by Jacob Wren
“That’s a completely fucked analogy.” I could tell Melanie was enjoying this now. That she was glad she had come. “We don’t say human life is sacred because we’re the majority. It’s sacred because we’re human too.”
“We’ll kill an insect because it stabs us with the tiniest sting, over a single drop of blood. The people I’ve killed were coming at me with much larger weapons.”
“But why were they coming at you? You have to take some responsibility. It’s not without reason.”
“We’re just trying to live another way.” Bear became pensive, looking straight at Melanie, then down at the ground. “It should be allowed.”
Melanie turned back to look at the outfits again. “Is it all right if I touch them?”
And because she was Melanie she didn’t wait for an answer, slowly walking along the row, running her hand across the fur, looking over at me in complicity, slowing down as she neared the end of the row, ready for more.
* * *
The phone rang and Steve answered it. “You’ll never guess who I’m fucking right now.”
“Who?”
“Come see for yourself.”
Steve and Eric arrived quickly. Samantha got up from bed, completely naked and soaked in sweat, hugging them both, kissing them on the lips, giving it a little bit of tongue.
Filmmaker A felt embarrassed to be caught naked, worse by two men, and covered herself with the sheet. She thought maybe she had fallen asleep for a moment, or maybe she had only been hovering between consciousness and dream. Either way she felt interrupted, this new influx of people, people from a group she had in some sense created. She knew little about them, only through rumour, and therefore wasn’t sure if anything she knew was correct. They all piled onto the bed, introducing themselves, covering her, she almost thought consuming her. She didn’t like this, tried to pull herself free.
“Maybe we could go get something to eat.”
In the restaurant they kept asking questions. It was as if they wanted to know everything, what she thought, how she lived, when, where and why she worked. But as the questions kept coming she realized in fact they only wanted to know one thing, they wanted to know what she thought of them.
“No one thinks they’re going to have an impact when they start something,” she tried to explain, “or maybe you think you’re going to have an impact, but at the same time you think it’s only hubris, chances are slim, better to focus on your own thing and let everything else take care of itself.”
“But now you have had an impact,” Eric interrupted. “What do you think of it all now.”
“I don’t know.” She didn’t know. And the parts she did know she didn’t want to share. “It’s overwhelming.”
“We thought the new filmmaking was about blurring the line between what’s scripted and real. And there’s nothing more real than sex.”
“Death is more real.” It just slipped out. It was absolutely the last thing she meant or wanted to say. She was nervous, uncomfortable, it was unlike her. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that anyone should die.” It was unlike her to apologize.
“But that’s what’s so powerful about the new filmmaking,” Steve was really trying to persuade her. “When you fuck you really fuck, when you die you really die.”
“I suppose.” She was being evasive. She didn’t like this line of reasoning. This wasn’t what she had meant. She had only been searching for ways to make her life more vibrant, more alive, and to make this very vibrancy her art. Fucking and dying didn’t feel alive, at least not in the way she had meant.
“You don’t seem convinced.”
“I don’t know.” There was always some way out. “When you’re an artist, if you’re a real artist, in some sense you always have to kill the father. That’s our legacy: the modernist break.”
“So you do want someone to die,” Steve joked.
“I don’t know. You wouldn’t think I’d want it to be me.”
They absolutely insisted she come home with them but she refused, refused again and was becoming a drag so eventually they gave up and let her be. She sat alone in the restaurant. They had left without paying so, unthinkingly, she took care of the bill. They had explained to her the cocktail, the cell phones, the Centre for Productive Compromise. She had to admit, it did sound like a good film but she didn’t want to live it. It didn’t matter if they were right and she was wrong and of course there was no right or wrong. She didn’t know what to think, how to defend her position or even what her position was any more. They had done this to her, opened something up, not much but a little, and she found herself, almost against her will, begrudgingly admiring them for it. Something had opened. In all of this there must be something she could use.
* * *
As predicted, Melanie walked straight up to the man chained to the radiator and started making out.
The beautiful woman looked up from her notebook, sitting just a few feet away, and watched, as from the doorway I watched all three. It was an unspoken rule in the Centre for Productive Compromise that men were allowed to be sexually aggressive towards men, and woman were allowed to be sexually aggressive towards men, but men were not allowed to be sexually aggressive towards women. This was one of the many ways we tried to keep things safe. Of course anyone could say no at any time, though most of us rarely chose this option, but a ‘no’ had to be immediately respected.
The famous artist chained to the radiator pulled half an inch away from Melanie and said no.
“Are you sure?” Melanie asked.
He was sure.
Melanie walked across the room and sat in a chair in the corner. She looked over at the woman still holding the notebook.
“Maybe you’d like to watch me and her go at it instead?”
The man chained to the radiator looked at the beautiful woman and then back at Melanie. For a moment it seemed he was considering it. He was still looking at Melanie. “What kind of Mascot are you?”
“What do you mean?”
He gestured towards the beautiful woman. “She’s a tortoise? What are you?”
