Over spheres, gels, warm dishes frozen, frozen dishes warmed, foams, marrows, emulsions, infusions, transfusions, eel milt, and bugs, we bickered. Our places were set with jeweler’s loupes to admire each dish. I will have control.
I was forced to exploit his fondness for convivial beverages.
I said, Get a bottle, Jonson. We have much to discuss.
The beverage refreshed Jonson. Conciliatory mumbles passed between us. My theory was, Jonson can’t bear to argue with me and his wife in the same day. He hasn’t the energy to maintain two resentments.
Later, outside a charging station, eating bags of Bunkles and Cheddar Clouds.
I said, Our film could be the catalyst for serious domestic cinema.
Jonson said, We’re looking to make a dream. We are men with dreams.
I said, I’m thinking magazine profiles, invitations to join the academy.
He said, Dreams. We will make dreams.
I said, Picture the little yellow eunuch on your sideboard, for your guests to admire.
He said, Dreams, incorporated.
I said, We’ll build the set in the country.
On the back of the scroll on which our dinner menu was hand-lettered, I diagrammed a studio encased in a glass chassis. With the set, and the natural effects I expected to exacerbate using lenses I’d sent off to have machined, we could light the film as it deserved. The next morning, it was as if this had always been the plan. Jonson is not willing to admit he’s overindulged, so he never breaks a promise made in his revels.
64.
COTTON’S GOLD
DIR. LAURA WILFREY
77 MINUTES
Cotton’s Gold.
Two corsairs, Narbeard and Brackles, learn of a trove buried by Captain Cotton one hundred and forty-one paces from a striking rock near the southeast cove of Pussy Island. The treasure was freebooted off the Spanish ship La Codicia in 1611. La Codicia was laden with gold dug from the hills near Tenochtitlán.
Cotton says, The trunk of a palm is carved with three diamonds. Under lies riches. I can’t spend it in hell. Don’t tell that bastard Yates, because he’ll kill ya.
They say, Aye, sir.
Exit Cotton.
Captain Yates wants to loot the port of Ocho Rios, where a tavernkeep once called him a man of low reputation, so he points Heaven’s Cutlass south. Pussy Island is three hundred miles straight west from Martinique, plus Brackles and Narbeard aren’t too hot on attacking a colony defended by Spanish cannon. They mutiny. Captain Yates, a big man, breaks the plank. He splashes in the turquoise sea without complaint.
Captain Brackles says, We sail for Pussy Island, where equal shares await each man.
The seas are mild. A spat between Narbeard and Brackles results in Narbeard sleeping in the bilge and Brackles shacking up with One Ear the cook. Pussy Island, a paradise, reconciles them. Men on the shore in black silks, poor dentition. It is the crew of the Lemon, helmed by Captain Sniggs, the brother of Cotton, who helped Cotton raid La Codicia, and whose ship, the Pique, was sunk in the raid. Cotton sailed off with the riches of Mesoamerica. Sniggs floated on his mast to Hispaniola.
Narbeard and Brackles offer Sniggs safe passage out to Heaven’s Cutlass to palaver. Sniggs’s buccaneers are entrenched on Pussy Island, but they don’t know where to dig. The island is a conch, two miles across, five long. Sniggs offers the pair of them half shares. Sniggs has thrice the men, killers all. Narbeard, believing timid men to be inconsistent warriors, hacks off Sniggs’s head. The crew is uneasy. They gave their word.
Captain Narbeard says, All’s fair, you cravens. Think of the gold! Rusty, you can buy a new ape. Hopper, a leg of ivory. Barber Jenny, the finest scissors.
The crew is swayed. They land at midnight on the conch’s spire. Throats are cut, musketoons discharged, curses spat on the breath of dying men. Come morning, Pussy Island is held by the crew of Heaven’s Cutlass, diminished by the night’s travails. More treasure for me, think the surviving pirates.
Brackles plants his spadroon in the back of Narbeard because a co-captaincy is not fitting for a rich man. Narbeard fits the treasure hole. On the tree, under the three diamonds, a crying Brackles carves Narbeard’s name. Away with the loot into the streaking equatorial sunset.
