INTERVIEW WITH THE MOCKINGJAY -- Chapter 1

And now for something completely different -- my "Hunger Games" fan fiction

After watching the first “Hunger Games” movie, I found myself intrigued by the dynamics of the dystopian tyranny, the ritualistic slaughter of teenagers for the elite’s amusement, and the rebellion that ensues.

After reading all three books, I became even more intrigued by the process of rebuilding the shattered nation of “Panem,” and the adults who actually fought the rebellion and now had to assume the duties of running the country.

I wasn’t as interested in yet another agonizing love triangle involving teenagers, being in my 50s. I am far past being a teenager, and I rarely find love triangles entertaining.

However, as a historian, municipal employee, and writer, I thought it might be a fun idea to write a novel about the adults rebuilding the nation, from their point of view — how they fought the war and won the peace.

It still isn’t finished, but, yes, I have the story arc in my head, and here’s what I’ve got so far. I will trickle it out, like J.R.R. Tolkien originally writing “The Hobbit” to entertain his son, who was a tank commander in the British 8th Army in World War II. He sent his son chapters of the book, and they were so popular, that when the younger Tolkien received them in the Libyan desert, he read them out loud to his entire battalion in the evenings, when both sides leaguered for the night. They were a smash hit with the Tommies. As we know, they became a smash hit with generations of readers.

So here we go, with no further introduction…

INTERVIEW WITH THE MOCKINGJAY – Chapter 1

I needed my war to understand why my father never talked about it.

My father was a Peacekeeper.

So was his father. And his father before him. And his father before that.

So when I was growing up in District 2, I naturally expected that I would become a Peacekeeper. That is, until I was 10 years old, and I told Daddy I wanted to be a Peacekeeper, too, and he turned around, pointed a gnarled index finger at me, and said, “No son of mine is going to be a Peacekeeper! Charlie Allbright is not a Peacekeeper!”

That was the only thing he said to me about his work, before and after he retired. After the ceremony, he hung his uniform up in the closet, put the medals away in a drawer, and never talked about being a Peacekeeper again. Until the rebellion, that is.

He only had one thing to say about the Hunger Games, too. He’d look up from his beer while he was watching them, and say quietly, “Thank God you’ll never be a tribute.” Then he’d look back down at his beer. He had the Hunger Games on – who didn’t – but he never looked straight at the violence on the TV screen. It was like he was looking a thousand yards into the distance.

So there was always this massive gap between us. This giant mystery. Why a man who had served for 20 years as a Peacekeeper, earned decorations for it, would not want his son to follow in his footsteps. Or even talk about it.

He’d talk about everything else – gossip, family, friends, what I was going to do with my life, but his work was the forbidden subject. He didn’t attend reunions of former Peacekeepers, or go to their functions in the Capitol. The invite would arrive, and it would go sailing across the room into the garbage.

Fortunately, my desire to be a Peacekeeper didn’t last past age 10, either. Nor did I have to worry about being a Tribute. Every time they held the Reaping, there was practically a fistfight among my schoolmates to see who would volunteer to get slaughtered in the arena. And the winner of the fistfight was almost invariably the winner of the Games. Those that didn’t make the games became Peacekeepers, anyway.

I didn’t think much of the games anyway. It just looked like the Capitol shoving their power down our throats again, year after year. At least we weren’t like the starving scarecrows from Districts 11 and 12.

By the time of the Second Rebellion, I was 29 years old, and running the district’s official newsletter. Opinions were divided in the newsroom over what we should do – support the rebellion, support the government, or just hide in the woods. I called the staff together, and told them they had to act on their individual consciences. Then we shut down the paper.

But I had a competitive edge all those years. While my schoolmates were learning how to hurl javelins and swing axes for the Hunger Games, my English teacher shared with me the language. Since I didn’t have to worry about being reaped, I read her rare volume of Shakespeare. “You have to believe there can be something better to life than the garbage they spout on television,” she said. “Just keep it to yourself, until the time is right.”

