Slow Fade

by Rudolph Wurlitzer

  “India,” Walker murmured. The soft sweet smell of his own species’ shit was what he had noticed first and the freak-out of having one of his bags stolen by a stoned and starving French hippie dressed as a sadhu in a torn dhoti and shaved head. From that first ludicrous moment he had experienced a violent fear of and estrangement from the whole place that was never really to leave him, whereas his wife, to her amazement as well as his, had immediately felt the opposite, as if she had finally found her true home.

  “As I recollect the story,” A.D. said dreamily, pushing the button on the tape recorder, “Jim and Lacey were slugging on each other right from the bell. Their whole scene was on the rocks except for an occasional wrathful fuck, which is what we open up on, but both of them are too guilty and uptight to cop to it. Lacey didn’t want to go to India in the first place because she felt too attached to her social scene, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to let Jim go because a part of her knew that once he got away, that was it, going going gone and no matter how much she might want to see him cut up in little pieces and scattered to the wind, it was her that was going to walk out the door, not him. . . . And Jim, he was looking for a way to cut loose and he wanted to go quick before Clem came back, because all the time he never really thought she was in danger, just off on some adventure and not telling the old man was her way of telling herself she was on her own. He didn’t like working for his old man, didn’t like his friends, didn’t like his car, didn’t like his house, didn’t like the second-rate mistress he had stashed in Chicago, in fact, he didn’t like his whole shot . . . he was that strung out with himself. . . . How does that sound?”

  “I suppose it was a little like that,” Walker said softly, not able really to remember. “More or less like that . . . except there were the pleasures . . . the terrifying pleasures, running from one to the other, and always money, piling up money, making deals, always that . . . obsession with the next high roll . . . manipulating.”

  “Where would we cut to from the last scene?” A.D. asked, trying to push it along, resisting an impulse to let the stars devour him. “You remember that weird scene in the bedroom where they were in the middle of packing and going at each other, throwing things and screaming out all the hate and then that last roll on the rug . . . ?”

  After a long moment where it appeared that he had dozed off, Walker began to get into it:

  RIGHT — TO INDIA . . . Lacey opening her eyes and staring at a large fan turning slowly above her. She would be lying on a single bed and you can tell by the vacant expression in her eyes that she has no idea where she is as we go with her point of view: wicker furniture, cool blue and white tiles on the floor, the chaos of their clothes and luggage spilled around the room as if caught in a violent wind, an empty gin bottle lying on the pillow. . . . She stands on the balcony in her dressing gown, looking down at an ivy-colored brick wall surrounding a controlled garden with flowers, peacocks, bowing waiters, and a highly theatrical show business yogi performing a series of flashy asanas for the hotel guests sitting at tables on the lawn, one of whom is her hung-over and bored husband. . . . Dismissing the predictable view beneath her, she gazes enamored at the street beyond the hotel enclave where two elephants pass like ponderous ships through a congested stream of people, cows, water buffaloes, taxis, buses. . . .

  EXTERIOR — MIDDAY . . . riding in a hand-drawn ricksha down a narrow side street. Jim is appalled and depressed at the poverty, while Lacey, surprisingly, has nothing but enthusiasm for the languid exotic atmosphere. Suddenly he lashes out at her, telling her to keep her banal responses to herself and not try to insist imperially that he see things her way and to leave him the fuck alone. In this alienated mood they arrive at a simple one-story house with a tin roof surrounded by palm trees. . . .

  INTERIOR — HOUSE . . . the melancholy sound of a vina and the tap-tap of a murdang, a long double drum. A dark-skinned woman in a maroon sari opens the door and they can see a large white room with a rug on the floor where an ancient white-bearded man in a starched dhoti interrupts the student playing the murdang and demonstrates how he wants the phrase played. He speaks in Tamil to one of the students, a handsome youth in his early twenties, but the young man, Samendra, is distracted by the appearance of the bizarre Westerners, in particular, Lacey. The teacher, Baba, takes a long stick with a black lacquer handle and whacks Samendra over the head, speaking to him reproachfully. Samendra bows, stands up, and walks over to Jim and Lacey. “Baba asks why you have interrupted the lesson?” Jim tells him the whole rap about Clementine and how they’re looking for her and how worried they are and Samendra says all this in Tamil to Baba and he gives a reply which Samendra translates: “Baba says music was not your sister’s true path. She was not a good student and Baba regrets having included her in his class.” Jim interrupts to ask if Clementine is okay, if she’s still alive, and Baba turns to him and states in highly theatrical Oxfordian English: “I do not care nor am I interested in what happened to your sister after she left my tutelage. Samendra will confess all he knows after his lesson is over. If you will excuse me, I am an old man and have no time for chatter.” . . . He turns his back. Samendra manages to whisper that he will meet them on the beach. . . .