65.
YOURS FOR NOW
DIR. AYOMIDE IKANDE
86 MINUTES
I said, Dr. Lisa, have you ever thought of acting?
Leaving the Conspicuous. Dr. Lisa wanted to see Yours for Now, the new Ikande film about the rise of the African Republic. She bought the popcorn. I am surprised the Transit Authority allowed the film to be screened in the Hub, because it is essentially an advertisement for technological socialism sutured onto a clumsy love story. Fatima, a nanotechnician, meets David, a professor specializing in the ethical programming of artificial intelligence.
Dr. Lisa said, No. Have you ever thought of being a physician?
I said, I haven’t the courage. What if I made the incorrect diagnosis?
When Dr. Lisa’s face absorbed enough pale and morose moonlight, it seemed to be its own source of illumination. I reject the stories of directors’ muses, for example, Alejandra Martillo’s beloved Henry, as corny self-mythologizing. Muses belong in the past with cigarettes and the personal automobile.
Dr. Lisa said, I’m hungry.
I said, There’s a place down Ashland I like.
Dr. Lisa and I dodged slow-moving families promenading southward. Dr. Lisa has a brisk stride. I find myself out of breath if we walk too far.
She said, Did I ever tell you about my friend Veronica?
I said, Don’t think so.
She said, We met in med school. Veronica’s mother worked for the Transit Authority, so she didn’t have to sign the public service contract. She was very smart but undisciplined. There was a lot of rote memorization. No matter how smart you are, it still takes a lot of time to get straight in one’s mind the arcana of the human body and the maladies to which it is subject.
She said, We had an anatomy test one morning. Veronica pulled me aside and she said, Look. Things are going bad with my boyfriend and I haven’t had time to study. You know I’m a hard worker. Just this once, let me copy off you?
She said, Keep up, I’m starving.
I said, We hit up that pupusería right before the movie.
She said, That was a long movie. Now, it was assumed that the medical students were honorable. We had put in so much work even at that early point, plagiarism and copying was not a concern of the faculty. But cheating happened. It was a lot of work. There were a couple times when I copied my homework, mostly for specialist things I knew I would not be practicing in. But this test was on fundamental musculature. If you did not understand a human’s abdomen, it would be very difficult to diagnose their problems, wouldn’t it?
I said, How many things could possibly go wrong with a body?
She said, I let Veronica cheat off of me. I felt bad for her. Her boyfriend, whom she later married, then divorced, was a rail tech, a job which he had only got because of Veronica’s mother, and he resented her success, earned or not.
She said, The next day, a large box showed up at my apartment.
She said, You have to walk faster. I’m going to drop dead if we don’t eat. I dragged the box into my apartment, cut it open. It was a complete set of the textbooks I was going to need for the next five years. They cost thousands of dollars. I was furious. I had tried to help out Veronica because I felt bad for her. She was paying me like I was one of her servants. Even worse, she didn’t thank me, she sent the books over like that made us even. I studied thirty hours for that test.
I said, Thirty hours and all you got was that lousy medical degree.
She said, On my way to class, I saw her in the hallway sitting with another student. She greeted me like I was her sister. I was
so angry, I spat on the ground in front of her feet, told her what I thought of her family’s money, and stomped off. In class, my professor called me over. She said that she had recommended me for, and I had won, a fellowship sponsored by a textbook publisher. Part of the award was a bunch of textbooks. She said she was sorry but she had kept forgetting to let me know.
We went into Café Extra Pleasure, Osvald’s spot. Rainy days, we’d trek south for crab dumplings in saffron broth. He’d pay if I came with. The crab was imitation. Osvald would get furious when I said this. These dumplings were his big discovery. There have been few times in my life when I have been comfortable enough to decline a free meal. We would take a moment, after our meal, to browse the seedy magazines sold in the back room. Osvald liked Inflated Asses. After the Confidence Crisis, skin mags became a big business.
Dr. Lisa said, How are the crab dumplings?
