A Short Film About Disappointment

by Joshua Mattson

  38.

  FRANKLIN’S REVENGE

  DIR. GEORGE SEGURA

  96 MINUTES

  Uncle Al, Millings’s grease man, was hard to find. Since the arboretum, I hadn’t noticed him following me around. I hired a fact-checking intern at the Slaw to track him down, telling her that Al used to work for Millings Kiosk, maybe off the books. It took the intern three weeks. I paid her out of the film’s discretionary fund, splitting the bill between five separate research accounts so Jonson wouldn’t get suspicious.

  She said, I hung around Millings’s building until a guy matching the picture came around, then I followed him to a diner. Asked the waiter if he came in every day. He lives okay uptown. Goes to the museums, passes time. He goes fishing most every morning by the canal off the Black Line, cross street Fletcher, look for the monument of the loyal horse. The Leisure Authority stocks the canal, so there’s good fishing.

  Off the Black Line. Sun eating the mist. I had been translating my sensory impressions, aestheticizing them, to explain to Dr. Lisa what I had seen and how it had made me feel. The more banal the impression, the better. As if gratitude could be transmitted. Maybe when the film was made I’d have an argument instead of the purgatory of words. The canal wound to the lake a half mile. Here it wasn’t so deep, three feet, four. In the park, no cameras. I thought I’d ask him for his apology, let him know that I could find him if need be. Like Millings. He fell for tough guy stuff. You apologized to these people and then you were their friend. They wanted their place in the hierarchy assured, that they were above you. They didn’t care where you were, how you were living, as long it was slightly below them. It was more important to insinuate and let their imagination do the work. Uncle Al’s line in the water. A vest with many pockets, a cooler. His lunch. He went down here and when he was done there was one less day remaining. One less sandwich and one less bag of coffee.

  What led a man of his age to hit a stranger on the back of their head and spill coffee on their precious Zaccardi compendium? A sense of duty, a lack of family. He could have done lasting neurological damage. Osvald hated people like this, bodies voluntarily placing themselves within a hierarchy, who thought they bore no responsibility for their actions because someone else had ordered them to act. In me, his outrage. My face hardening, twisting on the right. My right leg thrown forward, dragging behind me my left.

  To Osvald I temporarily abdicated control of my body.

  Osvald-in-me stalked across the grass. I was along inside myself and I was at peace because I knew I wasn’t my body. It was an object to which things happened, that it was unfortunate I was connected to by means of electricity. Osvald was quieter than me, putting his toe down before his heel. Not that Uncle Al could have heard all that well. I would have preferred Al face Osvald. It is possible that everything that has come is an accident but I do not find that likely at all. When this possibility is allowed into one’s heart, evils gain purchase. And the worst evils are one’s own because one knows them and they know one. They cannot be easily outmaneuvered and never murdered without sloughing a piece of the self. Which I resist, except now I had let Osvald go, I gave in, I let my friend defend myself. Because, although he knew what he had done and continued to do was sickening, he would use violence on my behalf.

  So it transpired Osvald spun around Uncle Al, slapped him hard across the face, and shoved him into the canal, a man of seventy years, who had lost his wife to a neurodegenerative disease ten years before.

  Uncle Al surfaced. In his wet clothes, looking frail and new. I wanted to pull him out and sit him next to a fire. I tried to extend my hand.

  But it was Osvald who pulled him out. Uncle Al’s bottom lip split. Blood on his chin, his vest.

  Osvald had accomplished nothing with his grotesque display of virility except invite retribution. I was traveling far from the impulses behind my film, an argument against materiality, by continuing the cycle of masculine posturing. History has suggested, concerning the internal struggles of men, the brain is not necessarily greater than the penis. However. Should the Millingses of the world be allowed to boast and dominate the conversation at the table, to bully those of us without advantages?

  No.