When the rebels invaded District 2, they seized our village almost without a fight. The local Peacekeepers fled into the Nut. Before I did anything, I asked my father what I should do. He looked right into my face with those tearful black eyes, and just said, “Join the rebels.” Then he looked away, trying to avoid my eyes.

The rebels needed fighters and writers. They needed fighters to win the battles and writers to explain the fighting to everybody else. I became a “combat correspondent,” lugging a rifle, a notebook, and recorder, filing stories for Plutarch Heavensbee, who I never met. He was just a disjointed message or a rare phone call, saying, “Good job, Allbright!”

Daddy didn’t ask me about the war, either. But when I joined the rebellion, he started talking to me about it. First when I was in the district, then in his letters to me. I would ask questions…he would answer them.

Some of them.

When the war ended and we won, I came home. There was no victory parade in District 2. I just walked into the house at the end of the road, and dropped my duffel bag in the door. Daddy came down the stairs, very slowly, and looked me over, looking a lot older than his 57 years. He wasn’t much into hugs. “You made it,” he said.

“Yeah,” I answered. “I’m home.” It was all very anti-climactic. We just stared at each other. There was this long silence between us. Finally, I said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

He nodded slowly. “Now you know,” he said.

Then he solemnly shook my hand, and shuffled into the kitchen to get me a bottle of beer. I opened my duffel bag, found the little frame with my medals on it, climbed up the stairs, and put them right next to Daddy’s plaques. Then I shut the door and didn’t look at them again.

For two weeks, I sat in the back garden, watching Daddy practice his putts. District 2, being a favored district, had a golf course. The Capitol had better ones, of course, but most of them had been plowed up by bombs and shells, and nobody was wasting resources on repairing them. But Daddy had this dream. Some day he would play golf in the Capitol.

He putted. I watched. We spoke to each other in monosyllables. I had nightmares by night, and silences by day. However, he talked a little more. Sometimes out of the blue. He’d tell a story, and leave it at that.

Five weeks later, I got the call from the editor of my division’s newsletter, George Altman, a guy in his 50s, who saw something in my ability and my background. He’d just got a cushy new job, taking over the Panem Times, the nation’s “newspaper of record,” which was, like the rest of the country, re-inventing itself. Was I up to reporting on that re-inventing, he wanted to know?

Sure, I said, if it pays well. And if the train can get me there.

“It’ll pay well,” he said. “And there are some really good fringe benefits. Of course, some of it will not exactly be fun, but it should be easier than the war.”

So I left Daddy to his putting and his silences, and took a train to the Capitol.

“We need to tell the people what they need to know, not what President Snow wanted them to hear,” George said when we sealed the deal over drinks at one of the few Capitol restaurants that didn’t get wrecked in the fighting. “We are building a new and hopefully cleaner society, to replace a tyrannical one, and we have to report this process honestly and fairly. I need reporters who can communicate well and with compassion.

“Compassion is the most important thing,” George continued. “For the past 75 years, this country has been based on sadism. We have to teach people that caring must come first and the dignity and value of the individual human being.”

George was and is a guy with a round face and not much hair. He came from District 9, where they grow corn and wheat. His mother was some kind of grief counselor there, helping people with personal problems. He ran their newspaper. As soon as District 9 rebelled, he turned an official rag into an incendiary broadsheet.

“Journalism is one way to advocate for the powerless,” he said, swirling his Scotch. One thing we have in the Capitol are vast supplies of classic liquor, carefully stored by rich people in their cellars. Now that’s available to the public. “We have to make people feel and understand what’s happened since the Mockingjay won the 74^th Hunger Games, what happened before, and what’s happening now.”

Outside, I could hear the roar of armored vehicles. Ten weeks after the death of President Snow, and the Rebel army – now the Panem Army – was still patrolling bomb-blasted streets. President Paylor had said in a recent press conference that until the Districts were being cared for, she wasn’t going to expend resources on making the Capitol beautiful again. “I couldn’t look Districts 11 and 12 in the face if I cleaned up Capitol streets while people are still starving out there,” she said. “The people of Capitol City have to start sharing the burdens.”

