The driver was a skinny kid with a baseball cap turned around on his head. “Hola,” he said to Fred though he didn’t look Mexican.
“Why are you following me?” Fred said.
“What makes you think we are?” the kid said.
“You were back at my apartment building, looking at my car. Now here we are. I suppose you’re a fisher of men too?”
“More a fisher of cars,” the kid admitted. “Let’s back up a little. It isn’t your car—not since you stopped making payments.” He picked up a clipboard, displayed the top sheet through the window. Fred barely read it, just saw the word DISCHARGE stamped in the middle.
“This can’t be right,” he said. “I haven’t even had a chance to make a payment.” Then he heard an engine start.
“Doesn’t look like you’re gonna get one,” the kid said, and Fred turned and the Escort was already pulling away, the man no longer behind the trees behind the wheel.
“He can use a slidehammer faster than most people can use their keys,” the kid said.
“You sons of bitches,” Fred said.
“I know, I’m sorry,” the kid said genuinely. “Let me give you a ride back into town.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Fred said.
“You don’t mean that,” the kid said.
Fred spat and started walking. The truck walked with him.
“Who’s fucking who?” the kid yelled. “You’ll die out here.”
“You’ll just have to live with that,” Fred yelled back, and in the end the kid got in the last word without saying anything and was gone. Dust settling quickly in thin air. Gone.
Fred walked. He stopped. The desert had him to itself. It wasn’t as smooth as it looked driving past; it was cracked and pebbled like something falling apart from neglect. It made a sound in the bushes: ssk, ssk, in front and behind and then to his side. Small cacti with flowers that bloom at night. He started walking again. Greasewood. Distant vague mountains. Shirt without tie. The sun a generalized whiteness overhead so you couldn’t tell east from west. He thought about putting his thumb out but there were no other cars as yet.
You had to be somewhere to be someone, and if he was still around when the stars came out maybe they would tell him who he was.
“And they just left you there?” the documentarist said. He sounded incredulous, but then he always did. He’d already apologized for it; he was just a born skeptic, but of course he gave everyone the benefit of the doubt.
He had a Ph.D. in philosophy. Roger Ebert had called him a genius, but Fred now equated this faculty with deserts and dispossession.
“More or less,” he said. When the documentarist pressed him for details, he mentioned getting picked up by the Highway Patrol, then became vague.
“I guess you could say I went underground.”
The documentarist nodded. He’d had to hire a private detective to dig Fred up. “But why would you need to?” he said.
“Figure of speech,” Fred said. He shrugged. He did not want them knowing who his enemies were just yet, nor his friends; there were other things to talk about. There were numbers.
The producer said little, ordered nothing. Sketched on a napkin.
The waitress came by with the coffee pot and the documentarist held up a hand. Fred nodded. The place was called Friendly’s and it was bright and well-managed, but it wasn’t named after anybody’s mother.
The documentarist asked him if he had an agent.
“People in my shoes don’t have agents,” Fred said. People in his shoes took them off to sleep on a cot in a boiler room. Mice.
“How are you making a living these days?”
“I’m in security.”
He was in a polyester uniform twenty hours a week. A large private university he wouldn’t name.
“Not that I’d exactly call it a living,” he said. “Which reminds me.”
The documentarist nodded again and looked at the producer, who finally spoke. He sounded like his last name, and his last name sounded like money. “We’ll agree to a one-time fee but there won’t be anything off the back end. All the other subjects have accepted the same terms.” He hesitated a little before calling them subjects.
“Frankly,” the documentarist said, “my films just don’t make that much cash.”
It was true. He was often regarded as the foremost documentary filmmaker of his generation but, Cannes, Toronto, Roger Ebert notwithstanding, he could not exactly call it a living either. He’d made a film that had exonerated a man on death row but otherwise barely turned a profit. He’d made a film about a physicist in a wheelchair who could neither move nor speak but could explain the origin of the universe, yet whose knowledge was not worth a fraction of the fee the documentarist commanded directing beer commercials, blue jean commercials, commercials for Exxon, Target, Nike, the kind of ad shown during the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards; people talked about them in cafeterias and cubicles the next day. They did not talk about quantum mechanics, and it would remain to be seen if they would talk about Fred.