  He had attacked me, and I was not a great or even a good person. Uncle Al’s hands shook. He was afraid to age, to become frail, because he had hurt the weak for some years. The shoes were the same pair that had appeared in my peripheral after he hit me in the back of the head with an unknown object, and poured coffee on my beautiful book.

  Osvald said, You best stay away.

  As Osvald dragged me across the grass, he seemed to reach the end of his strength and withdrew from my limbs to rest in his place of comfort, my imagination.

  39.

  THE MERRY BAILIFF

  DIR. JERRY ANDADOR

  61 MINUTES

  The corporeal form of Osvald and I last spoke in my bare apartment four years previous. Unknown to me at the time, it was he who had helped Isabel loot the furnishings the week before, leaving me mismatched flatware, a sticky desk, and two chairs. A blanket. She took the tailored curtains.

  After Isabel denuded the apartment, she left me a masterpiece of platitudes on a scrap of notepaper. Isabel’s notes, recommended by her therapy app, were similar to an office memo or landlord’s text. Claim, support, explanation. A lifeless note to which she had given none of her pain. In speech she was ardent and vulnerable, quick to anger. In a hurry to arrive at frustration. She overheard herself, paced the stage.

  The note bled gridelin ink. Osvald’s pen. He was loyal to these pens. Nobody could borrow one. He was surprised or not surprised when Isabel asked for help moving or he offered. A reason was fabricated. Her father’s age, his relative infirmity. The contents of the note evade me. They were so lifeless, so dismissive and without feeling, my memory refused to file them away. The words were as smooth as river stones. They did not mention Osvald.

  Our last meeting. Point B on the line segment. We slumped over the desk. Osvald had a bruise on the back of his right hand where he had smashed it against the doorframe carrying out my couch. I thought he was there to comfort me insofar as he was able. I will be dead, and none of this will matter. When the time comes to sit up and point my finger, to place blame, I will remain at rest. My living room looked distinguished without Isabel’s possessions.

  The salient quality of Osvald’s face is a cold, substantial, timid intelligence. In conversation he projects bemusement and detachment. A silent, rude Osvald is how he tells others he is sad. He reminds speakers of his displeasure when they bring up a subject he is not interested in. He is not a great listener unless the subject captures his imagination or unless he can emotionally relate to it, for example, fathers, rejection, crises of knowing.

  He slid a fifth of John Brown Gordon from his holdall. We had a taste for it. Between our first snorts and my empty apartment were years of soiled hallways and winter, years of staircases and vending machines. Some women and shouting. Every Christmas he would leave on my desk one exquisite piece of paper. Leaving The Merry Bailiff to sit in the cemetery, our backs against a cool headstone. It burned our throats to sip. To be buried side by side, we agreed. Bickering over monument designs. Osvald preferred a plaque. Mine was to be a snare.

  I said, The afterlife will be terribly lonely. To be not here nor there.

  Osvald said, There is nothing but nothing.

  I said, After life there is a cinema where we will go to watch ourselves.

  Slopping liquor everywhere.

  I said, I can’t find another glass. Isabel took them all.

  He said, Look in the cupboard above the stove.

  A measuring cup remained in the cupboard. How nice of him. There was a coffee cup in the fridge she had overlooked. He poured. I offered him a chair. I took the measuring cup. It was hard to sip from it with dignity. Without the fixtures, the light was
as bleak as a wedding invitation. Osvald rolled a pencil stub in his fingers.

  I said, She took the ice tray.

  He said, Hurt me, says the masochist. No, replies the sadist.

  I said, A plateau is the highest form of flattery.

  We spoke of bland cinema, which neither entertains nor instructs nor enlightens nor delights. We don’t believe in process for the sake of process. We may be apes but we will maintain the fiction that we are not. Osvald mentioned that he’s writing a film, but I didn’t think he was writing a film.

  It is tiresome to describe the hypocrisies of another person who is not around to describe yours in turn. One might work oneself into a false foaming rage. Our volleys were poor. The ball bounced differently in my bare apartment. I mentioned my fear of queues.

