Dr. Lisa said, I became aware in my late adolescence that many days I would have to choose to live. A day when it doesn’t occur to choose is good.
Dr. Lisa said, When I am in the shower after work, I think, did I live today? How did I live? If I felt like I didn’t live very much, I ask myself why not, but there is no answer. How I could live more? I don’t know. There are no metrics. And what people say is not true.
Dr. Lisa said, What people say is not usually truthful.
Dr. Lisa said, I try to help these people with their fixations, maybe because I have my own. My fixations don’t manifest in physical symptoms. They are not special, either, but thoughts about the elasticity of time, the mysteries of matter, and the finitude of trust.
Dr. Lisa said, Without trust, it is difficult to live.
Dr. Lisa said, How can you trust another human being? Knowing their autonomy, like yours, is under the governance of a subjective morality. How many times should you choose to live?
Dr. Lisa said, You think you know a person but you don’t. You will never know another person and this stings. Maybe the self can be known and maybe the journey of knowing the self is heroic or maybe it is venial. To decide it is a worthy venture may be vain.
Dr. Lisa said, I don’t know you. Maybe I think I have a good sense of you, but these senses are wrong. A person cannot be understood. We navigate by our own sense of realness, which cannot be applied to others. We assume others will act how we think they should act. When they do not, we are upset.
Dr. Lisa said, Everyone’s morality is weighted differently, and they are not incremental differences. What is very wrong to me might only be a little bit wrong to you. And one can never know those differences, because people are rarely truthful, they minimize the importance of truth, or they think it is better to tell an expedient lie. To me, lying is disgusting. I do it and I think that the expedient lies I tell are minor but others’ lies are major. How is one to know? There is nothing to measure against.
Dr. Lisa said, Awe is worthless and so is respect for distances.
Dr. Lisa said, Often I have fantasized I will get to stand in front of the throne to ask as many questions as I would like. Until my thirst for information is quenched. And I will stand in front of the throne, which I visualize as a desk, not so different from my own, and I will satisfy my thirst to know everything I have wanted to know about the people I have known, which might take a very long time.
Following us through the trees, a man in a fishing hat. Binoculars around his neck like he was looking for birds. He appeared about fifty, straight back. A suit which was never fashionable. Only the loose flesh at the throat betrayed his age. Why was this man, having passed seventy, still devoting himself to wicked tricks? Perhaps because he thought his age allowed him a measure of protection he hadn’t had when he worked for Millings’s father, snapping pinkies and setting fires. That moronic family spent too much time at the movies. Now I knew his face. Millings wasn’t as sincere as he had claimed in the office, but neither was I.
35.
TOOLS
DIR. JOHN FRANCIS SEBASTIAN
97 MINUTES
Although Osvald works as a secretary for an architectural firm, he prefers to call himself a clerk. Leyak, Malthus, Barbas, and Grigori is known for the Hotel Vengeli, one story tall and six blocks long, the Felly Reflective Caverns, hewn from the sandstone beneath Port Anaraes, the undustable Balloon House, and ZFR Financial’s acclaimed bunker. Forty-two of the forty-five Hub stadiums.
I see him at work, as if I am floating over his shoulder. I try to make him spill his coffee onto his lap, but all it does is make him itch his hand. My influence is subtle.
Speaking of Tools, opening Sunday at Original Cin, I can, for example, restrict his blood from flowing to certain areas. It can be devastating when paired with the correct suggestive images. When Osvald prepares to make love, at my behest all he can think of is the scene in Interpermanence with the elderly ménage à trois.
Answering Pingers, haranguing caterers, paging assistants, summoning janitors. Accepting the tantrums of middle managers. Recounting their fits to Isabel in the evenings, his voice low with indignation and disappointment. Osvald leaves his designs on his desk, where they are visible to passing eminences. The principals and the designers, the serious and the trifling, the saved and the damned, have not commented. His B.A. in architecture impresses nobody at the firm, including the guest janitors. Finding ways to slip his design ambitions into conversation has proved to be a chore. He has never been a talker.
