There passes instead a fermata of stillness that allows the molecules between all of them a chance to absorb their terrible knowledge, to do whatever fizzy subatomic rearranging needs occurring. Micah huddles beside Rose, who is unblinking and impassive, as pitiful and cold as a seashell at the bottom of a well. Meantime, the dinner just concluded, end-of-evening sounds of clattering tableware, jostled chair legs, and farewell chatter begin to move toward them like a fast-approaching storm.
Bumpy folds up his knife, and the hooligans scatter behind him, the smallest among them leaving the trophy on its side at the foot of the stairs, as the lobby begins to spackle with familiar faces of the famous and fabulous. “I’m just a song-and-dance man, but this is one number we’re going to finish together, Ginger.”
Then, all smiling Sambo obsequiousness, Bumpy sidles up to an elderly couple entering the lobby. Without prompting, he links arms with the woman in her mink stole and claims the coat of her husband, whose eyebrows lift like pup tents at the young Negro’s touch. “Hallo, ma’am, sir,” Bumpy says through keyboard teeth. “Allow me to show you good people to the door!”
THREE
It has been days since Izzy set foot outside the editing room, and drifting through stone-colored midtown streets, astrally alone, ignoring the puzzled stares of passersby startled to see a man walking down Broadway dressed in a bright red dashiki, he notices how intemperate the weather in New York has become. Catching his crimson reflection in a sheet-music store’s window, he acknowledges that he looks not entirely of this world.
Conferring with this red-chalk smear of himself, Izzy recalls the occult message that has pressed itself upon him during sleep. The words, which seemed ripped from a poem or an ancient scroll, occurred to him in a series of dreams (dreams of birdmen in flight; dreams of giant black spiders and terrifying winged cockroaches; dreams of unstoppable, overflowing toilets; the recurring dream of shattered teeth, being pulled from his mouth one stringy root at a time). A warning about the actualization of deepest dread, the message was one that Izzy inscribed on every available surface since its visitation. Across editing-room notebooks, table, and walls, even, in grease pencil, across his own forearm, he scrawled it, and he repeats the words to himself now, staring through his own whispered reflection on newly strange streets.
THE THING YOU FEAR MOST IS THE THING THAT WILL HAPPEN.
He had experienced a version of the thought years before, during his inaugural takeoff from Brooklyn’s Barren Island Airport, during which every sudden dip, every unexpected elevation, every sputtering mechanical gurgle, registered as a portent of doom. Say the plane skids off the runway or you fall from the sky. What then? What is the thing you’re most afraid of? He looked across the aisle at an elderly man, perhaps in his mid-seventies, who seemed not at all alarmed by the jolts and jostles. Why? Because the distinguished thing isn’t so far off for him. Blown engine today or not—tomorrow, next year, ten years from now—the great inevitable makes its gains. Why should its realization ever come as a surprise when we all, everyone, spend our lives speeding toward the bottom of that well? The thing you fear most is the thing that will happen.
If the message was true—as Izzy believed it to be—if religion was just a set of stories we tell ourselves, if the soul did not persist after death, if we were not to be reunited with our parents and loved ones after death in some cottony white playground, if life was indeed a business nasty, brutish, and short—the question became one of resignation. How to construct meaning in the face of the inscrutable? Dr. Freud, whom Izzy had lately taken to investigating, argued that the answer lay in love and work. But too many days—even days spent in the presence of loved ones, days spent doing good work—felt vacant. What then? What binds us together? A grinding repetition? A dull sense of duty? Could questions, as King Mishi suggested, provide truer consolation than answers? Could questions themselves—and the rarefied shape they take in the form of narrative, the stories we tell each other over and over—be the answer?
What question, what comfort, what distraction does Izzy find himself walking toward this late afternoon? After many months of silence and separation, Izzy’s friend, the Broadway publicist Howard Rubin Mansfield, tracked him down and insisted that the filmmaker take a break from his editing-room labors to have a look at some foreign Bible picture he couldn’t stop raving about.
