She said, Blood.
When Dr. Lisa bit my tongue, she opened the clot.
At a pharmacy kiosk, she sprayed my cut with more coagulant. Within the boundaries of her profession, her confidence returned. Her back straight, her voice brisk.
She said, If it’s bleeding tomorrow, get it restitched. A film is a bad place for a date. Next time, I’ll choose.
22.
LOVE UNDER THE HUB
DIR. GERARD ASCAN
93 MINUTES
Re: My possession of Osvald. It enables me to dimly sense what he’s up to. Sometimes I see through his eyes. In small ways, I can influence his conduct. Now and then I trip him. I can’t make him jump in front of a bus, say, or wire me money. But I do know if he was going to go into Notino’s, our favorite deli, I could make him order a Reuben, extra soystrami, my favorite, instead of his beloved hot pickled beets on rye, yuck.
How do I know this isn’t in my head? I was in Notino’s after catching Love Under the Hub in the Marcus Station Quik Flik. The Quik Flik edits films down to forty-five minutes, for those of us on the go. We’ve all heard the urban legend about the mutants under the Hub. What Love Under the Hub wonders: What if they were all really horny?
I asked Sal Notino when he had last seen Osvald and what he had eaten on that occasion.
Sal said, Been thirty-five months to the day since I saw him. He ordered the Reuben with beets on the side, which, as you know, was not his normal order.
I nodded to myself.
Sal claims the government experimented on him as a child and now he can remember everything.
Some of Osvald’s ideas are mine.
For example, planning his film, A Replicate. Mayor Alison was to be in the pocket of the Transit Authority. The scene where Billy slaps Alison to prove his iconoclastic bona fides is nothing but a transposition of Bellono and Duke Giovanni in my Altarpiece.
23.
ISLAND PROMISES
DIR. JANE FEIL
85 MINUTES
Island Promises, running as a part of the Grotto Theater’s Breakfast with Feil series, Saturday mornings, seven a.m., has no aesthetic but much sentimental value for me, because it was the film we saw before I proposed to Isabel.
Carl’s Creamery pimpled the brow of the hill. Isabel and I lived in the cleft of its chin. An aspirational native neighborhood. From our kitchen on the top floor of the building, at moonrise in autumn, we’d peer out the window to see how many people waited for ice cream. It was an important estimate. Our habit was to make up after fights with cones. If we waited in line for too long, we resumed the argument, left the ice-cream shop, screamed on the patio, returned to the line, bought cones.
On this particular evening we were enjoying the diplomatic calm after a fight.
Isabel said, I’ll never carry your child.
I said, I’ll never impregnate you because I don’t want to raise your crazy child.
Uninspired opening maneuvers. The fight bored us from the first words. We were out the door, on the way to Carl’s Creamery, before we even finished the argument, because it never captured our interest.
Eating our cones, pistachio for me and rosewater for her. It occurred to me to propose marriage. It might spice up our arguments. Isabel accepted, as she had my first suggestion to her, on a humid night several Aprils earlier, that we return to my room so I could show her my collection of moss agates.
At three p.m. the following Thursday, we were wed at the courthouse. The witnesses were Osvald and Isabel’s sister. We went for General Tso’s at Szechuan Dungeon, then to the Raven, where we got too comfortable at the east bar. After crying because she had decided not to wear a wedding dress, Isabel stood on the bar and kicked all of the glasses off, one at a time, with a bride’s delicacy and entitlement. Osvald apologized to the bartender and gave her fifty dollars.
Before the fight that led to our marriage, we saw Island Promises, at the Baxter, because Isabel thought the snack selection was superior to that of the Conspicuous and the Runaway Seven.
I said, A film is not a buffet.
She said, Fuck you.
The Baxter fit her cultural aspirations. Isabel favored the idea of the artistic process over engaging with it, like a dowager who will cut a check to a soup kitchen but won’t man a ladle. She watched films with her lips open, willing to believe. In my Gadarene pursuit of Isabel’s company to the movies, I overlooked her irritating tics of spectation, like her questions to clarify niggling plotlets, her groans at wooden dialogue, and her inability to sit in a theater without checking her Pinger. Twice a night she relinquished her sleep to check her Pinger, set it down, resumed her bad dream.
