The Journey Prize Stories 25

by Various

  3 This aunt, Roshi, was to become Cinema Rex’s most beloved customer. The boys and older men who worked as ushers all referred to her as Auntie, and offered her free Coca-Cola every time she came in. She drank gallons of it every week, and died of complications from diabetes in 1973. Devi, who outlived her by almost two decades, didn’t know her sister’s precise age, but knew that she had died too young. She never drank any sort of carbonated soft drink after 1965, but continued to take four sugars in her tea.

  4 Cinematographer Gordon Willis would indirectly answer this question for Vik. In 1972, Vik sat in a packed theatre in London, watching The Godfather. The lighting in Brando’s study precisely replicated the kitchen’s light on the day he had watched his mother prepare stew. The effect was intimate, not aquatic, and notable for how much of the darkness it made visible.

  5 Renga would later develop his corded strength with a set of exercises described in a Charles Atlas kit that was mistakenly delivered to his house six months after the opening of the Cinema Rex. The parcel was addressed to Raj Ghany, the silent fat boy who lived across the street, but Renga chose to accept it as a gift from beyond. The physique that he constructed and maintained was partially responsible for securing the respect of a curiously flabby and middle-aged Tamil action star named Arvind, who gave Renga his first major scoring job, on an explosion-heavy, 1983 rip-off of E.T.

  6 In the early 1990s, Siva realized how obese he had become at a screening of In the Line of Fire. He’d come alone, as he had a bond with Clint Eastwood that had nothing to do with his children or married life. The new owners of the Rex had installed rigid plastic armrests the previous week. Siva placed his large Coke in the cupholder of his favourite seat [27A] and sat, only to find that the armrests chafed his sidefat dreadfully. He came out of the film dented and numbed. As obesity problems had spread over the island in the past decade, the management found Siva’s petition for a row without armrests to be reasonable. Row 27 was soon stripped of the offending plastic projections, and cupholders were attached to the seatbacks of Row 26.

  Siva widened into the neighbouring seats until he suffered a massive heart attack in 2005 while attending to a patient who had been admitted after a heart attack of his own.

  7 Vik was to write many of his major papers at the London Film School on The Night of the Hunter, actor Charles Laughton’s sole directorial outing. Instead of tiring of “actor Charles Laughton’s sole directorial outing,” Vik began to love that string of words, thinking of it as his own personal cliché, a coded signature that appeared in all his work on his favourite film. When the editor of Cahiers du Cinema excised the French iteration of the phrase from Vik’s fourth article for the journal, without first asking permission, Vik swore to never publish in it again. Unfortunately, maintaining that promise to himself would only have been possible if he had succeeded in chucking his journalistic and academic career in favour of screenwriting and directing, a dream that failed to materialize after seven drafts of a screenplay and a humiliating internship at the BBC in his mid-thirties. CdC accepted his proposal for a long feature in which he would interview five important directors on their own poignant and career-influencing early failures. The piece was well-regarded, but Vik failed to attain the encouraging sense of recognition that he was looking for in these conversations with great figures of cinema; their failures had been experiments in learning and fortitude, while his own taught him that there were things he would never be able to do.

  8 While pre-code Hollywood films had made selective appearances on the island, The Night of the Hunter’s unsensational portrayal of a new wife’s normal sexual drive and Mitchum’s psychopathic distaste for regular intercourse was so unusual that it didn’t register as subversive. The audience seemed to look through the screen, a fact that Vik had noted before he was distracted and that he would later expand upon in his dissertation, a reception-theory piece that would eventually be resurrected as the centerpiece of his first volume of essays, Hollywood in the Colonies. This publication, more than anything else in his career, was responsible for his tenured position in UCLA’s film studies department, an appointment that he took up in 1984 and held until his retirement in 2011.

  9 Vik used an altered, depersonalized recounting of this incident in the opening chapter of his second major academic book, Rabelais at the Drive-In: Carnivalesque Interrogations of Class Structure in Colonial Cinema(s).

