"The problems I think about aren't very interesting."

"Les problèmes auxquels je pense ne sont pas très intéressants."

Part of a series from a page titled "Practice Quiz on Relative Pronouns."

Jeremy was cleaning up his garage when he saw Tilda Swinton. He considered the situation and decided it was a ridiculous proposition, but a delayed double-take confirmed his previous assessment. Tilda Swinton was hard to mistake, especially for someone whose girlfriend had made him see that Narnia movie twice in the theater.

Swinton was approaching quickly, swathed entirely in cornflower blue jersey; the drastic change in height that results from movement and optical perspective contributed to her frighteningly tall stature. She was a physical paradox of a woman: elfin but imposing. Expressionless yet ominous. Familiar yet foreign. Jeremy wasn’t sure what to do, but his impression was that holding a stack of newspapers from August 2005¹ was probably not the correct answer.

Upon her arrival at the threshold of the garage, she achieved a small, close-lipped smile and produced a quick wave. Jeremy had remained frozen as if encased in carbonite, an allusion he made only because Return of the Jedi was being shown on TBS at the present moment but his girlfriend had demanded he get to work on the garage. Otherwise he probably wouldn’t have thought of it. He stood motionless, staring. This was his standard action when being confronted with the presence of Swinton; this particular situation included among its deviations the fact that she was not projected onto a screen, and he was not in a dark theater begrudging the $12 he had spent on concessions for his girlfriend.

“Is your mother around?” she asked with her British inflection, where the end of the question goes down instead of up. The casualness of such a question frightened him. Another paradox. He answered briefly—no, she wasn’t—but truthfully. His mother lived in the greater Minneapolis/St. Paul area and he called only when he had trouble finding items at the grocery store.

“Would you ask her a question for me?” This time his response was a lie. He had no desire to talk to his mother, but every desire to find out what Swinton had to say. “Would you ask her why she didn’t respond to the latest e-mail she received from a man?” He briefly and spasmodically furrowed and unfurrowed his brows. “Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear,”--whew, clarification--“would you ask your mother why she didn’t respond to the latest e-mail she received from a man?” What the hell? Since when was his mother shunning the advances of men? Since when was his mother even in the same zip code as advances from men? Since when did Swinton concern herself with the personal correspondences of middle-aged medical receptionists in northern metropolises?

He agreed to give her a call; whether this statement was true was beyond him. For the next two hours, he continued to clean the garage with the same vigor with which he had cleaned B.S.², which was to say without any. For the next two months, he continued his life with the same vigor with which he had continued it B.S.³, which was to say without any. He never told anyone about the incident, nor did he ask his mother about her e-mail. From time to time he couldn't help but wonder what Swinton had meant. He upgraded his Netflix subscription to the ultra-exclusive 20-at-a-time plan. Adaptation. Michael Clayton. Broken Flowers (his girlfriend considered that one a personal victory). Vanilla Sky. Burn After Reading (he checked the IMDb page several times throughout the course of the movie to make sure the crap he was watching was indeed by the same guys who did The Big Lebowski). He then moved on to her earlier work: Orlando. Degrees of Blindness. Conceiving Ada.

He kept copious notes and revised them weekly. Dialogue, motivation, context. He was becoming Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind--he added that to his queue as a welcome respite from all the Swinton. No amount of careful study elucidated her cryptically familiar question.

----

"You're right," the author said to her friend. "The problems I think about aren't very interesting."

"Well," he paused to take a bite of his sandwich, "that's why you'll never be a writer."

THE END.

¹His present action.
²Before Swinton.
³Ibid.