“I’ll bet that little statement went over real well with the residents of Capitol City,” I told George as an armored car rumbled past.

“Most of the population has become alienated with the previous regime by that slaughter at the Presidential Palace,” he answered. “The rest have either fled or are learning the hard way. Our greatest problems are actually convincing many people in Districts 1, 2, and 4 that their culture of worshipping violence has to end.”

“You mean the people who worshipped the Hunger Games,” I said. “And I’m from District 2.”

“Your District was the last district to fall to the rebellion,” George said, “And you’re that District’s most eloquent voice. You can speak to the nation in general and the district in particular of the horrors we’ve been through and the need for positive change. That’s the biggest reason I want you on this paper.”

“It has nothing to do with the fact that Panem has four competing newspapers and Plutarch Heavensbee’s TV station, and that we have a national population of about 2.5 million people,” I said.

George smiled broadly and shook his head. “I would never think of something so crass.” The smile faded. “But the offer stands.”

Needless to say, I took the job. I had one condition. They had to hire Kae Lyn Harrington, my photographer from the war. That wasn’t a problem, George told me…she was already on the staff. They would assign her to me. Anything to make the old combat correspondent happy.

Two weeks later, I was occupying an apartment that had previously belonged to a pastry chef, covering the war crimes and conspiracy trials. I even had a maid, a former Capitol socialite named Calpurnia, who lost it all when a155-mm shell blasted open the side of her apartment building. She was very good on keeping up appearances. I think she threw herself into working for me to so as not to think about how her world had been turned upside down.

I took me and her two weeks to clear out the apartment’s stench of moldy bread, but I covered the trials for seven months. They were carried live on TV networks, so the whole country was watching the sordid tale of brutality, conspiracy, corruption, and most of all, contempt for people. There were few acquittals. They were starting from the top down, so I had to cover the trials of the senior cabinet members.

I found out that a lot of working for a major national newspaper was not fun. Like war crimes trials, for instance. The defendants were all bloated sybarites, who profited from tyranny, sadism, and corruption. With their weight gone, their plastic surgery undone, wearing gray prison uniforms, they looked as repulsive as their crimes sounded. I had very little sympathy for them, and I know it showed in my writing. Sometimes I would ask my father about these characters, and sometimes he would tell me a story about them from the old days. More often, he wouldn’t.

My bosses quickly recognized that these trials were making me sour, so they would send me to the new schools in some of the districts to give the “Career Day” pep talks to students. I’d talk to kids about how empowering writing could be, and they should become journalists.

They would ask if there was a “fun” or an “exciting” part to covering these trials. Or about fighting in the rebellion. It’s hard to find something “fun” when a widow is testifying about how her whole family starved to death while some bigshot in the Capitol was getting specially-cooked personal bread loaves. I didn’t talk to them about the war.

***

So it’s been seven months of the ministers’ trials, and they are moving on to the Peacekeeper leadership, and George is calling me in to his office on a Friday and shutting the door, which is never a good sign.

He is wearing a white shirt that droops too much over his belly, and a vest. Like most people in the Capitol, he’s losing weight under the more austere post-war diet. All our clothes are too big on us now. George never wastes time in conversations. “Your father was a Peacekeeper, right?”

“Yeah, retired. Did his 20 and out.”

George nods, and stares down at the floor, which has three versions of next day’s front page on display. “He was decorated, right?” George continues.

“He has a few medals. I don’t know how he earned them.” And I’m not going to find out, I don’t say.

George looks at me with a sad smile. “Someday you must get his story.” He pauses. “And tell us yours.”

I shrug, but I can feel my stomach churning. “It was a war,” I say. “We won.”

George has tried again to get my first-person exclusive on my part in Snow’s downfall, and failed, as usual. “Yep,” he says, with a gulp.

