, you’re only creating a new enemy—”
“Can’t you two PLEASE use some original lines?” Ruggles shouted unexpectedly. He then swore quite loudly. Then he huffed.
“You’re part of this, Smith,” Noyce said, eyes still locked on Hilti’s. “That name. That image. You were born to wear this jacket. And that’s what’s going to happen.”
Hilti had not broken the stare either. He cut an imposing figure, standing there before Noyce, gun pointed at his heart. Annie whimpered softly.
“And do YOU,” Ruggles said, turning to her, “have to be --- ”
Suddenly Hilti raised his leg and kicked the cabin door wide open. The outside winds howled like death, or like the next-door neighbor’s pet wolf, and Annie screamed loudly again.
“--- the stereotypical female?!” Ruggles finished, his voice raised over the wind.
“This is your last chance, Eli,” said Hilti. “Give me the map --- or die.”
“You don’t get it, do you, Hilti?” said Noyce, smirking and shaking his head. “That’s the whole idea!”
Hilti’s mind seemed unable to process this, as he just screwed up his face more and more trying to look fiercer and fiercer.
“But what about us?” Annie cried. “You’re just going to let us die in this plane crash?”
“Not exactly...” said Noyce.
Evidently something clicked in Hilti’s limited, antagonistic mind for it was at that moment he chose to pull the trigger. Strangely enough given the nature of this story, the bullet obeyed the laws of physics and shot straight into Noyce’s belly. Not the part Hilti was specifically aiming for, but, well, it would have to do.
And for the first time in his life, Eli Noyce had taken a fatal wound. He actually looked quite startled at this. The rest of the cabin’s occupants watched silently as he touched his wound with two fingers, and brought them shakily up to his face, which was so pale it had surpassed Annie’s.
“It actually...hurts,” he murmured, astonished at the sensation. He had been shot in other places before, of course, but only in places that would show how tough he was, give him scars and things like that. But never somewhere serious like this. Never in a vital area.
He slumped down further in his chair. “It hurts a lot.” His voice sounded strangled; he could barely get the words out.
Hilti snorted at him.
“I’ll find that X without you then,” he said. “Have a nice death.”
And he leaped out of the plane, into the sky. The green jungle could be seen below, and they all got a brief glimpse of the blooming white parachute before it whipped out of sight.
At that moment, the plane, which had been without a pilot for several minutes now, noticeably dipped downward.
Per usual, Annie made a loud sound. It was short-lived, more of an amplified gasp followed by an even shorter-lived, high-pitched squeak at the end as she grabbed onto something to steady herself.
That “something” turned out to be Ruggles’s bicep. He stared at her until she let go. Then the two left their seats to attend to Noyce, who had been sliding out of his chair and onto the cabin floor. Blood was pouring out of him now, his face all pale. He was, however, still conscious.
Ruggles and Annie knelt at his side.
“Don’t worry,” Noyce said to Annie, laboring for every breath. “The plane won’t crash until I’ve said what I have to say. Until you---” he indicated Ruggles “---accept your destiny.”
“W-what is he saying?” Annie asked Ruggles. “And we have no parachutes! We’re going to die, aren’t we? We’re going to die!”
Ruggles gave no reply, but narrowed his gaze on Noyce and increased the furrows of his frown.
“You have to take my jacket,” Noyce went on, working for every word. “It has the answer to everything. It’s the...it’s the X...that marks...”
“What we need are parachutes,” Ruggles said, cutting him off. “Not a jacket. Are there any---”
“This jacket is more useful than a parachute!” Noyce said, and coughed up some blood. “It’s a mantle. And I am passing it on to you. You are the rightful heir.”
Ruggles stood up, and seemed to realize something. The same epiphany Noyce had before.
“Wait, damb it all, wait! Is this—oh, no…no, no! This is a sequel, isn’t it?”
Ruggles proceeded to mutter “No” for at least another thirty seconds as Noyce continued to die a slow, agonizing death.
“I can’t die until you take it. This, by the way, is a horrible way to die. I’m in quite a lot of pain right now...”
He struggled to take off the jacket. Ruggles was up and pacing through the cabin, still repeating “No, no, no” under his breath. Annie, kneeling by Noyce, looked desperately between the two men.
“Ruggles!” she said. “Just help me help him take off the jacket! If it will help him...”
“My name isn’t Ruggles!” he burst out. “Just...damb it, just call me Smith.”
“I don’t care what your name is!” she yelled back at him. “Help me! Help him!”
She propped up Noyce in a sitting position so he could more easily shed the black leather jacket from his shoulders. Once off, she placed it on his lap.
Smith stood motionless for a few seconds, watching them. After a silent decision, he stepped over to Noyce’s other side, crouched down to his level, and stared him dead in the eye.
“Do I have to wear the damb hat?”
“It...it would be preferable,” said Noyce, still dying.
“But not necessary,” Smith finished. He took the brown safari hat off Noyce’s head and threw it out the open door, where the wind swept it away somewhere over the island.
Noyce looked longingly after it, but when he met Smith’s eyes, he nodded, affirming the decision. “Just the jacket. Put it on, and you’ll know exactly what to do, and exactly where to go.”
“It’s...it’s magic?” Annie said in a very naive voice. The shallowness of her character was deeply irritating to Smith.
