An Unusual Angle

by Greg Egan

  The three squares rise into mid-air, shining a blinding blue-white. The wound is hey-presto healed. The pain is gone.

  I feel a little faint from loss of blood but otherwise it all might not have happened.

  It didn’t happen. I do not have the will-power to cut myself that deeply, and I doubt if the squares would go through bone.

  All I can do is fantasise; all I can ever do is fantasise. They are locked in there, beyond my reach forever. I have been obsessed with the idea of getting them out for several years, yet my brain has not managed to grow a door, an exit, a chute … anything.

  Short cut-away to fantasy sequence: The surgeon walks into the room, shakes my hand, says:

  —I’m sure that I’ll be able to help you. Just a minor incision is all that’s required. Just sign this document, giving me sixty per cent of your gross domestic and overseas takings …

  Some chance. Not even for one hundred per cent would they do it. Arrogant ignorants.

  I want to parachute into the middle of Perth to see what the perspective is like (I’ve tried it with a viewpoint, but it’s just not the same (I think)).

  I want to look out the window as I smash a rocket into Mars at a kilometre a second.

  I want to fall down a well.

  I want to build a fifty-storey building out of pure magnesium, and then set fire to it.

  And that sort of thing.

  And then I want to project what I have seen onto a very big white screen in front of a darkened room full of people.

  That’s the hard part.

  Ho hum.

  I can only dream.

  Who will handle my films?

  MGM?

  United Artists?

  Paramount?

  Cinema International?

  Columbia?

  Twentieth Century Fox?

  I can only dream.

  There is a way around my problem. I could buy a movie camera, start a film company.

  But where would I get the money? Even 16 mm cameras cost a fortune, let alone 35 mm. And processing and film stock costs. And editing equipment, and lighting equipment (I get by with what’s there, but I couldn’t with normal cameras and films). And sound-mixing equipment …

  And it wouldn’t be the same. It would all be technically inferior to what I’m used to working with. And it would not be through my eyes, it would be through a heavy, cumbersome piece of machinery.

  I must find a way.

  The rabbit could help me, but when will I hear from him again?

  The squares will do nothing to help me, no matter how I plead. They seem to be made only to assist me when it is a matter of life and death.

  Well, this is almost …

  Shut up.

  I go outside. The air is cool and there is a faint breeze. The sun has just gone down, and the sky is half pale-pink, half pale-blue. There is not a cloud in the sky, but there is a shining near-full moon and Jupiter is easily visible.

  It is still amazing to me that the moon does not move when I move; there is no parallax at all that I can detect. It really is as far away as they say. I keep expecting it to move against the infinitely distant sky. Now I must think of it as a glowing white navel painted on that distant dome.

  At least, in one half of my mind that does not believe that the Earth and the moon are twin planets circling the sun circling the galactic centre rushing out as part of an expanding (for now) Universe.

  I begin to hum the music from The Outcasts which was a television series but was good despite that.

  Generalisations always have exceptions, and are hence worthless. Always.

  It blends without much trouble into the theme from Exodus which brings tears to my eyes not because of the sadness of the film, but just because of the music itself. They are not tears of sadness.

  The sky seems to get bigger, the horizon to get farther away, but it’s just me, subconsciously changing focal lengths.

  I start on ‘Greensleeves’ and the tears pour down my cheeks. What a pathetic sight. Then the theme music from The Collector and I am smiling as I am crying.

  The tall American politician starts to say something, but I send him away. I’m really not in the mood for his particular brand of taunting.

  I send a viewpoint out to catch the silhouette of my head against the pink-and-blue sky. What an odd shape it is.

  The sky is beautiful. I drop the viewpoint down to ground level, then charge with it up into the pink nothingness until the colour begins to desaturate.

  The grass is just beginning to go from green to grey. I have never seen commercial film capture this time of day convincingly.

  But I’ve done it myself.

  I seem to remember an ice-cream van somewhere, once.

  If I could convince somebody to operate …

  But I’ve tried for years with no luck. Perhaps if I had the money to pay for an operation like that … but that would be more than I’ve got, more than I’m likely to ever have.

  Ho hum.

  I want to jump through a plate-glass window. How would that look on a fifty-foot screen?

  A thought: perhaps I should get my nose cut off. It shows up as a faint blurred shadow superimposed on any shots of very close objects.

  Tough: it’s ultra-realism. Isn’t that the Aim? Every scene looks just as if You Were There. Wearing my nose.

  There’d be a lot of publicity, a big Première in New York or London or maybe Los Angeles. Hundreds of important film critics wanting to see the first movie actually shot through human eyes.

  What if they don’t like it?

  There’s always that risk. And who cares about critics, anyway! I certainly don’t. The public will love it (not that I should care about them either, but) I can feel it in my bones!

  Cliché!