  EXTERIOR . . . They walk across the street to a wide spectacular beach facing the Bay of Bengal. It is hot and little waves of heat rise off the sand. In the distance, ebony-colored fishermen in loincloths pull their nets toward the shore. They are in the middle of an argument about why Jim didn’t insist on knowing if at least Clementine was alive. He refuses to go back, saying that the place gave him the creeps and it’s not going to make any difference anyway. She turns angrily away, only to fall back toward him, startled by a solitary figure staring at them with a coldly detached gaze not ten feet away. His naked body is covered with white ash and he holds a small three-pronged trident in his right hand. They have another argument about whether they should move down the beach and then . . .

  SAMENDRA ARRIVES . . . Looking at the sadhu, he gives him a coin and claps his hands. The sadhu takes the coin but doesn’t walk away. “I could not leave,” Samendra says, sitting down opposite them on the sand. Anticipating Jim’s inevitable question, he says that as far as he knows Clementine is in New Delhi and that he can give them an address. It is obvious by the shy hesitant way he mentions Clementine’s name that he is strung out on her. “She was not a bad student but she had no real interest in music. She quite severely damaged her hand, you know.” They didn’t know. “Yes, yes,” he goes on rapidly. “She was in a taxi and there was a flat and as they were changing the tire the jack slipped. Her hand was on the ground and she just left it there for the car to crush. Quite amazing the way she left her hand there. I watched it myself.” . . . They sit facing slightly different directions as if they had lost their connections with each other, the sadhu staring straight at them as before. . . . Jim asks: “What happened with her? I mean, I always knew she was using Indian music as a hustle to have an adventure, to break away for a while, but this is very extreme.” . . . Samendra smiles at them. “Before the, ah, accident,” he says, averting his eyes and staring off at the sea, “your sister was visiting a man who sat with Ramana Maharsi, the enlightened being from Arunachala whose body has now left us. This man, Chandra Doss, who sat with Ramana Maharsi for six years, is not a swami or anything like that. He is a simple man who has a family and sells bidis, these little cigarettes, in the marketplace. You can see him there anytime. He makes all these bidis and he sells them. Your sister met him because that is where she bought her cigarettes and she began to talk with him. Everything was falling apart for her and she thought that she might have to return home and Chandra Doss told her that it was true that everything was falling apart and that it would get worse no matter what she did and that she should embrace that state rather than deny it; what Ramana Maharsi calls the Atma-Vichara, to inquire intensely after the self. And so she inquired intensely after her self because that was what she was doing anyway, a
lthough in a very ignorant way, and soon all she was left with was the chaos of her own thoughts. Then Chandra Doss told her to say neti neti, or, no, not those thoughts either, and that is where perhaps the real crises began because she could not accept the existence of the Aham-Brahman.” “The Aham-Brahman?” Lacey asks, bewildered by this explanation which has been spoken very fast, as if Samendra wants to get it all said so that he can just split. “Yes. Yes. The I. The absolute. The noise of her own mind brought a kind of madness upon her.” . . .“You mean she flipped out?” Jim asks impatiently. Samendra appears pained, as if Jim is being purposely obtuse, which he no doubt is. But Samendra proceeds anyway. “One might say that your sister became gradually obsessed with the awareness that she was not her thoughts. I was a witness. I was there every day to watch. She would not talk to Baba about her music. She would not respond. She would not practice. Her whole life seemed to stop.” . . .“What does that mean, she’s not her thoughts?” Jim asks, almost shouting. “Of course she’s her thoughts. Cogito ergo sum, baby.” . . . Samendra stands up, frightened and embarrassed by the aggression in Jim’s eyes. He turns away as if he cannot bear it any more, then suddenly whirls around to face them. “Tat-tvam-asi,” he shouts, his face beaming as if he has remembered a magic formula. Sitting down, he smiles at them sweetly. “Tat-tvam-asi. Thou art that. That is what your sister began to meditate on. I remember that quite clearly. Of course I do not know what it all means because I am not sannyas. I am a musician. Perhaps you should ask Chandra Doss about the teaching of the great sage of Arunachala.” . . .“She’s become some kind of freak,” Jim says quietly. They sit there silently until suddenly Samendra laughs and claps his hands. “You see, your sister discovered she could not control her thoughts for one second. That is something that we know here that you in the West are perhaps ignorant of.” . . . Jim stands up to leave. “I don’t know how to deal with that. . . . No, no.” Samendra jumps up to stand beside him. “I seriously doubt whether you can stop your mind for one brief moment.” . . .“Why should I stop my mind?” Jim asks. “I need all I can get out of it.” . . .“I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request,” Lacey says. “After all, it’s what Clementine was obsessed by.” . . .“I’m not in the mood for mystical parlor games,” Jim says, nodding to Samendra. “In any case, I appreciate all this information. At least we know she’s off on her own adventure and doesn’t need us showing up looking for her.” . . . Confused and insulted, Samendra bows and walks across the beach to the house. . . . “I think we should still try to find her,” Lacey says on the way back to the hotel. “Obviously she’s in an extremely perilous place.” . . .“Who isn’t in a perilous place?” Jim says. “Maybe she should find us.” . . . They have a terrible fight on the street that ends with their walking off in separate directions. . . .

