Captives

Todd Hasak-Lowy’s first novel will be published in October. Its title is Captives and its hero is Daniel Bloom, a family man and screenwriter for Hollywood. Lately, Daniel’s become disenchanted by a world, or just a country, of contemptible materialism, of institutionalized greed. Politics, political rage, soon infringe on his work. Daniel’s new screenplay emerges as a revenge fantasy. A sniper runs amok, assassinating everything, or everyone, wrong: “bad guys,” CEOs, lobbyists, flacks. But, as the trailers say, “this time it’s personal.” The reader begins to believe that Daniel truly wants these people dead. Then Daniel believes that he does. Then Hasak-Lowy’s Captives darkens — like the theater before the feature begins.

Todd Hasak-Lowy teaches Hebrew language and literature at the University of Florida. His previous book, of stories, was The Task of this Translator. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Zeek will publish an excerpt from Captives in two parts. What follows is the second. The first can be found here.

— Joshua Cohen, Fiction Editor


This still largely embryonic screenplay began for Daniel with the idea of an assassin whose preferred method is the high-powered sniper rifle. Though the figure of the sniper had, in various ways, been treated in other, earlier films, Daniel in particular being fond of the sharpshooter from Saving Private Ryan, he still believed strongly that there remained much unexplored territory. Daniel’s minimalist tendencies, his preference for scattering a handful of precision-crafted, highly contained acts of violence over his ninety-minute stories, made the sniper an obvious choice for him. The inherent sterility of the sniper’s violence, the distance, the brevity, the suddenness, also provided a new and fascinating challenge when it came to investing these acts with emotional weight. Daniel wasn’t really sure how he’d manage this, but was hopeful, and did have a general sense of gradually devoting more and more attention to the assassin as the story progressed, showing how his apparently seamless and essentially affectless acts were, in fact, riddled with misgivings and thus slowly tearing him apart. There was even the possibility of the sniper and the agent chiasmatically intersecting and thus passing by each other in regards to their respective stances on the justice of the sniper’s program to surgically remove a handful of horrible, powerful individuals from among the living. In other words, maybe the federal agent would decide to actually assist the sniper, while the sniper, aware of the agent hot on his heels, would wait expectantly to be caught, having come to see the error of his ways.

The sniper’s targets came second, and it was conjuring up this collection of somewhat fictional and possibly deserving victims that ultimately spelled trouble for Daniel. His stories had never been political before. Indeed, the sort of violence Daniel imagined and represented was not only limited, it was necessarily contrived, nearly to the point of allegory. If real-world politics entered into his screenplays it was solely to round out a character’s background, provide an initial motivation, or adequately ground the setting to placate some narrow-minded studio executive. Sometimes it helped set things in motion if, for instance, someone could be shown to have spent time in the military, but Daniel was never interested in making a statement about the military’s recruitment strategies (Unlisted) or bodyguards (Body or Soul) or rural America (Get Away). But in this case

Daniel found himself disinclined, for reasons initially unclear to him, to have his sniper target random, everyday individuals, in part, he realized, since regular people can be killed up close. A sniper hits targets from a distance precisely because these targets cannot be reached in any other way. During wartime such distances are a function of impregnable battle lines and contested topography, but Daniel’s distaste for the cluttered chaos of war made this an unattractive choice of settings. To tap into Daniel’s screenwriting strengths, this sniper would have to target people who felt perfectly safe, but people who necessarily, for some reason, would have to be killed from a distance.

And who were these people, these people who lived in perfect safety, but were in fact suitable targets for a serial sniper? The powerful, the apparently untouchable and powerful: corporate executives, politicians, etc.

Now prior to the development of this screenplay, Daniel’s personal desires and concerns never much entered into his stories. Daniel is not one of those screenwriters who, above all and deep down, longs to tell his story. He has never once felt the urge to write a screenplay about a guy like him growing up in a place like the place where he was raised, a guy falling in love or feeling alienated or watching his family fall apart. Indeed, Daniel first fell in love with movies, like so many before him, thanks to the escape they promised. As has been demonstrated, while Daniel is without doubt emotionally invested in these various projects, this investment manifests itself not in the content of the screenplays but rather in their stubborn, sustained composition. Related to this, it should be mentioned that for most of the seventeen years Daniel has written screenplays he has never been much more than mildly interested in politics or the state of things.

