The Historical Novel.

The Historical Novel began with a song. That was the current working plan. It would land in the black like a record needle landing in the heart: softly, with the vinyl gently bobbing up and down, and then the music would expansively arrive. The Historical Novel would employ extras in the background who were cheekily reading The Killer Angels, Civilwarland in Bad Decline, and Mason & Dixon, though none of them would be relevant to the story. The Historical Novel was being written by three Hollywood directors bit by bit every Sunday at Lunch at The Dancing Caravaggio in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles after the three of them had discovered during one networking afternoon that the three of them had all grown up in Virginia at more or less the same time. James, Ellen, and Blake. Williamsburg, Richmond, and Roanoke.

The waiter lingered, regularly changing his voice, clearly implying that he would be interested in auditioning for what he thought had to be a film but wasn’t, where he even began to back away in horror when he was told it was a collaborative novel, not only because examples of collective novels successfully working were so few and far between, not only for the content of The Historical Novel, but for the fact that his interest in film would land in the text like a flattened out fish.

The palm trees swayed back and forth like Fantasia-rendered notes trying to do sufficient anthropomorphic justice to “Redbone” by Childish Gambino. Stay woke, the sunset sang.

They were 60 pages into the project. Ellen had taken to rereading old history books from college and was looking over her former marginalia. James was looking at his kimchi and the valets parallel parking across the way and thinking back to growing up in Colonial Williamsburg, and how he and his brother used to hide their toys from tourists in the name of preserving the house’s authenticity -- as if nothing was expected from those visiting, not even a cringey car crash of excessive “thou”-ing. What did that make your life? Ellen asked.

I don’t know? His mind wandered up to the top of the thought to take in the view a little bit more thoroughly. I still have dreams of soldiers floating up over the city with a rope tied around their waist with friends or comrades below buoyantly chuntering away. As a way to pass the time? Blake asked. As a way of attracting the attention of a gentle or curious bird the same way you hold up the rear of your hand for a cat or dog to sniff?

But that’s not history, Ellen said.

No, he replied. It isn’t. But that’s not the entire point: Frederick Douglas once wrote about standing at a farm standing in the field outside a farm, staring at ships entering and leaving the Chesapeake Bay, saying, “You are freedom's swift-winged angels, that fly round the world,” and I wouldn’t mind seeing that replaced by an empty Route 64 on a gentle summer afternoon, with sails being sent up from the roof of each and every car that happens to make its way over the road. Why can’t be the Monument Avenue we want? Why can’t that be the one we get?