Gossamer working hours brushed away on the rail home. I see what he sees. He thinks of women. Osvald’s fantasies have no frisson without a plausible story. Without stories we have nothing to grip and twist. Karen, the HR assistant, has divorced her husband and is not sure how to date. The barista at Silver Bean likes his unorthodox satchel. She learns he sewed it himself. Isabel’s sister has a grudge against Isabel she needs to express. The woman on the rail likes the same Scandinavian dirge. His fantasies begin with his taste. His objects capture a woman’s attention.
Osvald’s longing ebbs and flows. The number of persons he has been inside makes him nervous. He fluffs it with a pair of make-outs, a wandering finger. He wonders how he can swagger up to the urinal with that count.
He attends company barbecues and lectures. Osvald hunts for people to impress the way he once scoured the network for Isabel’s personal information, hoping to find a tantalizing fact, a nice picture.
Osvald is confident his ideas will get attention. Passivity is a flavor of confidence. If he’d bring Isabel to company functions, let her make the friends, it would go faster, but Osvald, a thief, fears theft.
Osvald has the poor fortune to be overly competent. He will not be promoted to a job where he can upstage his superiors. The firm transferred him, after a season of groveling, to the head office in the Eastern Hub, away from Isabel’s family, away from people he knew, to whom he might have to explain himself. His desk is the first you encounter on a floor where draftspersons play darts, bend circuits, boast about hang gliding. There is nothing as exhausting as a person with disposable income.
He does not care for his coworkers. He squints to see what it is they have that he hasn’t. It seems to be nothing, maybe an absence, and he has something he ought to lose. He joins them for a beer when they condescend to ask. The place they go has no signage, no menus, no chairs. Osvald delights the architects by naming the music playing without fail. In fact, he can check on his Pinger, before they enter. The playlist is public. Everything can be touched, if one knows how to touch. He is satisfied to note his watches are more obscure than the architects’ sloppy throwbacks. At their gatherings, he does not speak unless he has a naughty, contrarian, or otherwise novel comment to contribute, to keep his reputation up. Office gossip excruciates him. A gap-toothed redhead who devises novel water systems and an interior designer in charge of paneling, molds, and etching have indicated with body language he is acceptable enough to be their mistake.
The days corrode his will. To relent to or contend with life. Either is okay so long as one is chosen. Another degree or another person or nothing, his Pinger, masturbation, pacifying foods, music, drawing, industrial accidents. To return to his process, which is a series of many minutes, a sequence, a set of minutes frightening when tabulated together. The bill is staggering when presented in whole. The bill of his minutes ought to be hidden from decent folks. One signs without looking.
By regulation, he cleans his desk on the sixth and the seventeenth day of each month. The bathrooms, designed by Leyak, the company exhibitionist, have tatami dividers, leaving one feeling exposed. Osvald cannot eliminate in these conditions. He is phobic of colorectal bacteria. In his bag are baby wipes, disposable gloves. Osvald has a propensity to clog toilets. He plunges in silence like a shinobi creeping across a lord’s bedroom. When we moved into our apartment, he waited un
til I was asleep to use the facilities.
Tools is about a doll maker who covets a doll he sees in a shop window. He inquires about the price of the doll, is informed the doll is not for sale, and resorts to murder to acquire the doll. I did not see it, but I did eavesdrop on a pair of women on a Mauve Line platform discussing the film. It does not sound very engaging. If you would have liked to judge for yourself, it was screening at the Handel yesterday but is no longer.
36.
