Tag: Daniel

Interrogating Daniel

I finally got an hour of writing yesterday. Not a good hour — I really need to get a feel for my characters again, because it’s been so long since I visited Whose Hearts are Mountains, given my editing forays …

I sit in the cafe with its bright light, tables and chairs from some old diner, and shelves of board games against the wall. Inspiration fails me; I stare at the letters I typed into my story. I’m bored with the story, bored with the process of writing.

A tall, lightly muscled man with black braided hair and dark skin strolls into the cafe. He is not like anyone else in the cafe; his presence washes the atmosphere with a certain surreality. I watch him order coffee, trade banter with the owner, and amble toward me.

“I’m Daniel,” he says in a resonant baritone. “You must be Lauren.” He reaches his hand out to shake mine. His grip is firm, his hand dwarfs mine.

“I am,” I respond, “but how did you know that?”

His speech is easy, slow like honey. “Because you’re my writer. You wanted to get to know me.” He leans back in his chair as if settling back to tell a story.

“Tell me a little about yourself.”

He chuckles. “You sound like my mother, the anthropologist. She can always get a story out of someone that way.” He pauses, large hand wrapped around the coffee cup. Black coffee, of course. “I’m an Archetype, an immortal, but unauthorized. Earthbound, we call it.” He takes a long sip of coffee. “My mother is the Kiowa Archetype, my father Valor Burris, the Archetype engendered to hold the cultural DNA of the African diaspora. I was born as an experiment, I guess, to create an Archetype Earthside, as it were. We didn’t know about Lilith at the time. She’s been around far longer than I have.”

“An experiment?” I ask. “I thought Archetypes weren’t good at creating new things.”

“Those of us who are Earthbound, whether unauthorized or drawn Earthside like my mother, have spent a lot of time around humans. We’ve picked up a lot of things from them including, I have to admit, coffee and cozy spaces.” He studied the coffee mug, then raised his eyes to mine. “We are babes in the wood compared to humans, who have shorter lives but more extensive folklore, more skills handed down from generation to generation, more identity as part of a whole. Except for the Earthbound, our generations do not interact, and each of us have to earn our limited experience anew. Thus we do not create — but we among the Earthbound are developing abilities to synthesize information, to create. This is frightening to other Archetypes, which is why we’re prohibited from entering InterSpace, the Archetypes’ dwelling place.”

“You’re not allowed in InterSpace?”

“No,” Daniel sighed. “We are Prometheus. We carry fire to our people, and we are punished for it.”

Character sketch and interrogation — Daniel Workman

Here is a character sketch with what I call an interrogation (although, ironically, it’s done with open-ended questions so it’s not really an interrogation):

Daniel (Daniel Workman)
Role in Story: Anna’s future partner; member of When Hearts are Mountains, Mari’s son
Occupation: Jack of all Trades; security 
Physical Description Tall, lanky, with long chestnut hair, light brown eyes, and café-au-lait skin. 
Personality: Low-key, gentle, bemused, righteous (not self-righteous). Jokes about being an outlaw. Has some baggage from No-Space detention.
Habits/Mannerisms: Touching/settling into objects to make sure they’re solid. On rare occasions, dissociating. 
Background: Daniel is the offspring of Mari, a woman of Lakota/African-American Archtype heritage, engendered for the Buffalo Soldiers in 1866. This makes him relatively young. He is one of the renegade Archetypes that left InterSpace 500 years before to visit Earthside, and one of the ones who never checked back in on InterSpace. (Most of the commune has origins in this exodus, as do Lilly and Adan. Others bounced in-between Earth and InterSpace like Luke. He spent 30 years in No-Space from 1920-1950, so he has no recall of that time. He particularly likes his Wild West Days from 1870-1895.  He was the one who suggested the commune build out in the high desert.
Internal Conflicts: At times, feeling like he’s lived too long but at the same time enjoying life; Does not know if he’s good relationship material with his dissociation.
External Conflicts: With Jude, who later betrays them to Free White State. With Anna when he discusses how his Nephilim son was born and talks about why he’s not good for her.

Notes:
Me: Daniel, tell me about yourself.
Daniel: I am called Daniel, and in the world of men go by the name Daniel Workman. I am an Archetype, young at 200 years old. My mother is Mari, known as Mari Ettner in the world of men, and Valor Burris is my father. As an Archetype, I was born full-grown and able to participate in human culture, which I have. I have always found the West a haven from my early days on the frontier when someone who was half-black, half – Lakota was accepted at face value. Back then, I had an affair with a comrade; same-sex couplings do not produce offspring.
In 1920, not knowing that I had the potential to engender children, I visited a prostitute in Reno and had a child.  That child was Nephilim, of course, and ran away immediately. I did not know who he was until 2022, when Luke Dunstan found him on a farm in Nebraska and brought him here. Jude has taught us much about subsistence farming and founded our herd of Navajo-Churro sheep, which is big enough for plenty of  wool and occasional meat. We now know that Nephilim can live to over 100, although he is starting to show his age now and we estimate his lifespan will take him to 150 or maybe 200.
The Powers that Be arrested me soon after in 1920 — this was when the Triumvirate held power in the Council of the Oldest. The charge was engendering a Nephilim, and my sentence was thirty years in NoSpace. I believe it was done to break me; I later heard they tried to capture others but did not succeed. Perhaps I was the slowest and the weakest; I don’t know.
Me: I’m sorry to hear about your stint in NoSpace. You sound very upset about it.
Daniel: NoSpace is an evil place. No sound, no light, no touch, no time. No anchors. That could drive one crazy after a day, a week. I spent thirty years there. It took away a piece of me, the piece that keeps me rooted in the moment; I sometimes detach from the world and float in nothingness, and someone has to touch me and speak in my ear to bring me back. When I hear of the Triumvirate — who now spend their time in NoSpace — or any of their free minions, the vision turns to red and I dissociate. I’m told I yell a lot when that happens.
Me: You talk more than my usual interviewees.  You don’t need many prompts.
Daniel (*chuckle*). Mari says I could talk the ears off a mule, but Eldon tells me she doesn’t know a mule from a mosquito. 
Me: You all talk like cowboys.
Daniel. We’ve picked up Earthside speech mannerisms — partly because we can’t help but do it; particularly to provide protective coloration. I can talk like many, many types of humans.  
Me: Tell me about your relationship with Anna.

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Daniel: Anna is quite an interesting person. She’s one minute pulling out her field notes and another minute laughing at something happening around her. She’s joyful, which is surprising despite what she’s gone through. When she gets mad, she’ll go toe-to-toe with me, and I appreciate that. She pulls me out when I dissociate. I don’t know if I can give her as much as she gives me, and that lessens my chances of bonding with her. Plus, what happens when she finds out I’m an Archetype?