Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good by John Gould

wizardry of the walls. There may be a couple squabbling or screwing a few feet in any direction, but how would you know? Even the jets angling in and out overhead do so with decorum, their intermittent thunder like distant surf. Canned, the sound could be used for hypnosis, for guided meditation, for white-noising an oncologist’s waiting room.
    Matt shudders, tugs tight his robe. He’ll move tomorrow. He rolls his cursor across the TV screen, hits Reply.
    Dear Mariko,

Insofar as I had a plan when I left you yesterday, it’s shot.
    Poor me!!!!
    I seem to have come down with something, so I daren’t be dropping in on Mr. Immuno-Deficient, or on Dad either. I’ve hunkered down at a hotel to wait it out. Oh, and last night I got it on with this amazing woman I picked up in the elevator. She’s a total genius, and she gets me, and she’s got this body, so round and womanly.
    What a rush. The power to impart truth, the power to withhold it. Did Mariko get this same bracing jolt the day she dropped her Sophie bomb? “She’s so young, Matt. She’s so full of hope.”
    Matt lets his revelation scintillate on the screen awhile, then deletes it.
    Please don’t call Zane’s place, I still aim to surprise him. My flight back isn’t till Friday, hopefully I can pull myself together by then.
    Hey by the way, I read She on the way here. I loved it.
    This is Matt’s first lie. His first lie today, that is—he’s lied plenty to Mariko in the past, generally in this same strife-avoiding kind of way. No, he didn’t read her screenplay on the flight, he read it in her office one day last week while she was working in town. He’d uncovered it (a fist-thick sheaf of printed pages defaced with frantic edits) during a feverish Sophie-sweep of her desk. And no, he didn’t love it.
    But why not? Granted it’s no masterpiece, not yet, but it’s bizarrely good, far better than it has any right to be. Its author isn’t even a
writer,
for pity’s sake. Mariko has a quick and ludicrously far-ranging mind, but sentences are most definitely not her thing. This is good news for Matt, since it affords him a role in their relationship, a “job” as editor of her websites. The thing is, though, words don’t actually matter all that much in the case of a screenplay. What matters is pace and structure.
She? She
’s got both.
She
moves,
She
gets somewhere. How is this possible? Mariko doesn’t even
like
movies.
    She
does have one major flaw, or at least one odd feature a kritik could sink his teeth into. She’s got no protagonist, no single figure who monopolizes our attention. So what to do with the star? Whither Sigourney? Whither Nicole?
    Trouble is, even this feature kind of works. The script’s theme (in which it’s soused like a Christmas cake in Cointreau) is collectivity. Nobody ever says
me
or
my
or
I
in Mariko’s imagined world, it’s all
us, our, we. We
in this instance is a mini-society rebuilding itself on a rugged patch of Canada’s west coast after some unspecified global calamity. Mariko’s been boning up on the Great-Goddess thing of late, the idea that there was once, before everything went sour—before men declared war on womanhood, on nature, on one another—a better time, an idyllic, gynocratic era in neolithic Europe. Egalitarian. Peace-loving. Goddess-worshipping. Mariko’s books are replete with photos and drawings of goddess imagery, figurines that are all boobs and butt and belly, divine incarnations of deer and bird and bear. It’s all quite staggeringly raw and beautiful, a blessed past that’s clearly reincarnated in Mariko’s dreamt-up future. When
She
gets made—why not, Mariko’s got good karma up the yingyang—it’ll be dubbed an “ecofeminist utopia.” Something along those lines.
    What kind of world is this? Strictly non-hierarchical. Everything’s done through collaboration, consensus. Nobody’s ever in charge, though a woman will reluctantly take the lead, in a pinch, with a lofty