Angelina lives in a crappy apartment in LA, scraping together a living as the writer for the online gossip tabloid, I Spy. Her photography counterparts stalk minor and/or ageing celebrities in various states of normalcy and it's Angie's job to come up with the slightly seedy or lurid byline.
Her boyfriend is a real estate agent in California. It might not need to be said that he has fallen on hard times. However it is worth saying that he has fallen back into the bottle, and stopped going to AA meetings. His contribution to rent is inconsistent, as is his appearance at her crappy LA apartment. What prevents Angelina from tossing him out, apart from a nearly paralyzing inability to face conflict? Sober, he's a fantastic lover. Drunk? A 230 pound snoring couch-hog.
Everything changes for her when one day, smoking a cigarette on her balcony and trying to find some way to make a plumber's-butt shot of Ruth McLanahan (aka Blanche Devereaux on the Golden Girls) into anything more than a tasteless "before her stroke" statement, a muscle-stimulating 180 volt lip curler appears in thin air at waist height and drops to the ground in front of her.
Over the next week this happens three more times; she is present for only one other - a plastic necklace of muted pastel beads. Two items arrive at night while she is sleeping and she wakes to find a single scuffed black boot, size 187 (rough equivalent men's size 9), and a package of rice milk crackers with an expiration date in 2031.
Despite her celebrity connections, many of Angie's friends are nerds and it isn't long before several of them have come up with the Wormhole Theory of How Things Appear On Angie's Balcony. They also hypothesize about the names and functions of the items, based on a wide array of experimentation, hand-waving, passionate intellectual conversation, and google searches. The lip curler, luckily, came in a box with instructions, otherwise it's hard to be certain what body parts might have ended up in a six hour state of shock-induced spasm. Converting the current into something pluggable-into-a-wall to confirm the efficiency of the device took two MIT graduates and a soldering iron but it works exactly as advertised. The most compelling support for the wormhole 25-years-into-the-future theory is isotope testing performed by a grad student at UCLA.
If this were a Hollywood film, the military would have descended on Angelina's apartment by now in order to study how to turn the source of 25 years-in-the-future objects into a weapon. But this is my dream, and instead Angie becomes a minor celebrity gracing the cover of I Want To Believe, a glossy specializing in the paranormal, alongside her sober-that-day-recently-coiffed boyfriend. Someone else writes the byline for that interview; she lands a paid daily blog about the objects that arrive on her balcony and then makes enough money selling them on ebay that she could move out of her apartment if she wanted to. She doesn't.
Normally I don't nap in the middle of the afternoon. Dozed off for a five minute shuteye at three and woke up at exactly 420, having presumably passed through the middle of area 51.
No comments:
Post a Comment