  I can only dream. No! I can do something about it!

  I can keep on asking surgeons, and I can keep on thinking about it in the hope that my brain will get the hint, and I can keep on trying to contact the rabbit.

  It’s better than nothing. It must be.

  To cheer myself up, I start to whistle the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark, then I switch to the marching music from the end of Catch-22.

  And then ‘Sanctus’.

  What’s the use in moping?

  And then Cabaret.

  All the recordings inside my head are sure to be illegal by the Copyright Act but the circumstances are probably so exceptional that I would not be prosecuted. How can you be charged with remembering something too well?

  (Silly question if you’ve read 1984 …)

  Though there might be legal problems if I try to exhibit those movies, with their sound tracks pirated from miscellaneous music I’ve picked up over the years. I’ll have to get permission (buy permission) from all the individual sources.

  And that sort of thing.

  Brain, take note: I want a music-composition section built as soon as possible.

  I wish I could show everyone what it looks like to fall face down in a field of flowers. They’ve probably done it themselves but closed their eyes. I get around it by filming through my eyes but looking through a viewpoint, to help stop my reflexes. Of course my inner ear still notices that something is amiss, but my brain believes its eyes (stupid fool). The sore nose is worth it and not too bad when the ground is soft.

  My dandruff is getting terrible. I must do something about it.

  Maybe I could persuade my brain to grow a light source so I could project the film back with my eyes; the optics are flexible enough to accommodate it, I think.

  Work on it. Read books about projectors and lighting devices. There’s always a chance. Fluorescent organic compounds? Go look it up, there must be a way.

  I wonder how much it cost to film Twilight’s Last Gleaming. What a dull film, but what a lot of work went into it. I suppose they hired those tanks. I could never be a movie producer: all that complexity, all that administrative work. Of course I’d have assistants and secretaries
but still there’d be so many things to think of to be sure nothing went wrong. I’d go mad.

  Perhaps I should become a humanist film-maker and only produce films revealing evil and injustice, like Z. But they all have to be either true, in which case it has to be a foreign government that I expose or I’ll get zapped, or generally applicable matters, in which case everybody hates me.

  Or I could just go around the world filming the sixty or seventy or whatever percentage of the population who are all starving. But what good would it do? If it was All Proceeds to UNICEF then people might come into the cinemas to be air-conditioned for an hour or two in exchange for ten cents out of their six dollars going to India hopefully not for bombs, but it is necessary to completely change half the world’s way of thinking before any real good can be done, and I could never make a film that would do that.

  Try as I might (won’t). Even with a big screen there is not enough impact, not enough certainty of concentration. Maybe The Exorcist can drive them insane and Jaws can keep them off the beaches, but can a film make them give up their cars and their pot bellies and their colour TVs? Will Ghandi?

  No.

  My head is itching terribly.

  My eyes are sore. Blindness is what I fear more than anything else. I don’t ever dream about it, I don’t dare.

  Why should I let myself get so depressed when I realise that there is nothing I can do about it at all? The best thing to do is just to live as simply as I can, without luxuries, give what money I can, trying not to think about the smallness of the effects.

  It’s the thought that counts.

  Bullshit! It is hard cash that counts.

  Cliché.

  The tall American politician only needs to smile. Or rather sneer. He knows how mad it makes me feel. His glasses are mirrored now.

  Should I make films to make people happy or to make them understand what the world is like and hence make them sad? Should I take them away from this grimy planet into the cold, clean depths of sterile space, or should I rub their noses in the ghettos?

  And what would I know about either?

  I once read that movie-makers should use opinion polls to find out what the public wants to see. Great! Positive feedback for every decadent force in society. Reminds me of Rome.

  Why the blurriness?

  Ah, and how should I portray schools? Sentimentally? Sarcastically? It all depends on where you point the camera and what music is on the sound track.

  When I was very, very, very young I kept promising myself that when I was older I would be a champion of ‘Children’s Liberation’ battling for the rights of preschoolers. I was convinced that I would never ever forget what it was like, that I would never betray myself.

  I have forgotten and I have betrayed myself.

  Sometimes that makes me sad, and yet I cannot bring myself to do all the things that I promised myself I would do. They all seem so ridiculous, and I am afraid of ridiculousness. Besides, children are probably all different now, wanting different things, looking at everything from different angles.

  I brood so much lately. Something about the fifth years leaving has put a churning disquiet into my bloodstream. I’m starting to see my future, and I don’t know what to do with the mottled shapes and the mocking voices. I’m so far now from the perfect womb-time. I want crystal-clear certainty of a pattern in the future as perfect as that pattern of the distant past.

  Sometimes I just want to go to sleep, to sleep forever. There’s no responsibility (what would I know?), no decisions. Everything is quite inevitable in dreams, and even in the worst nightmares the consequences are never that bad.

