by Rick Moody
Maybe Thaddeus would do it, knock her up on a noninterventionist basis if she asked in the right way. She’d have to learn some basic romancing skills. She’d have to ask if he were having a good day and how was his wife, and she’d have to ask if she could help him with the crossword. Whatever that stuff was that people did. He’s fucked everybody else in the office. Nobody has to tell her; she’s not an idiot. Is she that much worse than everyone else? She’s a fashionable dresser, and even if she has not exhibited much interest in men, it’s not that she doesn’t like them —
“Do you want lunch?” the intern breaks in.
“Huh?”
“I thought I’d ask if you wanted lunch, because I’m going to go out and get some lunch.”
“What are you getting?”
“Tofu scramble. A shot of wheatgrass.”
“You just ate three doughnuts.”
“Well, if they’re in front of me —”
“Get me some fried dumplings at the Chinese place.”
The intern stands up and puts out her hand. For the cash.
“No one’s given you the lesson yet?”
Vanessa makes up the lesson on the spot. The lesson is how to extract a free lunch from the good Chinese place by claiming to be part of a movie filming on location in the area. You go into the Chinese place, you say that you are making a movie with the biggest star imaginable. You say you are making a movie with Julia Roberts or you say you are making a movie with Tom Cruise or a movie with Brad Pitt or a movie with Nicole Kidman, whoever. You use the name of the most famous movie star imaginable and you say that you really have to have this order as quickly as possible. The difficulty is that the guys in the Chinese place speak very little English, and they have grown up in some unheated cinder-block project in a city like Shanghai, and they have been beset by graft-addicted informers their whole lives long, and they probably owe some toothless slave trader twenty thousand dollars for getting them out of China, and they don’t give a shit about Ms. Kidman or Ms. Roberts or Mr. Cruise. And therefore you are going to have to start to cry, you will need to produce tears at the Chinese place, and you will have to say that your job is on the line. If you don’t bring these dumplings over to the trailer right now, your job is on the line. You will have to say that you are having a really bad day, and you will have to say that you are getting your period and that you are about to get fired and that you forgot to bring the petty cash from the office, and can’t they just give it to you this one time, you’ll bring the cash tomorrow, and you’ll also bring them the autograph of one of the big stars tomorrow. And you might mention that the movie is being underwritten by some multinational entertainment conglomerate, like, try Universal Beverages, and see if that gets the attention of the heartbroken maître d’, try saying “Steve Case” over and over again and see if that gets their attention, because they understand Steve Case and they understand Bill Gates and Naz Korngold. Tell them that Naz Korngold is underwriting the movie or that Bill Gates will give you the money tomorrow and that you will get the signature of Bill Gates or Naz Korngold, who is definitely making a movie with Thaddeus Griffin, and see if that works. And so your objective is to bring back lunch without taking any money and to do it fast.
At the conclusion of these remarks, Vanessa feels better, and there is a poignant light moving through the confines of her office, illuminating bits of dust. The light is moving across the piles of paper, the light is passing. And then the phone rings.
Vic Freese has been promoted this week, that’s the word. He is codirector of the television division and he is brimming with confidence, which is almost impossible to take. Vanessa has felt, in the week of conversations with him, that he is getting closer and closer to edging her out of The Diviners.
He says, “Lacey has definitely signed on to play Nurit in the Hungarian section, and we have been discussing the idea of her playing a second part later in the film, too. You know, maybe an old woman in the . . . uh, Mormon episode.”
“What Mormon episode? I just had Thaddeus in here, and he was making up all this shit about the Mormons; I thought he was just —”
“Van,” he says, “you have to stay up to date. The Mormon section was a condition of sharing expenses with Interstate Mortuary Services.”
“Interstate Mortuary Services?”
“A subsidiary of UBC.”
“I know who they are.”
“They want to get involved in content. Content is the future. For Interstate Mortuary Services and their shareholders. Every consumer that they can get acquainted with the Interstate Mortuary brand is more likely to call on them later, when they are confronting a fatality situation.”