  Osvald said, This speaks to an essential selfishness. Why should you have to wait in line with the normal people?

  I said, Exactly, Osvald.

  He walks to the bathroom. Osvald pisses sitting. The crackle of his rusty urine. He washes his hands, repeating the second law of thermodynamics in triplicate to ensure proper duration. Concerning hygiene, Osvald is a show-off. This room is holy to him, for Isabel cleansed herself within. Her washcloth over there left for me to use. This mercy irritates him. Did it mean she still had feelings? How could she? The first pricks of a long and exhausting insecurity, a gift from me for the years to come. His heart stomping in his chest.

  Osvald looks into my eyes. Protracted eye contact was rare between us.

  He said, Do you regret that she left?

  I said, That’s a strange way to phrase it. As I recall, it was mutual. Actually, what I said was, Get out of here, go. She took that to mean forever rather than for the next thirty minutes until I cool down.

  Osvald did not offer bromides like it was all going to work out for the better in the end, the universe buttons a blouse and unzips a zipper, better to have felt and left, etc.

  Walking the five blocks from his apartment, he has worked up the courage to ask me if I would mind if he dated Isabel, if I would give my blessing, but his valor has faded in the intervening hour, in the bare light of my apartment, where I am a person, not an inconvenience or abstraction. Osvald has resolved to ask me this question, to accept the wrath his question may provoke, for to Osvald, pitiable Osvald, ill with terror and longing, it is the meaningful question, it seems to be the question of his life.

  A conscience is useless without seasoning. Trying situations are as painful to refuse as they are to accept. When Osvald has tiptoed into the bewitching mist of temptation, he has manipulated events so they were defensible if not righteous. Refusing to apologize has helped him maintain supremacy. Soon after our last meeting, he convinced himself I was neither suitable for nor kind to Isabel, a bumptious and ignorant opinion encouraged by her ex post fututum to assuage his conscience.

  In the coming months Osvald will deploy anecdotes to strengthen his position. He’s my friend but. I don’t want to say, but. Maybe Osvald will lie. He will lie by omission. He will fail to defend me from his predation, which is one of the prerequisites of friendship.

  Walking home, generous, empowered, without telling me what he meant to tell me, he resolved to instead treat me fairly in the vital coming weeks, to remember our long and close friendship, but the paternal feeling faded by midnight, when Isabel pinged, asking what he’s doing.

  40.

  CHIPS OR CHAINS? // THE NEW NEW ORDER

  DIR. ANDERSON ROGIER

  43 MINUTES // 29 MINUTES

  IN YOUR HAND, IN YOUR MIND // WHO’S RUNNING THE COUNTRY?

  DIR. ANDERSON ROGIER

  74 MINUTES // 14 MINUTES

  I had resolved to never again enter Original Cin, but I was in the neighborhood to get a caterpillar wrap at Jennie’s.

  Walking past, I felt the hateful sort of curiosity.

  Rogier’s early work is being shown at Original Cin’s marathon Sunday Double Double Feature series this week.

  At the box office, a slumbering cashier.

  The first documentary claims the Citizen’s Helpful Intrusive Pinpointer, known colloquially as the chip, is a mind-control device to force native-born Americans to accept the intrusion of our guests. Rogier believes a consortium of crooked dentists, tax hawks, gold-star grandfathers, and identical triplets meet every harvest moon to plot possible methods of technological control.

  The New New Order is his most spectacular stretch. Rogier takes from the Confidence Crisis the lesson that it wasn’t the ravages of climate change and Prosperity_Jr that decimated global stability but the expansion of social services. The way he tells it, paternity leave, not the inability to provide the basic services of governance, brought down the prosperous countries of the world.

  By the end of the second film, my spirits were low, my energy flagging.

  In Your Hand, in Your Mind, more thought-control. This time Rogier blames the low-voltage phones running Pinger, manufactured by the Transit Authority.

