His father, wanting to pacify him, had once ordered the tree to be pruned. About the boy it was known that he had an imaginative and artistic nature, perhaps overly so.
It was a rude shock to be recalled to the tenderness of his enemy. Across the tunnel of years his father’s act was revealed to be a grand gesture, something which he couldn’t have realized then, and which, knowing it now, was weighted with an extra pain: he hadn’t deserved it; and his father had been fully justified, in later years, in his rancor against Caracera, forever having to tabulate the costs of such largesse against the meager shows of sentient gratefulness from a boy locked inside the room of his private resentments.
Three klieg lights were stood up along the periphery of a vacated shot, shining the diffuse light of an overcast, rainy day with the help of paper filters—exactly the kind of day outside the Manila Hotel. The day’s shoot was to have involved General MacArthur’s dalliance with a local beauty at the hotel. Now, it seemed, Keitel had gone AWOL.
At the center of the lit area was the door to a room and surrounding it a little patch of wall and corridor. But whatever human scene was supposed to be enacted there had been temporarily postponed while various technicians—untrustworthy-looking men wearing the Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts of a perpetual lunch break/vacation—futzed and fumbled with the various metal boxes and wires and bulbs and hinged pieces of equipment that were omnipresent and imposing, as at a scene of a scientific experiment, so that Roger Caracera came to understand, implicitly, that the entire moviemaking process was about the mastery of gadgetry and that art, if it happened, would at best be on the sly. The equipment predominated and the actors were to be rushed in, milked of their functions, and then rushed out. In fact, the actors, once commandeered to the set, would be expected to behave like machines: replicating their performances take after take; breakdowns were allowed for the machines but not for them (it was expected that this rule would not apply to Keitel and the other big “names” and that they could, just like the technicians, take their time to finish up their en deavors). The schedule, though tight, allowed for both the malfea sances of these lead actors (whose erraticness was an extension of their gifts) and of the technicians (who were protected by all-powerful unions). The latter moved their pieces of equipment noisily, in a way that made clear their control of the set. Among them was the guy who’d invited Caracera to watch the day’s shooting, but who had not taken notice of his guest sitting in a corner on a canvas chair with a backrest that read CRAFT SERVICES.
Taking advantage of the break, the young director, who looked like an angleworm, twerpy and overcaffeinated, was busying himself with the press. HBO had a camera crew waiting. So did PBS. Meanwhile, Twentieth Century-Fox had also sent their own camera team and they were now being treated to some serious disquisition by the young man who, to his credit, looked unoverwhelmed. He answered questions with sweeping hand gestures like a majordomo indicating all that he sat on and smoothly controlled. It occurred to Caracera that the boy must know that the interview footage—along with the dailies—would be screened for his bosses and so had to act up to his role as, in effect, overseer of a budget in the tens of millions. Surely they were looking for some reason to fire him and he would not let them have the satisfaction? Surely his age and relative lack of experience had been a source of worry to them from the very beginning? Perhaps he’d gotten on the helm through the backing of one of the stars—who’d hoped that the young man’s relationship with Kubrick would roughly be tantamount to the passing of the torch of genius to this generation; and who, furthermore, never having had the chance to work with the master, would get the chance now, at least by association?
Art was one thing, however; economics and accounting, another. The boy was trying to overcome the undeniable physical fact of his boyishness with a lowered voice and an assurance to his bosses that they were all on the same track and that the movie he would deliver would be one long action sequence; however, this message was couched in counterproductive vocabulary that would be sure to send the executives back on the lot after their eject buttons. The young man talked of things being “perspectival” and “unmediated by the tangle of cerebration and sophistry,” and of the episode being depicted in the movie as an “opportunity for the reinstatement of a kind of headlong and heedless trajectory that had its apotheosis in the fifties, say, with the movies of men like Ford and Fuller.”
Clearly, thought Caracera, restraining himself from going over to advise the man, the young director should save his choicest bullshit for the PBS crew. While for his bosses, his language should match up with his stated intention: straightforward and unencumbered.
Seated on both sides of Caracera were people with tape recorders and steno pads in their laps, awaiting their turn. In the meantime they were brushing up on questions they intended to ask and on background notes for the production, which they’d been provided by a female assistant. Caracera had one too. He’d been mistaken for one of them and had been handed a sheaf of these notes, which he now went over lazily.
He expected, for some reason, to find the phrase “jungles of the Philippines” in these notes and was surprised to be told instead of how the production had had to choose between Vietnam and the Philippines for its location. The Vietnamese, Caracera figured, were returning the favor for Apocalypse Now when the Philippines had been chosen to stand in for their country.
So the Vietnamese government had offered free accommodations and other incentives to woo the production. The burgeoning Vietnamese tourist trade desired the further boost of a Hollywood connection. But in the end, the Philippines had been where four of the last five Asian-themed U.S. movies were shot, and, on the strength of that recommendation, had won out over Vietnam.
This seemed the only thing of interest to be gleaned from the notes, which were otherwise filled with biographies of the personnel involved, a plot synopsis, and a brief historical sketch of U.S. intervention in the Philippines—culminating in a jingoistic defense of American foreign policy, which seemed to Caracera more wishful and nostalgic than anything.
Suddenly, the journalists who had been busy scribbling into their pads looked up.
Activity was starting up again. This was indicated by the sudden hush that was heard to descend, as if a machine whose job it was to create an enveloping blanket of noise had broken down. It was the same kind of silence, awed and a little fearful, that ought to be followed by the entrance of a dignitary. Keitel, perhaps, or his cohorts. But the white actors dressed in military garb were not known to any of the people Caracera was grouped with. With them, walking several steps behind and apart, were Filipinos. Only after they too stepped into the hot ring of the lights, which were being turned up, was it understood that they were actors, needed for the postponed shot. At everyone’s tails, managing their movements, was a Filipino production assistant wearing an overlarge T-shirt that read, comically, UNICEF, above low-slung, wide-hemmed black jeans. He gave the impression of having not much to do and was trying to do it as visibly as he could.
Names were being called out. A bunch of phrases, including “Quiet on the set.” Here came the young ringleader, conferring with his director of photography in a loud technicalese, which he gave the impression of enjoying, knowing perhaps that it shut out everyone else.
The actors were being arranged by the production assistant to flank the doorway where the camera was pointed. Military men and some Filipino insurgents, it looked like, waiting for the general to finish up with his Filipina beauty—who, if his history lessons sufficed, Caracera remembered to have been the gift from a grateful nation to the victorious liberator.
Not once did the director check up on his actors. Instead, his style was to have another assistant yell “Action” for him, and then look not at the live scene but rather at its magnetized ghost in a monitor that flickered in front of where he sat and which was attached to the camera through a series of wires snaking on the floor.
Before Caracera, the sce
ne being played was at once ordinary, the dialogue businesslike, and yet, because of the knowledge of its double being preserved for posterity, highly compelling.
Not once were the Filipino actors heard to utter anything until near the end, and only one of them seen to open his mouth: “Yes, boss.”
The scene was ordered “Cut!” by the same assistant. Once more, the director and DP were seen to consult. Once more, “Action!”
Turning to the screen this second time, where the image literally flickered and pulsed, and the actors were rendered bluish, Caracera noticed an X mark at the very center, and to demarcate the edges of the film frame, a square drawn in a thin line that reminded Caracera of a spiderweb. Again and again, the scene was ordered reperformed. Not once was the camera moved for another angle. What was so special about the scene—which involved the military men conferring with each other, waiting for the general to finish with his native paramour? Unable to wait any longer, they finally entrust the sentinel’s duty to one of three Filipino men, leaving to attend to other matters. The curious sameness of scene after scene, during which breaks the director did not offer a single adjustment, owed to an obsessive-ness Caracera found hard to account for. Perfectionism, to be traced back to the young director’s apprenticeship with the notoriously exact Kubrick?
Two of the three Filipinos—the ones with no lines—were positioned to the rightmost side, so that their bodies jutted outside the excluding web.
“Yes, boss.” Yet again. “Yes, boss.”
The modifying word before the word “story,” in this instance, being “historical.” And so Filipinos instructed to perform as “history” has shown them to. Acquiescent, subjugable. Could this be what the overflow of pride in the Filipino press regarding a new, strengthened amity between this country and the United States, exemplified by this fifth in what was hoped would be an ongoing series of movies, was about? “Yes, boss.”
Roger Caracera himself had no talent for acquiescence and at its sight received the prickled flesh of fear, repugnance. The man he had come back to help bury had been a bully, with whom he had had no word for eighteen years. In one moment, picking up the phone, eighteen years had gone up in smoke.
There had been thick curtains pulled over the windows of one of the bedrooms in his sister’s San Francisco house, mansion, really, where the man lay dying. Only a thin wand of light was being let in, and this light had seemed to Roger Caracera, the prodigal son, the black star of his father’s disappointed life, to have been like a surgical finger of blame that the man, by choosing to be sequestered in that room, had been hoping to escape entirely. He felt just like this light, an intruder from the outside world disturbing the quiet scene of not-yet-death. With him in the room, looking on with tentativeness, was his older brother and older sister, the two successful children of the union of Jesus and Teresa Caracera. They were their father’s children—go-getters, moving with American upward thrust while retaining their Filipino obedience, their filial seriousness. The brother a banker, the sister a pediatrician. In them, the wealth of their Philippine adolescence was carried over, perpetuated, even bettered.
Roger Caracera was more his mother’s son. And the woman, from whom the father had wrested his children to move abroad, was now left rotting in some mental institution somewhere in Manila. The son shared in his mother’s erraticness, her lack of ambition. Next to his siblings, this lack, this juniorness, was a refutation.
There was the dead man in his bed. It was one of those hospital beds that you could adjust to make the patient sit up. There was the dead man sitting, looking at him as he slowly, fearfully made his way to the dead man’s bedside.
He didn’t know what to think. His mind was blank. He was conscious only of the room being no place and any place at the same time, aware that this dreaded reunion was taking place exactly as he’d imagined it once, long ago: inside the abstract realm of imagination, with the antagonist of his life helpless, deprived of the strongest weaponry of words, so that he, Caracera, was free to decide the outcome of the encounter to his satisfaction, to triumph, in other words. And yet, Caracera had felt untriumphant, reduced to mere tears. The same tears that were on his brother’s and sister’s faces. The three of them knew the general meaning of the scene—a conciliation, a tying up—but he felt that there were deeper secrets that eluded them. They knew that the man was dying and that, by living, by not following him to the grave, they had finally become, too late in their lives, their own selves. They were crying for the tardy knowledge as much as for the man’s suffering.
The man had thin greenish tubing up both nostrils. This tubing was connected to an oxygen tank that had a circular meter with a needle inside it that went up and down with each tiny breath. As Caracera approached he noticed that the needle went up and down with alarming speed, as if the man was afraid Caracera meant to harm him. Caracera’s sister Socorro had rushed to the dead man’s side, coddling him. But he had hit—more like patted, actually—her hands away.
Caracera noticed too the man’s arm, which had been stabbed into to connect him to two IV drips: one to kill pain, the other to deliver food. There were a few other bruises in the vicinity of where the IVs joined his arm and Caracera surmised that perhaps the man had tried to disentangle himself previously. This had made him break into more tears. He didn’t know why it should be this and not anything else.
Made weak by pain and further slackened by medication, his father’s mouth could not move enough to form coherent words, only sounds—communicating the cumulative weariness of waiting for death. So all the talking had been on Caracera’s end.
What did he have to say?
Lies, mostly. Compelled by the occasion to embellish on his thread-bare accomplishments. He taught writing at Columbia University—having failed as a writer, he had had no choice but to lower himself to instructorhood; and, adjudging from that sequence of compromise, had been compelled to stay unhappy for the rest of his life. And though he had the courage to confess what he did for a living, he tried to improve upon the paltry reality by inventing successes for his students—youngsters beginning to be published in famous magazines and acquiring book contracts—which by implication traced back to him.
His father was unable to reply to any of his assertions, but the man seemed to be grateful and maybe even a little proud.
During his time away from the family, Caracera had become a true adult, that was to say, cynical, unremorseful, self-propping, oblivious to the past, and perhaps a little destructive in the present; nourished by the distance, he had become the perfect nobody—not father, not brother, not husband, and certainly not son—but in the end, it was in his father’s power to give to Caracera’s “accomplishments” a sudden reverse image, a revelatory, shaming flip side: so that he was not, in fact, nobody, but rather conventionally, comfortingly (to the dead man) and sadly (to himself), “somebody”: a success by his attachment to, not his separation from, people, because look, wasn’t he, by his own admission, connected to his students, the effector, fatherlike, of their success in the world?
Twenty minutes into their first meeting in nearly two decades, the man had expired, dropping his head away from the side where his children had gathered, and towards the curtained window, as if finally able to face the evaluation he had been so afraid of all his life.
“Yes, boss.”
Yet again the scene was replayed. The white soldiers conferring and while they did, the Filipinos—were they actually native insurgents? could they be hotel staff?—waited. Waited for the one line.
It was not only because of his father’s death that he had dreaded his return to this country. Now, in front of him a veritable demented show created by a rewind-happy zombie, he knew another, more compelling reason.
“Yes, boss.” “Jungles of the Philippines.”
It had only taken him two short days to reacquaint himself with the overwhelming humility, the subjugability of the countrymen around him—on the streets, as he passed them by i
n the family car; and today. They evinced a palpable quality of Catholic prostration too that he had long since surpassed. That had been why reading “Philippines: Hot Hot Hot!” had been so mortifying. He had felt sure that, after having been spoiled by the States, he too would succumb to using the same imagery that he had regarded with such suspicion in that article, was sure, knowing well his lack of fortitude, that he would, made aghast by reacquaintance with this country, turn into the newest shiny exemplar off the assembly line of the Ugly American.
Sooner or later he would have to face his relatives and he would have to say to them, as Harvey Keitel would in a penultimate scene in Fiesta of the Damned: I have returned. Would it be understood that he was speaking only for his father?
“Yes, boss.”
“Cut!”
Already he was practicing the answer he would be required to provide the family, to what was sure to be their ceaseless questioning. His favorite word, which his family, especially his father, had given him many occasions to use.
Are you back for good?
No.
But you’ll be able to stay a while?
No.
Don’t you miss life here?
No.
How soon are you going?
As soon as he’s buried.
But aren’t you curious to find out what your father has left you in his will?
No.
SHIPS IN THE NIGHT
Ruth Ozeki
Baby slept in the eaves, under the rafters. Her room was shaped like a wedge of cake on its side, so that when she lay in bed and looked up at the steeply pitched ceiling, she felt as though a lid were being slowly lowered on top of her. She had grown so tall in the months since they moved to Vancouver that now, if she pointed her toes, the tops of her toenails scraped against the angle. When she brought this up at breakfast, Guy’s answer to the problem was,
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