The biggest mistake of my life was heckling a puppet show. And it wasn’t even a particularly good heckle. It was one of the early Punch and Judy shows in Italy with the Medici family still running the place. Punch was being the usual amount of abusive to Judy, and the fine art of motor control in puppets was still about a century away from passable, being the dumb young person I was, I shouted something about “Poor Humors.” That’s the thing, I can’t even remember the heckle. Just something about “poor humors” that I thought was hilarious and simply must be shared with the world.
The second biggest mistake of my life was not immediately running away.
“Can you at least humor me and try and enjoy the movie?” Francesca asked leaning over to me in the theater. We were about to watch the newest installment of Project Enceladus. Oh, you haven’t heard? It’s only the highest grossing, highest rated, highest decorated film series of all time. It makes Deadalus Awakes look like Space Jam 6. Yeah, it’s that big of deal. We sat suspended by wisps of silent air so it feels like we’re floating in the story. The “screen” as we called it in the 20th century, wraps fully around and above and below the audience. It’s a big globe, a world of stories. That’s probably why they call the theater “The Globe” (though it smells much better than the original, trust me on that one).
“If the movie is good, I’ll be good.” I’ve slipped back into my old heckling ways the last few years, but can you blame me? After about a thousand years of media and stories, they become a bit… stale. A bit predictable. Sure, I could just stop watching them and live life among the stars like the captains of those star vessels. And maybe given this necromancer’s curse I could’ve done something with my existence. But I tried being a doctor for a century. Tried amassing a great fortune another. At the end of the day, I just liked hanging out around town and watching movies. Though even that’s turned to ashes in my mouth. Great. “I bet you that Hyde stabs Sjoed in the back. Literally. Hyde will stab Sjoed in the back with something sharp, watch!”
Francesca hit me hard in the chest and the slap even echoed in the theater. “Well maybe some of us want to be surprised and enjoy it! I swear, I don’t know why I still go to these things with you.”
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Punch (or was it Judy, I can’t remember) froze in the middle of the show and stared directly at me. There were probably two dozen people crammed around this little stage on the cobblestone street – entertainment being difficult to come by in the 1630s – and now I have a good idea how the puppet saw me, but then I figured I was just seeing things. I wasn’t.
“Did the puppet maker forget to make you a felt tongue?” I shouted at the silent puppet. The crowd chuckled a little and it felt like I was doing well. The puppet slowly descended behind the stage, and as the little thing went down, its handler came up. Eyes more blue than the sea with a thick beard that came from some monster from the mountains. The crowd lurched backwards. Never would anyone imagine the playful voices from the puppets came from this type of character.
The puppet master pointed a finger with a horrendously long nail (honestly, how did he use puppets with fingernails the length of their forearm?) and muttered clearly at me, “You’re not as clever as half, clever man. And you’ll realize that before the end. For now I curse you until a lesson is learned. You clever man.”
“Aw, you think I’m clever!”
The audience didn’t chuckle this time.
Hyde stabbed Sjoed in the back with a spike from an iron meteorite and Francesca left me at the theater. She was my 18th serious partner since that Necromancer cursed me, I’m assuming I’ll be looking for a 19th before I get home. I can’t blame her, just the stories that I used to absolutely love aren’t the same after ten centuries. Or rather they’re exactly the same.
I remember standing in Globe Theater. Not the four they’ve rebuilt since the fires, flooding, that one time it was accidently infested with cockroaches, but the actual Globe where you could see the Bard himself muttering the lines under his breath behind the curtains. It stank, of course, not the plays or acting (though a little over the top if I’m being critically honest) but the venue itself. Have you ever jammed three hundred people into an enclosed space in the 1630s? And this wasn’t even France where at least they had the decency to try and cover up their stenches with other flowery kind of stenches. Even those stories felt a little… familiar.
I’m rambling. That tends to happen.
Globe Theater. Shakespeare. I moved there after the Punch and Judy affair. I never saw that necromancer lurking about anywhere. It helps that I steered clear of every puppet stage that popped up in the street, but I just never felt comfortable in the city again. I certainly stopped heckling. Though with the printing press exploding across Europe, I had a grander stage to be critical. I found I could make a living being a play critic. Every twenty years or so, I’d “retire” only to come back twenty years later with a new pen name and new scorching reviews. I was everyone’s favorite person at parties.
It was great fun reading the first drafts of Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Bronte, Poe, Dickens, I was even in the audience for that first moving picture when those poor souls jumped out of the way of the train. I called that one “predictable” since the train was fixed on tracks. It could only go one way, people.
Sorry. Rambling.
I’ll probably call Project Enceladus predictable, too. Afterall, I did predict the ending.
I’m just tired. I think if I stopped being such an ass, maybe that necromancer curse will be lifted and I can finally die. I’ve wanted to die so many times watching the same twists and surprised in theaters. I just can’t help myself.
I need to heckle as much as I want to die.
The New Martian 