IGMS Issue 49 (18 page)

The noise from Mondarath had eased, and the balconies were empty on the towers all around us. I felt both entirely alone and as if the eyes of the city were on me.

I lifted my chin and smiled, letting everyone behind their shutters know I wasn't afraid, when they were. I panned with our scope, searching the sky. A watchman. A guardian.

And I saw it. It tore at my aunt's gnarled trees, then shook loose the ladder down to Nat's. It came straight at me fast and sure: a red rip in the sky, sharp beak edges toothed with ridge upon ridge of glass teeth. Limbs flowed forward like thick tongues.

I dropped the scope.

The mouth opened wider, full of stench and blood.

I felt the rush of air and heard the beat of surging wings, and I screamed. It was a child's scream, not a woman's. I knew I would die in that moment, with tears staining my tunic and that scream soiling my mouth. I heard the bone horns of our tower's watch sound the alarm: We were unlucky once more.

My scream expanded, tore at my throat, my teeth.

The skymouth stopped in its tracks. It hovered there, red and gaping. I saw the glittering teeth and, for a moment, its eyes, large and side-set to let its mouth open even wider. Its breath huffed thick and foul across my face, but it didn't cross the last distance between us. My heart had stopped with fear, but the scream kept on. It spilled from me, softening. As the scream died, the skymouth seemed to move again.

So I hauled in a deep breath through my nose, like we were taught to sing for Allmoons, and I kept screaming.

The skymouth backed up. It closed its jaws. It disappeared into the sky, and soon I saw a distant ripple, headed away from the city.

I tried to laugh, but the sound stuck in my chest and strangled me. Then my eyes betrayed me. Darkness overtook the edges of my vision, and white, wavy lines cut across everything I saw. The hard slats of the shutters counted the bones of my spine as I slid down and came to rest on the balcony floor.

My breathing was too loud in my ears. It roared.

Clouds. I'd shouted down a skymouth and would still die blue-lipped outside my own home? I did not want to die.

Behind me, Nat battered at the shutters. He couldn't open them, I realized groggily, because my body blocked the door.

Cold crept up on me. My fingers prickled, then numbed. I fought my eyelids, but they won, falling closed against the blur that my vision had become.

I thought for a moment I was flying with my mother, far beyond the city. Everything was so blue.

Hands slid under my back and legs. Someone lifted me. The shutters squealed open.

Dishes swept from our table hit the floor and rolled. Lips pressed warm against mine, catching my frozen breath. The rhythm of in and out came back. I heard my name.

When I opened my eyes, I saw the Singer's gray robes first, then the silver lines of his tattoos. His green eyes. The dark hairs in his hawk nose. Behind him, Elna wept and whispered, "On your wings, Singer. Mercy on your wings."

He straightened and turned from me. I heard his voice for the first time, stern and deep, telling Elna, "This is a Singer concern. You will not interfere."

Accept the mystery

On 'The Leftovers' and our often-misguided quest for answers

There's a lot to be said for not knowing.

In both life and art (to whatever extent the two can be separated), it's in our nature to search for, even demand, answers. In both cases, I'm not so sure it's in our best interest to actually find them. The reductive way to put this is that answers, in and of themselves, are meaningless. Or, if not meaningless, then certainly much more limited in their capacity to illuminate than we seem to give them credit for.

For the sake of this argument, let's narrow the art down just to cinema and television, mediums with a historically tricky relationship with the distinction between answers and meaning, and the unnecessary conflation of the two. Here, we commonly think of answers in terms of plot resolutions and character motivations. But
direct
answers like that are inherently inadequate. The crime was solved, the item was found, this or that team won, the couple did or did not get together. So what. Movies and TV shows (individual episodes and longer, serialized arcs alike), by default, have a way of organizing their ideas in such a way that reduces them to a simple answer to a question or a simple solution to a problem. There's something intrinsically false about the tidy way they tend to wrap things up - which isn't necessarily a negative, just an observation. In any case, the best ones use those answers in service of a greater, more interesting end; for lesser ones, the direct answer
is
the point. And for many, that's enough. They followed a story and found out what happened at the end of it. Fine.

But ultimately, that doesn't really get it done, does it? No solved case or resolved plot can get to the bottom of anything. It's the
search
for answers - the thinking, the questioning, the speculating, the philosophizing - that's ultimately meaningful. The journey rather than the destination, to paraphrase the old cliche.

Few pieces of storytelling have understood - even embraced, in a sort of backwards way - this dichotomy better or more profoundly than HBO's
The Leftovers
, which recently concluded its second season and affirmed its status as probably the best drama on television. (Especially now that
Hannibal
and
The Knick
may be over.) This is a show fundamentally built on a premise that
begs
to be explained: Two percent of the world's population instantaneously disappears without a trace. In most incarnations, that would be the starting point for a long-running mystery. The show would revolve around it. Every character would be trying to answer it. We'd spend episode after episode uncovering - and discarding - clues to it, and eventually working our way toward an explanation that, let's face it, would satisfy very few.

The version of the show we got instead is the exact opposite. Not only has the show, through two seasons (with one left to come), refused to explain what "caused" the Sudden Departure, but co-creators Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta (upon whose novel the show is based) have made it clear they have no intention of doing so. This runs so contrary to how many consume fiction -
especially
serialized television - that the show's existence is practically a miracle. But its greatness underscores the utter flimsiness that any other approach to this story would provide. If Lindelof and Perrotta had decided to provide an answer for us - to reveal what
exactly
happened that day - it would ultimately be little more than trivia.