George kneels down on the carpet and studies at the front pages. The lead story is the latest verdict on the old Secretary of Education. He’d taken payoffs to look the other way while schools in my own district trained Careers. He considered that “sound preparation for the Hunger Games.” The prosecutor called that “profiting from training killers.” The judges sided with the prosecutor. Now the only question is whether or not the secretary will get the rope.

“I think he should hang,” George says.

“He trained killers,” I say. “He didn’t fire-bomb kids. I think he’s going to get 30 years.”

George nods. “You’re probably right. I’ll go with the one in the middle,” he says, pointing at the chosen front page. Then he looks at me. “I have to take you off the Peacekeeper trial coverage. Do you have a problem with that?”

I think for a moment. “No, actually, I don’t. I’ve had seven months of these trials. I can use a break.”

George exhales. “I’m glad. I was all set to give you the big lecture on how having the son of a Peacekeeper covering the trials of Peacekeepers could be a conflict of interest. You just saved me a lecture. Grab a seat.”

“Didn’t know I needed a lecture,” I say as I sit down.

“You don’t,” George says, collapsing into his chair. “But I need your very best effort for the next month. I’m putting you on the biggest story we’re facing as a nation and a newspaper.”

“The hunt for Caesar Flickerman?” I ask.

George laughs. The infamous host of the Hunger Games had vanished in the chaos of the war. The government is determined to locate him, because he may be the spark for a counter-revolution, if the new regime falls on its ass.

“No man with that ridiculous pompadour can stay hidden very long,” George says.

“He can if he shaves it off. Besides, he’s a motormouth, not a politician. I don’t know why he’s so important. He never had an original idea in his life.”

“Yeah, but people listen to motormouths. Anyway, that’s not the story.” George reaches onto his desk and grabs a Mockingjay medal. It’s one of the thousands that have been produced during and since the Rebellion. He leans forward. “Charlie, I want you to find the Mockingjay.”

I think my jaw goes slack. What the hell? “Me? You want me to go down to find Katniss Everdeen?”

“Precisely.”

“Every journalist and muckraker and fake prophet and publicity seeker in Panem is trying to get an interview with the Mockingjay,” I say. “I’ve got a better chance of an interview with President Snow, and he’s been dead seven months. The District 12 Commissioner arrests people who try to interview Katniss Everdeen. They protect her.”

“Yeah, but we’ve got the competitive edge.” He reaches around his desk, which is stacked with papers, and comes up with a parchment envelope, which he hands me. Inside is a letter from President Paylor. One sentence. Paylor doesn’t go for fancy phraseology.

“To the Commissioner of District 12: You are ordered to render all assistance to Panem Times journalist Charles Allbright and his team in their efforts to interview Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mullark. Respectfully, President Paylor.”

I let out a whistle. “Jesus, George, this is incredible. The president is ordering District 12 to cooperate with me?”

“This has been a political football for the past two months, and a growing national crisis since the war ended. There are 80 million theories about Katniss Everdeen and nobody knows the right answer. First she was the ‘girl on fire.’ Then she was the star-crossed lover. She became the symbol of the revolution. Then she shot the leader of the revolution. Then everybody said she was crazy. Then it turned out the leader of the revolution was going to be as bad as the leader of the old government.”

“Nobody knows why she did what she did, or how she did it. Many people think she’s just plain crazy,” I say, handing back the letter.

George waves it off. “No, you keep the original. Put it on your ‘I Love Me’ wall after this is over. However, that’s the exact point. Only one person in all of Panem can tell us her own story, and that’s Katniss Everdeen. The whole country is looking to her for guidance as we rebuild. She could set us on the right course.”

“Or the wrong one,” I answer.

George shrugs. “That’s something we have to find out. Charlie, we have a ruined nation trying to rebuild. A nation of widows, amputated veterans, blasted buildings, and confused people. The government is trying to make our people compassionate, caring, and united after 75 years of sadism and terror. We’re not going to build a new nation if we build it on lies.”