I said, They’re awful. Plus, they’re imitation crab. It’s ground and dyed cricket paste. How else could they be so cheap?
Osvald erupted. My hands started to shake, as Osvald tried to assert himself.
The waitress said, What will you have?
Dr. Lisa said, I would like the family-style snapper with two bowls of rice, please. And extra chilies. And what that lady over there is having to start.
The waitress said, And you?
I said, The special.
This was too much for Osvald. That I would come all the way here without partaking of his sacred crab dumplings in saffron broth was like an insult to his mother. He threw me to the floor, beginning a protracted battle for control of myself.
From the table Dr. Lisa shouted encouragement.
She said, Remember, it’s all in your head. Go to your peaceful place.
Osvald would wrest control of a foot or a knee for a moment, before I retook my position. Noticing a woman near the back door dining on his beloved dumplings, he lunged, flipping a table in the process, and ruining the apron of the waitress. Patrons scattered. Osvald had dragged me into a number of regrettable situations, but destroying the dining room of a cheap café, while Dr. Lisa took advantage of the distraction offered by my flailing body to appropriate a pair of loose spring rolls, might have been the worst.
With a sort of metaphysical shoving motion, I managed to regain the use of my body. Unfortunately, Osvald’s abrupt withdrawal caused me to stumble through the saloon doors into the back room, knocking over sundry magazine racks containing titles like Naughty Magistrates, Girth, Nude Supportive Partners, and so on.
Osvald seized my arms. He struck me in the face with a rolled-up copy of Ripe and Rude. Welts on my forehead and cheeks. Only when Dr. Lisa pulled hard on my hair did Osvald desist.
66.
TENDER FRONDS
DIR. MARIE RONDEAU
101 MINUTES
On the rail platform, brushing my teeth, getting my hair cut, seeing Tender Fronds with Jonson, slipping threatening notes into library books, I watch Isabel and Osvald pass the time, through his eyes.
Osvald has grown bolder. He is jealous of our filming, and when I am holding a camera, he will try to drop it or knock it over. He manages to knock it a bit askew, ruining the shot. Jonson has remarked on my clumsiness. We are two weeks from beginning photography on Altarpiece. Osvald hasn’t the forces for complete possession, but he can make filming a chore. My work, my sword and shield. May it chase him from me. Although I have become used to his presence. In some ways, it is a comfort.
Dozing on the couch, they look like Zurburán martyrs. They eat takeout. These are the moments of their most intense happiness and intimacy. While eating, they swap anecdotes about their lives at the office. One nods with vigor to compensate for their preoccupation with the carton of General Tso’s. Cannabis spray eases the tension of the workday.
On their couch the coin of their lives is spent. There is nothing to life but surrendering. As long as one continues to surrender, then one will be all right.
A self-contained unit, more or less. A shared complicity that doesn’t translate well to group situations. They pretend to enjoy each other’s families, fake delight at the visits of hoary friends, get drinks with sociopathic cousins, the family wolves. At the table with their new friends, who perceive them as a unit, they do a routine less savage than what Isabel and I trotted out.
When their friends ask how they met, Isabel makes a quip. As she does this, she cringes, dislikes herself. Osvald looks at the table. The friends respect them a little more for this ruthlessness. That decency inhibits fulfillment is an irony we have all had cause to reflect upon. The shy pride of betraying.
They overeat together, like prisoners horny for food. In our last summer, unwilling to take Isabel to the Dependence Day Parade, I suggested she ping Osvald that she was picking him up.
In four and a half hours, she returned, her belly a drum.
She said, I ate so much. It was glorious.
An implicit accusation floated over my scalp into the night beyond. Our kitchen window was open, the better to see the mawkish sunset so popular from the World’s Highest Terrace, where Isabel and Osvald had been swaddled in the breeze. The Désormière recording of Act Four, Scene Four, of Pelléas et Mélisande played, the scene at the well in the park, where Golaud dirties his hands. We must remember we are turning in light.
