Dream Sequence

by Adam Foulds

  Miguel García was one of the few filmmakers out there that everybody called a genius, a Werner Herzog, a Paul Thomas Anderson, a Scorsese, a man whose interest in you would guarantee the interest of others and who, moreover, made actual works of art. In so doing, he made actors, their faces, their gestures, their names, permanent in the history of the world. He was larger than Henry had imagined, thick-limbed, a slow and stubborn mass. His beard was unpleasant to look at. It was not an outgrowth of lustrous vitality, more a sign of indifference and neglect. His large, square-framed glasses were in the style of no style. They belonged on a man who lived with his mother, who spent hours in public libraries and carried his possessions in plastic carrier bags. That had been García. There was no outward sign of his intelligence, beyond a grumpy decisiveness. Sitting low in his chair, he gave the impression of an animal in an odorous den. He had peered out, judging Henry, deciding whether or not he was worthy of the immortality that he would confer only as a by-product of pursuing the distinctive beauty of his vision. This film, The Beauty Part, was preoccupied with the central character, with Mike, with, potentially, Henry. Desire for the part flamed up in Henry, scorched and faded, leaving him even more tired and despondent. Fortunately, his Diet Coke arrived and Henry could take a long pull on its cold caramel flavour, its caffeine and enlivening bubbles. No new messages on his phone, he reached for his post.

  The first, larger envelope was an invitation to a short film screening and party that he had no interest in. The second envelope was printed with his agent’s company name. That one contained another envelope, decorated with a sticker of a butterfly, in which was a handwritten letter.

  It began, My dearest Henry, it’s been so long since we met and yet every day I feel us growing closer together and I know you must do deep down as well. I watch you all the time on The Grange so I can keep seeing your face. I know it so well, I know your expressions, your hair and eyes, the sound of your voice. It is the music of my life.

  Why had this come to him?

  What’s the latest news I have for you? The strange weather I mentioned in my last letter keeps coming. I had a dream about you last night, back in the airport. And then, down in the islands. Remember how I told you that soon after we met I was down in St. Thomas and I wrote your name in the sand and drew a heart round it? I was there again, looking ….

  Henry stopped reading. This letter should not have got to him. Carol’s assistant, Vicky, was supposed to screen this stuff out, not just stick it in an envelope and send it to him. This was not helpful right now. This letter did not strike him as endearing or amusing. It was typical of quite a few he’d read in the past. Unsettling, uncanny, full of private madness and incantation and belonging to a live person who was out there right now, thinking about him, who thought she had met him, scrawling his name on pages, on the sand of a beach somewhere, and feeling a compulsion in the world that was about them, about his fate. It was nonsense and harmless, presumably, but so much better not to know, not to have this inside him. It should never have reached him.

  The waitress brought his cheeseburger. He folded the letter away and started to eat, terminating the hunger of several days with sweet, granular meat, a pulp of bread, wet tomato, sauces and pickles and handfuls of fries. He ate without pausing. After he’d finished every scrap, every golden fragment of fry, he awoke from the eating, feeling full, stabilized in his centre. He sipped his drink and picked up his phone. A few commercial emails but otherwise nothing. Henry didn’t use social media. He went to a newspaper site and read the headlines. In America, a gunman was holding people hostage on a university campus, having killed two already. There were photographs, video footage and live updates. His reading was interrupted when a man walked up and stood beside his table.

  “It’s Henry Banks, isn’t it?”

  Henry looked up at a smiling, sly, embarrassed and determined face, a hand held out for him to shake. “Yep. Sorry, do I know you?”

  “We did meet once. I’m Steve. I’m a friend of Gemma Lyons who was the AD on Shooting the Curl.”

  “Sure. Gemma.”

  “There aren’t enough Cornish surfing comedies, in my opinion.”

  “Critics seemed to think there was at least one too many.”

  “Ha. Well, look, I just wanted to, I know it’s kind of against the unwritten rules …”

  “Probably don’t do it, then.”