Promises follows two scientists doing research on the Tristan da Cunha volcanic islands. Amid the rockhopper penguins, Laura and Andy conduct a torrid emotional affair. Laura’s married. Andy has a sweetheart in Cape Town.
They practice tai chi, Andy the Yu style, Laura the Sun style. The obligatory scene with morning mist, the horizon, the pair in Golden Rooster Stands on One Leg, a segue into Hungry Panda Eating Bamboo, garish exercise pants, flute music. Both are from the South. Andy, of Africa. Laura, of Louisiana.
Trista da Cunha is so remote no light pollution blots out the Milky Way. Anyone could have made a film of interest with this location. That it is squandered on a romance is disheartening. They return to their spartan tents, hoping to hear the long yawn of the zipper descending. The next ship comes in four months.
An expediency saves them, and us, from learning lessons. A hurricane is inbound. They will be washed away. Evacuation is not a third-act possibility. Laura and Andy dither over whether they should do what they’ve wanted to do for three weeks. They made promises to people who will never see them. With the storm approaching, they have a romp in the fronds.
I was in high spirits leaving the Baxter. Though Isabel chose a dud, I did not gloat. She fished for lip balm.
I said, What would you do?
She said, What would I be doing on an island? I can’t stand the sun. With millipedes and whatnot. It was better when we dropped dead for no reason and worshipped stones. What is all this fuss about death? We have this turbulent interlude in the peace of nonexistence, we get torn from nothing, we get shoved back into nothing. We enjoy life by stripping it of its meaning and context. If we say, Here we are, having this nice walk outside the theater, then we are in bliss. If we widen the scope, bring our whole lives into consideration, then we become miserable. So I am against context, or rather for only narrow and situation-specific contexts. In this case, the context of their sex becomes death. What is a promise against death? Are promises contingent? Well, I don’t know. We’re back to context. What language can do without context is nothing. Promises are contextual, and have many unspoken conditionals, an infinite amount of conditionals, we might say. If I had to simplify, then I would say the breaker of the promise would say yes, and the person to whom the promise has been broken would say no. Of what use is this? I might fuck Andy. He had a pretty good accent even though he was boring. On the other hand, it would tarnish your grief, wouldn’t it? I would prefer that you authentically suffer forever after my untimely death. If a dead person can be said to benefit from the variables they have tried to control in life. So probably not. I can’t tell without the context of death how I would act. I might be better if I didn’t have to die. What would you do?
24.
STONES’ BREATH
DIR. LIN HWAI
109 MINUTES
Stones’ Breath, in wide release, is a masterpiece of technocratic chest-beating, a glitchy simulation of mercy borrowing the popular outrage of failed democratic movements for award season prestige. Jonson and I were paid to see it, but I don’t know what your excuse is.
Getting our hair cut, Jonson’s treat.
I said, Jonson, what about that knave Millings?
Jon
son said, Leave off Millings. Your argument ruined my party. You know my guests are not allowed convictions.
I said, I was thinking I would go around to his place, make peace.
Jonson said, He’s going to know when you’re insulting his intelligence.
I said, I’m insulting his taste. He can have his intelligence. What’s he up to these days?
Jonson said, He’s from the Millings Kiosk family. He gives money to the Jonson Foundation, and we are on the Shoreline Reclamation Board together. You know. Cocktail party friendships. Nothing of interest. I don’t know his dirt.
I said, He’s married?
Jonson said, Yes. His wife, Alice, runs the business. None of the blood Millingses could be bothered. He’s very fond of her.
I said, He has girlfriends, though.
My barber held a mirror to the back of my head. I nodded. For Dr. Lisa, for Altarpiece, I had been cleaning myself up.
