This Book Is Not Yet Rated

by Peter Bognanni

  “Wait,” I said. “Anjo. You don’t need to go yet.”

  She held up her phone as she headed down the alley.

  “You’ve got my number, boss,” she said. “Call me if you need me.”

  She dragged her feet slightly as she walked, just a woman in regular clothes, disappearing from sight. She looked so average now that she’d been cast from her kingdom. She was mortal after all.

  “My God, they excommunicated the Oracle,” said Lucas.

  “Evil bastards,” said Lou.

  I felt my eyes starting to sting.

  “We’ll fix it,” I said, barely thinking. “We’ll get her back up there.”

  “How?” said Lucas.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Just trust me. I’ll figure something out.”

  Lucas stepped right up to me.

  “We’ve been trusting you, Wendy!” he said. “And you’ve done nothing so far. All you came up with was a protest with no people at it. You’re our captain for God’s sake, and we’re dropping like flies!”

  I took a step backward, but he kept his face close to mine.

  “We don’t have anything else. You do realize that, right? You might have a celebrity girlfriend, but we’re all married to this place. My real family kind of sucks. My dad doesn’t understand me. He wants me to come back to Lebanon and be a banker. Without this . . .”

  His voice started to give. He opened his mouth to speak again, then he turned and walked away.

  “Hey, Lucas,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t turn around. But he spoke one last time.

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Just fix it.”

  He walked in the opposite direction from Anjo, toward the parking ramp across the street, kicking at pebbles along the way, his hands stuffed in his pockets like the teen rebel from a 1950s movie.

  I looked over at Lou. She lit a cigarette.

  “I know you want me to say something encouraging right now,” she said, holding up her fractured arm. “But I don’t have much to give you.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  We both stood there another moment watching Jasper finish his job. He had ignored us the entire time our ranks were falling apart, but now that it was me and Lou, he turned around and gave us a small wave.

  Lou gave him the finger.

  Then, when he was standing there slack-jawed, she turned and walked off herself, cane tapping against the asphalt. Which just left me and Jasper. My crew had deserted me, and I didn’t even have the benefit of staring down a worthy adversary. Just an exterminator in glorified painting clothes. And because I couldn’t think of anything to say, I did what I always do.

  I quoted a movie.

  “You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity,” I said.

  I’m not sure if Jasper had seen Toy Story, but the line didn’t seem to mean much to him.

  24

  All the shades were pulled at Raina’s house when I showed up there. Across the street was a group of doughy men standing around with cameras strapped to their chests like bandoliers. They lounged against their cars, chatting amicably, eating fast food from crinkly yellow wrappers. I thought maybe they’d try to snap a shot of me as I approached Raina’s door, but they didn’t flinch. Somehow, I had forgotten the rules: if you weren’t a celebrity, you were invisible.

  I had to knock on the door eight times before it finally flew open in a plume of cigarette smoke.

  “Listen, you leeches!” Trinity said.

  Then the smoke cleared and Raina’s mom saw me standing there, looking, I imagine, very depressed and pathetic and very unlike a member of the paparazzi.

  “Oh,” she said. “Ethan. It’s you. Sorry about that. I thought you were one of the vultures. Get in here quick before one flies in.”

  I stepped inside. Across the street, a couple of the men on the cars perked up at the sound of the open door. One of them scrambled to raise a camera with an absurdly long lens.

  “Nothing’s happening here!” she yelled. “Go back to your McNuggets!”

  Then she slammed the door so hard it rattled the windowpanes. This left the living room dark, and it took my eyes a second to adjust to the low light.

  “Why Raina ever wanted to come back here is beyond me,” Trinity said. “We have fences for this in LA. Here we’re totally exposed. It’s like a safari.”

  Trinity was wearing a silk robe over a fancy pair of monogrammed pajamas, and the most elegant pair of slippers I had ever seen. She only looked like Raina when she smiled. But ever since I’d known her, she’d rarely done that. Some people, my mom liked to say, just aren’t built that way.

  “Where’s Raina?” I asked.

  “Downstairs,” Trinity said, “I’m not letting her outside until things cool off.”

  “You’re not letting her out?” I said. “Why?”

  Trinity looked at me for a moment, like it wasn’t my place to ask that question. And maybe it wasn’t, but I couldn’t help it. Her daughter was clearly in a vulnerable place, and she was holding her captive in the basement?

  “It’s time to get things back on track,” said Trinity, “And this is not the way to do it. I’ve been trying to get us on a flight all day, but everything is booked solid.”

  “What if she doesn’t want to go back yet?” I asked.

  Trinity rubbed the bridge of her nose, like she had a migraine coming on.

  “Imagine something for a moment with me, Ethan. Can you do that? Imagine having everything handed to you. You’re literally plucked out of the crowd and given everything, and then you just throw it away one day because you’re kind of bummed out. Do you see where I’m coming from here? In any kind of art, things move fast. I know this. If you mess up, or you’re gone for too long, they move on to the next thing. I don’t think she gets that. There’s only one opportunity here.”

  The next thing?

