NARRATOR 4: Queenie + Percy discuss heroism in the televisual age

After the mayhem that ended our last evening together, Queenie and I pretended to be mad with each other and ran avoidance for a few days. To tell you the truth, I was a bit embarrassed. I mean, I don’t even fancy Sean Bean, I prefer my men a bit suave, you know. But it’s not often he jumps out of a cupboard in your friend’s apartment. And as I was stoned to the eyeballs on Xanax and Shiraz at the time (nice buzz actually), I missed a crucial opportunity to impress and put meeting the hobbits on the Quest agenda (Not that I believe in Quests). However, Queenie rang today and said to get my hot ass round, Percy needed our undivided. I made it conditional on revising my storage vision for the man cupboard. Queenie called me a conniving manslut and said dinner was at seven sharp.

Unbeknowst to Queenie, Percy was actually quiet because he was happy. Finally, he felt his Quest was back on track. He was surreptitiously noting what he could of the location and strengths of different heroes he saw on television. So he could ride out and marshall them. Unfortunately, they all seemed to live in a terrible, pestilence-ridden wasteland land called America, the centre of which, according to Queenie, was full of ‘droid people who deserved everything that was coming to them, and should be avoided at all costs. And he would need her help to get there. Another problem he faced was how to slip his weaponry out of the man cupboard without Sean Bean reattaching himself to his riding boot.

But this evening, Queenie had confounded his progress by hiding the remote control. ‘Swounds, she was relentless. After dinner with her and Narrator, she took his hand and said in a gentle voice that she needed him to understand that television was not real. It was an instrument for controlling people, she said. Narrator snorted at this and said Queenie must be well under control, then, seeing as how she was permanently plonked in front of it. Percy wasn’t sure what Queenie meant; he felt television was some sort of modern minstrel. Queenie thought that was a good analogy. Like cds and Playstations and chick lit novels, it was a way people kept in touch with important things like love and heroes and Quests nowadays, she told him. But unlike other minstrels, it was very powerful.

The reason it was so powerful was because everyone had one, everyone in the world almost, and so they all heard the same stories. This meant that the people who owned the stories could say whatever they liked, and everyone would believe them. And those people decided what dragons were and what heroes were, and because everyone wanted to feel the same as everyone else, they all hated these dragons and tried to be heroes like on television.

What kind of dragons, Percy wondered. Dragons such as fear and loneliness, said Queenie, the shadow crossing her face again. And what kind of heroes, he asked, a little afraid now.

Narrator, who was knelt peering through the keyhole of the man cupboard, suddenly said he could answer that, and started rummaging furiously through Queenie’s cd collection. He was looking for a minstrel called Bonnie Tyler, who had a great song about heroes, he said. Queenie got very annoyed and said she didn’t buy that kind of crap. Narrator reminded her of something called a karaoke bar in Kusadasi, 1996. They were getting quite upset about the whole thing, so Percy suggested they put on the cd made by a minstrel called the Boss. He said this because Queenie liked him. Narrator looked disgustedly at Queenie and muttered something about taking the girl out of the bog. Queenie looked at Percy strangely. You’re a lot smarter than you let on, dude, she said.