Chores go undone. Isabel runs her clothes to the Vietnamese dry cleaner. Osvald is not clean, although he is germophobic. He has to work harder in the relationship. He scrubs, tidies. He tries to keep their space clean. He fails. His junk proliferates. Isabel shoves aside woodworking tools, printer fodder, soldering irons, nanokits, bike spokes, textile samples.
The threat of me hangs over Osvald. The fear I might comb my hair, board a rail with their address on a wrapper. On my black horse with a rose in my teeth, to make a ridiculous dramatic gesture. To end his joy. Begging Isabel, who is so susceptible to gestures. I feel Osvald feeling this.
67.
BARGAINING WITH MAROAT
DIR. JAMES OSVALD
5 MINUTES
An old film of Osvald’s. You can’t see it.
Interior shot, our living room. A warped piano, pinups, vistas of terror and devastation torn from a pterodactyl coloring book, dying ferns, poster advertising Inquisitor, bust of Caligula, puncture in drywall from a pogo accident, paisley sofa, buff synth-leather love seat, soiled dishes, kliegs modified into lamps, the neighbor’s venial tortoiseshell cat, library books of translated poetry, of romantic etiquette, of fluorescence, of stain removal, of pagan magic, bottle caps, a stained harmonica, miniature skateboard, coffee mug printed with double entendre. What a treat, to see old things.
The film is not Osvald’s finest effort. A man enters. He flops on the sofa. His hand passes over the table, returns with the magic book. He is me, ten years younger.
In the book I am holding on-camera, Sabbath of Flowers, I read the surest way to get a person’s attention is to write their name while urinating. I went through a phase where I would scrawl Isabel’s name on glittering monticles of snow.
Flipping through the book, I roll my eyes, snap my fingers.
I say, Beard of goat, giraffe’s throat, to my sanctum come Maroat.
Off-camera, Osvald detonates a homemade smoke bomb. The damage from it cost us our security deposit. Out of the pansy fog steps Maroat, the Haggler. It is Osvald costumed in a jumpsuit and satin cape sewn from a bedsheet.
A note on Osvald’s dramatic method. To project depth, he visualized his conception.
The mystical aims of Bargaining with Maroat are tarnished by the continuous medium shot. Osvald lacked a DP, so a tripod had to suffice. He tried to sell the static effect as a metafictional conceit, but the film resembles a home movie more than a genre-bender, a thrilling Thursday shared by a real estate agent and a frazzled actuary in a quiet node motel.
One can cast curses with
urine. While probably not effective, these actions function for the curser as a favored sports team may for the average person, as a dump for baleful feelings.
Maroat is prepared to grant me a boon for thirty years’ labor as his apprentice. I desire a woman, Orzsabet. I am not willing to work for her affections. This is within Maroat’s power, as is the ability to transmogrify ducks to swans, to make clouds heavy with blood, and to cause a man to believe his penis has fallen off. I can have Orzsabet for two months, two years, or two decades.
Maroat says, All relationships are finite. The strength of your ardor will be inverse to the duration of the partnership.
I choose.
Maroat offers me a game of chance. We will draw from a deck of Bicycles until one flips over the ace of diamonds. If he turns it over, he will receive Orzsabet when my period ends. If I turn it over, my period of servitude will be thirty days.
In my costume, I felt a tingling on my skin. On-screen, an attack of transposition. A bit of me slithered out my nostril. A bit of Osvald slithered in.
I don’t recall our wallpaper undulating like that.
Isn’t this fuchsia smoke effect far too advanced and, well, sinister for Osvald?
And what are these flashing violet lights seeming to transmit between Maroat and me, around minute six?
And what about this bloodshot eye overhead that I see only when I pause the film, the size of a beach ball, taking in the scene?
Shuffling, I ask Maroat what he did for his apprenticeship. He cuts the deck. He transcribed fragile manuscripts at the sticky carrel of his master, Carropos the Touchy. Before lunch, stomach whinging, he transliterated the wrong symbol. When Carropos attempted to cast a spell, he was sucked into the unknown. Maroat was free. We flip the cards. Two of clubs, eight of hearts, three of hearts, ace of hearts.
A Short Film About Disappointment Page 18