  “All right. But I’m going to anyway. I’ve got a script. We’ve got a script …”

  “He’s doing it. I said don’t do it and he’s doing it anyway.”

  “And a production company ready to form.”

  “That’s fine. That’s good news. Just go through my agent. I’ve got to call her now, actually, funnily enough, so if you’ll excuse me.” Henry gathered his phone, his post and satchel and stood up.

  “Sure. I’m sorry. I just. It’s perfect for you. I saw you and I had to say something.”

  “It’s fine. Just talk to my agent. And don’t do it again.” Henry shook the outstretched hand and walked away.

  Out in reception, he called Carol.

  “It’s me, Henry.”

  “Great. Good. So how was it?”

  “Oh, first of all, Vicky sent me some quite unhinged fan mail for some reason. That’s really not helping anything.”

  “Not her. A new girl. Don’t worry about it. I’ll have her put to sleep. How was Miguel?”

  “It was quick. I’ve got no fricking idea.”

  “He is hard to read, apparently.”

  “That’s true. I’m telling you that’s true. There didn’t seem to be anyone else there which maybe is a good sign. If he hasn’t got half a dozen in America lined up.”

  “You never know.”

  “Do you know if he’s seeing other people? You haven’t got another client in the mix for this? Tom? Is Tom going up for this?”

  “From what I’ve heard from Sally already, he likes what he’s seen of you very much. Of course he’ll want a couple of other people on tape.”

  “Of course.”

  “Relax, Henry. If it’s not this it’ll be something else. Plenty of offers coming in for you. This isn’t the only line of attack. I still think there could be a slower transition from The Grange. You could still do the Hollywood Englishman, rom-com thing. You know I think you’d be great at that.”

  “But this is the one, though, isn’t it? I mean, García. A lead. It’s totally Cannes. It’s a proper film. It’s like a Michael Fassbender role. Has he been offered it, do you know?”

  “It would be a great thing to do. Short meeting can be a very good sign. Make your impression. Make your point. Job done. Now do you need any more reassurance or shall we leave it until I’ve heard something?”

  “Sure. I was really just hoping you’d had an immediate call or email, to be honest.”

  “Soon as I hear anything, I’ll call.”

  “I know you will.”

  “You’re a great actor. You’ve had a terrific six-year run with a huge TV show. The career move afterwards can be scary but it will all be fine. Lots of interest. Lots of exciting things ahead. Stop worrying.”

  “I will. Okay. Speak soon.”

  Henry descended the stairs to the toilet and stood in front of a urinal, hiking his satchel across his back out of the way. A long, relieving piss. He hadn’t known he’d needed to go so badly. Amazing how the nerves of an audition annihilated ordinary sensations. He ran calming cold water over his hands and pressed them to his face. He pulled his hands up out of the howling dryer. He walked back up the stairs and looking out through the window in the front door saw, unmistakable, out of place, loose in the world, the large, yellow head of García sailing past. Henry stood for a second and took it in, García’s sunlit, sullen, authoritative profile printed on his mind’s eye like a face on a coin. What should he do? He wanted to go outside to
see more. He turned to the receptionist and said, “Could you put the food on my account?” This felt good, the beginning of an adventure.

  The street felt different now, more visual, more cinematic, as though García had summoned it into a stronger existence. There he was, walking down towards Shaftesbury Avenue. Everything focused. The edges of the buildings sharpened, the people and traffic distinct, kinetic. The moment was completed with the scooping flight of a pigeon down from a ledge. Henry decided to follow him, just to observe him and see where he went. From his direction it was obvious that he wasn’t returning to the casting suite. Henry paused to maintain his distance and watched which way García turned. Left. Henry hurried on now to avoid losing sight of him.

