X kneels in front of the TV in her streetclothes unconvinced. A new show unfolds. Style and alluring Science Fiction mind games, said the TV Guide On-Line. The recent immages and of commercials reveberate, as a series of flashing immages. The sound was down, but a 4 Wheel Drive SUV had, spun it’s wheels and driven from a post impressionist painting.

The picture now, reveals nocturnal blue light flickering, as the camera’s eye lingeringly washes over a dark and quiet apartment. Credits, created by, music by... fade in and away from the screen. The camera stays on a drift of air blowing delicate white curtains into the room, ushered by the subtle fade in of a horn, siren, a dog’s bark... Stray city sounds emerge artistically like the first unaccompanied instruments in a some Syphony. She smiles pleasently at this stock film immage none the less. The screen reveals the a woman abed. Only a single soft sheet is covering her, arranged as to show her curve. "Magic Girl...?" again falls from into the room and Magic Girl stirs. She turns in her bed, the wind gusts into the room, rippeling across the sheet, across her lanky body. She bolts up, alarmed, as if seeing something hanging in the air before her. She’s wearing a boutique, thin, white neglege with a slight sheen to it. The camera exploits her chizzled cheekbones, thin neck, muscled shoulders, the curve of breasts. Calming down, she looks around. Bad dream she seems to think, smiling slightly.

[X wished she could look like, could have someone like that. She both regrets this for societal reasons and resents her regrets. In her surroundings, esthetics are important to her, so why not with herself, with people.]

"M-A-G-I-C G-I-R-L...!"

She Jumps from bed.

Looks around, a horn blows and the canned sounds of the city fade in. It calms her, she’s not panicked, walking to the window, she peers out, but the phone rings.

"Maggie,." a mans haggard voice.

"Yeah." She looks confused sleepy.

"I need to see you."

"Who-"

"It’s Jim."

Who’s Jim, her expression seems to say, but "Jim," she repeats. "Where are you?"

"The Berlin Wall."

Silence.

"The club."

She gets it. "OK... I’ll be right over."

And there’s a swish, and Maggie appears, disoriented at the door of the club. She looks half as if she’s just fresh from a cab ride and half as if this is just implied travel, as if a line of black just seperated her from the last scene. She’s dressed in a short tight black dress, black tights with patterns of vines, thorns’s and roses? The door opens out with a crowd of laughting people washing around her. She’s still disoriented, pushed back a few steps, looks over her left shoulder and pushes into the club, where the Thick Thump-Thump-Thump of the beat of the Middleastern/house music, gushes unevenly from the crackeling speaker of X’s TV set, who had settled back on the couch by now points the remote, and lowers the volume.

The imposing bouncer, behind his standing desk, holds a licence up to a lazer, hands it back to a woman and the blue light flashes in his eye.

"Maggie, his happy gravely voice declares. He hugs, enfolding her. She’s startled, shies away, but surrenders and he releases her as if satified. "go get a drink on me." He launches her down a corridore, past an artsy assortment of black clad people, wild and alien, otherworldly, or thirdworldly. They looked as if they shopped, and had their hair done in Soho, but interwoven with tribal beeds. They had the wirey, lean and hungary look of the third world poor, Bali, Jacarta, Mogadischu, Tunis, Hati. Their voices conformed, with spoken French, English accented with melodies of unmembered languages. She avoids a screaming man’s flailing arms, shies from another happy man’s manic laughter. The camera haults a few beats on a on a couple’s kissing, the man’s hand moving up slowly a toast brown thigh of an Indian woman’s leg. M takes two steps back. Commerical and X runs to her bedroom to change into her sweats. She haults in front of a row of TV screens. It’s snowing, a man’s wandering in a fury of white. He staggers to a hault, looking down his hands. "THE SNOWFLAKES ARE ALL THE SAME!!!"

X’s phone rings.

"Damn..."

She fumbles for the VCR, takes from it a tape, puts in another, recording over something else important that she had missed.

"Hi..."

He sounds despondnt, sad.

"Hi..."

"What are you doin-"

"Nothing really."

"Grande Non-Fat Late?" Grande Hazlenut mocca.

