Dear diary,
Since, as you know, our story has now surpassed its ultimate conclusion, let us back up a little and explore in greater detail that era when Lord Bryan had just set forth upon his journey to become the Ritz Hotel’s most efficient room-cleaner ever.
Lord Bryan is now the best staff member at the Ritz; for, as soon as he set forth upon his journey to become the most efficient room-cleaner that Caesar Ritz will ever see (Caesar Ritz is the hotel franchise’s owner), without delay, Lord Bryan accomplished his mission, by cleaning many rooms that morning very well. It was an instantaneous success.
Now, returning back to the ending: You will know, if you’ve been following the story (on a side-note, I vowed to stop writing stories after my fourteenth antinovel, but now I find that I’m unable to stop my gentle reader from continuing our shared habit and writing “my” next fake novel all by her herself) — I say, because you’ve been following the story, you know that the main character is two women, Betty and Midge, who comprise UNE FEMME. And I think that Midge is the one who is walking down the hallway of the hotel with Lord Bryan in this famous final scene. It’s hard for me to distinguish one woman from the next because they’re all so dazzling: I’m like a kid in a candy store. Or Lord Bryan is, rather. (I’m trying to distance myself from my alter ego, this time around. — I think I’m doing an OK job.)
At this point, Midge must summon her self-command to refrain from accompanying Lord Bryan into the next hotel room. This is because, when Lord Bryan forces open the door, despite its bolt lock and “Do NOT disturb” sign, its decor and inhabitants appear ineffable. (Most of these rooms are secured from intruders by being locked and barricaded from inside, with the hotel’s furniture physically blocking the entryway; also they have these same “Keep away, custodial personnel: Do NOT clean our room this morning” signs hanging on their door-knobs, because this lodging establishment is known for being a good place to go when you want to embody physical symbols of intimacy with one or more people in private.) However, Midge contains herself as best she can, consoled by the thought that her desire has been entirely satisfied already by this glimpse — for Ein Sof (“The Endlessness”) can manifest as a delay in mirrorage — also, as a bonus, she can hold the present perception in her memory and use it to provide a backdrop for this or that, later.
By the way, the two women who appear in this second-floor room that Lord Bryan now enters with his cart of cleaning supplies are both slender and half-wearing translucent laboratory smocks.
After the hotel door closes, Midge retrieves the wheeled seed-spreader from her cleaning cart and fills it with fertilizer that comes in the form of spherical pellets. She walks at a steady pace, up and down the hallway, until all of the fertilizer has been broadcast. Then she fills the spreader with grass seed and repeats this process. She then uses the elevator to access the hotel’s garage, where she finds a long garden-hose with a sprinkler attached to its terminus. With this hose in her hands, she pilots the elevator back up to the second floor and begins to water the seeds that she just planted. She waters them five times a day, for many days. When her manager questions why she is neglecting her cleaning duties, she replies that she is improving the property’s value. This leaves the manager dumbstruck, because no one can argue with logic.
I forgot to mention that Midge also adds topsoil to the hallway — just enough to cover the patches where you can still see carpet underneath. Soon, small green shoots begin to sprout. Midge loves the feeling of grass growing under her feet. She reclines and observes one of the spears for a few epochs in summer, and then she takes a break for lunch. Lord Bryan has packed her a sandwich with tomatoes from their neighbor Sally’s garden. “Mmm, so good!” Midge exclaims aloud involuntarily, in a non-human language. One of the birds in the rafters hears her and flutters down to listen to more of Midge’s bird-talk. Midge tells this feathered friend all about her grass-growing experiment in the Ritz Hotel hallway and how well it worked. The little birdie sings a song in praise of Midge.
While all the above is transpiring, Lord Bryan is gainfully employed cleaning hotel rooms while loose women chase him in vain. This is fun for all — the damsels don’t mind that they can never manage to get this staffer onto the bed with them; and Lord Bryan himself finds that the challenge of avoiding the ladies’ endless attempts at ambushing his majesty heighten the challenge of performing his cleaning dharma; which he always accomplishes to the satisfaction of all parties (from the unclothed females who comprise the hotel’s customership, to the suits in upper management), in each and every hotel room. He takes pride in his work. Lord Bryan never fails, when finished with a job, to halt momentarily at the exitway’s threshold, salute the inhabitants, and apologize for the disturbance; noting that he had entirely missed seeing the “Do NOT disturb” sign before breaking in.
When pushing his cleaning-supplies cart over the newly grown soft grass in the hotel’s hallway, moving from one room to the next, Lord Bryan now passes a small lift-boy who is polishing brass fittings. Bryan stops abruptly and gasps and places his hand on his heart, as if he’s about to pledge allegiance to the Ritz Hotel Flag. He addresses the lift-boy directly in a voice trembling with emotion:
“Are you whistling the latest air with a good deal of vigour and a reasonable amount of accuracy?”
The lift-boy shrugs, “I guess so.”
“The tune that you have chosen to grate upon your scrannel pipe reminds me of my true love, whose name is UNE FEMME.”
