One Single Heck

-> Phonics For Adults <-

*

“wake up,” she urged the dummy, pressing her hands to the pulse points on its wrists. “come on. what the fuck.”

“yeah, i don’t think that asking nicely is going to do the trick,” hank said, his eyebrows raised. his helmet, the special one they’d decorated for him with craft supplies from michael’s when he’d gotten promoted to firestation chief, sat askew on his head. “i can see now why they didn’t pass you.”

annabelle rolled her eyes. “it’s a psychological thing,” she said. “it’s like, you give the brain an instruction and it follows naturally. and the pulse-point thing always works. i don’t know why it’s not, like, in any of the books, but i swear to god it’s worked for me every time.”

it was true that annabelle had the best record on low body counts, which was good because she was the smallest person on the team not counting Georgie, who was a corgi. jake and lillian were always making fun of her for having been the shortest of their whole rookie class. but it hadn’t ever been a problem before; annabelle rarely had to carry anybody out, because she was good enough at getting them on their feet.

but none of that would matter if she couldn’t pass her stupid recertification exam, because they’d take her badge and she’d have to go be, like, a doctor or something.

hank blew out a long breath and sunk down to where she was kneeling on the station floor in full fire gear, giving CPR to the practice dummy, whom they called dierdre. there was a little light that went on when you’d saved its life. it had been a dull gray for an hour now.

“look, AB. i know you’re a good firefighter, and i know you know how to deliver CPR. just do it like you do it during an emergency. you’re overthinking it.”

“but this is what i do during an emergency!” annabelle cried, throwing her hands up. “i put my hands on their pulse points and i use psychological mumbo-jumbo and they just get up and walk!” 

hank blinked. “…really,” he said, voice flat. “people who’ve been inhaling smoke for half an hour just … get up and walk.”

“the brain is an incredibly powerful organ,” said annabelle, shrugging. “look man, i don’t know, okay? but it works. i haven’t had to actually do CPR in like a year and a half.”

he gave her a long, quiet look and said, “well….huh,” before pushing himself back up onto his feet and frowning off into the distance. “keep practicing,” he said after a minute, and left her there.

-

hank switched her team.

“what the fuck, man,” she said, sliding into the truck next to him as the sirens went on. “i can’t get CPR on one fucking dummy and suddenly you don’t trust me to do my job without supervision?”

carl and bethany very carefully did not meet her eyes in the rearview from the backseat. bethany pulled a magazine from beneath the seat and said loudly, “look, carl, jennifer aniston and brad pitt are getting back together.”

“thank christ,” said carl. “i’ve been really worried about jen.”

hank gave annabelle the flat look that had gotten him promoted to firestation chief in the first place, the one that said i’m your dad and you don’t want to disappoint me. as always, annabelle wilted underneath it, sliding down in her seat and crossing her arms over her chest. it was a difficult feat in full gear but she wanted him to know she was feeling sullen.

“i trust you completely,” hank told her, his voice a light scold. “i want to see you in action so i can help you figure out what’s going wrong with the dummies. sometimes it’s hard for the brain to accurately remember everything that happens during a crisis.”

annabelle rolled her eyes. “i told you,” she said. “it’s just – it’s the same thing every time, I’m not like, blacking out.”

“great, then i’m about to learn a cool new trick,” hank said serenely, and pulled the truck out of the lot. annabelle kept her gaze focused out of the window, watching the city pass as carl and bethany talked loudly about which celebrities were dating which other celebrities and who wore what better. she tried to swallow down the nerves that tightened her throat. maybe the dummy was right. maybe she was doing something else and didn’t remember it. maybe the last two years had been a fluke and she had no business being a firefighter. maybe she was about to get fired.

there wasn’t a fire, though the alarm was going off. instead they found a bag of smoking popcorn and the collapsed heap of a forty-five year old bachelor type, down to just his boxers and a pair of slippers with llamas on them. he had no pulse. 

hank held carl and bethany back, directing them to deal with the smoke from the popcorn; annabelle he pointed toward the resident with a jerk of his chin. 

she sighed, kneeling by his side. she pressed her hands flat to his heart and then dragged them across his chest and down each arm, to his wrists. with her thumbs on his pulse point, she hissed, “let’s go, man. up and at ’em. you’re not meant to die in your underwear while cooking popcorn, come on.”

she held her breath for a few moments, conscious of hank’s eyes on her, and let out a long sigh of relief when she felt his pulse jump beneath her, watched his eyes flicker. “what the fuck?” he asked, voice a croak. “what happened?”

“you gotta eat more vegetables, bud,” annabelle told him, and looped his arm over her shoulders to help him get to his feet. she was so relieved she could have wept, but instead met hank’s eyes with a challenging glare. see? she thought. i told you. “let’s get you to the ambulance.”