  Nobody noticed García, nobody knew. And why would they? There was no sign to indicate who he was. He had no interest in red-carpet fame. That belonged to his actors. He had better things to be doing. He wore boxy, unfortunate jeans with the sad wrinkled knees of an elephant. His stomach stretched his striped business shirt. He wore a suede jacket. He walked with his head tilted slightly back, looking out through the big square windows of his glasses. García was the centre of the scene and at the same time outside of it, observing and unnoticed. They had turned again now and were walking down Charing Cross Road. Henry saw that a woman had noticed him, Henry, and had taken out her phone to sneak a photo while García walked right past her. She could have reached out and touched him. She had the wrong man. It was Henry who was nothing. He ignored the scratching of her attention, the ugly smirk people sometimes wore when they thought they were getting a picture unseen. When García had moved on, he walked quickly, blindly, past the pivoting woman.

  Perhaps García was heading for the second-hand bookshops, maybe the one with art books on the corner, but, no, he continued on. He paused, stopping Henry in his tracks, to look across the street at something, maybe that group of tourists or that glass-fronted Chinese restaurant with large photographs of dumplings in the windows. Something. Something was happening in García’s mind, out of Henry’s reach, some thought that might become cinema. Whatever it was, it finished. García continued walking.

  Henry started to wonder if he shouldn’t make use of this opportunity, whether he shouldn’t bump into García as if by chance and get him into conversation. Talk about the part. Make an extra push. Successful actors often did this. They campaigned. Henry thought of Kate Winslet phoning James Cameron again and again until he gave her the part in Titanic. And all those stories of people showing up to auditions in full costume, writing letters, sending tapes. Naturally, you only heard about the successful ones. There must be many more failures, actors annoying directors, marking themselves out as desperate and unstable, eagerly dousing themselves with the petrol of humiliation and lighting a match. Impossible to calculate. But if he did bump into him, if it had just happened, without Henry having followed him beforehand, then Henry would naturally say hello. It would be strange not to.

  García was beyond the shops now, beyond the restaurants and the theatres, heading towards the corner of Trafalgar Square. He waited at traffic lights to cross over at the National Portrait Gallery. Hanging back, Henry saw García’s untidy hair brushing the collar of his suede jacket as he looked from side to side. The lights changed and García crossed. Henry waited a moment and crossed himself as the lights were changing back. A car moving towards him braked hard, lurching up on its suspension. Henry ignored it, raising no hand of apology. He watched García among multiplying people turn right into Trafalgar Square, along the low front wall of the National Gallery. Henry followed. To his left, the blatting of an amplified voice, the applause of a crowd gathered around a street performer. García turned through the small gateway and walked slowly up the steps to the gallery’s main entrance. So this was the destination, the end to the walk. And Henry hadn’t lost García through some private door he couldn’t enter. This was an invitation to speak to the man.

  Inside the gallery, García stood under the coloured dome with one hand on top of his head. He saw where he wanted to go and pushed through a swing door. Henry did the same, pushing the same smeared brass plate on the heavy door. García was standing at the end of a large red room with paintings glowering down. Henry turned and faced one of them, to look as though he was looking at paintings. He stood still in the busy institutional hush, the active quiet of people pausing and passing. He felt self-conscious. This was on the verge of going wrong. He would have to act soon if he wasn’t going to be spotted first and then García might choose to ignore him and then what? He had to do it or go home. He stared up at a face from the Renaissance, grey, lean, bearded, young.

  The man held large iron scissors in one hand and stared down at Henry. He wore a sumptuous silk jacket and large red trousers or pantaloons or whatever you called them. That was why Shakespeare was so rarely done in period dress: the costumes looked ridiculous. Henry, pressed by the man’s unshifting gaze, mentally greeted him as though he were really standing there, staring silently out of his varnished century. When Henry looked around again, García was gone.