“A fatality situation? Listen, I just want to make sure that we’re . . . that Means of Production is the development arm of the series right now, because we have all our people working on it. We have it out with two writers, and I’m going to see who comes up with the best treatment for the first episode, and then we’re going to move the ball forward.”
“You don’t even have a writer yet? Jesus. We’re talking principal photography no later than September.”
“We have names.”
“Look, I don’t know how long I can hold the place for you. There are other parties interested. Big names, names I’m not at liberty to reveal. There are people who think there’s theme park potential here. Everybody loves a water ride. There’s cross-marketing potential with the divining rods. The toy companies have been contacted. And did I tell you about the really great product placement underwriting agreement we have right now?”
“Uh, don’t tell me . . . doughnuts.”
“Exactly!”
“My people secured that Krispy Kreme financing.”
“Vanessa, don’t bullshit me. My assistant here is in close touch with the chairman at Krispy Kreme. . . . Hang on. Gretchen? Gretchen? How many calls have we made to the guys at Krispy Kreme on the thing? The thing! Hang on. Vanessa, did you hear that? Did you hear what she just said? She says we’ve made at least twenty calls this week to the Krispy Kreme guys alone. In the last two weeks. Their involvement was a prerequisite for all the talks with UBC.”
“You didn’t talk to UBC, Vic. I talked to UBC. I talked to Maiser right after I talked to you . . . what day was that? Saturday? I talked with him right after that. He didn’t mention talking to you. It was all me. I did the pitch, and I’m in touch with the guy. Don’t mess with my contacts.”
“How long can I hold the spot for you? Can I hold it forever for you? Vanessa, I can’t. I would like to, but I can’t. That’s all. Get your story together. Tell me who’s attached, and as long as they’re clients of this agency, we’re in business. I think I can get you the line producer job on the actual filming if you want it.”
“Line producer, my ass. How many days do I have?”
“You have a few days.”
“Because you have no idea —”
“I don’t care what’s been going on.”
“Okay, okay. Judy Davis for Brigham Young’s wife . . .”
“Are you crazy? Can you say the word? The word is Australian.”
“She’s not Australian.”
“She’s Australian as puddles of beer vomit.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Gotta go!”
The intern appears with the dumplings. She pulls her chair up right next to Vanessa’s desk and she spreads wide the plastic trays. She arranges the little pools of dunking sauces. She makes her preparations with a minimum of conversation. She holds up chopsticks in one hand and in the other she holds a plastic fork. Vanessa wants the plastic fork but takes the chopsticks.
The intern says, “I told them we were in discussions about a reality show called Take-Out. Who can deliver the items the fastest, that kind of thing. They knew all about reality television. They kept repeating Regis Philbin’s name in the form of a question.”
The intern has one expression and the expression is boredom. And the qu
estion is, in this time of unprecedented prosperity and budget surplus, why all the boredom? The intern eats a dumpling. And then, in a ruminative spirit, she offers the following: “My father is ready to give you the green light, but you have to tell him that I’m here. And you have to tell him that I’m going to do the location scouting. That’s what I want to do first. My career trajectory is up the production side. In this case, I want to be able to drive around the Southwest for a few weeks, looking for the right locations.”
Never once does a flicker of interest pass across her vampirically pale features.
“How do you know that he’s ready to give us the green light?”
“He’s embarrassed by my mom. By the divorce settlement. By his stupid girlfriend. He’s looking for a place where he can make a stand. And he’s embarrassed about the news division. He’s going to have staff reductions in the news division, and he’s going to have to do more tabloid television type of stuff, and he doesn’t want to, because the news guys are the only guys he likes. He’d rather do anything than have more reality programs, but he has to do it. And when he has to do stuff like that he’s always looking for something else. What’s the thing he can do that’s completely different from whatever everyone else is doing? A miniseries. Why would he want to do that? It’s stupid. A miniseries is just a bad idea. Who actually watches these things? Nobody watches them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some Civil War thing with Robert Duvall in a hairpiece? Nobody watches that except your grandparents and the Civil War reenacters. Get drunk and eat a lot of fried chicken out of buckets and then pretend to fire your musket at your neighbor the muffler repairman. Then you pretend to have your leg cut off by the Walt Whitman character. That’s who watches the miniseries. Nobody wants to do them, and that’s exactly why my father will want to. He’s going to want to look like he’s a man of principle.”