The lift-boy voices wisdom: “Then you should maybe stop wasting your time with these hotel floozies and go enter into a state-and-church-approved wedlock with Midge and Betty.”
Parrying wisdom for wisdom, Lord Bryan outmaneuvers his Adversary, shouting: “Get thee behind me, Lawyer — for all these lovely dames that you call ‘floozies’ are every bit as much the zelem of UNE FEMME as my favorite flames.”
Lord Bryan now hefts a giant boulder with the intent of crushing the lift-boy beneath it, but, at that very moment, his co-worker Betty happens to walk around the corner into the hotel hallway pushing her own cleaning-supplies cart that is heaping with neatly bound sheaves of unperformed teleplays — she stops and gasps and delivers her line: “Don’t do that yet — for we shall have no way of operating the lift.”
Lord Bryan turns while still holding the enormous boulder overhead (like Atlas hefting Earth) and addresses his beloved friend: “But I myself know how to operate the lift; and so does Midge, and Ms. Kubelik.”
Betty thinks for a moment, hoping to hit upon a comeback to this scripted bit of dialogue; but, as it is written: one cannot argue with sound logic; therefore she bows and murmurs “Fine.”
Lord Bryan prepares to thrust the boulder down onto the lad, but at the last moment he suffers a qualm of conscience: Bryan ultimately lets the rock tumble from his arms in a direction that does not hit any of the actors in this scene. The stone crashes thru the floor and presumably annihilates tens of extras who are living in the floor beneath this one; but that does not matter, cuz the people who are slain are all inhabitants of foreign nations that the U.S.A. is at war with. (Nations whose names are hard to pronounce.)
“Thank you for coming to your senses,” Betty weeps and hugs Lord Bryan.
“Yes, and thank you for saving my life,” ad-libs the lift-boy.
Lord Bryan shakes his head at this boy who is his co-actor in this scene. He still cannot find anything to like about the lad. But he’ll keep trying.
Now Bryan looks deep into the eyes of his friend and lover: “Ms. Schaefer,” he sez, “forget striking — strikes don’t work: that much we have learned; at least Midge and I learned it, when we went on strike and then the corporation turned murderous — instead, let us altogether QUIT our jobs at this ritzy hotel and go do something else with the life that God has blessed us with.”
“I am in total agreement with the terms of your offer,” Betty answers with robotic sarcasm.
Bryan and Betty both share a laugh.
The lift-boy leaves.
Lord Bryan and Betty and Midge now enter the elevator. Bryan programs the vessel to take them to the enemy’s camp.
“Where are we headed?” asks Betty, looking up from her typewriter while scanning the text of the screenplay that she is still putting some final touches on.
“A place that is filled with people that we all despise,” Lord Bryan voices heroically.
With a dramatic gesture, Midge now flings open the left and right side panels of the elevator, exposing a small enameled bridge that leads into the distance. “Look! Do you know what this is?”
It was extremely unlikely that Lord Bryan would have any knowledge of where the three of them are headed, since he really does not know how to program elevators: he was only winging it, when he claimed to be pressing the right buttons in that earlier scene — he was flying by the seat of his pants, with his black cape flapping on auto-pilot, hoping that any erroneous movements he made would be fixed during the editing stage. The reason he pretended to own more expertise than belonged to him was simply to impress UNE FEMME. Indeed, it would have been fatal for Lord Bryan to reveal his actual plans (I mean the ones that had been collecting dust in his head from before his birth), since the bridge in question — the one that we’re all gazing at now in this present special-effect shot, which is probably just a matte painting — was the device of a local training corps originated by the archdeacon of his preferred Social Network in the early days of the Internet. Its presence in Lord Bryan’s adventure indicates that nobody, not even the film-crew, knows what comes next.
Midge had started painting flowers a day or two before, all along its expanse, so the bridge is very beautiful; but it’s still scary cuz nobody has ever crossed it. Yet Betty has sharp eyes, and she notes that there is a threepenny detective novel protruding from Lord Bryan’s breast-pocket. Betty’s facial expression upon noticing this fact causes Bryan to follow her eyeline forth to its aim and recall that he placed the paperback there before his shift started this morning.
“Have you espied my entertainment?” Bryan slides the book out of his pocket. “I was planning on reading this during my smoke breaks; I found it under the pillow, in the bedroom of one of the hotel guests — I think they might have been using it as a diary, despite the fact that it’s written in the style of an airport novel,” he sez, casually flipping its aging pages. “Its title is FISH SLIDES WORM OFF HOOK.” Bryan points to those words, which are printed on the cover. “It’s about how the smartest mermaids in the sea have learned to avoid biting the bait along with the hook that is dangled before their face by the fishermen above, since this results in their being dragged up into heaven: instead, they carefully take hold of the line and pull the fishermen down to THEM, and then they—”
“I know what the book is about,” interjects Betty; “I’ve read it numerous times, with pleasure.”
So all three of us step out of the elevator and onto the bridge. We traverse its full length, even tho it is terrifying because it’s so high up and has no railings, plus its floor is covered with poisonous snakes who are indifferent to us as long as we don’t crush their heads.