OKAN
DIR. VICTOR NNAMANI
144 MINUTES
I agreed to curate the Conspicuous International Film Festival. The previous curator, a Bast emeritus, expired of a heart attack during a screening of Haupt’s Omega, specifically the scene when judgment is passed on the idolatrous village. The Bolivian government deported Haupt, so he burned the footage and reshot at Cueva de las Manos in Argentina. The curator was not mourned by the staff. He paid in change, pinched. When I die, I would like to be sat in a theater kept dry enough to desiccate my corpse. Five showings a day. Then I will never feel alone, or at least only until the next showing.
The owner of the Conspicuous held the festival for tax purposes. To hear him speak, the theater was in danger of bankruptcy, despite filling to capacity four nights a week. He owns the block. Theaters will never disappear. The reforms after the Confidence Crisis included the banning of home entertainment systems, along with the widespread curtailing of data usage, which has made it difficult to watch at home. It’s done, if you have the means, like Jonson, but it isn’t common. The owner of the Conspicuous is a cheap, miserable bastard, and I feel comfortable putting that in the Slaw, because I happen to know he’s illiterate.
Lest he offer the curatorship to Jonson, I felt obligated to take on the responsibility.
Who knows what dreck Jonson would choose, how many of his society buddies would pack the theater? He’d have the arrogance to make it a success.
Jonson’s pals are keen to align themselves with serious cinema. They ignore the avant-garde, the cranks, because they catch from them the stink of didacticism, the disdain of money at the kernel of serious process, and they want to get rich.
The festival lasted one Thursday and one Saturday, on the week the Firebats sequel was released. Shoals of costumed children left disappointed. Better they learn now.
On Thursday, we showed Rrepang’s What Was to a smattering of the neighborhood loonies. I invited the director to attend, but he declined.
He said, The Underunited States is a country dedicated to the innovation of inequalities.
For Saturday, I chose Okan. I sent flyers to the Nigerian Business Association. It was mentioned on Bast mailing lists and at the Well of Forever, an evangelical church with a ministry in New Zion. I pinged Jonson an invitation with specific instructions about whom to forward it to. The Voyageur ran a drink special called the Kilimanjaro, which was twenty ounces of draft beer in a tall thin glass, for five dollars, against my wishes.
In the pocket of my blazer on four cornflower index cards was my speech. The speech exhorted the necessity of cultural exchange. It sketched a brief history of West African cinema and what qualities distinguished it from cinema of the East and South. It posited Nnamani had seen the films of John Burr and Grace Green in a Benin City cinema, giving him the indelible picture of American machismo he undermines in Okan. It broke the ice with a little cineaste joke about the surrealist who walked into the lens shop. It didn’t go on too long.
On the night of the screening, I placated Osvald-in-me with a candy bar so he wouldn’t sabotage my speech, straightened my tie, and over the loudspeaker I introduced myself, the decorated critic, academic, and director of Altarpiece, forthcoming. I strode out from behind the damson curtains.
The theater was empty except for Dr. Lisa, provisioned with Gummy Nooses and Chocodiles. I mumbled the title of the night’s film and, making a threatening gesture at the projectionist, joined Dr. Lisa to watch the film.
37.
THE ROYAL WE
DIR. IRENE WEIDE
74 MINUTES
Jonson and I plan my film in the production office for Altarpiece, currently a construction trailer parked less than a mile from his penthouse for convenience. When prudent, we don the hard hats included with the trailer.
Because of his investment in AlmostPeople, Jonson has access to models with experimental programming. The company is looking to expand into the secretarial arts. Three AlmostPeople, Gaston, Henri, and Phillippe, are our assistants. Gaston takes voice memos, Henri places calls for material, and Phillippe derides us.
Jonson said, Gaston, take a memo. Have Henri make me reservations for dinner tonight at Flavors of Colombo.
Gaston said, Very good, sir. Henri, make Mr. Jonson reservations for dinner tonight at Flavors of Colombo.
Henri said, The patio or the dining room, sir?
Jonson said, The patio will do nicely.