O unhappy man! Izzy thought upon arriving at the screening room and finding Howard waiting for him, alone, his face as tightly knotted as the loop of his necktie. How could he ever have mistaken the man’s mordant humor for anything other than dimmest sadness? Situated across Howard’s lap like a stadium blanket is a small, well-manicured spaniel that looks up from the publicist’s waist with a half-expectant expression, as if Howard has already told him lots about Izzy.
“My life’s companion,” Howard volunteers, introducing Bruce. Uncertain what would be an acceptable form of physical greeting after so long a time apart, Howard uses the dog as an excuse not to rise from his seat and instead offers none. “The only creature on God’s green earth I’ll happily take shit from. Ha-ha! You’re looking well, Isidor,” he continues, his speech keeping a step ahead of his thoughts, “modeling the indigenous fashion, I see.”
A bright red handkerchief the same color as his tie and expensive socks warns off approaching happiness like a stop sign. Even at rest his shoulders are scrunched too high toward the neck, gathered tension and denial causing the body to torque around itself like vines climbing a university dormitory wall. A life lived in code, hope measured in earlobe tugs and colored handkerchiefs. If the man seemed permanently gloomy—a person for whom every cloud has a cloudy lining—his expression nevertheless holds the serenity of a man who doesn’t dare happiness.
“What is it we’re seeing?”
“Not one for chitchat,” Howard responds, stung. “Still acclimating from the trip, I gather. That’s fine, that’s fine. Yes, well, the picture’s called La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc”—a thousand Frenchmen instantly felled by Bronx-flecked pronunciation—“and I’ve never seen anything quite like it. You know Dreyer?”
“The Scandinavian?” Izzy, carefully removing Bruce’s teeth from his hand. “He’s the real thing.”
“Yes, well, I believe this picture marks an enormous leap forward for your fledgling cinematic art. The images are something like the equivalent of grain alcohol, and the film contains what I consider to be the single greatest performance ever committed to celluloid. At the risk of embarrassing myself further, I shall say no more until our immersion in it is complete. Rocco,” Howard snaps to the Italian projectionist. “Lights!”
Izzy has not seen a film in a theater since before they left for Africa, and he is ill prepared for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s treatment of the story of the Virgin of Orléans. With its religious theme executed in a manner as rigorous as a Flemish canvas, with its ascetic storytelling style, its intertitles lifted verbatim from court transcripts of the martyr’s trial, and its parade of faces—faces in all their particularity and peculiarity; faces held in extreme, near-clinical close-up; faces forced to yield up their mystery like grapes submitting to a winepress—The Passion of Joan of Arc imprints each of its images upon Izzy’s consciousness like a watermark.
Heart beating perhaps twice over the course of the film’s eighty minutes, Izzy is thunderstruck by the picture’s compositions and camera movement, its hypnotic patterning and sublime reiteration of forms (the shadow from a windowpane falling as a crucifix across a prison-cell floor); the uncanny medieval implements of torture (the saws and winches and spiked spinning wheels); the undercurrents of unabashed eroticism (Joan, dressed in men’s clothes with close-cropped hair and the frisson that passes between her and Antonin Artaud’s priest). And Izzy is knocked sideways by the lead performance of Melle Falconetti as the nineteen-year-old martyr—which appeared to be not so much a performance as an act of conjuring. But it was through Dreyer’s decision to tell the story as a catalog of close-ups that t
he picture achieved a kind of purity and saintliness. The insistence on the primacy of the human face—the director’s belief in the essential dignity and strangeness of every actor’s set of features—came through as less an illustrative storytelling choice than an inevitable spiritual imperative. The absoluteness of it, the actuality of it! The Passion of Joan of Arc wasn’t a picture about something; it wasn’t a performance or a staged re-creation. It was the thing itself.
“Do you see?” Howard asks once Joan’s martyrdom is complete and the lights come up to reclaim the two of them for the twentieth century. Howard has hoped his friend would recognize the latent plea in showing Izzy this particular film. He has hoped that Izzy would interpret the picture’s message as being one about unnecessary self-punishment, that by way of its deliverance they might find it in themselves to forgive each other for being who they are and appreciate that they are no longer condemned to live in a medieval age of martyrs and visions. Several times during the picture, Howard had to stifle himself from crying out about Joan and her lovelorn priest, Look how happy they could have been together!