When the trio of Lord Bryan and UNE FEMME reaches the far side of the bridge, they encounter a stairway. Once they reach the top step, the landscape is flat.
“Don’t look back,” Midge gestures urgently, “but the police are chasing us.”
We all look back and see that the bridge, which we traversed to get to this lofty flat land at the top of the stairs, is crawling with cops.
“That’s OK; let them come,” Lord Bryan smiles. “The more, the merrier.”
“But aren’t they going to arrest us, toss us in jail and administer torments?” Midge is concerned.
“No, they’ll like us,” Lord Bryan assures her; “we’re enjoyable to journey with.”
“But then what’s their motivation for coming?” asks Betty, after which she types a number of keys on her manual typewriter corresponding to the amount of characters that it would take to write out in longhand her present inquiry. “Why would they be pursuing us as fast as possible, if all they wanted to do is be our friends?”
Lord Bryan’s countenance now falls. “Oh thou of small faith,” he sez to Betty, who keeps typing measuredly while all this dialogue is being spoken; “wouldn’t you yourself rather run than walk, if you sighted a trinity of friendly looking travelers, like the three of us, up ahead on the road, at the end of a bridge that leads to a staircase?”
Now the police force arrives and yells thru their bullhorn: “Greetings. Please state your business here.”
“We’re on a mission to find some fun way to kill time,” Lord Bryan states honestly.
“We like the sound of that,” sez the woman with the bullhorn. “Do you mind if we join you?”
“Not at all,” sez Lord Bryan.
So the cops join the book. And our trinity soon discovers that this entire police force is played by my readership (or I should say OUR readership, since you’re the one composing this tale, dear gentle reader). The subsequent action sequence leads to a verbal exchange where you admit that you were saddened by the fact that I, the author, seem lately to have forgotten that my alter ego, Lord Bryan, had, in the earlier chapters, married YOU, not Betty and Midge; or at least alongside Betty and Midge. So we all apologize and bring you and your audience along with us in the form of a whole bunch of cops.
While we’re sprinting to the next oasis, Midge whispers in my ear: “Mark my words, Lord Bry: I wouldn't wonder if these police were placed here by the author to seduce us, because they’re all one single female whose badge reads UNE FEMME; and she’s a stunner to look at, ain’t she?”
“You are correct,” replies Lord Bryan while running at top speed and sipping a martini.
Now our trio and their accompanying legion of policewomen finally reach their destination: a vast mountain of emeralds.
“Is this the famous Emerald City, from The Wizard of Oz (1939)?” sez one of the policewomen. “Them’s the green stones, isn’t they?”
“Yes, but now, after a lengthy battle scene with us in our flying saucer (the one where we bested the bad Saint Johns in their jet, which then nosedived into the fire-marsh), it has become simply a mountain of emerald rubble,” explains Betty in a lengthy span of expository dialogue.
Midge nods in agreement.
“What did we come here for?” asks another of the policewomen who are all played by different versions of you, O gentle reader.
Lord Bryan shrugs and shakes his head.
“It seems very familiar to me,” sez UNE FEMME.
“That’s cuz you played the Good Witch who helped to guide our missiles,” the legion of female cops remind UNE FEMME of her supernal, pre-life career in showbiz.
Lord Bryan ignites two sparkler sticks, to give the shot some visual interest beyond his ever-flapping cape. “This is the finest collection of green jewels in the world,” he gestures swirlingly with the sparklers, highlighting the mass of gems before them. “It must be worth a whole hillock of grass!”
Betty rolls her eyes while suppressing a smile and then rests her forehead against her typewriter, knowing that, instead of “a whole hillock (etc…)” the script told Bryan to say “a field of grassy hills extending beyond the infinite, which is what we shall make of it; then we shall wander here happily ever after.”
Now Midge gets an idea — she taps Lord Bryan on the shoulder: “See here, Bry, I think I just had a creative breakthrough. How would it be if you found out that you’ve been playing your character’s own ancestor, who is his forerunner and mentor, so that you might legally inherit this place. You get me?"
“I’m in full agreement,” sez Lord Bryan instantly. “You leave it to me, Midge, and I’ll fix this thing up in two ticks…”
“Wait, wait!” sez Betty, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but wouldn’t it be better if we just keep the heap of gems as our finale, implying that we managed to raze the Emerald City, and left it bombed-out and destroyed, thus having managed literally to kill money!? — I don’t think it would add anything to our film if we were to introduce a murdered god who needs to then sign a release to act as his own non-murdered savior in some prequel or whatever.”
“She has a point,” sez Lord Bryan. He folds his revised screenplay into an origami jet; then, once all the Saint Johns that he dislikes have climbed aboard, he tosses it into the marsh of fire where it joins the false prophet.
Midge agrees that she let her sense of self-amusement get the best of her. “Sorry,” she sez.
Then the book comes to an end that pleases everyone. Its cover is closed, and its enigma is buttoned shut. However, the policewomen now begin snooping around for new clues, in hopes of reopening the case.
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