Phillippe said, Rising sea levels encroaching on the freshwater supply of Sri Lanka have made it uninhabitable, thousands of its residents live as poor derided guests in this city, and Harris Vincent Jonson V, instead of doing something about it, drops hundreds of dollars on a cuisine that no longer exists due to his forefathers.
Jonson said, Phillippe, I fail to see what all that has to do with my dinner. I’m eating, you know. A man has to eat.
The Altarpiece script fills six composition notebooks. There is no dialogue. It is a list of shots that may fit well in the film. That word, script, is jargon I don’t have use for, but Jonson must be pacified. My notebooks will be misplaced when filming begins. Better the film exist as a branching set of possibilities radiating outward from a central image of Bellono beholding the ducal altarpiece from behind the canvas.
Since I am going to become Bellono, I will know what he should do, when his habitat is established. We prepare a cage for him to pace. Then the film will be finished and it will be a cage for the viewer or an ongoing commitment. One’s relationship to a film is like a marriage. With time, some deepen, some become meaningless.
We are supposed to be planning logistics. Jonson’s fiscal optimism will be disabused in its natural course. He has ensured that the office is well supplied. The carbon outlay for the contents of the fridge would be a whole year for me. I understand the cap is much higher for different tax brackets, but even accounting for that, he must have bribed an official or been done a favor. The trailer has a Ping-Pong table. We play a game until I cave in the ball with a heavy blow. Between swatting, we talk. I would like to allow myself Jonson’s friendship but I have lost the sense of how such things are negotiated. After a certain age, perhaps new friendships are superficial. While talking, he fixes his hair. Though Jonson polices his reflection, his pleasures will form a coalition and gain control. Gratification accretes.
Altarpiece hasn’t begun to ambulate. It is slime. Weide took four years to complete The Royal We, her failure. We are incomplete without disappointment.
Jonson said, When Lucretia straightens her hair, I think, did she straighten it for me? I review who she was with to see if she straightened her hair for another man.
I said, Maybe she felt like straight hair.
He said, I would die if she left.
I said, Most thirty-six-year-olds in your tax bracket are thinking the opposite, frankly.
He said, Sometimes she seems bored.
I said, Yes, all humans do. Is it her duty to entertain you and be entertained continually?
Why was I defending her? I wanted to be the sort of person who would believe the best about a person even if I never believed the best about a person. I didn’t want to contribute to any more misunderstandings. I had not been sleeping well since I saw Lucretia and Seel in the park. I never have to tell him because he would never know I knew. We have a financial arrangement as well as the mycelium of a friendship. Either could fruit at any time.
He said, Is there something on your mind?
I said, Food, Jonson.
We beach ourselves on the divan. I’ve put on fifteen pounds from the landslide of carbohydrates delivered to the trailer door. Jonson had a biffy placed next to the trailer, but it wasn’t private enough, so the company came and removed it to a cul-de-sac down the block. They spooled yellow tape on road cones around the portable toilet and parked construction equipment Jonson rented nearby, including a crane we are not licensed to operate, to keep the public away. We wrenched a manhole open to complete the deception.
In the trailer, we have set up three screens, on each of which a different film plays. Mornings, we take turns choosing fifteen clips to program from Jonson’s server. The other person must guess the theme by one p.m. or sit in the lumpy chair for the remainder of the workday. This week’s themes. Jonson: romances directed by expatriates who returned to their home countries. Me: unsuccessful expeditions resulting in death, metaphysical expeditions included. Jonson: unrequited admiration between practitioners and/or heterosexual females without a demonstrable and obnoxious sexual subtext. We went around on that one for hours about what might be counted as demonstrable and obnoxious. No work was done. Me: exceptional soundtracks composed by a person who worked on one film. Jonson: missteps following masterpieces that were later reevaluated as masterpieces themselves. The trick is to extend the mystery until about twelve-thirty.
Jonson opened a bag of Riesling. Beads of sweat on his forehead. A pleasure one can afford is a little less enjoyable than the opposite.
A Short Film About Disappointment Page 11