Just seeing her back in the vicinity of the theater made me feel a little better. If there was any hope at all, the Oracle would have to be involved.
“You remember Raina,” I said.
“Of course,” she said. “Harold and Maude.”
“Whoa,” said Raina. “That was a long time ago.”
“I remember every time I summon the spirit of Terrence,” she said.
Then she lifted her binoculars and trained them on the wall of the run-down apartment building across the alley from the Green Street. We were all silent as she let them rove from window to window, finally stopping and adjusting the focus. She licked her lips. Then she took the lenses from her eyes, and looked at me.
“That’s the one,” she said, pointing to a unit on the third floor. “If it’s going to work, it’s got to be that one.”
The shade was half drawn in the middle of the day. A small spider plant sat on the sill, spilling its long tendrils over the edge.
“How would it work?” asked Raina.
“Well,” said Anjo, “I’m afraid we can’t use Vicky. She’s too big. But there’s a portable DeVry projector in the storage closet up in the booth. It’s old, but the last time I tested it, it seemed to work okay. We set up in that window and project on the wall facing the back lot. Sound is gonna be dicey, but we’ll figure something out.”
There was quiet for a moment.
“So,” I said. “Let me get this straight. All we have to do is break into the Green Street to steal a projector, convince the person in that apartment to let us use their home as a projection booth, and then show outdoor movies without a permit on a building that’s just been shut down because of a rat infestation. Did I forget anything?”
Anjo thought for a second.
“Yes,” she said. “You did. We’re going to need film prints. And I assume we’re broke.”
“A correct assumption,” I said.
Raina looked from the window on the third floor to the projection booth.
“Well, I’m on board,” she said.
She took a step toward the Green Street, eyeing the locked door.
“I would just like to remind everyone,” I said. “That two of the three of us here have a criminal record and a court date.”
The two women looked at me. Then Anjo sat down on the gravel of the alley and took her binoculars off. She brushed her bangs off the top of her glasses, and looked toward the Green Street.
“Can I tell you a story?” she said.
She must have known that it was impossible for me to say no. I had never even tried to ignore one of Anjo’s lectures. I sighed and sat down across from her. She rubbed her eyes and then, with closed lids, began:
“When Steve McQueen played Captain Hilts in The Great Escape, his character was captured again and again trying to escape a Nazi POW camp. Every time he tried to escape the camp, he was brought back and thrown in the ‘cooler.’ Solitary confinement. But each time he tried to escape, he learned more about the area around the camp. And his fellow prisoners gradually used this information to design a tunnel that would actually work. His enemy, the head of the camp, Von Luger, tells everyone there will be no escape from the camp on his watch. And a friend of his is even shot trying to get over the fence.
“Finally the time comes for the great escape, the one they’ve all been planning for the whole movie. McQueen’s character makes a valiant attempt. He steals a motorcycle and even jumps it over a wall to evade the soldiers coming after him. But in the end, he gets caught in barbed wire and returned to the camp. It seems he has been defeated. Yet, when he returns, his enemy, Von Luger, has been dismissed from his position because of the escape. And he will probably be executed by his own superiors. McQueen is thrown back in the cooler, but he lives to see another day.”
“So,” I said, taking a moment to soak this in, “are you saying that winning isn’t necessarily what I think it is?”
Anjo didn’t speak.
“Or that I need to give all of this up and buy a motorcycle?”
Raina looked at me and then at Anjo.
“No. She’s saying it takes a little danger to come out on top, right? You have to take risks, act like it’s a matter of life and death!”
Raina knitted her brow.
“Right?” she asked.
Anjo picked up a pebble from the alley and skipped it along the asphalt. Then she stood up and polished her glasses with her shirt.
“The Oracle has spoken,” she said.
30
It didn’t take long for the paparazzi to find Raina again. By the second night at my house, there they were: parked outside, smoking and watching. Their numbers had dwindled a little bit, but there were still a few paunchy dudes waiting shamelessly for her to come out of the house. Raina seemed resigned to the problem, but my mom was not. She called the police three times. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really much they could do as long as the photographers stayed off our property.
It wasn’t a big deal for the moment. We weren’t going anywhere. And there was more strategizing to do.
We had been dealt another small blow that afternoon. After meeting with Anjo, I had gone to the university’s Film Studies department to see if I could get access to their archive of prints. I was hoping to rely on my dad’s name to get me in, but they had recently hired a new chair who never knew him. He didn’t seem impressed by the copy of Dad’s book I brandished, or any of my impassioned pleas about the theater.
“A lot of those prints are really valuable,” he said, looking past me out on to the quad. “They have to be handled with the utmost care.”