Howard carefully folds his damp handkerchief. “Now do you see? Now do you see what I mean?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“It’s been a long time, Izzy. How about we go for a drink and get properly caught up?” Attuned to the scent of pheromones, Bruce yelps his assent.
Izzy’s face is matted with perspiration and tear tracks. “Thanks, but no,” he answers. “There’s somewhere I have to be just now. But thank you, Howard, very much, for sharing that picture with me.”
Izzy kisses the man’s clammy bald head, which tastes unmistakably like cork. They have been watching different films. A soul fallen from love into nothingness, Izzy leaves the screening room consumed with thoughts of immolation, visions of martyrdom, grand gestures realized and engulfed in flame. He would depart tonight. He makes the decision walking the few blocks from the screening room back to the editing suite, recounting the shepherd girl’s final, silent prayer before burning at the stake. (“Dear God, I accept my death gladly, but do not let me suffer too long.”)
Never did New York seem more alien to him. Never before did the city seem to exist as a dream of itself. The singing of trees and trucks, the siren calls of construction, the tinkling of silverware escaping revolving restaurant doors, the howling of wind down avenues, the snarl of subways emerging from elevated caves, all of it melding together in some strange and beautiful and necessary music. All this he realizes he would have to abandon.
Keys do not know they’re keys; they await some lock’s recognition. Defining themselves through action, that’s their beauty. Returning to the editing room just moments ahead of the thumping arrival of Bumpy Johnson and a collection of Harlem’s most feared gangsters, Izzy silently surveys his prison cell. The wrought-iron industrial machinery, the hanging glossy strips of immortal stuff, the rows of hourglasses, the map of his beloved home, and, new to the room, a series of mockups he had printed the week before, posters advertising sinister and imaginary films of the crew’s African exploits. Recognizing at last the materials that lay before him the entire time—the clay he daily shaped in his hands, medium of magic and dust—the key slips its bolt, tumblers fall like toy soldiers, and the sound of the door closing behind him rings out like a consummation, confirmation that he knows what he must do to set things right.
ONE
Arthur Marblestone died, and Micah found a room in Till’s house and cried very much. Though Marblestone had served in no army, he insisted on being buried with an American flag draped over his casket and had made arrangements for there to be a twenty-one-gun salute. The funeral—conducted in Hebrew, afforded moderate coverage in the trades—marked the second of two deaths that delayed Micah’s return to New York.
Micah had done his best to avoid everything related to the physical fact of Margaret’s pregnancies—using as distractions work, drink, and philandering—but with Rose’s miscarriage he was right there. There was lots of blood. There was the revelation of women as fluid and ocean and moon. And there was Micah’s surprise at the shifting, liquid nature of his own feelings. As Rose recuperated in Till’s compound with its great, year-round Christmas tree and chronic yuletide cheer, her look was as far away as that of Manet’s barmaid, a kind of level, distant passivity, her mood a fort that Micah found difficult to breach.
“I never got to feel it kick,” she said after several days of silence. “I don’t know if I was ready to become a mom, but it would have been nice to have felt it kick.”
“Well, being a parent’s no picnic.”
“You think I’ll ever meet your sons?”
“That’s not really possible, no.”
“I’d like to be a mother someday.”
“You will be.”
“It won’t be yours, though, will it?”
“No, it won’t.”
When he wasn’t at his mistress’s bedside, Micah spent his time in California hustling on behalf of Imperial’s failing fortunes and talking up the Africa footage that might no longer exist. Fulfilling his final role as surrogate son, Micah also helped Masha Marblestone sift through the ruins of her husband’s estate, the big man’s heavy oak casket clattering behind it a chorus of claims and accusations like tin cans clanging down the street after a couple of newlyweds. With Marblestone now gone, Micah was aware of how fully exposed he was professionally. If he was thought of as Imperial’s A-list director—and a filmmaker who was yoked to a genuine box-office force in the person of Henry Till—Micah also knew he was deemed a second- or third-tier talent by the major studios. Being judged too young, too brash, too profligate, too ungovernable had never bothered him so long as Marblestone considered him his prize pony.