Melanie thought for a split second before clicking in. “I’m not a Mascot.”
“I thought everyone here was a Mascot.”
“You’re only hot for Mascots?”
The man considered this for a moment. It was as if the things he had found, up until this point, most profound and provocative, had suddenly been sexualized, as if he was considering whether this new (at least to him) more sexual interpretation was accurate.
“I wanted to come here.” He finally said. “Before they kidnapped me, I had wanted to come here, to meet them, to somehow be a part of all this.” I didn’t know he had been kidnapped, though the moment he said it of course it made perfect sense. “Before I came here, I was struggling, grasping at straws, struggling to maintain a position that was no longer tenable. Being here has simplified things. I am chained down. I am brought food. I am unchained in order to wash and exercise. And it has also simplified my thoughts. I ask myself what is important, and the answer is simple: What the Mascots are fighting for is important. The way they want to live, playful and strange, at odds with everything else we think we know. They are not consumers, they are reinventing cosmopolitanism, reinventing what it means to believe in something and fight. The longer I stay here, the more I admire them. So yes, if that’s what you mean by being hot only for Mascots, I suppose it’s true.”
Melanie looked bored. She was never one for lofty speeches. She liked fire and she liked action. But I was fascinated. With no knowledge of the new filmmaking, that artist chained to the radiator was in the moment, everything he experienced more precarious, more vital. His struggle never paused, while our knowledge of each activity as being ‘only’ new filmmaking somehow dampened our understanding of it. With the Centre for Productive Compromise I had always felt, if we got bored, we could stop at any mome
nt, but if the Mascots stopped they would be rounded up and killed. I felt enormous admiration for them, seeing them anew through his eyes.
“I guess that’s a no,” Melanie replied. “You don’t want to watch her and I go at it?”
The man laughed. “Before I came here there would have been nothing I’d have liked more.”
* * *
Eric and Samantha were excited, buzzing from the ‘mentor encounter,’ but Steve was morose. He was questioning, silently, for himself, everything they had been doing and why. Their mentor had somehow thrown him off, the way she seemed so faded, and the more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him that in all of this there was some great, stark irony. She had started the new filmmaking in order to live more fully, more vitally, and yet after twenty years of practice she now seemed like someone with little investment in life. Steve wondered if a similar fate awaited the Centre for Productive Compromise, if all their cinematic adventures were somehow a road that led in only one direction: toward exhaustion and disillusionment. When they had tried everything, what would be left to try?
He wanted to share these thoughts with Samantha and Eric, but the meeting apparently had the opposite effect on them. Samantha seemed particularly emboldened by her recent conquest, excited and energized by new possibilities. She began giddily proposing new scenarios.
“So let’s say Silvia, we all remember Silvia . . .”
Eric nodded that they did.
“Silvia’s at The Knife, she stops by there from time to time, doesn’t she, and her phone rings and it’s me. I’m phoning her from bed. I’m in bed with the mentor, post-coital, holding hands or being spooned. The mentor doesn’t know who I’m calling, but she’s used to me calling strange people at strange times so thinks nothing of it, and Silvia doesn’t know who I’m with. And Steve comes up to Silvia at The Knife . . .”
Steve had been distracted, hadn’t been listening closely, but at the mention of his name clicked back in.
“Steve approaches Silvia at the bar, introduces himself, says he’s a friend of Paul. All this time Silvia is still on the phone with me . . .”
It was unnerving how much Samantha knew about Silvia, Paul, their mentor and the rest of the circle. Like how some people might collect baseball cards or celebrity gossip, she tried to follow, through rumour, hearsay and the odd notice in the press, whatever she could about their mentor’s life.
“So Steve is with Silvia and I’m with the mentor. Then, next, I’m not sure. There’s just so many ways it could go . . .”
“Does Silvia hang up on you when Steve arrives or does she stay on the line?”
“Stays on the line, of course.”
“What are you two talking about?”
Samantha thought for a moment before letting the scenario unfold: “I’m telling her that the sex in her last book is some of the best sex I’ve ever read. That there are so many things I’d love to act out, so many things we could try together. She jokes that I better be on the left, because if I’m on the right it might prove fatal. The mentor doesn’t know who I’m talking too, but hears me mention a book and becomes suspicious. She’s cagey around talk of Silvia’s book. We’re talking about whether her book could be a kind of script or scenario for new filmmaking. Whether or not there’s ever been a new filmmaking literary adaptation, and how this idea might be one possible way forward. The mentor is listening, her curiosity peaked by all this talk of new filmmaking, and of course at the bar Steve is also listening.”
“This is like a porn movie with no porn,” Steve interrupted.
“I thought you loved scenarios with a long, slow build,” Samantha teased. “The anticipation . . .”
“I love scenarios where everyone’s in on the game. Where everyone’s cocktail-ready and primed.”
“You don’t know that I can’t convince Silvia and our mentor to join the cocktail.”
“I don’t want to convince anyone, makes it too much like a cult. For me, I’ve always preferred when people spontaneously join the fun.”