I left his office and searched the halls a while, hunting for a familiar face, some old colleague of Dad’s I might recognize. But it was summer and most of the offices were empty. My last stop was Dad’s old office at the end of the hall. The name on the door was another one I’d never seen, and where Dad’s portrait of Stanley Kubrick used to hang was now a hockey pennant. I sat down on the floor in front of his door for a moment and rested my head against the hard wood. Then a janitor asked me politely to leave.
Hours later, I sat on the floor of my room in a similar position, staring at the blank screen of my television. I had disappeared from the dinner table half an hour earlier, claiming I needed to fill my daily quota of movie time. But when I got to the couch, for the first time in recent weeks, I felt no urge to turn something on.
It was the strangest feeling in the world. Usually, I could watch a film no matter my mood. That was the brilliant thing about cinema: you could calibrate a movie to virtually any state of mind. Feeling no hope in the world: Apocalypse Now! Feeling jaded about love: Blue Valentine. Feeling like watching a group of vegetarian goblins try to change people into plants so they can devour them: Troll 2 is your movie!
But for the life of me I couldn’t think of a movie that would speak to my current life circumstances. Why hadn’t anyone made a movie about a seventeen-year-old guy from Minnesota who is maybe in love with his best friend, mourning his dead father, in charge of many dysfunctional humans, including a foul-mouthed octogenarian falsely accused of robbing a Costco, unsure what to do with the rest of his life, and pouring his remaining energies into saving a movie theater nobody cares about?
Where is that movie?
Something moved in the corner of my screen, and I realized someone had opened the door. I turned around and there was Raina, wearing one of my old T-shirts and a pair of baggy shorts. The T-shirt had a picture of Godzilla on it, under the words “I’m Big in Japan.” My dad had gotten it for me for my twelfth birthday, and even though it was an extra-large and black, I had worn it nearly every day of that summer.
It occurred to me suddenly that if I ever wanted to get over my father’s death, I was probably going to have to throw out all of my T-shirts. That or give them away. Raina certainly looked better in this one than I did
.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” I said.
She sat down on the floor, across from me, drinking a juice box.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
“Brought a couple from home,” she said. “I never leave home without juice. It’s an unpredictable world.”
I tried a smile, but my lips hardly budged.
“Mopey Moperson,” she said.
“What?”
“That’s you. Mopey Von Mope Mope.”
She took a drink from her straw.
I continued to sulk. I wanted to stop, but it was like someone had activated my sulk mode. I was incapable of doing anything else.
“Maybe this is all for the best,” I said. “I mean . . .”
“I loved you, too,” said Raina.
The words came fast, and my brain was on a short delay.
“What was that?” I asked.
“You heard me,” she said.
She looked right at me.
“You’re right. I heard you,” I said. “But . . . why did you say it?”
“Because it’s true. And I should have told you before.”
I felt an odd lump in my throat and heat radiating from my ears.
“Also,” she said, “I’m not sure we mean it in the same way. But that doesn’t stop it from being true.”
I swallowed. Part of me wanted to halt this conversation in its tracks before it went any further, but I was too curious.
“How do you mean it?” I asked.
She sighed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Can you try?”
She brushed her hair off her neck and shuffled it over her shoulder.
“I just don’t like this rule that says love has to be one thing,” she said. “Like, why is that all we get? Either you love someone romantically and you want to have sex with them and marry them and have all of their babies forever, or you get nothing?”
The first option didn’t sound so bad to me, but I didn’t want to say that.
“Well,” I said, “there is the love you feel for . . . your family.”
“But that’s boring love!” she said. “It’s barely a choice. You almost have to feel that. I’m still talking about love that’s a choice. Where you pick someone.”
She pulled her legs up to her chest. I watched her, unsure what to say or do.
“Okay,” I said. “I see what you’re saying but . . .”
“It’s okay if you don’t,” she said. “I don’t know if I see what I’m saying. These last couple years have been really weird. I feel like I’m figuring this stuff out all over again. I just wanted to tell you that you weren’t . . . alone.”
My room was easily five hundred degrees now. Someone had switched it on like an oven. I got up and cracked a window. The sounds of the night came humming in, distant traffic and cicadas. I walked back to my spot on the floor in slow motion, and when I sat down, my body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. I wasn’t sure if I would ever be able to get up again.
“Past tense,” I said.
She didn’t speak for a moment.
“You said it in past tense, too,” she said.
I got up and walked to the other side of my room, and pointed to a patch of wall beside the window.
“You see this spot here where the paint doesn’t match?”
“I see it,” she said.
“The first color is called Bold Potato. But when I went to buy new paint, all they had was Citrus Mist. So, now there’s potatoes and citrus, which kind of seems wrong. It would make a terrible soup anyway.”
Raina looked at the wall and then back at me. Her face was scrunched in a confounded stare.
“This is where I wrote your name in Magic Marker,” I said.
She looked at it again.