  I wanted to repeat this out loud. But, there was a desperate look in her eye, so I let it go. She pointed toward the basement stairs.

  “Talk some sense into her, will you? She might listen to you.”

  All I could do was nod. I didn’t have much fight left in me at this point.

  I walked down the familiar carpeted stairs to find Raina lying on the orange couch listening to earbuds connected to her phone. Her eyes were closed, but she must have felt my footsteps because she opened her eyes when I reached the bottom. She popped an earbud out and gave me a faint smile.

  “Dude,” she said. “You look worse than I do, and I’m a prisoner.”

  I didn’t waste any time with small talk. I explained what happened at the theater in a few sentences. When I was done, she nodded and stretched her legs out on the couch.

  “So I guess this is what they call rock bottom,” she said. “I’m trapped in a basement and you’re locked out of the Green Street. Could it get any fucking worse?”

  It was a harmless joke, probably meant to raise my spirits a bit. I understood that. But it landed wrong for me. I couldn’t help thinking about the fact that the last place where I really felt a connection with my dad was closed right now, with police tape wrapped around it. And from there, the bad thoughts kept coming.

  “I wish I could say this was rock bottom,” I said. “But the truth is: I’ve already been there.”

  Raina was quiet a moment.

  “Ethan I didn’t mean . . .” she said.

  “Three years ago,” I said.

  Her face went white.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” I said. “This is pretty terrible. And I feel like garbage. But rock bottom was when my dad died unexpectedly. And then, pretty close to rock bottom was when a person I loved never even called me.”

  At the word love, she winced. It was like I’d pricked her finger with a needle.

  �
�I know,” I said. “I’m not supposed to say it. But it’s true, I loved you, Raina. And that doesn’t mean you had to love me back. I know that. You feel how you feel. But you didn’t reach out when I needed you most, and that was the devastating part.”

  Raina sat up on the couch, and took out her other earbud. I could tell she was conflicted. This had all probably taken her by surprise, and she was already stuck in her basement. She looked like she was ready to fire something back at me. Maybe even tell me to leave. So, it surprised me when she took a breath, looked up at me, and said:

  “Sit down, Ethan.”

  “I don’t want to sit down,” I said.

  “Just calm yourself for a second,” she said.

  I didn’t realize how tense I was until she mentioned it. My jaw was locked in place and I was trying not to cry. I sat down on the couch and pushed my palms against my eyelids until I saw all the colors.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said. “Your version.”

  ETHAN’S GLOSSARY OF FILM TERMS

  ENTRY #14

  DISSOLVE

  One image slowly transitioning to another. For a moment they overlap.

  It’s one of my favorite moments in all of movies: that second (or less) when the two images are superimposed over one another, and you’re actually in two different times and places instantaneously.

  Time has ceased to exist linearly and space has collapsed.

  25

  Here is what I told Raina:

  My dad got the flu.

  Then he died.

  It wasn’t quite that simple, but it was close.

  I wish there was a more dramatic story I could tell about how he hung on bravely while fighting some rare disease that has its own honorary 5k run. Or that he had died pulling someone from a burning hospital or standing up for someone who was being bullied, or even in a war we shouldn’t have been involved in just so other people could nod their heads in a way that normalized things a bit. Instead, when I tell people how he died, they usually say one of two things.

  The first is:

  “What?”

  And the second is:

  “That can happen?”

  I don’t fault them necessarily. As much as they’ve been told to express compassion when someone has been dealt a loss, it’s human nature to worry about your own survival. And I think what they’re doing mostly is just being terrified that the next time they have a sore throat they could end up in the morgue. No one wants to think about that. There are already enough scary things in the world without having to frighten yourself with thoughts about how catching the flu at work might take you out.

  But that’s what happened. He came home sick one night after teaching a class and he went to sleep on the couch right away. If I had been a better detective, or maybe a trained medical professional, this would have been the first sign. Dad was an energetic dude, and even when he was sick, he usually held forth from the sofa about whatever movie he was watching, sucking down herbal tea from a thermos. Just a few months prior, he had a cold and summoned me over to watch the beginning of Jaws with him.

  “Ethan, did you know that the robotic shark didn’t work in the early days of the shoot?”

  He blew his nose into the handkerchief he still carried with him everywhere.

  “It sank like a stone! But that flaw changed the whole movie. They had to film without a shark at first and it’s what you don’t see that really scares the bejeezus out of you!”

  It’s what you don’t see.

  That phrase came back to me later and gave me chills. Because even though Dad was talking about a shark movie that day, he could just as easily have been talking about his own body in the weeks to come. Specifically, his lungs.

  There are three main ways the flu can kill you. None of them is common, but all of them are bad. The first is a bacterial infection. This can cause pneumonia which can kill you. The second is multiple organ failure, which is what it sounds like. The third is respiratory failure. Basically, the virus inflames your lungs so much that oxygen can’t pass through the tissue. Then you just stop breathing.

  That’s how it happened with Dad.