“You’re so uptight sometimes . . .” She was about to lay into him but stopped herself. So much was going on here. In fact, Steve was always a bit cagey when talking about their mentor. Perhaps there was some jealousy. In many ways he was already their leader-by-default. Perhaps, on some level, it pissed him off that no matter what he did, how clever or sharp he was, there would always be someone over his head. In some ways their mentor was like original sin, proof that no matter what they did the Centre for Productive Compromise would never be entirely their own.
Samantha could see why all of this might bother Steve, with his razor-sharp ambition and desire to see through everything to the core, but really she couldn’t care less. For her, Filmmaker A was inspiring: no more, no less. There was no substitute for the kinds of liberation she had found through seeing certain situations in her life as scenarios, in scripting them and by scripting them, taking control. And there was no question that Filmmaker A had single-handedly made this liberation, such swift and joyous rushes of freedom, possible.
* * *
Melanie was fascinated. Maybe it was only that she wasn’t used to being turned down, but I don’t think so. For me, her fascination had about it something strange and convincing. Now, each time I visited the house she would accompany me, grilling each of the Mascots in turn, trying to understand what made them tick, how their version of filmmaking could be so different from ours and, at the same time, so complementary. Feeling out opportunities for seduction, for new and striking scenarios we could all soon play out together, yet finding none. It was curious that they put up with her questions, graciously, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Perhaps in some sense they liked the attention.
Melanie was talking to the Kangaroo as I, once again, watched from across the room.
K: It’s true we’re not born this way. Yes, it’s a decision. We decide to wear the outfits, but once you’ve made the decision it’s a commitment, it’s like your skin colour has changed. No one who becomes a Mascot ever decides to turn back.
M: It’s the same for us. When we sign on, we sign on for life. But . . . I mean, there are moments when I’m lying awake at night, when I have doubts, when I wonder just what the fuck I’m doing with my life.
K: We don’t doubt, we fight. There’s no time. As soon as you pause for reflection you’re dead.
From across the room the dynamic was clear. Melanie was playful, flirting, curious, feeling out the situation, the boundaries of its honesty, tasting it for pleasure. But Kangaroo was focused, looking straight ahead, fielding each question like a knife.
K: When Popsicle was killed . . .
M: How did he die?
K: Two bullets in the back of the head as he was getting into the shower. It was the first time someone was assassinated – there’ve been a few since – but it was the first time one of us was killed out of outfit, couldn’t defend ourselves, didn’t get caught in the line of fire. We had a big meeting with everyone. Popsicle was our favourite. Everyone fucking loved that guy. There was no one better. And we asked the question straight. This shit is more dangerous than we ever imagined. If anyone here wants to leave, go for it. Everyone here will understand, no one will judge you. And no one flinched, no one budged. To be honest I don’t know why. Maybe it was only out of respect for Popsicle.
M: The thing is I don’t believe you. Everyone has doubts. It’s only human.
K: Maybe when you put on the outfit you’re not exactly a person anymore. In some sense you become animal. And your instincts keep telling you that the fight is just.
* * *
Filmmaker A was scheduled to speak the next day in Spain but she cancelled her flight. Did she want to fuck Samantha again, she wondered to herself. Was her curiosity about these oversexed acolytes only a pretext to get some more action? Or was there, as she suspected or at least hoped, more to it? Did she see in these P
roductive Compromisers some glimpse of her former self, her former idealism? And in such a glimpse might she hope to reignite her practice?
And then she had the perverse idea that would change everything: She would go out and buy at 16 mm camera. She would use the old filmmaking, which was of course where she began, to make a documentary about the new filmmaking. Could she actually do this? Was it a stroke of genius or a betrayal of everything she had stood for and believed in over the past twenty years? She didn’t know, but it was an idea, a new direction, and she was hungry enough for new directions that she had to give it a try.
* * *
Steve was examining his eye in the mirror when Eric got home. There was definitely some bruising and it fucking hurt. Eric glanced through the bathroom door, catching sight of the mirror, and headed into the kitchen for ice. He had been bashed in the park about two years ago and had basically avoided the park since. He walked into the bathroom, pulled a towel off the rack and poured in the contents of the ice tray, holding the frozen towel against Steve’s eye.
“Was it an ambush or a show?”
“A show.”
“What was the script?”
“I was going to tell him I didn’t love him, I loved you. We’d kiss then he’d punch me in the face. Then we’d fuck. You were supposed to be here to watch, maybe join in, but he was early.”
Eric laughed and as he laughed he realized that he almost wanted to cry. It was like a new filmmaking love letter. He wished he had been here to see it.
“He only punched me once. But he was stronger than he looked.”
And then they were both laughing, the ice scattering onto the floor as they kissed.
Later that night they were planning a visit to the Mascot house. Everyone was invited yet no one knew why. Eric joked that Steve’s black eye would lend them cred, show that their brand could be just as tough as the Mascots, but the joke fell flat since they both knew they were nowhere near as tough as the Mascots. The discrepancy defied humour.
* * *