-

“the bad news is that you have a lot of practicing to do if you want to pass your recert,” hank said without preamble, showing up at her apartment. she didn’t think she’d ever seen him in jeans before. it was weird. “the good news is i understand your problem now.”

annabelle stepped aside, beckoning him in. “what problem?” she demanded. “it worked! you saw it work. that’s the opposite of a problem.”

hank shrugged. he handed her a trifold that he’d clearly printed off at home. it said so you think you’re a necromancer. annabelle blinked down at it, and then up at hank, and then down at the trifold again. “i … don’t understand what’s happening here,” she told him honestly. 

“i’m not in the community and they’re kind of cagey, so i can’t really tell you a lot,” hank told her, stilted and visibly uncomfortable. “but i have a cousin who is, and um, i just want you to know that this doesn’t change anything. you’re still who you’ve always been and you have my complete support. we’ll figure out how to get around the recert. maybe i’ll – i can put you on admin duty to give you time to study. we’ll say it’s because of an injury.”

“hank,” annabelle said, with some urgency. “hank, this flier says the word necromancer.”

“yes,” agreed hank, looking relieved. “oh, good, you’ve heard of it already. i thought i was going to have to have the whole your body is changing talk.”

annabelle shook her head. “no, i – hank. you know that … um, you know that necromancy isn’t real, right? people can’t bring other people back from the dead. that’s crazy.”

“annabelle, not four hours ago you instructed a dead man to stand up and he did.”

“okay, he wasn’t dead, obviously. he was almost dead, at best.”

“no. he was dead.”

“i felt his pulse! it was very faint!”

“you called his pulse. no one else would have felt it, because it wasn’t there except in response to you.”

“hank, what the fuck.”

he shrugged. “read the flier,” he instructed. “and bring dierdre home with you. you’re going to have to practice a lot if you want to get recertified, considering you haven’t one time had to use any of the skills you learned the first go around.”

he bussed her temple as he went by, letting himself out of her apartment with a friendly wave. annabelle looked down at the flier in her hand with a frown. when she unfolded it, the first page said, everyone’s necromancy journey is different, but most people discover their gift by accident. have you ever brought a pet back to life? touched an elderly relatives hand and seen some of the color flood back into their face? or perhaps, more subtly, been able to keep cut flowers alive long past their purchase date?

annabelle looked at her kitchen table. she’d had the same vase of tulips on it since she moved in, three years ago. it was true they periodically started to wilt, but she usually just changed their water and they were fine, popping back up one after the other as she slid them into the fresh vase. 

Before I get into that comparison, I want to make something clear. I didn't like the introduction of a slave-master narrative into the unholy family dynamic. The racial implications made me uncomfortable. However, discomfort and offense are not the same thing. While I found it unsettling, I did not find it racist or anti-Black, and that's the key distinction.

So many people seem to be loudly subscribing to this tribalistic "us vs them" version of identity politics that has them projecting a whole lot of their own issues onto media. There's an awareness of how political TV shows are despite the fact that media literacy is at an all time low. So many people are assigning moral value onto media works and so many people have been conditioned into thinking that portrayal somehow equals endorsement.

And because portrayal equals endorsement to certain types of people, portrayal always ends up getting the short end of the stick, whether or not its endorsement. You know, censorship, moralism, fascist thinking and all that stuff.

So yeah, I expected the backlash because this is the bullshit one always has to deal with if you like your shows with a bit of complexity to them.

But it pisses me off that the Claudia seance is being cheapened into another political soundbite about how "the writers just wanted an excuse to be racist."

Do I think people are allowed to be hurt by portrayals of racism in a show? Of course I do. I've been hurt by it since I was old enough to understand what race was. I'll probably be hurt by it until the day I die. It's valid to be upset by something and never want to watch it again. There are plenty of shows I haven't finished because they were too triggering for me.

Do I think that being upset by something gives me the right to assign values onto writers I know nothing about for simply doing their jobs and telling a story? No, the fuck I don't.

Writing about racism doesn't make you racist any more than writing about murder makes you killer. And the fact that lately, so many people can't grasp that is scary to me.

You tell a story about race, you tell a story about racism. Because racism is alive and well. And even if we manage to create a post-racism society, racism will have been alive and well. They're a package deal.

I want people to be able to tell stories about race. I want every kind of depiction about race there is. The good, the bad and the messy. We've been invisible for too long.

And if you think thoughtful media portrayals of racism are just a writer's excuse to be racist and not a portrayal of issues and inequalities that can and have played out in the real world because of the systems of oppression that underpin them, you're clearly unable to separate a fictional story from your own personal baggage and I have nothing to say to you.

These terrible takes about Claudia are extra irritating to me as someone from an African country, who grew up on multiracial and multicultural shows and studied post-apartheid and postcolonial literature at university, media that had racism as a recurring theme, because the narratives, like IWTV and TVL, were about racist structures and the people who lived in them.

