Andrew Polk

Andrew Polk was a frail, bald ex-movie director. It would never do to assume he hadn't any skeletons in his closet. He was also a vicious axe-murderer, though nobody else knew this about him... for very long. He was just the sort who would push the edges to breaking of any categorical typification placed in, as it was tonight.

On this night, he was in a box. It wasn't a drab sort of box the likes of which could be found at just any office supply store so much as five delightfully decorative slats of venal fiberboard pieced together with care and precision. Copious amounts of work had gone into making this particular box androgynously livable. Here a scarf, there a knife; Crocodile Dundee wouldn't have been caught dead with it by any means, but it was a serviceable knife for any purpose. It was this very knife that would soon be mysteriously found ten-thousand miles away in the back of a corpulent Brazilian cadaver who had already been dead for several days.

How exactly it traveled mach 3 under no apparent propulsion through layers of solid steel and vacuum was a great mystery of the ages until one day, far, far in the future, naturally-occurring miniature wormholes were discovered to be much more commonplace that any theory had predicted in its wildest dreams.

Andrew Polk removed his robe and hung it on a nail protruding through the edge of the box. The nail had been his worst enemy on three separate occasions since entering the box, each time requiring a bandage in a different location, only once on himself. It was no ordinary nail. It had no head that he could find. He'd been on both sides of the box time and again. On the inside, where his robe so cleverly now covered it, he had always, always seen the pointed end of a short nail. On the other side of the wall he saw, alternating, a small gecko and the other pointed end of the nail. Every time he looked, it was the opposite of what he'd seen before, and it was always the same gecko.

He'd tried to remove the gecko once, which was the style at the time, thinking it had been shoved on to the nail somehow, but it was stuck more strongly than a banana in the hands of an angry gorilla. Which was precisely the kind of metaphor that applied to Andrew Polk two years previous, when he'd almost wrapped up his final movie, The Jungle. Sadly, when the lead actor was found lying in his ex-girlfriend's bed with an axe in his back, all hopes of completing the masterpiece were lost. The world was stunned into silence when the news was broadcast, but none so much as Andrew Polk, who had very vocally decided in a bar the very previous night, to an attentive bartender and audience that he would kill that man if he screwed the scene up one more time. "With an Axe!" He had shouted, shortly before his common-sense, trying to save himself, knocked him unconscious. Then to find, after dragging himself home, that all over the news was the announcement of his lead actor's death, he immediately found that he had absolutely done himself in. He had less than no alibi.

He wasn't even surprised when the police had shown up on the set the next morning looking for him.

And so it was that he was now in this box. On a no-man's island. Gently coasting around a colonized, military-owned asteroid between Earth and Mars, in a sub-orbital geo-dome. It wasn't all that bad, except the box was just small enough to require exiting to do any sort of real stretching, and there was the noise of a dying emu sounding out every five seconds. It took some getting used to, but the clincher was that all the dead emus washing up on shore were piling up and starting to smell.

Andrew rubbed his hands together conspiratorially, ignoring the throbbing pain in the back of his left hand sufficient to drop even the least amiable koala bear. He had great experience with ignorance. So great, in fact, that he didn't even know it. He rather would've enjoyed making up the phrase "ignorance is bliss" if somebody else hadn't already done it. He almost stood up walked out of the box, only to be shot by an aficionado of his earlier works. Luckily for him, he didn't.

As old as Andrew Polk was, he hadn't really that many titles to his credit. He had taken a sabbatical at the peak of his career, a move which was widely regarded as the stupidest idea since sliced bread, which was discovered to have been a very bad invention indeed shortly before this. Those who had enjoyed his works up to that point were invariably disgusted (except for those who weren't) by his return to film forty years later to "try something new". They had enjoyed his earlier works because of the zing and panache he brought with him into his movies. Somewhere during those forty years, he had gone on a safari to western Europe (by now completely overrun with jungle) and lost those two very things that allotted enjoyment globally henceback. So his return to the world of movie art was met with glorious indifference... until he released his first movie, which caused a rebellion in Turkey and, reportedly, the deaths of several mafia gangsters in the Congo. It was at that point that his fanbase suddenly shifted to all and only those people who didn't like his older films.

Instead, he decided to defend himself, and fully stand up as he walked out of his box, whereupon a bullet narrowly missed his nose and failed to even properly blast a hole in the wall of the bio-dome in which he—and soon the sniper—lived for the rest of his days for his crimes against humanity. He proceeded to defend himself with the nearest sharp thing he could find. It wasn't until two months later and another two failed attempts on his life by the same man (each defended with a different sharp object) that Andrew Polk was allowed access to a camera to shoot his final farewell; a painting for the ages, as it were; Michelangelo's David, except with Andrew Polk instead of Michelangelo, and Andrew Polk's Last Will And Testament instead of David. Not a very provocative title, he'd be the first to admit, but it would just work. That's all Andrew Polk ever said. It would Work. The simile, on the other hand, just didn't.

Perhaps one uneducated in the ways of Andrew Polk's time would not understand why he decided and was allowed to create this film at this time. Let me explain. Cruel and Unusual punishment was no longer outlawed, as long as it was outlaws performing it on each other. He soon had the dome back to himself, and when he died two years later, his film was released to the world, and everybody understood Andrew Polk, only too late. Many people knew he still had one last great film in him. Perhaps only one great film, but whatever their opinion, it was great; a monumental achievement for the society of film, and for the world. And one could never truthfully deny that Andrew Polk was amazingly, unpredictably right. It worked.