  CUT TO JIM WALKING DOWN THE STREET . . . so sunk in anxiety and despair that he barely notices a street festival of chanting pilgrims, snake charmers, sword swallowers, and acrobats. He passes a wooden platform where Kathakali dancers move through the rituals of an ancient myth with slow graceful gestures. One woman, her face divided into two colors, red and blue, laughs with one side of her face and cries with the other. He moves on, through screaming children throwing bags of water and urine. They surround him, taunting him, covering him with red dye, and drenching him with the awful fluid. He stands there helpless and enraged, unable to control himself. . . .

  LATER, HIS CLOTHES STILL DRENCHED . . . he finds himself before a cigarette stall on the corner of a busy thoroughfare. A small gray-haired man with most of his teeth missing sits on a rug at the rear of the stall sorting through a pile of handmade cigarettes. Jim stares at him, unable to approach. Several times he tries and the man waits expectantly, looking up at him. Jim glances at his watch, as if he has an appointment. Across the street pilgrims perform bathing rituals in a deep green pool in front of an ancient temple where women have spread out their laundry to dry on the stone steps. Monkeys chatter in the trees. A funeral procession passes, a child’s body lying on a board covered with garlands of fresh flowers. “Time is a cruel master,” the man says, but Jim can only nod. Finally he buys a pack of American cigarettes and leaves. . . .

  AT THIS point, Wesley, sitting at a café on the beach at Mazatlán, stopped reading the typed transcript of Walker’s tape even though there were more than a few pages remaining. It was past noon and he was on his third margarita and he felt slightly dizzy and more than a little hung over. Walking toward him on the beach were Sidney, the second unit cameraman, and Harold, a young producer from London sporting a new Panama hat and a Hawaiian shirt who had flown in the previous night and whose mission Wesley had somehow forgotten. He was not happy to see them. He needed time for his own thoughts, for this sudden permission he seemed to have granted himself toward an interior dialogue, or failing that, at least a period of refuge from the gleeful and vicious publicity he had received since his walkout and subsequent firing two weeks ago. “Neti, neti,” he said aloud, realizing he knew nothing about Walker’s mind and precious little about his own.

  “You certainly chose a bucolic spot for yourself, Mr. Hardin,” Harold said, maneuvering his bulk into a chair as he and Sidney sat down at the table.

