The AD thanks the actor, says the requisite words of dismissal. Obviously, they’ll be in touch with his agent. Obviously.
“So?” says Ansel to Albert.
Albert, who can pass for one iota nicer than Ansel, but probably taxidermies babies for a hobby, looks at me. I shrug. The brothers scare the crap out of me, and I’m not going to voice an opinion, but they read it on me anyway.
“He’s not the guy,” says Ansel. “You wanna go kiss some indie film actor ass, be my guest. But you wanna make this picture, we need to keep looking.”
Albert squints at me. The brothers are careful about all of their choices. In all the articles about them, this is what the critics say, that they get second, and third opinions, that they run through scenarios ten, fifteen times. That they do laborious post, rather than do reshoots, and that they are incredible technicians, because how they do what they do is by not wasting resources. And so whatever, to getting my opinion, but the AD points out later that they aren’t asking any of the other PAs.
“You agree?” Albert asks me.
I nod yes, just a little nod. The brothers have begun to distinguish me from Melissa and Ari, the other Ivy assistants. They don’t want it to go to my head, but they might have learned my name.
Ansel says, “how long does a funeral have to take, anyway?”
“You were the one who said she could be counted on,” says Albert.
They have been known to get physical with each other, two men in their fifties in not especially good shape. We exit the studio, and once I’m in the hall, I relax somewhat. The AD closes the makeshift door on the studio, and the voices become muffled.
On my way here earlier, before I’d reached 125th, I had stopped by the post office hoping for a check from my mom. Instead, I found a letter from Nancy. Now, while we wait for the brothers to decide what to do, I try to decipher the handwriting.
It’s postmarked Pittsfield and it’s written on an Amtrak napkin. Look, writes Nancy: New England. We like our stories to end on a farm in the country, a kitchen; the heroine is scrubbing pots and eating dry meals, and probably praying. That’s where we think this is going. He’s the bad guy and she’s his victim, but she’s learned some valuable lesson, feeding goats and making yoghurt.
But it’s her begging him on the train platform, and it’s him saying no. No. It’s gotten too bad, and it’s too late. They’ve managed to scrounge enough for one ticket to California. He’d dropped a muffler and popped a tire on his way to the farm, but Nancy still thinks it’s fifty-fifty he’ll go after her eventually. It’s fifty-fifty for a wedding on the beach.
Around me, the crew are gathering their belongings, slinging their bags onto their backs.
The AD taps my shoulder. “We’re calling it a night. Do you need me to walk you?”
There are seven dark and empty blocks between 125th and 118th, where the foot traffic begins to pick up again. They aren’t easy blocks to travel alone, but I’m already calculating how fast I can run, how soon I can be back in my dorm to my man. Above me, the train hurtles past. I am thinking of the Amtrak, on its way West, whether the boyfriend will drive after her. Paul has paged me, which means they are leaving Blue and Gold, that there’s every chance he’s already lying in my bed. The night is summery, still in the high seventies. The streetlights have haloes of humidity around them. I too feel I hang above the city. I begin to run the blocks, fearless and hungry.
After rehearsal breaks up at the St. Mark’s Theater, Davos and Ned and Paul and Nadine go out to the bar. Paul gets drunk on well gin and tonics, on Happy Hour specials, and then he rides the 1/9 to me. I take off my clothes as soon as I get through the door and we don’t mind how sweaty it is, how slick our skin is in the gathering summer. Now it is night. He is sitting by the fan in my dormitory, looking down at the street, ashing into the whirring blades. I kiss him. He tastes of Prince Rounded Flavors and his own sour breath and a giant slice of Coronet pizza. He tastes of cloud. He is tired but he is twenty-three and I pull off his shorts, and I kick out of my panties and slide him into me. Our mouths are bone hard, are open, are yearning into each other.
We fall asleep under the cool sheet on my twin bed, one of us dangling over the side. Early, still raw with exhaustion, I wake up in a room without oxygen. I am like a beach before tsunami, the tremble of the lake before the sinkhole swallows. This is me trying to stay still; this is my body before I give in. My legs and my spine and my eyeballs want cloud. They want it, but they will take Paul, will accept Paul as substitute. I know it’s too much, but I have to wake him, too. With my hands, I have to do it. I have no choice.
