The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

Note: My apologies to Borges.

The guard approached my cell like it was the last thing he wanted to do. I had gained a Hannibal Lecter kind of rep, and while my past might have earned it, I wasn’t about to make a daring escape set to classical music, killing everybody on the way. I wasn’t going to ever leave this prison. I knew that much for a fact. I looked up at him to see what he wanted.
“Lawyer’s here,” he said.

He tossed in shackles, and I put them on before he opened the cell door. I don’t mind talking to lawyers. They provided company. We walked out of the death row block,  and eventually made it to a private room that could be locked. I sat in a metal chair, across from a lawyer and a pile of papers. Two guards stayed in the room with us. It was procedure.

“Hello, my name is Tom Meyers. I’ve been appointed to direct the appeals process of your case,” he said. He was young.

“No appeals,” I said.

“I’ve noticed a few technicalities of your case that we might be able to use to commute your execution.”

“It won’t stand up. I know.”

“But…” He was confused.

“I did it all. Not entirely like they said in the case, but it was close enough. I wouldn’t sweat the details.”

“You don’t want appeals?”

“Won’t change nothing. You’re the third one they sent. I’ll tell you the same story as the others, and then you’ll go back to your office, have a shot of that 20 year scotch you like so much, then probably another, and then you’ll try to forget me, but you won’t be able to.”

He looked at me funny, wondering how I knew. I smiled back at him to set him more at ease.

“I can’t drop it. The Office of the DA will need a full report,” he said. “Start at the beginning.”

“You’ll see,” I told him.

“There are neighborhoods that are dead ends. You know them. You probably lock the doors when you drive through, if you ever found a reason why you’d have to drive through them. You don’t want to break down there. You don’t want to get off at the Dunton exit on the freeway, that’s why the freeway goes clear past. If you saw my neighborhood in your windshield, you’d turn back. I don’t know what business outsiders have there anyway. And if you were born in a neighborhood like mine, you were dead before you even got started. It’s just a matter of time. You can talk about the crime, the poverty, the drugs, the pollution, they’re all parts of the same beast. The neighborhood is a predator, it’s always stalking you. All around you are its claws and fangs, its hot breath seeping into your lungs, and the sound of its heartbeat that lingers in the back of your mind. It gives you fear. We all live scared there, no matter how much we deny it. Read the rest of this entry »

The Oral History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

By Bryan Lee Peterson

Polonius paced the dressing room space nervously, trying to pull his lines back up from memory. He’d been going like this for the hour since he’d arrived with Fortinbras, who lay asleep on a hard wooden bench.

“And keep these precepts in memory: Look after your…thy character. Give your …thy thoughts no tongue, and no unappropriate thought an act. Be familiar, but in no way vulgar. The friends you have, their adoption tried, Bring them into thy soul, and hold them like steel. Do not dull thy palm with the entertainment of every new hatched, un?edged comrade. Beware entrance to a quarrel; but, finding yourself there, bear it in mind that the opposed may be wary of thee,” Polonius said. He scratched his head and then started over. He’d never been this nervous before a performance in all his time in performance.

“I hardly remember these lines. How long has it been?

Fortinbras lifted his head only enough to directly address Polonius.

“Too long,” he said, and put his head back down. He had large bags under his eyes, they hadn’t let him sleep either.

“I’ve lost track of the last time we did this. When was the last time we were even together? I was in the camp for months, I know. Before that, there was a time where I never saw day or night, and I lost track of time. None of us knew what day it was. There were only days.”

He shook his head.

“I lost track as well. After a while I stopped wondering, it caused too much pain.”

“There are so many lines to recall. Why was I cast as Polonius, anyway? He just goes on and on. He’s a prattler, and I’m not a prattler by nature.”

“Sure you’re not,” Fortinbras said.

“Maybe a bit when I’m nervous.”

“Sure,” Fortinbras said with a sly nod, and a slight wink. “When you’re nervous.”

“But there’s so many lines to remember. It just feels so much like it was another age when we last did this. So much has happened to us.”