  He paused, trying to feel his way through the sullen atmosphere Wesley was projecting. The fact that he was in awe of the legendary director didn’t help. Wesley sat immobile, his face half hidden underneath a peasant’s straw hat, staring at the thick line of jungle where squads of green parrots kept up a raucous chatter. Inside the café the jukebox played Hank Williams to an empty room. After a lengthy silence, Harold tried again: “Your charming wife told me to tell you that she won’t be joining us for lunch. She pleads guilty to a shopping compulsion directed toward native rugs.”

  Wesley said nothing, looking at Harold with a preoccupied frown until Harold was forced to look away. Sidney, on the other hand, didn’t mind Wesley’s mood, much as it seemed to match his own, and he waited until he had ordered a drink before he tried to bring the situation into some kind of focus.

  “Harold might be able to come up with money to continue shooting. I filled him in this morning about the stuff we shot in Durango and those few scenes down here and the one with Evelyn on the fishing boat.”

  “Of course I have to look at the footage,” Harold said. “But I’m thrilled with the whole concept. And I think a personal straight-from-the-guts exploration of a major crisis in a famous man’s life has broad popular appeal.”

  “I was thinking just the opposite,” Wesley said.

  “Indeed?” Harold said. “Sidney gave me the impression you were quite excited about the way things were going.”

  “I don’t want to think about results, which means I don’t want to think about money, which means I don’t want to consider turning what are essentially private notes into a feature film. I started shooting out of rage, just wanting to shove it up the studio’s ass. I’m not interested in hustling my private life and I don’t want anyone else doing it either.”

  “Then what am I doing here?” Harold asked.

  “I don’t know,” Wesley said quietly. “And I don’t want to know.”

  “Does that mean a wrap?” Sidney asked.

  “For you it does.”

  Wesley watched a sailboat slowly coming about in the offshore breeze and felt himself to be in a kind of agony. He was either saying things that were too personal or not relevant at all.

  “Are you considering other projects?” Harold was asking.

  “I’m developing a script to be shot in India. A contemporary story about young Americans searching for themselves and finding the opposite.”

  “That seems a sweaty task,” Harold said. “Sort of a producer’s nightmare.”

  “I would rather read about it myself,” Wesley admitted.

  “Perhaps you don’t want to work at all. Perhaps it’s time for philosophy and rumination.”

  “Perhaps.” Wesley rose slowly from his se
at. Swaying slightly he looked down at them, his face stern and yet somehow fragile. “My store is not open, gentlemen. Either for personal little forays into my beleaguered psyche or for broad popular entertainment. But perhaps you can develop something between yourselves.”

  With that he left them, walking slowly down to the beach along the edge of the sea, his white linen pants rolled up past his ankles, his blue cotton shirt falling loosely over his waist. The air was heavy and moist and he walked in a slow shuffle through the sand. His body was no longer friendly to him. His joints ached and his breathing was shallow and he moved with no obvious purpose or direction. He could not remember a time when he wasn’t involved in some project, either going toward or leaving behind. There had always been something to fasten on to, people around to keep him going, keep him on the point, pull him through. It was true that over the past decade he had come to take it all for granted, that he had in a sense just gone through the motions as developments formed around him from the accumulated weight of his professional presence. It was a somewhat startling fact that he was still functioning at all after more than thirty films in the can, that the inevitable damage to body, mind, and soul, although severe and now seemingly terminal, had been held in check enough for him to sustain a reputation as a safe and bankable director. There had always been a raw primitive edge to his work, a kind of sentimental passion that every once in a while would bring in gold from the box office. But all of that was gone now.

  He took off his white linen jacket and lay down on the warm sand. But the noon light was hard and exhausting and abruptly he moved off the beach to sit in the shade of two giant palm trees. The light was softer and more diffuse and that pleased him. An awareness of light was what cushioned him when he approached a scene, what protected him from the mechanical boredom of the medium. But fuck light, he thought. He was headed for a black hole. The journey of his son toward the disappearance of his daughter reminded him of that. He resented having to read Walker’s pages. It was a forced and unnatural arrangement, one that he shouldn’t have initiated. But unfolding the remaining pages, he began to read anyway: