FIC: Average 2/6

[lobelia321]

TITLE: Average
PART: 2/6
AUTHOR: Lobelia <lobelia321@aol.com>
WEBSITE: http://www.geocities.com/lobelia321/
PAIRING: Viggo Mortensen / Kiran Shah
RATING: R
SUMMARY: Viggo is adrift. Kiran is in love.
FEEDBACK: Yes, please, I would love feedback! Anything, even if it's only one line, one word!
CONTENT/WARNINGS: RPS. Middle-aged dwarf.
CATEGORY: Weird pairings. Hobbit stand-in.
SPOILERS: *The Two Towers*, *The Return of the King*
ARCHIVE RIGHTS: Beyond the Fellowship. My niche. Anyone else, please just ask.
DISCLAIMERS: This is a work of amateur fiction and poetry pastiche. I do not know these people. I am not making money. The events described in this story did not happen.
AUTHOR'S NOTES, THANK YOUs and DEDICATION: See Part 0/6.

Visual Aids.

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3 *Viggo*

I am not myself tonight. Or rather, I am myself, but that is all I am managing to be. My condition of not being able to go outside myself continues. It is all right for my acting. Work on the film has started in earnest, and in a way, my present state of mind is perfect for the acting.

Nothing distracts me. I don't need the outside world for playing my part. I need only my script and all my little scribbles in the margins, and I need only my shooting schedule, and I'm fine. I can draw everything I need for my part from within myself. Deep within myself. And I don't think I have ever reached so deep within myself. It is making me shudder; it is giving me nightmares, in fact.

What I can't do in this state of being-inside-myself, is to paint. For that, I need to reach outside myself. Acting is drawing upon yourself. Painting is drawing upon the world. If I want to communicate, if I want to reach out to the world and pull it into myself and transform it in paint, I need to feel in touch with the world first. And I don't. The world is out there, I am in here, and anything else is a dream.

Or a nightmare.

I have the same one regularly these days. Ever since my first night here in Wellington. It is not even a real nightmare. When I write it down, it appears harmless. But when I dream it, it makes me break out in a sweat. I wake up in the middle of the night, in the horribly small hours -- I don't know why they call them the small hours, it makes me scared just thinking of them as small, as if time diminishes in those hours -- anyway, I wake up and I'm sweating and my heart is beating. I always think, maybe this is it. Maybe this is the heart attack that will kill me. Those are the thoughts one thinks at two in the morning. Small, defeated thoughts for the *small* hours.

The dream is set on a roller coaster. Or a sort of roller coaster. A huge scaffolding, made up of colourful long metal planks with holes along them, like enormous sets of, what were those engineering things I played with as a kid? Yes, meccano sets. Like an enormous meccano set. These long planks sway and wobble, and in between are bridges, suspended bridges, or roller coaster-like tracks that wind themselves up and around these long poles. The whole thing is somewhere high in the sky. All I see are clouds and a blue, blue sky, pastel blue, nice really. I zoom along the tracks, suspended in some sort of a trolley or cart. I zoom up and down, it's breathtakingly fast, and then I plunge deep, deep, but I always come up again. There's the sense of being followed, of another trolley behind me, hot on my tracks.

Then I wake up. And that is all. It doesn't sound very scary, written down or told aloud. Except I haven't ever told it aloud. There's not really anyone to tell this sort of thing to. Only me. Only me and my small blue notebook.

Aragorn is a bit of a lost character himself. He is a wonderful part to play, but I know that he will not stay lost forever. Soon we'll be filming scenes from the coronation, from the time when he has found his kingly destiny -- and then what? Will I be able to rise to that kingly role? That semblance of mastery? Well, if not, I will have the script and the sets and the costumes to help me along the way.

In fact, I am wearing the costume now. I took home Aragorn's costume and I am sitting here, wearing it, writing in this notebook. I shouldn't be writing and sitting here, I should be eating. I should make or buy myself some supper. Instead, I am subsisting on tubs of yoghurt again. I must take care not to spill any blobs on my page. Oops, there goes one.

Aragorn's costume is wonderful. It is thick and heavy. It has a sort of maroon overcoat, with embroidery on it. I like fingering the material. It is like an outer shell, a carapace. I can curl up inside it. Aragorn's costume keeps me safe. But it also keeps me apart from anything else. It is like thick armour, keeping the world out, keeping me in, but allowing nothing to cross over.

I wish I could be permeable, like one of those microscopic animals. Those animalcules made up of one cell only; they haven't got skins, they've got permeable membranes, and they absorb food and reject waste by osmosis, if I remember that right from school. That's what I want to be able to do: relate to the world by osmosis. I'd like to have that membrane and just swim about the world, taking in things without effort, turning them over and looking at them within myself, and then ejecting them again, changed and transformed by my thoughts.

Instead I sit here, huddled in Aragorn's mantle. Which isn't osmotic at all. Which is thick and water-resistant. World-resistant. Impermeable.

Maybe I should have an affair or something. Maybe that would jolt me out of myself.

But with whom? There is nobody, not a single person on this shoot, who is attractive in that way. To me, anyway. To me, in my present, impermeable state.