It's so fucking painful to realize that the majority of these would be lumped under "generic racist propaganda" on this stupid US-centric website because for some reason people think that a piece of media having racism in it makes it politically incorrect propaganda, unfit to be enjoyed, studied or consumed. Without realizing what an oppressive, imperialistic, white standard that is.

"I'm a good person who only consumes media that is 100% non-racist, non-sexist and politically correct."

Congratulations. I can't go a week without experiencing some form of oppression, from other marginalized people even, because internalized marginalization is a thing and my parents and grandparents grew up in systems where racism was valued. In fact, racism is valued to this day in certain places, but I'm overjoyed to hear that I'd get punished by Western audiences if I were to write about it. I'd be nothing without your erasure.

The scene where Claudia finally gave Louis a piece of her mind could've been a wonderful opportunity for the fandom to talk about how racism is a structural context that marginalized people cannot separate themselves from or how traumatized people can and do weaponize each others' internalized racism against each other.

It could've been a wonderful opportunity to discuss how Claudia was misrepresented because of Louis' guilt and love for her or how female characters, black women in particular, are rarely allowed to show their ugly sides in media, especially when the narrative is told through a male lens. A male lens that's been well established as someone who puts himself and the people he loves on pedestals and continues to view her through rose-colored glasses to this day.

It could've been a wonderful opportunity to talk about the myth of the perfect victim or how her being trapped in a young girl's body means people have "no idea of her strength."

It could've been a wonderful opportunity to discuss how much of that scene was Claudia finally being honest and letting out all that pent up resentment she never got to share with Louis while losing him was at stake (but now she has nothing to lose) or how much was cruel lies motivated by the pain of being ripped from her resting place, seeing Louis and Lestat there together (Louis choosing Lestat over her AGAIN) while she's stuck having to exist without Madeleine.

Some people did speak about that which is awesome. Thank you for existing.

But mostly, it became all about "My morals have been violated" (fine, don't watch it then) and "what Claudia said was inexcusable, how dare she" (you're policing a traumatized black female character, EXCUSE YOU) and "the writers are such racist and sexist meanies for no longer portraying Claudia as Louis' most special manic pixie throw pillow" (??? make it make sense ???). It mostly boiled down to the fact that Claudia was cruel to Louis out of anger.

"This isn't Claudia."

There's literally an episode titled "The Ruthless Pursuit of Blood with All a Child's Demanding". Describing Claudia. From Louis' perspective. The person who has an admittedly rosy view of her.

She's ruthless. She's bloodthirsty. She's cruel.

She's every bit as ruthless as Lestat, whose blood flows through her veins. She's every bit as bloodthirsty as the coven that took her out. That's why they had to team up in order to do it. And she's every bit as cruel as Louis, who we've seen do this type of thing to multiple characters at multiple times. Lestat taught her how to hunt, but if there's one thing Claudia would have learned from Louis, it would be being cruel to people out of anger.

Racism is one of Louis' core wounds and triggers. We see it throughout season 1. Lestat uses the racially neutral term "fledgling" to address him, and he assigns racial meaning onto it, after which Lestat never uses the term again. Claudia uses "slaves" as a buzzword to manipulate him. Daniel uses racial terminology to get him to open up in the interviews. His favorite human meal is Jim Crow racists. Every time he acts on impulse, it's triggered by someone else's racism or perceived racism. It's a core wound so it's the best way to be cruel to Louis. Claudia is a predator and she went straight for the jugular.

Did you expect her not to?

Claudia was summoned to once again assuage the guilt of the two people who were complicit in both her deaths. She was immediately confronted with the image of the two of them together again after decades of searching for and not finding her companion, Madeleine.

Before she died she literally called them out for the self-absorbed bastards that they were, the fact that they constantly used her as a pawn in their drama and the fact that her being made a vampire was never about her, but about them.

She died because Louis refused to listen to her warnings about Armand. And then Louis still stayed with Armand for years after that, the very years she was stuck in purgatory without Madeleine, showed her private diaries to everyone, because her words were published in a fucking international bestseller, read out her most vulnerable thoughts about getting assaulted to her abuser to fuel his own sanctimonious hero complex and then paid a sex worker to act like her.

Of course, she's harder on Louis and easier on Lestat. Louis was supposed to be better than this. As unfair as it is, she always held him to a higher standard. Lestat was always the scumbag she detested (and father she loved in secret) and she never let him forget that. Louis was the father she was open about loving (and scumbag she detested in secret, because she could not afford to push him away when he always had one foot out the door anyways). Louis was the person she had the most faith in and trusted not to fail and betray her. And then he went and did all that. Lestat was just acting like Lestat, but Louis broke her heart.

She is allowed to be pissed and to say whatever the fuck she wants to in order to get that message across. She is allowed to say things that she knows will hurt them, Louis in particular, whether or not those things are true. She's allowed to be in enough anguish to lash out about it where it'll hurt most. Because they'll always have each other anyways.