BLOGGING TWILIGHT, pt. 22: The Terrors Of The Earth

I’ve been reading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. Previous installments can be found in the directory.

Chapter 22: Hide-and-seek

Bella is a little paranoid to be hanging around Alice, worried that she’ll get a vision. It turns out that’s not an irrational fear at all—almost immediately Alice bends over the desk and her eyes roll back into her head. It doesn’t seem like a good vision, all evidence to the contrary. Jasper comes back in and loosens her grip—so I guess that means that when Alice gets a vision she clenches her hand around whatever she’s touching and can’t let go. Must be rough for Jasper if those visions come at inopportune times, if you know what I mean. Alice is reluctant to say whatever she saw, which makes Bella panic and makes Jasper confused. Actually, it makes his eyes confused:

His eyes were confused as they flickered swiftly between Alice’s face and mine, feeling the chaos…

Oy vey at that last part. Jasper kicks in the Vampire Valium, and Bella decides to harness it to steady her resolve. Alice starts calmly asking if Bella wants breakfast. She’s all blank-eyed and detached—she and Bella have a “who can be more suspiciously calm” contest for the next few pages. Bella puts her money stash in her pocket—the one she brought to Forks intending to buy a car with—it’s a testament to what a boring town Forks is that Bella has found nothing to spend money on for the last few weeks.

They drive to the airport, and Bella asks Alice how the visions work. “Edward said it wasn’t definite…that things change?” Bella says. “Some things are more certain than others… like the weather. People are harder.” That’s what she said. Alice, I mean. It’s good to know that Alice understands the weather is determined by science—Edward probably thinks that Jesus picks out the weather every morning like an outfit. Alice can’t see the course people are on until they are on it, which is why she hasn’t handcuffed Bella to the car door yet. She’s probably can’t see the forest for Bella getting killed in the mirror room. It makes for a weird conflict in this chapter—Bella is basically being chased by the idea that Alice might figure out what she’s doing at any second.

Edward’s plane is landing in the largest terminal, and Bella starts using her knowledge of the layout of the airport to formulate her plan. Alice and Jasper look at the departing flights, trying to figure out where to send Bella. It seems like the obvious choice is somewhere on the other side of an ocean, if this guy is tracking by scent and everything. Really all of my knowledge of survival vis-à-vis the outdoors and animals tracking you comes from reading Gary Paulsen novels as a kid, so I probably have no idea what I’m talking about.

The minutes passed and Edward’s arrival grew closer. It was amazing how every cell in my body seemed to know he was coming, to long for his coming. That made it very hard.

That is a lot of what she said! Bella, I mean. Alice keeps pushing for Bella to get some breakfast (motherly instincts—that’s a plus because if they ever adopted Bella would be a bad mother. I say adoption because surrogacy would be out of the question—Alice did a lot of LSD a few decades back). Bella eventually announces that she’d like to go to breakfast.

Alice stood. “I’ll come with you.”
“Do you mind if Jasper comes instead?” I asked. “I’m feeling a little…” I didn’t finish the sentence. My eyes were wild enough to convey what I didn’t say.

There’s an awkward rhyme to that last line, but whatever. Bella’s addicted to the Vampire drugs ALREADY? That was fast. Jasper takes Bella to the airport cafeteria, and she asks to go to the bathroom. He lets her go, and she starts running. The bathroom has two entrances, and she goes out the other. What follows is a long sequence of Bella running and being afraid to look back—she slips into an elevator, gets outside, can’t find a cab, and hops aboard a shuttle to the Hyatt. There are few scenes that would qualify as action in this book, and unlike the car crash, this one is nicely paced and structured. I only really object to this:

“This is a shuttle to the Hyatt,” the driver said in confusion as he opened the doors.
“Yes,” I huffed, “that’s where I’m going.” I hurried up the steps.
He looked askance at my luggage-less state, but shrugged, not caring enough to ask.