Nn

Inperminance

X hung up the phone, agitated by the conversation. Meaningless, and she was getting into the show. What, twenty minutes had passed, a half an hour? She didn’t know.

She unmuted the TV. It laughed at her in a bimbo’s cackle. [shrill] Maggie the TV character, looked harrowed, disterbed, distraught. She slumped at the bar.

X remembers glancing up at at M dancing in the strobe lights, more of a servant to phisics, or fate than an artistic participant.

"Maggie!" exclaimed the bartender, he extended a mechanical(?), yes a mechanical arm forward for a handshake. It had buzzed with the sound of internal gears, the straning of electricity.

We’re in the future?, X thought.

The stock look of noncognition, fell across M’s face and than a delayed flushing of recognition. "Sarge!" she exclaimed back, as if he were the first comfortable place she had gone that day.

"I heard you were here... been hideing from old Sarge?" He slide her a tall glass of dark rich foamy ale, the camera linger’s on it slow flow over the sides.

Too artsy... This show’s gonna fail... ... I like it. Indigo jumps up on the couch, sliding into her prone hand.

"The boss wants to see you," he says gravely.

Dazed disrecognition seperated by a thin line of dread. She sips her ale, wipes the foam from her lips and the camera looks at the door at the side of the bar. Imperminance, it read, coming into focus, as M’s Pov approaches. Commercial.

Damn...

[office scene]

M’s POV fades back almost to the beginning credits of the show. The room’s different, but the lighting’s the same. She’s abed, but a young girl now, and "Magic girl" again falls into the room. The young, beuatiful, delicate M stirrs. She heard her door open, watched [past tense now?] a shadow moving across her pink carpet. A man’s voice, "Maggie?" He says gentally reaching out her hand, which seems to be that of her fathers, but the camera soon reveales the face of "The Boss" from the previous scene.

He takes her on a tour through her home, still holding her hand. His black treanchcoat flutters behind him, down the stairs, through the foyer, living room, kitchen, den. Golf clubs lean in a bag next to the door. He lets go of her hand taking one out. "You see this all Maggie?" The camera sees him from down low. He towers. He gestures widely with the golf club through the dark, wide, white, modern, space of the spacious den.

M knodds tentitively. She’s cute, in a white, pink flowered nightgown barefoot, the camera towers above her, she looks small, vunerable.

His voice raises. "It’s all temporary,’ he said grandly. "This is the best you will ever have, and the rest of your miserable life will be pain.... Do you like that, Maggie?’

She knodds her head in a cautious no," The camera spies on her from ever higher up.

"When Zen monks go away some of the other Zen monks build a delicate piece of artwork, sprinkling coloured sand on the floor in beuatiful intricate patterns." The camera flashes to shaven headed monks in orange robes sprinkling sand over a colourful, pattern on the ground, as if to illustrate the point, and swings back to M. "When they come home, the artictic bald monks then wipe it away in one fell careless swoop." He swoops the golfclub to illustrate. "You know why they do that Maggie?" He’s almost yelling now.

Why aren’t her parents waking up. He her dad?

He takes her hand again and with the other swings the club, smashing a vase on the black grand piano. "Imperminance!" He yells grandly, pulling her back through the house the way they came, smashing things all the way. "All things, Maggie, are temporary, this house,’ Smash "This TV set" Smash. They go up the stairs, she stumbles, but he pulls her up. He dropps the golf club and a shot gun materializes in his hand, from benieth his raincoat. He opens a door at the end of the hall, and presumably her parents spring up he blows away her dad in bed, the mom gets up quickly, screaming and running for the bathroom, but she gets it in the back, throwing her into the door. This is TV and there’s no blood, but X wonders how this got on there never the less.

The little Maggie is left in the bedroom, she walks to her dad, touches his face.

"Mommy!" Comes from the hallway.

"It’s OK sweatie..." comes the voice of the man.

The camera swings slowly around the little girl, lowering lowering like a cork screw until it’s viewing maggie from low and she appears tall in the screen.

"Daddy!" Screams the voice of the child.

The camera stays on the worried face of the little girl. The gun fires. Fade out.