“Not magic. It doesn’t literally mean anything; it’s symbolic,” Smith said, taking the jacket in his hands. “It means...”
He left the sentence hanging. As the two men gazed at each other, a connection was made. They understood each other perfectly.
“Now I can die,” Noyce said, gratitude and relief emanating from his eyes. “Now I can escape. Thank you.” Then he added, “See you all later.”
And he closed his eyes.
Smith stood up and put his arms through the jacket, causing the gods to smile. It was heavier than he thought it would be. He walked over to the open door, where the wind still howled and whipped at the jacket’s corners.
Annie took in the impressive, glorious, jaw-dropping handsomeness on display. Her mouth hung appropriately open.
“It fits you perfectly,” she said, as if in a dream.
“I know, I was afraid of that.”
From the open door Smith then ducked into the cockpit to look out in front of them. They were almost to the edge of the island, almost out over the sea. And the plane was heading down. Not rapidly; it was not so tilted that they lost their balance, but eventually it would overshoot the island and crash into the water at a very acute angle, very far from shore.
He re-entered the cabin.
“Annie,” he said loudly, over the wind. “When I tell you to, you’re going to take a running leap out of the door. It needs to be far enough to clear the floats. With the right timing, we’ll land just off shore, close enough that we can swim safely to land. Everything’s going to be fine if you do what I say.”
Annie gaped at him. “I-I-I can’t.”
“Do you want to die?”
“N-no...”
“Then you’re going to have to trust me.” Just like they always have to, he thought, exhaling. I feel my hair turning gray already.
“Don’t you know how to fly one of these things?” she said, a pleading tone in her voice.
“I probably do now that I’m wearing this, but that’s too easy. We need to break paradigm here.”
“That doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Smith didn’t reply. Annie huffed. Her hands gripped the back of Noyce’s old seat tightly, using it to stand herself up. Noyce’s empty body remained on the cabin floor.
“Are we just going to leave him like this?”
“Noyce?”
“Was that his name?”
“It was. Eli Noyce.”
“Eli Noyce, Eli Noyce. That sounds like something else.”
“That’s what I thought, but I couldn’t place it. Anyway, it’s always good for a name to be clearly established.”
“Unlike yours.”
“My name is unimportant,” Smith grunted as he took Noyce’s body in his hands and started to drag him to the back of the plane.
“Why were you going to Rainswept Isle in the first place? You never answered me that.”
Fear had fled the scene, though the plane door was still open and a bloody dead body remained in their midst and the plane they were in would be crashing into the sea any minute now. Annie, it seemed, had forgotten all that. If one were to ask How could you forget? she’d probably reply How could I not, with that leather jacket-wearing man in the room?
Smith looked at her, then pointedly away, out one of the cabin windows.
“Visiting family,” he said, his back to Annie.
“Family? There’s nothing on the island but smugglers and natives.”
Smith turned, looked at her again, then turned back.
“Well, maybe I won’t then.”
He opened up the luggage compartment above the seats and took out his pack and her small suitcase. He brought both over to the open door, surveyed the jungle below, and tossed them out.
She started to protest, but could not utter a coherent word.
“We can find them later,” he told her without looking. “When we’re out of this sky. But never mind that right now. It’s time to go.”
Annie, remembering the situation, blanched, and Smith sighed, not quite in disgust, but close to it. He walked over to her, grabbed her arm (exactly as she had done to him minutes before), and pulled her over to the open door.
“We’re about to cross right over the beach and be out over open water. The moment you see the shore below the plane, jump. By the time you get out of the plane you’ll be over the water, but not so high that you’ll get hurt from the fall. You’re going to feel a sharp slap all over your body, but it’s better than a big kaboom disintegrating you. You can be afraid, you can scream if you want, but you have to do it. Okay?”
Annie looked horrified. She shook her head vigorously.
He sighed again.
“If you don’t do it, you’re dead in twenty seconds.”
She stopped shaking her head, but gave made no other movement.
This time his sigh was absolutely in disgust.
“I’ll help you. Will you do it if I help you?”
She nodded very minutely, almost imperceptibly. But he could tell. He understood.
“We’ll jump together, then,” he said, and glanced towards the cockpit. “We have about ten seconds.”
He brought them to the empty doorway. They stood together on the precipice, wind blowing through their hair. Her fingers held onto the doorway like a vice, a vice without much traction or strength and lubricated by sweat. But her demeanor had changed.
“I need to get a running start,” she said in a surprisingly calm voice, just barely louder than the wind.
The shift in tone took Smith aback. It was like watching a hunted rabbit suddenly stand up and face you.
Rabbits don’t have that much poise, he thought, thinking further. She’s more like a...swan.
“Well, I suggested that to you before, and---”
He didn’t need to go on. She had stopped listening, and started backing up to the opposite wall of the cabin. Something had overtaken her. She had lost all her flustering ways. It was as if she were in a different place...a different mind.
Without a word to Smith, she moved.
As she took the few steps across the cabin, Smith noticed a strange litheness in her movements, an agility he could not have anticipated her having. He could see the muscles move beneath her coat, which until then had succeeded in suffocating her natural frame, perhaps purposefully so. And when she took a flying leap from the open door, she practically launched, and with the grace and form of the aforementioned swan.
Maybe there was more to her after all, Smith thought as he followed after her, past the hat that had flown off of her crown, plunging into the sea below.