“You think I should call him?” Vanessa nervously wipes off her lips with a take-out napkin for the fifth time.
“He’s going to call you. But you have to be completely ready. If you don’t have a writer, lie about having a writer. If you don’t have directors lined up, lie about having directors. And when he says to fly out there, don’t take any meetings with anyone from the network where he’s not present. By the way, my scouting ticket has to be business class.”
Then they go back to the dumplings. After that, a couple more doughnuts. The intern gives Vanessa a disquisition on her interests. The intern likes Antonioni, the intern likes Tarkovsky, the intern likes Fassbinder, the intern likes Sirk, the intern likes Kurosawa, the intern likes Ozu, the intern likes Wenders, the intern likes Herzog, especially the Kinski films. She wrote her senior thesis on Kinski. And Vanessa makes up a list of movies that the intern should watch that she hasn’t yet seen, and she does it with zest, even if her stomach suddenly feels as if something is inside her, intent on gnawing its way out. When the intern finally goes back out to her desk to chew on her hangnail some more, Ranjeet and Jeanine peer into the office as if they’ve been waiting.
“Got a second?” Jeanine says.
Vanessa looks for her pen and her list of problems.
Jeanine wears an expression of forced joviality. Ranjeet is dressed in an expensive suit, and he wears a matching tie and pocket square, and he has removed his turban and shaved his beard. Ranjeet is beaming. He has been living in the office, Vanessa knows, because the kitchenette has become a chaotic scene. It smells like vindaloo in there. Vanessa should feel concerned. She’s sure he once mentioned a family. Maybe he’s not in close contact with his family this week. What she likes is that she has an employee who stays long after she has left for the night and who is there before she gets into the office in the morning. If he has to shave in the kitchenette, fine. He’s out there trying to meet with the big agents, and he’s talking to casting directors about the miniseries, and he’s going over the treatment, sentence by sentence. He’s a postcolonial onslaught.
“I am here,” he says, “to make a presentation. My assistant, Jeanine, has helped me in the matter of this presentation.”
What he does is stretch wide his arms, as though he’s doing some kind of special Sikh dance or something, and he says that the prologue to the miniseries must begin with the four fundamental elements, these elements being earth, air, fire, and water. Remember, he says, that when the Hun sweeps down from the plains, what the Hun brings is fire. Remember that the dawn of civilization is a moment of much fire. The hunters and gatherers, Ranjeet says, shiver in the dark on the plains until they remember that the fire can be fed. The fire can be fed with sticks and branches and it will continue to warm them. Turn toward the fire! This is how it is with the Hun, sweeping down from the plains, bringing conflagration to the decadent civilization of the Romans and the Saxons and the Gauls. So the miniseries itself, Ranjeet says, begins with fire, and the first image is of fire, and the camera sweeps through the forest at the moment when three separate fires are about to converge on a fourth, a moment of pure immolation, the kind that firefighters dread more than all else. And, yes, this fire could be anywhere, this fire could be in forests of the United States or it could be in Siberia; the audience doesn’t know at first, Ranjeet says. We know only that it is fire. And what feeds the fire? What feeds the fire is wind. And so in the midst of these fires, we feel the gusts blowing, we feel the flaming trees swaying in the gales, and then there is a shot from a helicopter, sweeping along the treetops as they burst into spectacular combustion, as if the conflagration is gobbling up trees by the hectare. And now we come to the edge of the wood, and the camera is actually dollying backward, down a hillside, a hillside already scorched, left with nothing but blackened stumps, as a cavalry of Huns flees out of the forest before the massing of the three fires, north, east, and west, before the windswept conflagration, Ranjeet says. They sweep down the hillside, and now the camera pivots as the cavalry of Huns goes past, and it gallops with them farther down, where, ahead, we can see a village of farmers and traders, and we can see now that the Huns are intent on descending into the village, and once the marauders have rushed past the camera, we see a last straggling pair of Huns, one with a crutch, and his companion, a Moor. Clots of dirt are flung up by the hooves of horses, Ranjeet says, fouling the surface of the lens, and into this hillside of ash and dirt plunges the man on crutches, falling to his knees and then onto his side. When he rises up slowly, he looks at the dirt in his hands. The fire is behind him and around him. The wind has changed direction, violently, and now the fire is flanking the little town of farmers and traders of the Silk Road, and the man knows, the man on crutches knows this, and he looks at his companion, the Moor. No words are exchanged between these devoted friends, but the sentiment is clear.