“Jesus, Mellie,” he says, four hours into a gin sleep. “What’s wrong with you?”
Paul is twenty-three years old and, including me, he has slept with twenty-four women. Paul says that none of them, not one of the two dozen lovers, has ever acted like I do, constantly after him, waking him to make him have sex with me. It’s too much, is what I understand. It’s abnormal. But, I am trying to fix something. A quality of numbness that keeps interceding between our two skins. There is a thing in my mind, red, blurry, and if I focus on it, if I hold onto it, I can find him in there. I can break through the skin of cloud between us. We meet at midnight, at dawn; we fuck and we sleep and that is how I am holding us together.
Later, in full light, I wake again. The bed beside me is empty. Paul sits a few feet away with The Voice. “Mellie, listen.”
I haul myself upright and prop a pillow between my back and the wall. He’s gotten me a coffee from the cart and he is squatting on his long legs with the folded newspaper in front of him. My phone is ringing but we are used to ignoring it.
“So,” says Paul. “Remember how I was telling you we saw Vera Woczalski at the previews?”
I nod, but I am still groggy, have no idea who this is.
“The critic. The theater critic from the Voice. She’s like twenty-two or something, but she was there. And she published a review of the play.”
“So?”
Paul gives me an involuntary smile that contains no pleasure.
“I can’t read it. You read it.”
He hands it to me, and I anticipate what it will say, because I have known all along. The play is a disaster, is an insult to the audience, is crude and amateur and derivative. Woczalski writes:
Davos Kruck has developed something of a reputation in the downtown scene, but this play casts a backwards shadow over the director’s early works, which after all only come to us in translation. Having seen The Magic Knife, one wonders whether earlier faults might have been overlooked, whether it is time for a reappraisal of the director’s reputation.
But then she says:
Newcomer Paul Greene is seemingly as artificial as the others onstage, but his artifice transcends to become the thing the play promises . . .
It’s just that line, but when I look up, I realize that Paul has already read it, and that it accounts for his agitated euphoria. He wants me to help him know how to react.
“It’s always better to be bad in a good production than good in a bad production,” he says.
“Still,” I say. “It’s talent. You get to know that from the newspaper. That you have talent.”
“Not that I even necessarily agree. Who is Vera Woczalski? She’s twenty-two. There are a hundred drama school girls she could be.”
Suddenly, I’m seized with something fierce for him, a righteousness on his behalf. “She’s right, though. She’s completely right. You are good. It’s the rest of them that are full of shit.”
He holds the paper, eyes boring into it. He waits for the words to gain some incantatory power, to manifest themselves as true or false.
I think about what was said to him on the train through Siberia. It would have been an assessment, a judgment about his native gifts. He boards the train as a supporting player. Davos pronounces. Paul jumps off the train into the unbearable blue. The thing is forgotten. Paul gets the lead.
; What Professor Mackin said to me, when I missed the Marshall deadline. “You are used to being the smartest student in your literature seminar. Fine. That’s fine. But we’re talking about the smartest people in the country now. It’s not something you can bullshit in a one-day marathon.”
New York tells us: you’re playing my game now.
“In the script,” I say to Paul. “How does it describe the ice boy?”
“It just says, beautiful.”
Yes, I think. G-d, yes. Lean, hard bones, skin that is both pale and brown. And his beauty is more intense with the worry written there now. He puts down the paper, sips his coffee cart coffee. I want Vera Woczalski’s words to have power to match whatever Davos told Paul while he was sitting on that square suitcase in that freezing train compartment; I want him to listen to me. It should be enough that I say it. You’re talented, beautiful. I have a secret.
Nancy calls us, drunk. “I’m reacquainting myself with tequila,” she says. She is at her parents’ house in Brookline. No one can reach Andi.
“Is she with the bad boyfriend?”
“It’s the same boyfriend as always,” says Paul. “It’s that same guy Judah.” He’s been having his own conversations with Nancy. I wonder if he has a secret, too.