  He’d been sleeping a lot since he came home sick, and had even canceled classes for the first time in five years. I remember I didn’t want to go to school on the morning it happened because I wanted to spend the day with him, even if he wasn’t feeling great. But school was sacred in our house, so that was not to be. Before I left, though, I went into my parents’ bedroom and lay down next to him.

  Mom was in the kitchen making him some tea and toast, and I could hear her arguing with the morning news. Dad was awake, and it seemed like he was doing better, but he kept coughing and taking deep breaths. He asked me how I was, and touched my earlobe, which is something he used to do when I was a kid. Then we were just lying there together in his room.

  It was dim and cool—Mom complained that he liked their room kept at the temperature of a deep freeze—but his body was so warm I could feel it a few inches away. I knew pretty soon I was going to have to get on the bus where I would try to stay awake on the quiet ride to school, listening to a podcast about horror movies. Then I would go through another day of diagramming sentences and solving for x, trying to blend into the crowd between periods, missing Raina, and eating lunch with the same crew of sort-of friends who put up with my talk about cinematography.

  But for the moment, I didn’t want to move. And suddenly, I thought of a question I couldn’t believe I had never asked him. I sat up and looked at him, his curly hair nestled in the folds of the pillowcase. His eyes were half open.

  “Dad,” I said. “What was the first movie you ever saw?”

  A smile came to his lips before he answered; maybe he was playing the memory in his head, or just the thought of it was enough to make him happy.

  “It wasn’t a real movie,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It didn’t show in a theater.”

  “So, what was it?”

  “Well,” he said, “there was this family next door when I was growing up, and they were a little strange. The Porters. The dad was a professor at the university, which was the first time I even knew that was a job. He was an education professor actually, and he home-schooled his kids. He let them follow their passions. If they didn’t want to learn fractions, they didn’t have to. They could make a map of the solar system instead. Everything was like that at their house.”

  “That sounds kind of awesome,” I said.

  “I was very jealous when I got older,” said Dad. “But I was young when I first knew them. Four or five, I think. Not even in school yet. I guess I had seen parts of movies before that, silly animated things, but my parents were big into reading. Movies were the enemy. Anyway, the boys always had a project going. If they weren’t building a robot, they were lofting a weather balloon. But one of the kids, the oldest of the bunch became obsessed with films. He finally convinced his dad to buy him a Super 8 camera in order to direct his own movie.”

  “What was it?” I asked.

  Dad stopped to take a long breath.

  “It was a version of Peter Pan,” he said. “Kind of. I saw him and his brothers in the yard filming it. Their mother had sewed them costumes, and they were the most amazing things I’d ever seen. Bright feathers and green velvet. Spray-painted silver pirate swords. Incredible hats. There were painted sets and ocean sound effects from a tape recorder. They basically turned their backyard into an MGM studio lot. There was a wooden fence separating our two yards, but every day I heard them out there, I made my mom lift me up so I could see what was happening. I didn’t really understand it, but I knew it was something wild and important.”

  “And they actually made a full movie?”

  “It was only fifteen minutes long, but it was a movie. And they even had a screening one
summer night not long before they moved away. They sold tickets for fifty cents in the week leading up to it and you had to have one to get into their backyard. I begged my mom to buy me a ticket, even though I knew the film wouldn’t start until well after dark. But she agreed. I think she was curious herself. She always talked about how ‘eccentric’ the boys next door were, but there was always a smile on her face when she said that word. Like it was something to be prized as long as it didn’t happen in our house.

  “The night of the screening, Mom walked me next door. The youngest of the Porter boys was the ticket taker, and I remember he wore a little cap and called me ‘sir.’ All across the lawn were mismatched chairs. Some from the kitchen. Some folding chairs. Even a recliner transported from the living room. I had wondered all week how they would get a movie screen into their backyard, but when I got back there, it all made sense.

  “Hanging on the clothesline was a bright white bedsheet. It was nailed into the ground so it wouldn’t blow around too much in the breeze. And set up by the house, on top of a bunch of crates was a real projector. I couldn’t believe what a simple trick it was. But I was in awe. They did it somehow. They built a movie theater in their yard and they were going to show us something they made.

  “The adults drank beer near the house. I think my mother even had one, even though I never really knew her to drink. But all the kids were fixated on the screen, waiting for the last of the purple sunset to vanish behind the row of houses across the alley. There were fireflies blinking in front of the screen. Someone handed me some Kool-Aid in a paper cup. It was so sweet and cold; it seemed to make my whole body tingle.

  “At ten o’clock sharp one of the boys welcomed everyone to the premiere of the film. He talked a little about his artistic process, in what was clearly an educational assignment from his dad. Then he walked back to the projector and flipped it on. There were a couple of bleeps, and the film flickered through the reels. Then there was a group of pirates sailing on the ocean.

  “I mean, of course it was just a painted background, but there was wind in their hair, and someone was sloshing water around. The footage was grainy and dirty and poorly edited. The sound went in and out. But I sat there stupefied for the entire fifteen minutes as Peter and the Lost Boys fought the pirates and won and, in this version, decided to be kids forever.