To be clear,
The Leftovers
- which begins three years
after
the event took place - is not simply trying to be mischievous or confrontationally withholding; it simply finds (correctly) much greater truth in everything
but
the "answer" to this particular mystery. The Departure is, for all intents and purposes, a MacGuffin. Instead of treating it like a puzzle and trying to solve it, the show focuses on characters - some who lost loved ones in the Departure, some who didn't - existing in a world in which the inexplicable has happened. Without the requirement for, or expectation of, a definitive answer, the show becomes entirely about the search for meaning, or order, or purpose; about the big questions we ask in the face of tragedy or loss, ambiguous or otherwise; about the lengths and depths we will go in order to understand. Or, as the case may be, control, or atone, or recover, or forget, or remember.

While the show itself has resisted the need for hard answers, it embraces the human need to search for them anyway. Both seasons are filled with details and subplots about new religions and philosophies and scientific theories that have sprung up as a result of the Departure, and designed to find a reason for it all. In season two, for example, one team of researchers seems convinced that it's a matter of geography, and that the supposed anomaly stands a good chance of occurring once again.

Most prominent, though, is the cult-like Guilty Remnant, a group of silent, chain-smoking pests dressed all in white, who present themselves as "living reminders" of the Sudden Departure. Their presence and their behavior throughout the series has been chilling and vile, but they've certainly made a sort of point - to us and to everyone they so smugly, placidly confront with their very presence.

Despite the aberrant actions the group takes, the show doesn't simply let them become one-dimensional villains - there's too much empathy for the very human reasons the group and its methods sprouted in the first place. Even in season two, when we see former Remnant members leaving the group, their "rehabilitation" doesn't really take unless, and until, it's replaced by something else. Some other belief system. Something that fills that void, that provides the kind of purpose and direction they sought in the aftermath of the Departure. (In this case, it's one character falsely co-opting the supposed "miracle" of a faith-healer - Holy Wayne - who appeared throughout season one.)

The Leftovers
is as naked a testament to the human experience as anything I've seen on television, and it's largely because of the way it reflects - through, and in response to, a genre conceit - realities about the way we make meaning of our lives, particularly in the face of what we cannot ever truly understand or process. The characters on the show suffer sudden, instant and unexplained loss - but
all
of us similarly experience loss, and even though we typically have more explicit knowledge about what happened - and when, and how - that does not make it any easier to understand or reconcile. There is no ultimate answer or reason that we can ever unequivocally know; sooner or later that's the conclusion that confronts us. And if
we
don't get any kind of conclusive answer in life, why should any fictional character?

It was not long after the finale to
The Leftovers
' spectacular second season aired that I lost someone of transcendent importance to my life, and even up to this very moment I have no mechanism to process this, or find any conclusive meaning to it. I suspect I never will. It certainly wasn't as mysterious as anyone's Departure, but I'm no more at ease or comfort, nor have any greater sense of understanding, than any of those characters whose lives were so puzzlingly turned upside down.

Part of the problem is that so many of the questions that spring to mind, cosmic or otherwise, are intrinsically irrational. For me, the questions were despairing, bordering on angry. I found myself wondering what right I had to keep on, for instance, watching football, or going to the movies, or going to work, or doing anything that might be considered normal in a life that now seemed anything but. I wondered why there was still laughter. I wondered why anything that was should still be.

In looking back on the show, I realized that for the first time I understood - even empathized with - the Guilty Remnant in an unexpected way. Not in terms of methods or any kind of belief system; rather I found myself, in the days and weeks after this life-changing event, upset at the thought of the continuation of normalcy, and all of a sudden the thought of a constant, "living reminder" began to make a strange sort of sense.
I
wanted to remind everyone, too. I wanted to remind myself.

One of the most notable things about
The Leftovers
, particularly its nebulous approach to the central mystery, is that its showrunner, Lindelof, is the same man behind
Lost
, the often-brilliant series that ended in such maddening fashion six years ago. The failures of that show's finale seemed - and still seem - like a weirdly miscalculated response to the conventional need for closure and explanation, two issues he's so gracefully avoided on
The Leftovers
.
Lost
's endgame was staggeringly banal - too clean, too tidy, too obvious. Too simplistic an idea. And yet I understand that the show would have risked an even more antagonistic reaction had it gone in a completely wild and/or cagier, more abstract direction. Maybe with those stakes, it was a lose/lose.

At any rate,
The Leftovers
seems like the antidote. And still, there will be those who desperately want an explanation when all is said and done. For many, the show was frustrating enough as it was, and the continued lack of closure to the show's core, narrative catalyst - the basis for the entire world it inhabits - will only add to that. But, by avoiding that (at least through two years), this show is meaningful in a way that
Lost
's finale prevents it from being.

In discussions of this nature, it's only natural for minds to wander to perhaps the most divisive ending of all,
The Sopranos
. As a long-time passionate defender of the way David Chase ended the series, I've never understood - expected, yes; understood, no - the apparent need, for some, of a definitive conclusion. (Especially because the show was never especially plot-driven anyway.) If Tony had simply gotten killed, or gone to jail, or joined witness protection ... OK, but ultimately, who cares? What possible purpose would such a clean resolution, on its own terms, provide? Even if the implication is, or might be, that he died in that diner (as various references during that season, and visual cues in the final scene, may suggest), the cut to black is so much more interesting and dramatically rewarding because it's
not
about simply what did or did not happen. It asks us to consider so many implications and possibilities; there's so much more to chew on with the focus directed
away
from his ultimate fate. A scene in which someone shoots Tony in the head tells us nothing. The scene in that diner tells us everything.