Growing up, Daniel detected a vague displeasure and even occasional hostility being directed toward those responsible for whatever it was that went on in the 1980s. His distinct pleasure, in the early nineties, to find himself suddenly living under a government he didn’t instinctively identify against surprised him, but this pleasure, too, soon faded, and once more Daniel retreated from these matters into the pretend, self-contained, punctuated-with-violence world of his screenplays. Perhaps this violence was, then, in some sense, a response to his long-running disappointment with the state of things. Perhaps there was some sublimation involved. Daniel would not necessarily have denied this, but neither would he be much moved by its possibility.

Over the last half-dozen years or so, however, Daniel has been sensing a slight but steady shift within himself when it comes to thinking about the state of things. His previously longstanding, reliable, but somewhat limited cynicism and distaste for this state of things had once allowed him, encouraged him even, to turn his back on the possibility of working to improve it. Things weren’t great, perhaps they were quite dire in certain areas and from certain perspectives, but they appeared stable enough and bearable enough, at least, or especially, for him, not to mind it all that much. He occasionally encountered words like responsibility and duty and urgency and unsustainable in discussions, private discussions even, about this state of things, but these words slid off his back, or he turned his back to them, something facilitated by the overall political apathy of Hollywood, where the only activists were movie stars, whose activism was so clearly a form of vanity that it served to distance Daniel and his ilk yet further from the very possibility of political engagement directed at improving the state of things.

But this new decade, which happened, dramatically enough, to be a new century and, if that weren’t enough, a new millennium as well, seemed to augur something else entirely. Each passing day Daniel found himself more and more preoccupied with thoughts about the state of things, a state that was bad and getting worse. Small talk at casual get-togethers gravitated more and more toward a predictable meditation on this state of things, leading quickly and inevitably toward an abject, forlorn consensus that things were bad and getting worse. And while in the past a conclusion of this general, if not as severe, sort was often reached largely, it appeared, in order to generate a bond between those participating in this pessimistic consensus, now this consensus was at best cold comfort, because, and everyone knew that everyone agreed on this before the predictable conversation even began, things were really very, very bad and getting much, much worse. To the point that Daniel had recently become haunted by a certain intractable rage at those responsible for this state of affairs and a similarly persistent frustration with himself for doing nothing at all, beyond voting in the electorally irrelevant state of California for president once every four years, to change things. All of this may have been exacerbated by the growth and maturation of his son, Zack, who from time to time asks for explanations about this or that news item, and who, moreover, represents, not at all metaphorically for Daniel, the person who is to inherit the world that Daniel’s generation is making for him. While Daniel hardly enjoyed having inherited a broken world himself, he appeared to have managed well enough, but the notion of failing to assume any real responsibility to fix the world that his son will inherit, a world that is perhaps, likely even, to be qualitatively worse than the world he inherited, such that there is a decent chance that Zack is going to inherit a world so broken that he is almost certain to suffer or at the least witness up close some really, really unpleasant things, was not something he could ignore, nor could he ignore the troubling implications of experiencing and understanding this new sense of responsibility by suddenly and sincerely subscribing to the cliché “the world our children will inherit,” a cliché he had previously dismissed for years as the stuff of laughable sanctimony.

And so that July, one clear July morning in fact, as he sits trying to write this screenplay in the quiet, peaceful guesthouse behind his family’s luxurious home, Daniel suddenly makes some unhappy realizations. First, Daniel realizes that the assassin’s actions represent a form of wish fulfillment. While in the past there may have been elements of wish fulfillment in his screenplays, while perhaps Daniel indeed wanted to know and thus imagined in detail what, for instance, was involved in taking revenge on one’s captor, this was always carried out on a solely abstract level, one limited to isolated individuals encountering and responding to existential and thus universal dilemmas. The real world simply didn’t enter into it. But with the assassin things had changed. The assassin’s targets were chosen as targets precisely because of who they are and what they represent in the real world of today. Moreover, Daniel realizes that even more than staging these murders with exquisite precision, Daniel wants to fantasize, at length and in great detail, about the systematic murder of a short list of individuals he feels are responsible, or at least emblematic of the forces responsible, for the current state of things. This screenplay, it turns out, is another revenge story, only the vengeance is fueled not by a particular, isolated act confined to the imagined world of Daniel’s story. Rather, Daniel’s assassin is taking revenge on actual people, or fictional characters who are clear stand-ins for actual people, for what they have done to create this state of things, and in so doing have created the world that Zack is to inherit. Daniel, he realizes as he stares out onto the family pool and nervously chews an innocent pen to the point of no return, unequivocally wants a number of real people dead, and this, he realizes, is perhaps the most efficient and promising way of going about expunging them, at least in his imagination, from the human record. Finally, the great potential of this screenplay stems not merely from its various narrowly understood cinematic qualities, its suspense, its development of character through action, its use of powerful visual images, in particular the inherently pleasing aesthetics of seeing a soon-to-be dead man positioned just so in a sniper’s crosshairs, to enthrall its audience, but more so from the way this movie will, Daniel imagines, tap into a collective rage, a collective desire and even need for, in lieu of actual violent revolution, the staged murders of a representative swath of leaders responsible not only for the dismal state of things, but for a state of things that includes, necessarily, the widely held conviction that the collective for whose welfare these leaders work has been rendered utterly powerless and politically irrelevant, so much so that they might well be allowed to gather in large numbers in darkened movie houses to view a fictional story in which leaders who strongly resemble their own leaders are taken out by a lone sniper as punishment for systematically and intentionally disregarding the needs of this very collective.