Thumping away like a bass line through this song of personal and professional anxiety was Micah’s worry over Izzy’s whereabouts. As days of silence calendarized themselves into a biblical week, Micah became convinced that Izzy had somehow managed to wing his way back to Africa. Micah was at least three days away from New York, putting him seven or ten more from the Dark Continent. And Bloat, the man most likely to hold a lead on Ariadne’s thread, proved impossible to reach.
Howard was the last man reported to have seen Izzy the night after Micah flew out west, and the publicist had no pertinent details to add to the missing-persons case beyond Izzy’s strangeness of dress and manner, his general uncommunicativeness, and a screening report concerning the private viewing of a foreign film.
“Your brother seemed very moved by the picture,” Howard said about his friend’s reaction to The Passion of Joan of Arc, sounding more resigned than saddened by the news of Izzy’s disappearance. “I’ve seen other friends of similar temperament do terrible things to themselves. I do hope Isidor is wiser than that and chooses to take the long view.”
Returning to New York at last, half suspecting to find Izzy hanging from the editing-room ductwork, Micah was instead greeted with a message for him from his brother, scrawled across the wall in Izzy’s inimitably nervous hand in thick, foot-tall block letters:
THE THING YOU FEAR MOST IS THE THING THAT WILL HAPPEN. YOU WATCH, MICAH.
“Fucking little cocksucker,” Micah said to no one in particular. Pinned to the center of the floor, sealed in an envelope marked “SSC,” another message awaited the filmmaker. “Watch your lemons. The time for tribute draws near,” read the card in Madam Queen’s familiar, tight calligraphy.
“Little fucking cocksucker’s going to get us all killed!”
The room had been ransacked, every shaving of celluloid cleared out of the bins and swept from the floors, all the reels and spools emptied of their contents. Each of Izzy’s prized hourglass figures had been emphatically smashed, the tile covered in splinters of glass and dunes of dust. Even the room’s ancient, immobile projector—a piece of industrial hardware that had formerly presided over its corner of the room like a ship’s anchor or a railway water tower—had gone missing, leaving b
ehind a clean, bright rhomboid of floor. The only remaining piece of equipment was a Moviola, which loomed over the empty scene like a tombstone.
“I shall have to hang a shingle,” Bloat said in a phone voice dripping with sugar and arsenic once Micah was finally able to make contact. “From all appearances I am now in the brothers Grand business. Apologies for being so long out of touch. The Pfefferminz trade has been booming!”
For a price Bloat confirmed that, yes, he had booked passage for Micah’s brother to make his way back to Malwiki the week before. For another fee the smuggler would happily make arrangements to have Micah met at the Brooklyn Navy Yards as early as tomorrow afternoon for a similar return trip. Additional sums would ensure that word would reach Mtabi and the translator would meet the moviemaker in Congo.
“I can confirm that your brother was traveling abroad with a good deal of cinematographic-industrial equipment—much more than what you took along for your first expedition,” Bloat reported for a final figure. “The transport of this tonnage to the interior presented a set of hitherto-unheard-of logistics and challenges, but given how Isidor made clear that money is no object, my associates were able to assist in this endeavor as well. After that, I’m afraid the trail grows cold.”
Izzy! So ill prepared for life, so in need of reality training, able to touch only the surface of things, like a spoon skimming the top layer of hot soup. The thought of Izzy undertaking alone so rash and dangerous a trip—his attempt to big-picture it, to reconcile all the strands of his fears and uncertainties in one bold move—no good could come of it. Worse, in his solipsism, his willingness to read the collapse of the village and a people’s collective fate as a backdrop for his own awakening, Izzy had put himself, his brother, Rose, Margaret, and the boys in no small jeopardy. “You fucking little cocksucker!” Micah repeated, pulling together passport, paperwork, and bills into his leather travel satchel. “I should leave you out there to rot!”
O, Africa! Page 29