  If nothing else, one admires his work ethic. His filmography lists two hundred titles, mine has none.

  Who’s Running the Country? posits that the Transit Authority is the true power in the Underunited States, because nothing can move anywhere without its approval. It also claims Prosperity_Jr was a hoax and drinking water is effeminate.

  That night, before bed, I put my Pinger in the refrigerator, as he suggested, to avoid negative vibrations from the seventh dimension.

  41.

  PRINCE OF IGUANAS

  DIR. HANS CLAES

  93 MINUTES

  Dr. Lisa was gracious enough to conceal how she felt about my apartment.

  She said, It’s nice around here. I never see a family on the street in my neighborhood. There’s too much to do alone. The headsets and exercise. The elasticity regimens and the brain-boosting programs. That fad for designing fragrances.

  She said, Have you ever been impressed with yourself?

  I said, Have you?

  She said, I can think of a time. But I asked you first.

  I said, A long time ago I was working on a short film. There was one shot I liked very much, of a man unlocking his door. I can’t even remember what the plot might have been. This shot was wrong in a way that seemed to be an excellent imitation of my personality. I was confident I had imposed my sensibility on the camera. The problem was, it made other shots look shoddy or ill conceived. The project got scrapped because of how well this one shot pleased me. I couldn’t match it.

  I said, Now you.

  She said, I managed to grow, from seed, a Sayers Droseria. It was a whale, three whole centimeters. I would sit there, night after night, with my magnifying glass, willing it to open.

  I said, I should like to examine it next time I’m over.

  She said, I watered it to death.

  I said, What about professional accomplishments?

  She said, Listening to doctors drone about where they have worked and learned diminished these for me. Anyone who mentions the institutions they have passed through in order to gain social cachet is a frivolous person. Programs have taken the guesswork from what we do, except in rare cases, such as in my field. The person inputting the symptoms is not so special.

  My projector played Prince of Iguanas. In my bed eating stale pastry. It was the sort of film made to crack jokes over. We used a cannabinoid inhaler before the movie. Laughing and long silences after explanations that didn’t make sense.

  Dr. Lisa, bored with Prince of Iguanas.

  She said, There’s a reason not many people know about this movie.

  I said, The director was a pastor who made films under an assumed name. They weren’t discovered until his death.

  She said, No, it’s not good. It isn’t interesting or entertaining or aesthetically significant. There seems to be no theme or life or absurdism. We
could be lying here without it playing and I would be more stimulated, happier, and at peace. Because now the burden of looking rests with me. I might have to find out what happens to this man in this iguana costume. Why do you like it?

  I said, The iguana costume.

  She said, I worry about your film if you think this is good work.

  I said, I’ll take you down the street.

  From my window, I scanned my block, making sure there were no suspicious persons waiting for us. I thought Uncle Al had his fill but one was never sure. Millings, who knows?

  Out. Two blocks east of the panaderia, the construction site that had been half finished as long as I remember. Kids were playing inside without supervision. This neighborhood was scheduled to be desirable for the Zone crowd, but a murder happened on the street, cousins arguing over a lottery ticket, a wrench. Because of this murder, I got to keep living here, instead of moving farther out again.

  I said, Up here.

  Once more on the inhaler before entering Brainforest Coffee. Eight booths along the far wall. Tables with women playing chess, a napping man, four students. At the counter, we stared at the boards. I asked Dr. Lisa what each of the dozen coffee drinks was. She explained as well as she was able.

  To the left of the bar, an iron door, painted blue, marked DISAGREEMENTS.

  I said, It’s soundproof. The walls are so flimsy around here, couples can’t yell at each other without getting their building’s data throttled for disturbing the peace. In there, they settle their differences. It is also a popular destination to let out the screams one has been trying to stifle.

  She said, I need to try this.

  Dr. Lisa, with some difficulty, pulled the door shut behind her. My first time in that room, I had stayed nearly an hour. When I walked out, I felt remarkably chipper. An abscess of resentment lanced.