After this large and distressing conclusion comes into perfect focus, Daniel turns his head quickly away from the pool and removes the withered pen from his mouth, hoping that this abrupt motion might permanently dislodge from his mind this conclusion and the long trail of thoughts that led to it. Without moving, frozen in fact, paralyzed even, Daniel runs as fast as he can from this realization, whose full consequences he still hasn’t sorted out, but whose general implications he already recognizes. Simply put, Daniel should not write a screenplay that gives voice to such a bleak view of the world.

Either Daniel will have to convince himself, really and truly, that he doesn’t think things have gotten to the point that various powerful individuals need to be erased, or Daniel will have to do something about the world, not kill people of course, but rather get off his financially secure and undeniably privileged and flat-out-lucky ass and devote long, long hours to fixing the world. Right away Daniel senses that neither of these possibilities is tenable or appealing. He looks around, unsure how to proceed. After a full minute he stands up and leaves the guesthouse.

Still not entirely willing to admit he now occupies the unenviable position produced by this dilemma, Daniel spends the rest of the day compulsively performing the various activities he performs when stuck in his effort to make progress on a script that does not involve the need to come to terms with his murderous rage or recognize that he is accountable, ultimately, for the state of things. Daniel slowly walks Alfred, the aging, arthritic, loyal family dog, who silently refuses to respond to his master’s pleas for help, runs three miles in place on a treadmill, eats a delicious, overpriced lunch by himself in public, goes to a hideously bad matinee, where he sits in the dark by himself in public, and, finally, drives to the ocean and stares out at the beautiful thing hoping for some ministration, or, at the least, some pity. Daniel’s wife, Caroline, calls his cell phone twice, but he does not answer. Over the last two years, watching her husband and his swollen ego suffer, Caroline’s distaste for the movie industry has fully metastasized into an unruly, intransigent, and volatile rancor that is so not fun to be around that Daniel has more or less stopped sharing with her any of his screenwriting and deal-making experiences, save the most innocuous and predictably welcome. This is, of course, a problem and not really the kind of thing that can continue unaddressed for much longer, since Daniel’s identity and sense of self revolve in large measure around his screenwriting and deal-making experiences, but since Daniel had been an insufferable asshole, closed up, selfish, restless, irritable, and finally cruel, for over four straight months during the previous spring and summer, he figures she can be accommodated for now. In another couple months, when Caroline finishes her latest interior-design project, they might perhaps decide on a policy going forward. He stares at his phone after ignoring her second call, briefly wrestling with the guilt and resentment. Then he calls Holden, his agent.

—Bloom, what’s up?
—I’m at the beach.
—Ouch. Four o’clock on a Tuesday. Not a good sign. What’s up? Do you need talking down?
—Yes. But in person.
—Today’s no good. How’s breakfast tomorrow?
—Fine.
—Nine sharp, at the corner of Highland and Third. There’s a new place.
—Sounds good.
—Go home. Watch the first half of The Graduate, up until Hoffman starts dating the daughter. Then watch the opening of A Thousand Clowns, until the social workers show up. If things get really bad, try the opening of Harold and Maude, or the middle of E.T.
—I can’t watch the end of anything?
—Absolutely not. And do not, under any circumstances, so much as touch The Deer Hunter.



From the book Captives by Todd Hasak-Lowy, to be published by Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

Images by Leonardo Kaplan.