“George, she’s a reclusive 18-year-old kid, who’s been tortured, starved, beaten, lost her little sister, lost her home, been through the Hunger Games twice, liberated this city in gruesome combat, and then went totally crazy…”

“All the more reason why we need her story.” He waggles his index finger at me. “There are other important reasons. We have new generations coming up and they are all drawing inspiration from what they’ve heard. They should draw inspiration from the facts, not the legend. And that generation also needs correction.”

“In what way?”

“You know this better than anybody. How many kids in your school wanted to be Tributes?”

“Think of a number and double it. What are you getting at?”

“How many of them do you think still want to be Tributes?”

I squeeze the letter in my hands. “Nearly all. The trials are going right over their heads.”

“They see the Hunger Games as being glamorous and exciting. And the winner gets a life of ease. We have to erase that concept in the teenagers coming up.”

“Can’t we do it with the trials of the Gamemakers and their staff? Don’t you think the testimonies of family members of dead Tributes will make good TV and copy? I’ve interviewed them myself.”

“A famous man from our planet’s early history said that the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of thousands is a statistic. Our people are being buried in statistics right now.”

“Who was the famous man?” I ask.

“A guy who ruled another continent. His name was Josef Stalin.” I think I’ve heard the name. Since the liberation, the history of Earth is being dug out from sealed libraries and mansions. As a society, we’re trying to regain our memory. I read Shakespeare. Kae Lyn listens to the blues. And George does Sherlock Holmes. I guess he thinks Katniss Everdeen is the next Holmes adventure.

“Katniss Everdeen has the undivided attention of the current generation of youth,” George says. “Her life’s message will speak directly to all the disaffected and disenfranchised teenagers out there and connect them with our new society. We have to move speedily to disarm a potentially violent generation, which could rally behind a demagogue, overthrow the government, and restore tyranny.”

That’s a hard point to argue with. George usually cuts straight through the garbage and finds the central issue. Makes for a good editor.

“What if her message is: ‘more violence?’ What if she’s plain nuts? Then her message could inflame that same generation.”

George throws his chair back. “I thought long and hard about that. It’s a major ethical question.”

I start to ask why, but he answers my question. “If she turns out to be an apostle of violence or just plain crazy, we can’t run the story.”

“What do we do?”

“We report the situation to President Paylor, kill the story, and leave her alone.” George thumps his desk.

I lean back in my sofa. “That’s the deal you made with the president. If she supports the government, we have the story of the century. If not, we cover it up. So we’re really acting as agents of the government.”

“Not a good thing for a newspaper to do,” George whispers. “But these are unusual times.”

“But why us to act as the interrogators? Can’t the government just send a couple of their researchers down there with a recorder and say, ‘Katniss, we need you to spill your guts and save the nation?’”

“She won’t talk to them,” George says.

“You’re kidding.”

“President Paylor went there personally in a hovercraft, and she slammed the door in the president’s face. She doesn’t want any invasion of her privacy. The government needs the truth, but they have to handle her with kid gloves.” George pauses. “As you said, she’s an 18-year-old girl, who’s been tortured, beaten, starved, manipulated, and not even the president is willing to risk damaging her further. Even to save the nation. I think at some levels, everybody’s afraid of her.”

I look back down at the front pages. Maybe George should go with the one on the right, I think absently. Eyes bulging out of his head in amazement punctuate the Education Secretary’s bland face.

“There’s a lot riding on this story,” I say.

George nods. He looks away at his office wall, which has a framed copy of the first issue of the new Panem Times on it. The story was Paylor’s inauguration ceremony. “It may be the biggest story in world history. Another tyranny takes over, it could lead to war and annihilation of Panem.”

I look up. “Okay, but I have a few more questions.”

George shrugs. “Shoot.”

“Why me? I’m the son of a Peacekeeper. She won’t talk to the president, why should she talk to the son of a cop who may have killed her best friends? I grew up in District 2, which won most of the Hunger Games. She probably hates our District on principle.”

“You may be the son of a Peacekeeper, you may be from District 2, but you’re also the best reporter, the most intuitive writer, and the most caring person I have on staff. I need someone who can empathize with suffering. You saw plenty in the war. You’re a combat veteran. You opposed the Hunger Games. You’ve covered the trials. In your own way, you have shared experiences. I’m counting on your ability to empathize with her and make a connection.”

