Chapter Twenty:  The Dark Night of the Soul

Localad returns to his apartment ruined, feeling he’d sold his artistic soul for money.

He did not leave his apartment for two full days after the numbers came in. The concierge room service brought him meals arranged under silver lids, the traditional method by which luxury conceals lukewarm potatoes.

He ate very little.

On television, entertainment correspondents discussed whether Purradise had signalled “fantasy fatigue.” Localad wondered whether audiences were tired of fantasy or merely tired of being given the same old fantasy in increasingly expensive hats.

The film moved through the news cycle and began to shrink.

For eighteen full months it had been enormous. It had occupied offices, soundstages, contracts, meals, flights and the best part of Localad’s mind once reserved only for the weather. Now it became a weekend figure, then an industry lesson, then an item beneath a celebrity divorce.

Watching the news cycle around the film shrink from the opening-weekend coverage to a smaller, more specialized conversation among film bloggers and industry newsletters debating whether the softer box office had signalled a broader downturn for mid-budget fantasy adaptations, a conversation that had almost nothing to do, anymore, with the book itself, or with Localad, or with the twenty years he'd spent building a world that had somehow ended up as a footnote in someone else's quarterly earnings discussion.

He thought, during those two days, about everything he had traded to get here. The bookstore's debt, paid off — that part, at least, remained true, a real and permanent good that had come from all of this, whatever else had gone wrong. But he thought, too, about the manuscript itself, the single bound copy he had not seen in over a year, somewhere in an office or a storage unit in this city, uncredited beyond a small line of text beneath a title in a font he hadn't chosen, its story compressed and reshaped and shouted over explosions until the thing that had made it all matter to him, the quiet, hard-won, unresolved grief at its centre that had been erased so thoroughly that a room full of executives had cheered at the moment it should have broken their hearts.

He thought about the restraint clause, and about how the internet had somehow, without his help, found and articulated the exact grief he was forbidden from expressing, and about how strange and lonely it felt to have his own heartbreak accurately described by a stranger while he himself remained legally silent.

He thought, finally, late on the second night, about something Marjory had asked him months earlier, back when the fights still felt winnable: is there still something worth staying for. He understood now, with a clarity that felt less like an epiphany and more like exhaustion finally clearing enough fog to see the shape of things, that the honest answer had been no for a long while. That he had kept staying not because there was something left worth protecting, but because leaving would have meant admitting that the thing he'd protected for twenty years, the proof that he was more than a man who inherited a failing bookstore, had been taken away from him and turned into something he didn't recognize at all, and admitting that felt, for a long time, like admitting he had lost.

He had expected failure to feel like a collapse.

Instead, it felt like being left behind by a parade he had never wanted to join in the first place.

He had not lost the book. He understood that now, sitting in the dark hotel room at two in the morning, three days into a box office disappointment that belonged to a film that was no longer, in any way that mattered, actually his. 

He had lost a fight for control of an adaptation, which was a different thing entirely from losing the thing itself. The book, the actual four hundred and thirty-one handwritten pages, the story of a girl choosing her own sword over her sister's grief, the quiet ending he had been afraid, for two years, to be brave enough to write, still existed. It existed in a drawer back in Meridian Cove, in the original manuscript pages he had never thrown away even after typing them up. It existed, more precisely and more completely than in any draft the studio had ever seen, in his own memory, in the twenty years of work that no rewrite could actually touch, because none of the rewrites had happened to the book. They had only happened to a screenplay that shared its name.

He opened the apartment safe and removed the folder containing his contracts.

Money had saved Harbour & Page. This remained true. The bank balance was clear. The shop still stood. Gratitude and regret, Localad discovered, could occupy the same body without cancelling one another. Human beings were annoyingly capacious that way.

Had he sold his soul though?

The question appealed to his secret grandiosity. A soul was mythic. Selling one involved flames, signatures and a purchaser with excellent cheekbones.

The truth was less impressive however.

He had leased out his confidence in small renewable portions.

A note here. A compromise there. A reasonable adjustment, a commercial necessity, a request to remain collaborative. No single surrender had looked fatal. Together though, they had built a road away from the book, and Localad had regrettably walked it while congratulating himself for staying near the process.

At two in the morning, Localad finally understood something.

The film was not, in any shape or form, the book.

This sounded obvious. It had always been legally, materially and spiritually obvious. But he had allowed the adaptation to become the official version in his own mind, as if the loudest representation automatically inherited the reality.

It did not.

Jasmine remained Jasmine.

The eleven knights remained inconveniently eleven.

The Wound remained open.

No explosion had ever travelled backward through time and fatally altered a single sentence on the original page. Hollywood had not destroyed his book. It had made a different thing entirely and just borrowed the name.

Localad stood, turned on every light in the room and called Priya Reyes there and then. It was nine in the morning, her time, which was the earliest hour he had considered civilised for a legal resurrection. It was the first phone call he'd made in three days that wasn't to Marjory.

"I need you to read my original contract again," he said.

“I have read it,” Priya said.

"Carefully. I need to know exactly what I still own."

"You already know what you own," Priya said. 

"We went through this eighteen months ago. They own the film rights. They own the adaptation, the sequel rights, the merchandising tied to the film's specific characterizations. What they don't own—"

"What don't they own?"

“You own the underlying literary work.”

“In ordinary words please.”

“You own the book.”

The sentence entered him with great warmth.

"The book," Priya repeated, and Localad could hear her flipping pages on the other end of the line, the sound of a document she had clearly, at some point, memorized. “They own motion-picture and adaptation rights,” Priya continued. “They own derivative elements created specifically for the film. They own Brand, as depicted in the picture, the film’s villain, the redesigned mythology and whatever merchandising rights are attached to the six-mouthed creature.”

“Mercifully.”

“They do not own Jasmine. They do not own your original prose. They do not own the right to publish the manuscript you completed before the deal. The publishing rights to the original novel, your manuscript, were never part of the deal. Desmond's team only ever wanted film and adaptation rights. Nobody, at any point in the negotiation, asked for the right to prevent you from publishing your own book, in your own words, exactly as you wrote it."

“So I can publish it myself?”

“Yes.”

“Exactly as written?”

“Yes.”

“No studio approval?”

Priya’s voice sharpened by half a degree, which in Priya constituted a full on firework display.

“Localad, they purchased an adaptation. They did not purchase its history.”

Localad sat up in the illuminated apartment, feeling, for the first time in eighteen months, something that was not exhaustion and was not grief but was, unmistakably, the early, unfamiliar shape of a plan.

For the first time since first arriving in Los Angeles, the apartment windows no longer seemed to contain the city. They merely showed it.

"Then I want to publish it," he said. "The real book. Exactly as I wrote it. No studio notes, no gender-swapped lead, no shouted lines over explosions. I want people to be able to read the actual story. The way it was written."

There was a pause on the line, and when Priya spoke again, there was something in her voice that hadn't been there in months. The specific, careful excitement of a lawyer who has just found a genuinely good use for a clause she'd once negotiated almost as an afterthought.

"Localad," she said, "I think that might be the single best idea you've had since the day you signed that first contract. Finally, you have a plan with no explosions."

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