“Is there still going to be a wedding?” I ask.
“I’ve got my dress,” she says. “Is it tacky to wear red when someone gets married?”
“Maybe it’s for the best,” I say.
“You should come for opening night,” says Paul. “On your way.”
Nancy says, “I’ve got to puke now. Love you. See you.”
Paul is looking at the review again, scrutinizing it as if it’s a message from Zarah, full of hidden warnings and signs of the future.
“I think I should go easy on the cloud tonight,” says Paul, lighting up a Prince. “I think I need to cut back.” He gives me an absent squeeze, wraps himself in my pink robe and pads down the hall to the floor’s shower. Kids screw in there, all the time. I want to follow him in with a bar of soap and I am beginning not to know whether my impulses are sweet or creepy, sexy or sick.
Instead, I go through his things. I open his messenger bag, and thumb past his annotated script and his Swiss Army knife and the Gumby pencil case in which he’s taken to carrying his cloud. I hold it up to my face and inhale, inhale, inhale the sharp lemon scent, then I open it. Inside are two spoons and a torn leather cuff with three letters tooled in. D A V. It is a memento, a mystery, and it carries with it a sense of violence. The phone rings, but I don’t pick it up. The only person I want to talk to is right down the hall and once he goes, he’ll never call. Downtown, dress rehearsal, it’s an entirely other world.
Six
Longwood Towers
2010
I stand, for a moment, just out of view of Longwood Towers. My pulse beats at my neck as I come into sight of the dark façade. The sun is in my favor, or less plausibly, the therapy is working, because this time, I have no trouble making out the fountain, the looping drive, and the several towers.
The countdown to Found Footage is at nine days. The video of the headless woman has two hundred thousand hits. Something is stuck in the pages of my paperback. Now, I stand in the exact spot where Mr. OD TO had vanished. No seeking him out, Emily had made me promise. No hanging at places he might happen to be. I think of what I know of the SUV man, his twitchy hunger, the confusion, his urgency. This is not a person who would sit around a lobby for weeks, just on some hope I’d return. Still, I’m looking for him in the shadows. Of course I am. But it had also been Emily who told me to come, that I didn’t need to be in earnest. Everyone has bad motivations. You just have to do life, one thing after another.
So, now here I am, Longwood Towers. As I make my way toward the entrance, I conjure back my conversation with the bald man after pizza, the rain coming in. There was something he’d wanted to ask me, a little device coming out of his pocket. He’d mentioned the project. And then he’d become someone else. Someone smoking a Prince cigarette beside a black SUV. He’d vanished into these shadows. Two men? One man? Cloud tries to make connections, wants things to relate. My boss, the man in my driveway, and now the man from the Monday meeting. As if there is some kind of polarity in operation, disconnected episodes try to connect, to intersect, but perhaps it may be impression only, merely brain detritus, the afterimage of a high I am suffering rather than perceiving.
Still: it feels real, like pieces, logical connections are looping in. Things spark and flare in the periphery, notes of meaning which refuse to coalesce. The itch to write, to get it on paper, is almost impossible to resist. I step through the doors.
I recall, vague, red carpeting, a sense of hush, but the lobby is chiefly beige now. There is a coffee bar in the corner, a sundries shop. An older man snoozes beneath a newspaper, in a shaft of light. A doctor-type mutters into his phone. A teenaged girl collects mail from the clerk behind the desk. And what of Mr. OD TO? I scan the room, for some indentation in a cushion, some cigarette butt in a planter, but everything is mute.
Then, someone is striding toward me from the direction of the elevator. His face is vague. I look slant at him, trying to make him come into focus, the juice of adrenaline rising. Shaven head. The documentary man, the SUV man. They want to swap. But the faceless man is smiling, and the smile shows no menace. Now, he calls my name, my right name.
“Mellie?” His voice is benign, no smoker’s rumble at the back, none of the gummy muddle. “Hey, you OK?”
I know him, but not from my driveway or the car ride. He’s just the man from the Monday meeting. My clenched muscles begin to loosen. I am relieved, which surprises me, which is maybe some kind of progress.