  10 Vik was not to see the rest of The Night of the Hunter during its run at Cinema Rex. His mother was so relieved to recover him that she limited his punishment to a ban of the film, which counted as a light penalty to her, but was crushing for Vik. His long essay On Interruption, which caused one critic to call him “the othered Barthes,” begins with the author’s broken first viewing of Laughton’s film. “So did my career,” Vik said during an interview with that same critic, an instructor from the American University of Paris who managed to simultaneously condescend and flatter.

  11 When Vik did watch the film all the way through, he was able to place the moment when the man had walked into the theatre: it was during the moonlit boat ride that the children take down the river, where every shot foregrounds an animal that looms massively over the drifting boat in the background. A lunatic masterstroke on Laughton’s part, a sequence that Vik never dared unpack in the confines of one of his academic studies of the film, for fear of damaging its place in his memories and his sense of film.

  12 Renga had never allowed the other boys to come to his house for a number of reasons, the most significant of which was that he did not want them to see his piano and begin to ask questions. After the events that took place on the opening night of Cinema Rex, which included Vik seeing his home and the piano it contained, Renga dropped his English lessons with Reynolds in order to take on additional musical training at the conservatory on the eastern side of the island. This allowed him to see less of Vik, and to focus on the skill that would get him off the island two years before anyone else of his age, with his admission to the Royal College of Music in London. He ran into Vik at an early Pink Floyd concert in Camden (they would often, separately, boast that anyone who hadn’t seen the band perform with Syd Barett could never understand what popular art lost in his disappearance). The conversation they had that night was their longest since the night they had been pulled away from Robert Mitchum’s pursuit of two celluloid children and a cash-stuffed doll. Their friendship began again, quickly and simply, with Renga purchasing two lagers at the bar with pound notes passed to him by Vik as heavy psychedelic noise interrupted their talk. When Vik took his beer from Renga, he saw that the spindly pianist’s finger was stuck a half-inch into the liquid. He noted the sight nostalgically, then forgot it in order to enjoy his drink. They both agreed that drinking felt safer off the island.

  13 At that concert in Camden, just after having bought a large blended scotch for an unappreciative and very-ugly-up-close David Gilmour, Renga confirmed Vik’s theory. “Wanker guitarists everywhere favour the brand that strangled my dad, it seems.”

  14 At a retirement event, when he was asked what he thought his greatest contribution to film had been, Vik replied that it was the minor role he had played in installing Renga in Hollywood, twenty-five years earlier.

  Renga had lopped off his unwieldy last name as soon as he started appearing in the credit sequences of Bollywood films, and it was as Renga that he was known to Vik’s friends and colleagues. Vik pinpointed Renga’s Hollywood launch as the first handshake between his friend and Bobby Gopal, who had been hailed as a new Satiyajit Ray in the international press and was utterly ignored in his native India. Renga was crashing in Vik’s Westwood guest room, writing incidental music for daytime TV shows as he attempted to break into the real scoring game. “We’re two bachelors in our forties,” said Vik, after two months of this arrangement. “Living together. In California. And not even one of us has the dignity to be homosexual.” When Renga had failed to laugh or return a comment, Vik realized something new abo
ut his oldest friend.

  It may have been part of the reason that Bobby Gopal had established an immediate sympathy with Renga at the UCLA reception following Gopal’s lecture on the hidden racial complexities of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The talk had been elaborate and fascinating, and became even more interesting when Gopal tossed his blank papers aside to declare that he’d improvised the whole thing and didn’t believe a word of it. Still trim in his fifties, his physical grace shamed the spider-bodied Vik, whose bulging abdomen had put an end to the useful life of his favourite jeans earlier that year.