“You wrote my name on your wall?”
Then she got up and walked over to where I was standing. She looked at the lighter part of the wall, that parallelogram of citrus.
“Yeah,” I said.
She looked at me.
“Why didn’t I ever see it?”
“You never came over to my house,” I said. “Remember?”
She let this sink in.
“So why did you paint over it?”
“I was sure you were never coming back,” I said. “And to make things a little easier. I didn’t need to look at that every day.”
She moved closer to me.
“But I came back.”
“You did.”
I could smell the shampoo in her hair now, and a trace of her mom’s cigarette smoke. Looking up at that patch of wall, my room didn’t really feel like mine anymore. The person who had lived here was somebody different.
“Ethan,” she said, “I just don’t . . .”
“It’s okay,” I said quickly, less to reassure her than to cut off whatever was coming next.
She was quiet.
“You don’t owe me anything,” I said.
“I know that,” she said.
“No, I just mean all that stuff you said about not being a good friend to me. It’s okay. I understand now. You’ve been absolved.”
I waved my hand over her head.
She smiled.
“Thanks, your holiness,” she said.
Neither of us moved. I wanted very badly to cry, but I held it back this time. I’m not sure why. Raina probably wouldn’t have cared. I just wanted to be convincing in my appearance that everything was fine. That I really could be her friend when she needed one. I’m pretty sure I didn’t breathe until she spoke again.
“I’m pretty tired, Ethan,” she said.
Suddenly, it was okay to move again. So, I walked toward the door. I wanted to just walk out without saying anything, to keep my voice from cracking. I wanted to go to the couch and breathe.
“Everything,” she said, “is just so different from one day to the next.”
Raina got in my bed and stared up at the ceiling.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to explain anything else. I understand.”
She wasn’t looking at me anymore.
“If it’s okay,” she said, “then why do I feel so bad right now?”
I stood in the doorway, not quite in, not quite out. This time when I spoke, my voice wavered a little.
“What do you want me to do, Raina?”
“Can you just sit here for a minute?”
She pointed to the bed.
“Why?” I asked.
It took her a moment to speak, and when she did, the words came slowly.
“I’ve been having trouble sleeping. And it helps just to have someone in the room sometimes.”
I took a breath. This was something I could understand. When my father was gone, I had to sleep with the door open for months. Just hearing the other sounds in the house was reassuring. Having a feeling that not everything would be gone when I woke up.
“I can do that,” I said.
ETHAN’S GLOSSARY OF FILM TERMS
ENTRY #47
MATCH CUT
A cut where the composition in two shots is almost exactly the same.
The most famous one is 2001: A Space Odyssey. One of the apes throws a bone in the air and Kubrick match cuts to a space station, exactly the same size in the frame, showing millions of years of technological advancement in a single splice.
But match cuts don’t have to be this dramatic. They can also keep a character in the frame, and switch the background, so it looks like you’ve blinked and they’re suddenly somewhere else.
Like maybe they close their eyes in one shot, sitting up on a bed, and then open them in the next and it’s morning.
31
Her hair was in my face when I woke up. I was still sitting in bed and she was leaning against me, her hair swirling over my shoulder, right into my mouth. I coughed, but she didn’t move. I had never woken up next to another person and it was a strange sensation. I was hot from her proximity and my bed was a little too small. I didn’t move, so I wouldn’t wake her up. I just sat there for a moment, watching the room slowly brighten in the half-light of morning.
She adjusted herself in bed and put an arm around me. I looked down at it. A skinny arm with little blond hairs all smoothed in one direction. Was she actually doing it on purpose? No, I reasoned, she was not. She was obviously still asleep. She could be dreaming of another guy right now. Or a really big gerbil. I gently lifted her arm and put it at her side. Of course, I missed it when it was gone.
“Did you stay here all night?” she said, in a fog of sleep.
“I didn’t mean to,” I said.
Her eyes were still closed.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It was nice.”
Then she lifted her arm and put it back around me. I felt my palms getting damp. I got up a little too fast and walked across the room.
“Whoa,” she said, rolling over. “What’s the deal man?”
I was really thirsty all of a sudden. I picked up a bottle of warm soda from my desk. I took a swig. It was even sweeter warm, but I was thirsty, so I kept drinking. When I was done, I looked across the room and found her watching me.
“I just can’t,” I said. “Do . . . that.”
“Do what?” she said.
She looked genuinely confused.
“Touching,” I said.
No sound from her.
“You made yourself clear last night, okay?” I said. “And I just need some time to kind of realign. . . .”
“Realign? What am I, a car?”
“To just stop thinking about you in a certain way, so I can . . .”
“So you can, what?”
The soda wasn’t sitting well in my stomach.
“Just don’t pretend!” I said, louder than I wanted to.
The room, of course, went quiet.
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