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4 *Kiran*

Brother-dear

I have now been on several trips around the area, and New Zealand is really a very beautiful place. I am so glad to be here! I've been on a number of drives, up the coast and to a forest area called Rimutaka, and up the Hutt Valley which is the valley going up north from Wellington. I will send you photos as soon as they are ready. You will notice that John is also in those photos, you know, John Rhys-Davies, I told you about him. He has been taking me on these outings while I am waiting for my car to be fixed up. John and I also went down to the South Island on the ferry. We were told that you can sometimes see dolphins there but unfortunately, we did not see any. Out of luck!

Have I told you about my map? In a bookshop here, you can buy an upside-down world of the map, and I have bought one and put it up on my living-room wall. Only they don't call it upside-down; they say that it is our maps which are upside-down! On this map, north and south are reversed. New Zealand is right at the top, and then the entire world is below, standing on its head. Britain is fairly much at the bottom, just a tiny tongue-shaped speck. It is an amusing map, but it is also thought-provoking, in a way. It makes me think of the unfairness in the world, and of how the powerful nations impose their own view of the facts onto the rest of the planet. So that Europe is always at the top and at the centre of the universe. Europe and the United States.

Of course, the map also functions as a proper world map. I went through today and spotted all the places I have worked and filmed in, and then the places where I have lived. Well, that made me feel a tiny bit melancholy, especially thinking about Nairobi. Do you think about that time much? It was a good place to grow up in, on the whole. Do you still remember that little shop we used to go to and nag baba-ji into buying us sweets? Having to leave was terrible.

I have written a poem about my thoughts after buying the map:

*History*

He who writes history
Writes the story of greed.
He who writes the past
Writes a tale of conquest.

The ownership, the open hands
That pull and take at nature:
All of this is obsolete
All of this is obscene

When this is gone, when we all rule
Ourselves and nothing else,
Our hearts will burn
With the memory of a lost heaven.

Work is getting to be quite strenuous. This week we have been filming a snow scene, set on a mountain pass. Part of the scene will be filmed on location, in a few months, but we have been doing the studio parts. I have spent the last few days in the sound stage with fake snow whirling at me. They have set up a huge fan to give the effect of a snow storm. It is very hot in the studio, of course, but we are all decked out in cloaks and things, and have to pretend to shiver with cold. Also, we don't get to wear protective masks. The crew and camera people are all wearing these small surgical masks but everybody else just gets snow up their noses. It is true that we body-doubles wear quite heavy masks, made to resemble the actors' faces; they are rather uncomfortable but they do afford protection. It is tough on the actors, though. John, especially, was suffering terribly.

We have to struggle through these high mounds of fake snow. The idea is that the snow is too much for the hobbits, and they have to be carried by the men. I am carried by Aragorn, you know, the ranger-guy who later becomes king. Oh, and here's another bit of news: we have a new Aragorn! There was some change-over of actors, I don't really know the details, with the result that a new actor was flown in at the last minute. His name is Veego something; he's not in my schedule yet, I will have to look him up in the revised version. Anyway, this Veego plays Aragorn and gets to carry me around in the snow. He seems like a nice enough fellow. In between takes, a gang of us gathered round to watch him play chess against another of the scale doubles -- now what was that fellow's name again? Very embarrassing, I've forgotten; he is another desi (but I don't know from which part of India)! Maybe that is the reason I forgot! Anyway, whoever it was won the game, and it was very funny to see the two of them have a go at each other about that afterwards. I think we are going to see a revenge match soon!

I didn't watch the whole of the chess game because I was having a good, long conversation with John. He is having terrible problems with his make-up. He has to undergo this arduous process of having his dwarf-face applied every morning, and the make-up is giving him terrible allergies. It really is a trial. I wonder, dada, if you could perhaps send some of that tincture or lotion or whatever it was that Chaitan was talking about? You know, the stuff that Bombay-chachi sent last Diwali? Didn't she say that her neighbour or someone had used it for his eczema, and that it had worked really well?

The snow filming stops tomorrow, and next week we start on the horses. I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to that! After filming was over today, I went to the stables to have a look at the horses. Remember that time I wrestled that horse to the ground, rodeo-style? Chaitan took some photos; it was when I still had that afro hairdo, haha!

Anyway, I talked a bit to the wranglers about the riding. I will always be riding double with another average-sized actor, and mostly, in fact, with this Veego man. And what do you know, while I was chatting to the wranglers and checking out the horses, the very man came in, and he was still wearing his costume! The costume looks like a sort of mediaeval knight's tunic, by the way, and he immediately started asking the wranglers all sorts of questions, and then he insisted on mounting one of the horses and going for a test ride. Quite the eccentric.

They didn't let him, of course.

It was only after a while that he noticed me, but he smiled immediately and said, "You are Merry, aren't you?" I said yes, and he made a joke about carrying me through the snow, and I made a joke about riding together. It was all very friendly, and he seems nice, if a little over-anxious about his role. I didn't tell you that his costume involves a sword, also, and it was getting in the way of his legs all the time! He kept calling me Merry but I reckon that was because he had forgotten my name and did not want to admit it.

Ah well, nobody ever remembers the stand-ins' names.

Perhaps I will start calling him Strider.

Yours affectionately,

K.

---------

TBC

Comments

[giglet.livejournal.com]

Viggo! Stop being a twit, would you? Lobelia, I'm enjoying this very much.