Only the pure of heart, only the humble of intent, the look seems to say, only the faithful, only the believers, can rise to a moment so fraught with peril. And then the man, Ranjeet says, lifts up his crutch, and what the camera sees, Ranjeet says, is the crutch against the flaming sky, here are the flames, and here are the black clouds and flames so hot that you would throw yourself on poison-tipped pikes to escape them, the flames on all sides, and I promise you this part could all be done with models and with found footage of American fires, but against all this is the crutch, and suddenly we find our hero, because that’s who he is, a hero, seizing the crutch in the forked V where he has placed his arm all these many years that he has been lame, and it’s like he has been healed in this moment of peril, healed by his need to do the thing that must be done, and he is holding the crutch aloft and he is saying these words, with all the anguish and grandiosity of a man who is saving an entire civilization from itself: “The innocents of this town shall not perish for want of rain!”
The Moor raises up his cloak over his head against another gust of the wind that is controlling the events of this storied day, and above him we see the great black clouds that have been gathering, the clouds that we have not been able to make ou
t because of the smoke from the forests, but now we can see, because the camera is level with the clouds scudding over the scenery; yes, there are great black clouds that are heavy with rain, that are pregnant with the possibility of rain. And this is the moment, the moment of the pronouncement of our hero, when the rains begin. In a tempest. Again, Ranjeet observes, this could all be done with models and digital enhancements. There will be no need to actually film these storms.
“I tell you these things,” Ranjeet says, “because I want to say to you that I am the man who must direct the miniseries. At the very least I must direct the first episode, and also the episode which concerns the founding of Las Vegas. I am the man because I have the vision. I must direct.”
26
Behold, a portrait of the family, in the year 2000, as preserved on the digital video camera of aspiring filmmaker Annabel Duffy. The family assembled in the living room. Duffy residence, Newton, Massachusetts. First, the Reverend Russell Hunt Duffy, in casual clothes, a pair of easy-fit jeans ordered from the L.L. Bean catalogue, a turtleneck in brown, cardigan sweater with cables. He’s wearing slippers, too, but they’re not in the shot. The camera captures the Reverend Duffy’s discomfort. The vacant smile, as if pasted into his salt-and-pepper beard, is the indicator that the Reverend Duffy doesn’t know what to think. He squints. He gives nothing away. The Reverend Duffy, depicted as a man of strident routines. A man who has made sure that the used books in the bookshelf behind him are rigorously alphabetized, though many of the books are unread now for decades.
Beside him on the couch is his wife, Deborah Weller, PhD, who has her arm around the reverend, not vice versa. She’s the one who’s laughing about the whole thing, laughing about the slow pan, about the idea that Annabel should film the five of them while they are all there, because it’s what she can do, because it’s her gift. Annabel promises not to do anything with the film, not if they are unhappy with the results. It’s what she can give them, a portrait, when they are doing the one thing they can do, which, she says, is loving one another. Her mother is the one with the surfeit of love. Her mother on the couch, her mother laughing as if nothing in years has been as good as having the five of them here for this unscheduled time, even if it is a gathering that has an unfortunate premise, Tyrone. But that’s forgotten during the duration of this slow pan from right to left. Her mother is wearing navy blue corduroys and a paint-stained chamois-cloth shirt, cream colored, and her long brown-and-gray hair is shaggy around her shoulders, and her expression is both exhausted and joyous. If she had to lift a Volkswagen off any of them, she could do it. And yet is her mother anything else besides a force for selflessness and love? Where is that other woman, libertine, the hidden lover of sensuality, the drinker of too much wine, and why is she never in the shot? Why always laughing, selfless, and full of joy?