“You’re—Isaiah?”
He laughs. He has a nice laugh. “That’s a new one on me.”
“Sorry. Emily couldn’t remember.”
He hands me his card and I slip it in my wallet next to the OD TO paper and the photograph, then I follow him toward the elevator. I glance again, sideways. He looks back.
“I’m so glad you’ve agreed. You kind of took off, last time we spoke. I thought I’d spooked you.”
“As I recall it,” I say, “you were the one who vanished.”
“Could be,” he says, and we leave it at that. He’s cloud people, and so am I. I’m not done with my suspicion, the sense that there’s some unrevealed history there, but he doesn’t call forth in me longing or desire and perhaps among our kind, it isn’t always necessary to square these things. For now, I try to trust that he won’t transform into some bad other version, reveal some hidden face.
“You haven’t been around,” he said. “I thought you—” He was going to say relapsed, but he’s stopped himself.
“Checked myself in,” I say. “I guess I kind of had to.”
“Well, you look great,” he says.
I want to cut myself down, but instead the compliment just hangs there for a moment, awkward but not entirely unpleasant. As the brass doors close, I catch my own face in one of the mirrors. I’ve weathered my cloud use OK—I don’t have the blank look of N; I don’t resemble the junkiest girls, with their rut marks and their chin blooms of color. Since I’ve quit, my hands are more typical, less puffed, but still. I don’t look twenty-five.
“I used to steal stuff from the garbage rooms at this place,” I say, the thing becoming true as I tell him. “As a kid, I mean. Not like last year.”
He nods, gives me a look as if I’ve told him something he already knows.
“I’m curious, though. These apartments. How’d you end up doing interviews here?”
He shrugs. “It’s a little sterile, huh?” The elevator door opens, and we step into a large, light-filled room. A guy in the corner reads a newspaper in Arabic. The big-screen television shows captioned coverage of a tornado, up-ended trailers. We take a table by the window.
“It’s fine,” I say. “Nice. I just, I meant Longwood. Is there a reason you picked this pl
ace, in particular?”
“You know a little bit about my project?”
“Emily said you were after origins, the origins of cloud. Like Cold War? Mad Doctor Strangeloves smuggling it in caviar tins?”
“There’s actually some evidence for film canisters, in the early case law. They raided this warehouse in Sullivan County, in the Poconos, pornographic materials coming in from Ukraine, and that’s the very first cloud seizure on record. Anyway, my father—you know my father?”
“I wouldn’t, I don’t think,” I say.
He nods, does the thing again like he’s considering correcting me, like we’ve been over this ground before. “Personally, my father was involved. Is connected with that first cloud property. That’s what I mean. Origins is close, but it’s more personal. Interpersonal, even. The term we use is root place.”
“This is a OneLife thing? A point of branching?”
“Let’s have coffee before we get into the mystical stuff, huh?” He stands, and fusses at the coffee station, turns over his shoulder to address me. “Cream? Milk?”
“Extra,” I say. “Either.”
Here’s an entertaining fact: I haven’t talked to a man like this, like in a pair, over beverages and without being high, since I was a teenager and it feels a little bit like touching the frayed end of a hacked-off electric cord. Emily claims she doesn’t have sex anymore. Her ex that she used with is the guy in prison. No way, she says, not even if he were clean and got Jesus. Still, she tells me, when you go for a long time without, sometimes you can have weird spells. Emily says, she gets to be like those starving cartoon rabbits who see every umbrella as a carrot stick, every pencil. Only it’s not carrot sticks I’m seeing. For me, as he hands me the coffee, there is a kind of echo, as is we’ve both long ago made this same gesture. I try to smile and talk like a normal person to the guy. It would help if I could remember his name. Not Isaiah, but like it, holy and homeschool, Jedediah, Ezekial.
He takes a seat at one of the tables and shifts his bag to make room. It doesn’t look big enough to hold much equipment. “So, yeah. The audio project. It’s about this idea of root places. Users, you know how they short out, come up blank against certain things?”
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