Jonson said, I doubt it. That is a marriage you could build a church on. Millings is a nice guy. He has a couple glasses, gets mouthy. You don’t have to drink to run your mouth, so you shouldn’t judge.
I said, He threatened me at your dinner party.
Jonson said, You were insulting his taste, you kept pretending to mangle his name, and you dismissed his director rather than giving a diplomatic argument against his films.
I said, Well, yes. I am comfortable with those points.
We stood up. Jonson tipped our barbers.
He said, How’s that doctor?
I said, She’s great, Jonson. She has the healing touch.
He said, That’s good. I heard she was the best. I have to run to an appointment. Tomorrow night, let’s talk about Altarpiece. How will it resolve?
I said, It won’t.
Jonson said, Millings lives two stops east on the Tangerine Line. You might make it easier on yourself by stopping by the office, which is on the floor below his residence, and leaving him a message. It would appear to be good manners to say, I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot, how about that movie, et cetera.
I said, Jonson, where would I be without you?
He said, The theater or behind the theater. Now I’m going to get you some of that texturing foam, and I expect you to use it at least three days out of the week. Keep it clean and good things happen.
To get to the Tangerine Line I had to cross a Liberian neighborhood. Bantering university students with eco-remediation textbooks stood outside storefront ministries with banners denouncing Pan-Africanism, which professed no religion was true. Pizza parlors hung with portraits of assassinated politicians. Under every slice, a greasy pamphlet. Faded pop returning the women in the veterinarian’s lobby to nightclubs long bulldozed. Bootleg colas drunk in public defiance of Hub statutes. Though the African continent had surpassed ours in innovation, in design, in education, and in the democratic process, though the names of their cities would be given to future colonies in the solar system, there would never be a culture more entertaining than ours. The world needs a clown. Our legacy would be how well we diverted the world from what we had done in the world.
The Tangerine went under the canal. On the other side, it was different. There was nothing worth mention, only redoubts of prosperity. I took out Millings’s card. A navigational arrow on the card informed me I was but three blocks away. His building was an early-century eyesore designed for Russo-Chinese Alliance bureaucrats on the take. Of course, the property became almost valueless during the Confidence Crisis and the subsequent uprising against private wealth. Since then, this neighborhood, once a third-rate business district for regional corporations, had become a series of shoddy compounds guaranteed by surveillance.
The elevator asked for my destination.
I said, Millings.
It said, Business or residence?
I said, Residence.
It said, We’re sorry, the Millings residence has not authorized any deliveries today.
I said, Business, then.
It said, Very good.
A big cheap room. The lake’s haze in the distance. Boxes piled here and there, of samples. Candy, cannabinoid sprays, tampons. Millings wealth one nickel at a time. Who would have thought there would be such a demand for fancy branded vending machines? If I understood the situation, the kiosks were no longer profitable, but the slices of real estate their thousands of kiosks were inserted into were immensely valuable. Almost nothing could be redeveloped in the city without buying a kiosk back from Millings Kiosk. I understood why Millings didn’t care for the family business. Squeezing developers did not fit his self-image.
Behind the desk, a man simulating water conflicts on his Pinger. He was playing Egypt and seemed to be in trouble from the Arabian Peninsula.
I said, Is Mrs. Millings in?
He said, Mrs. Rangor is in a meeting. If you wish to wait, I can ping her.
I said, Yes, thanks. Tell her Mr. Chivo wishes to speak with her about a personal matter.
He said, Please have a seat, Mr. Chivo.
She kept her maiden name. Maybe she was prideful. The secretary took another turn before pinging Mrs. Rangor. I reached into the box of samples to my left, as quietly as was possible, and slipped a handful of power cells into my pocket.
He said, The third door on the left.
I knocked, entered. Mrs. Rangor’s office was furnished with a sectional couch, three handsome paintings of a bygone vegetable, a plasma map of the kiosks in the Hub, color-coded by functionality or profitability, and a large desk, the surface of which served as her device’s workstation. Mrs. Rangor herself, a snarl in a nimbus of curls, gestured at a chair.
She said, How do you do?