Askance? Somebody has a Word-of-the-Day calendar. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with flexing a little vocabulary every now and then—to quote the Jurrasic 5, “You gots to have vocab/ letters make words/ and sentences makes paragraphs”—but it’s so rare in this book that it always feels weird.

Bella has a fleeting image of Edward coming to the spot in the road where the shuttle took off, the place where her trail will go dead. It’s a cool little flash-forward, and it is all too brief. Bella gets a cab at the hotel and tells him her mother’s address. He complains that it is too far away. Fucking cab drivers, always giving you shit.

When I waited tables at the Hard Rock in Boston I used to get out around 2am, when all the bars close. So it goes without saying that the Faneuil Hall/Government Center area of Boston is a hellscape around 2am, and cab drivers generally refuse to pick up people they assume to be drunk. I used to see drunk guys diving into the street trying to stop empty cabs, bribing them for fifty or a hundred bucks over the fare to get them to let them in. Most of them still wouldn't do it, they’re probably too used to getting burned.

So the first thing I had to do was make it clear to cab drivers that I was not drunk, but the bigger hurdle was the fact that I live in East Boston, which is on the other side of the tunnel with a toll on the way back in. (So you know, I couldn't even walk home; I would have needed a canoe.) There aren’t a lot of bars in East Boston that aren’t patronized by East Boston winos, so there’s nobody to pick up once over there either. I realize that cab drivers therefore have every reason to not want to give me a ride, but I used to have to spend a good hour getting turned down by 20 or 30 cabs before someone finally agreed to do it. They would always bitch the whole way over, and I always gave them a big tip as a little “shut the fuck up” on my way out of the cab. My logic was that if I did it enough I could eventually turn the tide of anti-East Boston sentiment among the cab driver population, but it never happened. And I eventually just stopped showing up to work at the Hard Rock anyway.

Bella does the same thing I always did, throwing eighty bucks over the seat. The driver changes his tune, and they’re off. On the car ride, Bella fantasizes about having stayed at the airport to meet Edward—visualizing the reunion, thinking about where they’d relocate.

North somewhere, so he could be outside in the day. Or maybe somewhere very remote, so we could lay in the sun together again. I imagined him by the shore, his skin sparkling like the sea. It wouldn’t matter how long we had to hide. To be trapped in a hotel room with him would be a kind of heaven. So many questions I still had for him. I could talk to him forever, never sleeping, never leaving his side.

It reminded me weirdly of the “let’s away to prison” speech from King Lear where Lear, reunited with his estranged daughter but defeated in war, entertains delusions of a happy ending with her as they are being carried off to jail:

No, no, no, no. Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out—
And take upon ‘s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies.
(5.3.9-18)

Both speeches are upsetting because they are utterly deluded, but I’ll give the edge to The Bard because Lear and his daughter die a few hundred lines later, and I think we all know that Bella is not actually heading toward certain death.

The cabbie asks after the house number which ends Bella’s fantasy, “letting all the colors run out of my lovely delusion.” Maybe I’ve been too influenced by the recent dream imagery in Shutter Island, but how could the filmmakers behind Twilight miss this cue? It seems directed specifically at them, but nothing like it exists in the film. (Jesus, I keep saying I’m going to review the film after we finish this, but I keep giving away the store!)

Bella gets to her house and runs to the phone where, as promised, a number is written on a whiteboard. She tries to enter the number but is so nervous she has to start over again, which is another one of those cinematic details I really like. She starts over again, and eventually nondescript, bland, red-shirt wearing, ethnically vague, boring-ass James comes on the line. He tells her to come to the ballet studio. Duh. We saw that coming; so did Bella. Why didn’t she just go straight there?

Bella has more fleeting visions as she runs from her childhood home, picturing her mother in her youth. Putting aside being almost completely certain that Bella will be OK, this is really upsetting when you think about it. Bella is heading for a quick, violent death—alone, in an unfamiliar place. She’s not going to have an opportunity for her life to flash before her eyes, so she’s getting it in while she can. Abrupt death is totally unromantic.

Chapter 22 is epic in length by Twilight standards, so we’ll pick up here from here next time.