Chapter Twelve:  Replaced by a Ghost

Trent Vance's assistant called at ten in the morning to ask if Localad could come in at two. Localad assumed it was about the sixth draft, which he'd turned in three days earlier and which had, for the first time in the entire process, made him feel something close to proud again. A version that had absorbed the notes but, he thought, had kept the emotional core of Jasmine's arc largely intact, a version he was prepared to defend with something like his old conviction.

He was not in any way prepared for the meeting he walked into.

Farrah Locke was already seated when Localad entered.

He recognised her immediately. She had written some enormous action films, each containing at least one vehicle used in a way its manufacturer had never intended nor recommends. She was a successful screenwriter with three blockbuster credits Localad had actually seen in theatres, one of which had made more money globally than the whole population of the county Localad grew up in.

Desmond was there too, at the end of the table, not meeting Localad's eyes in a way that told him, before anyone said a word, that whatever was about to happen had already been decided somewhere he hadn't been invited. Again.

Trent stood to greet him.

“We think the script is in a really strong place structurally," Trent began, and Localad felt his stomach drop at the familiar shape of the sentence, the praise arriving first, like an anaesthetic before a major incision.

Localad sat. He had begun to understand that strong places were where scripts went to be killed.

“We want to bring Farrah in to do the next pass. She's incredible with tone, with action, with really landing the big swings this movie needs in the third act."

"I thought I was doing the next pass," Localad said. "I turned in a draft three days ago."

“We read it. You’ve done some extraordinary foundational work.” Trent said. "There's a lot we love in it. But we're on the clock now. We’ve got a release date the studio's committed to publicly, and we need someone who can move fast and bring the kind of blockbuster muscle memory it needs in the short time we have left. It's not a reflection on any of your work. Honestly, it's the exact opposite, your draft is what has given Farrah so much to build on."

“I wrote the foundation before any of you bought the building.”

Trent’s expression registered his appreciation for the metaphor while rejecting its whole application.

“We’re now moving into execution velocity.”

“Is that even a sentence?”

“It’s a schedule.”

Localad looked at Desmond, waiting for him to tune in and say something, anything, to intervene the way he had at the very first meeting, defending the ending, the emotional core, the thing that had made him drive off with a stranger's manuscript in the first place. 

Instead, Desmond looked tired, and older than Localad remembered him looking three months earlier, and when he finally spoke it was in the careful, hedged tone of a man who had already fought this fight somewhere else and lost.

That hurt more than Trent. Trent was just a system wearing cufflinks. Desmond however, had once read the book until dawn.

“Am I still writing the film?”

“No.”

At least he said no.

“You’ll retain full story credit,” Desmond said quietly. “And ‘based on the novel by.’ That’s protected. Contractual, that's not up for negotiation, whatever happens from here on in, you'll be fully credited for creating the world and the characters. And you're not completely off the project. Farrah wants to talk to you, get your input on the mythology, make sure the changes serve what you built."

"That's not the same as writing it."

"No," Desmond admitted. "It's not."

Farrah Locke found Localad in the corridor afterward.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Are you?”

“Yes. But I’m also taking the job. Both things can be true, which is one of the uglier facts about this business.”

Farrah Locke, to her credit, was kind about it in the specific, practiced way of someone who had clearly done this before, to other writers, in other rooms. 

"I think your book is genuinely special," she told him. "I read it twice before I said yes to this. I'm not trying to erase what you built. I can just work fast. That's what they're paying me for. That's the whole job, honestly, showing up when the clock's already running and making the trains run on time."

She had read Purradise twice. She fully understood the ending. She also admired Jasmine.

“So, what happens to the ending, the one at the Wound. Will you protect it?” Localad asked.

“I’ll protect what I can.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It’s the only honest answer anyone in that room can give you.”

Something shifted, briefly, in Farrah's professionally composed face. "I think there's going to be pressure to make it bigger," she said, carefully. "I'll fight for as much of the quiet as I can. I can't promise you it survives intact. I've never once, in eleven years of doing this, been able to promise a writer that."

He went back to the corporate apartment that night and sat on the floor of the balcony that didn't open, phone in hand, and did not call Marjory, because he did not yet know how to say out loud what had happened without it sounding like the total failure, he was afraid it was. Not a failure of talent, exactly, but a failure of nerve, of negotiation, of knowing, the way Desmond had warned him five months ago, which three things were worth fighting for before someone else decided for him.

He imagined the conversations he could have with her: In one version, he made a joke. In another, he sounded noble. In a third, he admitted that the thing hurting most was not being replaced but having cooperated so thoroughly with the process that replaced him.

He thought about Ross Kettle's easy, uninvested competence, and Trent's careful praise-then-cut sentences, and Farrah's honest, unable-to-promise-anything kindness, and understood, for the first time with real clarity, that the machine did not need him to make the movie. It had never needed him. It had needed his book, once, at the beginning, the way a fire needs kindling. Only useful for exactly as long as it took to get something bigger burning, and after that, totally replaceable, the way kindling is always replaceable, the way the flame doesn't remember, once it's caught, which twig it was that started it.

Across town, Farrah opened his latest draft and began making changes. The software preserved his name in the revision history; a grey digital ghost attached to lines that no longer belonged to him.

Desmond called at midnight.

“I should have fought harder,” he said.

“Did you fight?”

A pause.

“Yes.”

“Did you stop when it became expensive?”

Another pause.

“Yes.”

Localad closed his eyes.

There it was: not villainy as such, not betrayal in the grand operatic sense, but the ordinary moral economy by which a person rents out small rooms in his soul and is surprised, years later, to find the whole building occupied.

“I’m sorry,” Desmond said.

“So am I.”

Neither man specified what for.

Thank you for reading thus far. Click here to read the full story from the beginning. Or here for the start of Act II.