I said, Not well, Mrs. Rangor.
She said, Do I know you?
I said, In a way. My name is Dan Chivo, of Chivo Industries. Last fall we met briefly at a thing. Your husband was very taken by my wife, Lila. He has been sending her messages again. Please inform him that if he continues to harass my wife for salacious photographs, I will seek legal satisfaction. I have friends at the Daily Central, the Hub Slaw, and the other content aggregators. I will make sure the headlines say “Millings Kiosk Scion Serial Sexual Harasser,” or something as obnoxious. Keep a leash on that man. I don’t know what sort of arrangement the two of you have, but please keep my marriage out of it.
Mrs. Rangor said, We have no arrangement.
Surprise in a holding pattern over her face with nowhere to land.
Mrs. Rangor said, Of course this behavior will be dealt with. We have had some problems in the past, but I did not know.
I said, Mrs. Rangor, I would appreciate if you kept my name out of this. I fear reprisals from your husband. Did you know he already had a man assault me in the street? Of course you didn’t. Do you know who this man may be?
Mrs. Rangor said, It was probably Uncle Al. I don’t know his last name. He was Rolf’s father’s fixer, they did things differently back before the Crisis. Rolf is trying to do things like his father would have, because his father didn’t care for him much. He pretends, but his father felt, why pretend? Rolf’s father paid for Al to get the vitality treatment, from friendship or from loyalty, I don’t know. So he is more active than he ought to be. That’s him in the photograph.
I snapped a picture of the picture of Uncle Al.
I said, Thank you, Mrs. Rangor. I will take my leave.
She said nothing.
I was blindsided by a seventy-year-old.
Damaging Millings’s marriage would have been unthinkable before his man, in that clumsy Broder homage, attacked me on the street, and destroyed the Zaccardi book. After that I felt, if my person wasn’t safe, then his marriage wasn’t. Knowing those lies would encourage his worst behavior. So be it. Millings needed to understand that he had no more power than the rest of us. It was a political grudge as much as
it was personal.
As I strode through the lobby, pretending to be aggrieved, the power cells fell from my pocket. The secretary looked at them, my face, returned to his game. Arabia controlled the canal. The Nile had dried up. His options were few.
25.
OF LIGHT
DIR. MARIE BLAT
79 MINUTES
The Betternet was throttled in my neighborhood again. A person vandalized the Tolerance Kiosk in the park. Three days of slow data was the punishment. The culprit was not named nor was their address revealed, because they were a minor. In the past month, it has been cut when Goel, K., did not attend his mandatory biodiversity seminars, when Stevenson, T., was caught underreporting income from his snack carts, and when Lal, A., shouted a slur at a woman in front of her at the market. Since I live in a guest neighborhood, and I am not chipped, I can’t get another data source. I could only write this review at work, a place I do not like to go.
That the authorities do not completely shut it off but slow it down, so that to wait for a single page to load takes almost ten minutes, seems to me a pernicious form of torture.
It took four hours to get to the office. My rail pass is under review. Allegedly, I tripled my garbage ration last quarter, which, coupled with the malfunctioning sensor on my showerhead, made me a wasteful person in the eyes of the Usage Authority. They suspended my pass. The effort of appeal, of finding the right person to bribe, of writing one of those hateful Letters of Contrition, seems worse than waiting out the sentence. Wasters Walk, as the famous poster says.
I walked down the lakefront. Since spring, littering has been in vogue. It started in the northeast districts and now is established in the Hub. Every twentieth person dropped a little something on the ground. An enterprising guest set up a popsicle stand along the pedestrian path, because the sticks were small enough to escape the sensors on the cameras. Litterers got to feel cool without paying the fine. Downtown people were upending garbage cans from their condominium balconies. The rumor was the Cleanliness Authority had bribed celebrities to start the trend of littering, hoping to inspire a general movement in the populace to throw trash on the ground, to finance the cleanup of landfills the Hub had encircled. Rogier’s working on a documentary about the phenomenon.
A Short Film About Disappointment Page 8