  But I just keep waking up.

  I wish the rabbit were here to mock me. His comments were always kinder than the others’. I can’t believe that I was responsible for all his actions. I can’t. He was too much fun. In retrospect.

  Shut up. Switch off. Shut down. Elegant eloquence today!

  It is nearly the end of the holidays; there are just two (short) weeks left (well, you have long and short tons …). So many teachers and students left last year, everything will be different … but I’ll soon get used to it and it will seem eternal once more.

  It will be too long and too short.

  Happy and sad.

  Exciting and boring.

  Beautiful and ugly.

  All at once, mixed in so thoroughly that you have to look hard to see all the individual components.

  Right now, what I want more than anything else is to grab my mind and my life and shake it back and forth until, by magic, it takes on the perfect form that will guarantee that it will be worthwhile and happy.

  An explosion of unfocussed light and I am dizzy, panicking, blind. My head is burning, my scalp feels like it has been torn with a can opener. I squeeze my eyes in pain and spinning yellow-and-green patterns writhe in front of me.

  I wake on the ground, my right hand over my head, sticky with dried blood. The blindness has left me, and there is only a little pain as I take my hand away and disturb the newly formed scab.

  Something must have fallen on my head: a rock or a piece of metal.

  Fallen? From where, an aeroplane? Perhaps someone hit me.

  Think: first thing to do is to wash it, disinfect it, then get to a doctor in case of concussion.

  I walk inside. My balance is fine, there is no pain actually within my head anymore. I try to feel the shape of the rip in my skin but I pull my hand away from the pain.

  Gutless!

  Shut up.

  At least this has stopped my stupid brooding.

  Reality intrudes.

  Whatever.

  Into the bathroom. I run the cold water through the shower, put my head under, jerk it out with a loud exclamation, then force it back under. Blood splashes on the bath and the wall. My hair has stuck together into a solid mass around the wound, and does not seem to be separating. I turn on a little hot water and the hard clots begin to break up.

  Just as I think I have washed away all the blood, the wound begins to bleed again. I turn off the shower, grab a towel, and press it against my head. Then I sit and wait for the bleeding to stop.

  I count to a thousand. Then I take away the towel and feel around the wound. There is a roughly circular perimeter which I feel around, not going in any further than the edges. Then I brace myself, move my index finger, up in the air, over the spot where the centre of that circle would be, and then I bring it down, slowly.

  It touches soft membrane, but there is no pain. I push a little …

  There is no bone underneath.

  I explore the velvety tissue with the tip of my finger. As I approach the edge of the circle, there is a slit, like a deep cut, or a fish’s gill. There is no pain as I prod the opening.

  Then I put my thumb and index finger below the flap of flesh.

  Underneath there are five hard, long, thin cylinders. I grip them one at a time and drop them carefully onto the towel.

  I just hope hair will grow back on the soft spot.

  I pick up one spool, examine it closely.

  Standard-position sprocket holes and all!

  The film is kept from unwinding by a tiny transparent sheath over the spool. I slip it off. The film begins to curl out from natural elasticity. I hold it up to the light.

  I unravel several metres before I recognise which one it is. I have never seen film this way before, the way every other film-maker knows it.

  Then I wind it up tightly, replace the sheath.

  I leave the spools on the towel while I clean up the bathroom, then I slip them into my pocket and put the towel in a bucket of water to soak out the blood.

  I think I am grinning. I’m sure I look foolish. I very much like the angle at which the sun comes in through the bathroom window.

  I take the spools up to my room, arrange them in a row on my desk. Then I sit there. I just sit there and stare at them.

  I go to a mirror and work out how to brush my hair so it covers the
soft membrane. I run down to the bathroom and put some detergent in the bucket with the towel. I wash and dry my face, straighten my clothing. Then I walk back to my room and lean in the doorway. They’re still there.

  Only then do I scream with a voice that shakes my universe:

  —I’VE DONE IT!

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1 - ESTABLISHING SHOTS

  Chapter 2 - CARNIVAL ATMOSPHERE

  Chapter 3 - TEDIUM

  Chapter 4 - MUSIC

  Chapter 5 - HOLIDAYS

  Chapter 6 - HUMOUR

  Chapter 7 - ENTERPRISE

  Chapter 8 - HONESTY

  Chapter 9 - COMPANY

  Chapter 10 - HEAT

  Chapter 11 - ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES

  Chapter 12 - RAIN

  Chapter 13 - HOCKEY

  Chapter 14 - ASSEMBLY

  Chapter 15 - MORE COMPANY

  Chapter 16 - DISSECTION

  Chapter 17 - REHEARSALS

  Chapter 18 - PERFORMANCES

  Chapter 19 - STANDING UP

  Chapter 20 - RELEASE