  After the lecture, Gopal directed his answers to Vik’s questions toward Renga, whose slender muscularity complemented the director’s well-kept form. “My next one is going to be a gangster film about colonialism. Well, not about colonialism, per se, but you know, cultural rape.” Renga asked if there was a composer attached to the project. Bobby replied with an interested “No,” and Vik silently peeled himself away from the conversing men, returning to a conversation he’d engaged in earlier with a scarecrow-haired screenwriting professor whose dryer-mutilated sweater displayed more wrist than neck. Renga appeared at his side a few minutes later to request the car keys, so he could play a tape of his music for Bobby. When Vik walked toward his Camry at the end of the reception, he saw Renga and the new Satiyajit Ray kissing in the back seat. Vik called himself a taxi. When Bobby Gopal’s Mother of Slums swept the Oscars two years later, Vik told his new wife, who had once been married to that wrist-flashing screenwriting professor, that he should have received some sort of producing credit for ushering Renga’s Academy Award–winning score into existence, however indirectly.

  JAY BROWN

  THE EGYPTIANS

  It’s a photograph of a famous snowstorm in 1974 when the city shut down and the world shrank to a single neighbourhood, and the shape of everything was soft and simple for three days.

  It was taken in Windsor, from the concrete porch steps of the home where Clive grew up. The boxwood hedge is a column of white with its bare branch tips breaking through the snow like insectoidal cilia. Across Ray Street the bricks and glass of St. Bart’s rise above the snow and out of frame. The hood of the car in the driveway is buried completely by roof-fall and serves as the top of a giant mound that slopes inwards toward the front of the house. The two bodies on the slope: Clive and Carl, both ten, in their parkas, hoods zipped to full power so that their faces are sunk back into furry tunnels clouded with breath. They are lying still, arms and legs straight, like King Tut’s faithful guardian mummies.

  Clive pulled it from the album earlier today, the fibres from its shedded matting were tufted on the back corners. He looked at it for several minutes, and pressed it between the pages of an Architectural Digest on his desk-side table with the letter from Carl folded around it.

  Now, as Clive stands on a new brick path that follows the natural contours of Victoria’s inner harbour, surrounding the Industry, Clive’s development, he’s got a million things on his mind but Carl’s letter keeps surfacing like a toxic Old Faithful. The timing could not be worse. Clive does not need this right now. This afternoon, in two short hours in fact, the ribbon for The Industry will be cut. It’s an actual ribbon – “ribbon cutting” is not metaphorical. The ribbon is green and will stretch between the two iron lampposts that frame The Industry’s waterside promenade. There will be photographers. Clive’s son will hand the brass scissors to Bob Naussman. His wife and daughter will join with the members of the ARC Development board and lead the first set of unit owners onto the unblemished blacktop of the walkway. Everybody will merge at the berm by the street entrance, where the sidewalk veers under an iron arch, for the unveiling of Jacob Klosterman’s expensive soaring wire heron.

  Everything has to be perfect. If the clouds over the Juan de Fuca Strait bring rain and there is consequent drizzle pooling in the subtle warp of The Industry’s fresh asphalt pathways, even that will annoy him. Asshole crows clustering around the brushed steel Industry garbage bins along the promenade will annoy him.

  Even the sight of his own son monkeying in his suit with the kayak stands, right goddamned now, when he could be thinking over what Clive has said about his simple role in today’s pomp, is driving Clive’s pulse through his body in what feels like cartoonish lumps in a hose.

  And his daughter’s arms are a nightmare of scabbed eczema that she’s refused to cover up with the silk sweater he bought her, and has instead stuffed into her reeking canvas purse. That purse will go or so help him. Her long hair is dankly straight and parted by her ears so there’s a visible swath of angry pink skin down to the neck of her T-shirt. She emanates a dissatisfaction that seems complete and irrevocable.