I can’t argue with that kind of logic. “How long have I got?”

“As long as it takes.”

“What if she slams the door in my face?”

“You do the same thing you always do in getting the information we need. You talk to everybody in District 12, from the Commissioner down to the kids in the parks. If they have any. You work on the people she knows and trusts, and gain their trust.”

“But we’re still trying to manipulate her.”

“We need to know her truth. And part of that is how she was manipulated.”

“We can tell that story.”

George thumps the table. “Absolutely. It’s an important message to our citizens to avoid being manipulated. Maybe she can send a message in just saying, ‘Don’t be like me. Say no to violence.’”

I think for a long time. “I think you want to empower her, rather than manipulate her.”

George’s voice takes on a hushed tone. “My mother used to say that all the time in counseling sessions. Try to find empowerment in any situation, and use it to become stronger. This is more than a big exclusive, Charlie. This is about ending a war and healing a nation.”

I put my head in my hands to absorb the situation. I think about the kids I grew up with in District 2, who had only one subject of discussion: how they would win the Hunger Games. The Games are gone, but that sick, twisted hunger remains. That hunger has to be filled with the more wholesome food that the new society is making. Nevertheless, District 12…we’re talking about a society that is a sealed-off compartment, like a lot of the empty apartments in the Capitol. Nobody knows what’s behind the locked doors of apartments that belong to dead people or criminals awaiting trial.

I look back up at George. “How about this…suppose we start off with stories about District 12. It’s the smallest and least-known district, anyway, and the whole war started there. Before the war, everybody thought they were a bunch of inbred yokels. Now it’s a martyred ruin. I could do a series of stories about how the district is rebuilding itself, positive pieces, which would win the confidence of the residents, and make them willing to open up to me. Through them, I can connect with her.”

It’s George’s turn to lean back in his chair and think. He stares at the ceiling and the blinking fluorescent lights. Then he exhales slowly. “That’s good. Very good. There’s a compelling national interest in what’s going on in District 12. In many ways, it’s the laboratory for how we rebuild the whole country. No District suffered as much under Snow and no District suffered as much damage in the Rebellion. Okay. File regular stories on the rebuilding process. We’ll run them up front.”

“Okay. I’ll need some time to get up to speed on this project.”

“I’ll get our library guys to work with you. We’ll go over the files and tapes on Monday. Tuesday I want you on that train to the mountains.”

“I also need Kae Lyn Harrington. She’s been my camera woman in a year of war and seven months of peace.” She’s the only one I can talk to about the war.

“Your camera woman?”

“Yeah. I don’t go anywhere without her.”

George shakes his head. “You can’t have her,” he says blandly.

I flush red. “Can’t have her? What the hell, George? She’s fast and she’s good.”

“Precisely why I need her on the hunt for Flickerman. She’s going out Tuesday with the patrols.”

“Damn it, George! You say this is only the biggest story in history and you take away my camera!” I can’t tell him that I need her as a friend more than I need her behind the lens.

“Which is why I’m giving you Ace Archer.”

“Archer?” He’s 19. From District 1. The only thing I know about him is that he’s fast and good. “Don’t know the guy personally.”

“He’s a good photographer.”

“That I know. He can shoot pictures.”

“Then you have no objections to taking him?”

“I’d rather take Kae Lyn, than have to break in a new photographer.” I sigh. “But if that’s what you want, I’ll take him.”

“Great.” George rises to shake my hand. “Look, I don’t want to put too much pressure on you, but the nation needs the Mockingjay’s story told. For good or evil, Katniss Everdeen put this country on its present path. We need to know that it’s the right one. You’re the only one who can do this.”

I know it’s time to go. “I hear you.”

As I leave, George offers one final piece of advice. “And, Charlie? May the odds be ever in your favor.”

I turn back. George has a wan smile. “Thanks a lot, boss.”

“Any time, kiddo.”