“Hm,” Fortinbras grunted in agreement. “Last time we had better accommodations.”

“We’ll never get back to that, will we? This performance can’t possibly change anything for us, right? I’d like to think that we could somehow make it out, but that doesn’t seem very likely.”

“To thine own self be true,” Fortinbras said.

“Is that the next line? I wish I had a book somewhere.” Read the rest of this entry »

Belasco was on the middle step of the staircase, heading down, when he realized that he had forgotten the library book he’d wanted to bring down. Posed with this problem, he asked himself the obvious question, “Is the book I meant to bring closer if I head back up, or if I press ahead?” He could never be too sure. If he went back, it was up, to the left, right, straight, left, no, that’s not it, right, and then another right and into the study. Or maybe those directions would lead him to another dead end. Even if he found the study, there was no guarantee that it would be there. Of course it would be there, the study doesn’t move. He thought of the way if he were to go forward. He didn’t know the way. For all the years that he had lived in this house, he still hadn’t figured out the way forward. “Damn it then, I’ll go forward, and let the winds prevail upon me to find it, whatever it was I was to find.”

He walked down the rest of the steps. He picked up his thoughts where he had left off, which was writing a story in all its grotesque minutia in his head without the words. He was trying to make light of a certain incident between a man, Aldous, and his father, also Aldous, who was dead but speaking to him. The dead Aldous was recriminating the living Aldous for marrying below his status, even though he had done the same. This gave him experience but the son looked past that at the shining smile that was his bride. The younger Aldous was pleading, but what was his plea? Certainly not love. Perhaps indifference. He couldn’t be sure because Aldous and Aldous hadn’t told him the reason yet. Belasco passed the study, but took no note, for it wasn’t the study he was looking for. He looked for the solution.

He went left, right, straight, then left and wound up at a dead end. “Perhaps indifference is not the way to go.” He turned back to the corner, then left again, decided indifference was the way, and there was no dead end. He couldn’t tell if this was the course he had taken a moment before, or not.

Anella was in the kitchen. She had just turned away when Belasco walked by, and didn’t notice him immediately. She had been on the phone with an exasperated editor looking for such and such story that was late as usual, and probably lost in the halls of the house somewhere. Or maybe it was the dean of the university Belasco had attended who now wanted to confer an honorary degree, to make up for unceremoniously expelling him for some shenanigans in more sophomoric years. When she did notice Belasco’s flittering presence, she grabbed his stack of phone messages and ran after him.
Too late, he had rounded a corner, which she rounded, and then a choice, a fork, a fifty-fifty shot, which she had learned she always lost. She returned to the kitchen, all the while muttering, “That man, that man,” in time to answer the phone again. Read the rest of this entry »

In television, the one-hour drama is based on a four act structure. These acts are defined by the commercial breaks in between them, and usually end on a cliffhanger. The series I am working on now started off life as a hour long television drama pitch, and I did quite a bit of analysis of current shows at the time. Your average television scene is two minutes. If you time it, you’ll almost always get a scene break at every two minute mark. The first and second act have about eight scenes each, the third will have six, and the fourth will have ten. I’m sure there’s some marketing reason for this, more so than a writing choice reason. In television, you have to have your four to five commercial breaks.

I think this structure is useful in writing narratives of all sorts. In act one, the protagonist becomes aware of the problem. In act two, the protagonist becomes entangled, and this complicates the problem. In act three, the protagonist tries to solve the problem, and fails, which usually raises the stakes in some way. In act four, the protagonist must overcome all of this to solve the problem.

This formula is what I don’t like with some television shows. I’ll pick on House since it is very popular right now. At first, I really enjoyed this show. The characters were interesting, House was as sardonic as I am, the stakes in the story were very real to the characters in the story. On the other hand, the stories became so formulaic that I could almost set my watch to the patient’s seizures and the mention of lupus. I don’t watch it anymore, but my wife does, so I’m going to flip on my DVR, and as I veg out, I’ll make some plot notes. Then we can go back and do some analysis.

Read the rest of this entry »