  His wife, at least, is trying to pull Brandon out from his position behind the kayaks, to impress upon his skittering eight-year-old brain the importance of the occasion and the need, for just a little while, to speak like a regular human being and not forever regurgitate the same tired, shrill, yuk-yuks of his pull-string SpongeBob SquarePants doll. His wife, at least, is lending the occasion some appropriate gravity and decorum. This is millions of dollars. This is eight years of work. Everybody who counts will be here today. He’s satisfied that she’s working hard to make sure he’s not embarrassed in front of the members of the ARC board and Bob Naussmann, the small-time Harper wannabe whose office stamp of municipal permission cost ARC hundreds of thousands in wheedling concessions and design changes. And he appreciates her very much. Though it’s always hard to forget that there’s something about the way she holds her mouth when she’s talking to attractive men. That there’s something about the way they lean into her ear and the way she gently brushes their hands away that goads him into long fantasies of certainty and revenge.

  Things are precarious. Clive is already set to explode, like a solar system–consuming star just about to absorb the last of its fuel.

  Goddamned fucking Carl Chellapinko, thinks Clive, I banish you from this world. I put you into the trunk of a rusty Pinto and have it compacted into a square of metal so tight and shiny it could be a piece of modern art.

  Workers have been on hand for the last seventy-two hours doing touch-ups and checks at the direction of a hulking contractor who’s rarely seen outside of his van. The event coordinator is on her cellphone, her laughter carries on the wind. Clive must shoulder everything himself. Everybody forgets their job the moment it’s almost, but not quite, finished. Some union loafer has left a bucket of white paint by the kayak stands and Brandon’s buffed Timberlands are just missing knocking it into the water as he swings around the bars. “We’ve been smackldorfed, Squidward!” says Brandon SquarePants. “And then I took a shit!” Because everything is funnier when you say that afterwards.

  Goddamn it! Goddamn it, Brandon! says Clive to himself. Fiona, control him! Control control, Fiona. Just for today. So help me. – “Honey,” he yells, “watch the paint there.”

  Looking around for a tradesman – “Can somebody do something about that paint?”

  The letter from Carl came to Clive’s office, return address some apartment building in Windsor. The Excelsior. It’s neatly written and lucid, though strewn with scribbles in the margin – as though it is of two minds.

  Dear Clive,

  We ran into each other after high school in the Mountain Mall once, remember? Right in front of Japan Camera. You and Kathy Iverson had bags with new tennis things in them. You guys were sweethearts, I think. You were going to play together down at Lawnson Green. And you were late for the time she’d chalked you down for. Remember now? You said to give you a call sometime.

  Well, sorry for taking so long to get back to you. Ha ha. More than twenty years maybe, eh?

  You know, this letter, the idea to write this letter, came to me about a month ago when I was riding my bike behind a guy and we were both stopped at a red light on the street. (I don’t have a car.) He turns to me and – so what’s up with what happened last night – he says – what’s up wi
th all of that dancing you were doing – never seen you like that and all. And I was thinking, you know, what? to myself, and said to him – sorry? And he was laughing and said to me – “getting on a bit to be so deep in the sauce” – and then he narrowed his eyes and pushed up his helmet and said – I thought you were a friend of mine. I thought you were somebody else who’s always riding behind me on the way to work.

  That little bit of talk was pretty much all I’d had in almost four months. Proper talk, anyway. I felt bad thinking of it like that, especially since it was an accident and all. It made me think, you know, what kind of person does that make me?

  Which is to say what? We haven’t spoken in so long, but god you were easy to find. Your name and so much about you is all over the internet. You’ve really made something of yourself and you must be a busy person. I haven’t had the same kind of success, but I don’t begrudge you yours.

  I’ve been thinking of Nelson Derrick and that snowstorm when we were kids. I think it’s time to

  Naked, Clive fills a room like a football tackle pad. He’s smooth and a bit rubbery like Stretch Armstrong left in the sun. Swathed in his navy overcoat with a tufting cravat and fresh black crew cut, Fiona’s told him he could be a doorman at a strip club. Just waiting for someone to give him a little lip. He likes to wear leather gloves even in warm weather. He likes the bulge and their slight creak of give when he makes fists in the air.