  Henry followed in the direction he must have gone and searched for him among the many incidental people. He wasn’t in the next room. He wasn’t in a larger room of huge, colourful Italian paintings that Henry vaguely saw as a turbulence of gods and Christs and draperies. Another room, other people, none of them García. This was typical, this was indicative—Henry felt it suddenly, the landslide sensation of failure. He would not find García and he would not get the part. Henry hated thinking this way, interpreting signs, anxiously scrying the future, but helplessness made him as superstitious as anyone else. I wrote your name in the sand. Driving home, the brightest rainbow I ever saw. What was meant to be. If fame had taught him anything it was that everybody was mad in that way, in the dark privacy of their thoughts. Fame pulled it out of them like magnets, the weird personal connections, the destinies, the universe wanting things for them, or needing them to go through things first, to help them learn.

  García was gone, had disappeared among the visitors from many countries, leaving Henry with only his mad analysis. Henry walked at speed, openly hunting now but without expectation of success. When he did find García, inconspicuous in another of the large rooms, a short stout man looking at a picture, stepping backwards to get a different view, momentum carried Henry straight to him.

  “Mr. García,” he said.

  García turned, confused, like a man woken, and then said, “Ah, it’s you.”

  “It is.”

  “Miguel. You should call me Miguel. Not Mr. García.”

  “Miguel. Isn’t this funny?”

  “Funny?”

  “Funny peculiar. To run into you like this in here.”

  “Oh, sure. A coincidence. Yes.”

  “Exactly. I sometimes come here after meetings, you know, to refocus, to connect with some art.”

  “I see.”

  “And why are you here?”

  “Why? Maybe the same reason. Why wouldn’t I be here? I’m not in London so often and to see these great works, I mean, come on.” With a slight swing of his shoulders, García indicated the paintings all around. “There are great works in just this room, Spanish painters, as it happens, that are worth a ticket to London. Look at this one I’m looking at. Velázquez. The greatest. The life of the court made him a bit crazy, I think, but that happens to all artists dealing with power and money. But that’s a different story. Here we are with God. Do you know what this is?”

  “It’s Christ. After the flagellation, the whipping.”

  “Yes, and this child?” García shifted to his right, pointing with a stubby finger. “This child is the Christian soul. A child I suppose because the soul is innocent, new in the world. And the angel standing behind is encouraging the soul to contemplate the suffering of Christ, still tied up and bleeding.”

  García was energetic, released from the judg
mental passivity of the audition room. Henry was thrilled to be beside his enthusiasm, to be the recipient of his thoughts. He could listen to García explaining the painting all day. He looked at the picture himself and saw something.

  “Oh,” he said. “It looks like the child, the soul, is looking at Jesus’s face at first but he isn’t. The angel is showing him Jesus’s back, all torn up and bloody. God. It’s weird. Like they’re looking at a TV.”

  “That’s an interesting comparison you make.”

  “I suppose. I just meant the way that they’re looking at it.”

  “Intense, no? Contemplating the wound. I think it is the most beautiful, most terrible thing, this child soul made to look at the torture victim and feel his suffering. My feelings about it are absolutely contradictory. As I think they must be. I grew up with this Catholicism. My feelings are contradictory like they are about any big thing in your life. On one side, the Nietzsche side, I am repulsed. Why obsess with this darkness, this pain? Why always turn your thoughts towards it? And this coercion of the child, I feel it in my childhood. That is very dark, too. Life is also flourishing, health, abundance, joy. Why not face towards that and contemplate it? Why not direct the soul to that? But the other side in my thoughts is that this is true. Life is full of pain and isolation and binding. The way Christ is helpless with his hands tied. No one escapes it. And the sympathy in the image, the gentleness, the solidarity, the reassurance of the angel. It’s beautiful. It’s what people need, you know. There is this suffering but it makes sense. It is part of a plan.”

  “It is beautiful.” Henry looked at the soft, pained face of Jesus, the modest halo of brighter light around his hair, the delicate spattering of blood on his loincloth and thigh, the child, hands clasped, twisting around to look. “It’s a profound thing.”