“How much?” Fred said, and the producer slid his napkin across the booth as if to show him his sketches. Fred looked.
“How many other subjects are there?” he asked. He didn’t hesitate.
“Three or four,” the documentarist said. “I haven’t narrowed it down yet.”
“May I ask who they are?”
“I’d rather you guys didn’t know about each other just yet,” the documentarist said. “What you each have in common is an unusual occupation and a powerful conviction about what you do.”
“Well I don’t do it much anymore,” Fred said and, using the producer’s pen, drew another picture on the napkin and pushed it back across the booth.
This was only to be expected. The documentarist leaned in without looking at Fred’s numbers and said, “Why is it I get the feeling you’re holding out on us?”
“Things may have slipped my mind,” Fred said. “I’m sure it’ll all come back to me before the camera starts rolling.”
“It might be to your advantage if things start slipping back in now,” the producer said.
Fred thought. “I could use an advance,” he said.
They signed their names to it, shook on it, and the documentarist picked up the check. He’d had the eggs Benedict, Fred toast and coffee.
Fred didn’t make it to the funeral. He was on his way in a slightly used Buick Park Avenue (silver, gray interior, 3.8 V6, cash) when on an impulse he took the freeway extension outside Ashland and pulled off into the outlet mall there. It had been built over the waste to which they had once taken their guns. Maybe it wasn’t an impulse. He cruised around the parking lot for a while, not in search of the past but a place where he could buy a cup of coffee and bury the warden alone. He recalled for some reason a movie about a subdivision built over an Indian grave site. He drove around. There were stores that sold Levis, women’s lingerie, household items, sporting goods, but none were troubled by restless spirits and it took him fifteen minutes to find parking.
He found Starbucks.
* * *
At first all he had to do was talk. The documentarist would ask a question and Fred would answer. He had his doubts. “I’m not much on conversation,” he confided to the documentarist. “I might need a little priming…”
So the device.
The device enabled the subject to look both at his interviewer and the camera at the same time. It consisted of a video camera, projector, and a two-way mirror, and it worked so well the crew privately joked they would have to invent another one just to shut Fred up. The documentarist had developed it expressly for this film. It gave Fred a face to talk to and when you saw the movie he was talking you right in the eye, his head twelve feet tall. Patent pending.
Genius, some said again (though some insisted it was just a variation on the teleprompter), a revolutionary advance in the art; the interviewer didn’t even have to be in the same room with the subject, nor was he when
Fred said things like “I studied celestial navigation with a direct descendant of Leif Ericson,” or “When I was fourteen my father’s throat was cut right in front of my eyes.”
At first there were three others: the lion tamer, the man who wrote fortune cookie fortunes, and the man who built life-sized statues of famous figures (the Virgin Mary, Mao) out of Legos. But after certain facts came to light and the Report began to exert its inexorable pull, shaping the film around it, the other subjects were consumed, squeezed out, tentatively to be reunited in a future project with a composer who made music with insects, a deaf-and-dumb detective, or some as yet undiscovered eccentric. They still hadn’t changed the title.
Additional footage was required: the old prison where his father had worked and died (closed), the old Catholic grade school (a housing project), the house he’d grown up in and watched burn down (an unsold square of dirt). Fred driving through the new world the old neighborhoods had become. The second unit kid in the passenger seat with an old spring-wound model, 16mm, loaded with high-speed black-and-white reversal.
A Baptist church that used to be a bank.
“Used to be Third/Fifth Federal,” Fred said.
“You don’t have to talk,” the second unit kid said, under the dashboard for the angle. (The documentarist had quickly noted Fred’s inability to speak and watch the road at the same time, and decided to record his narration as voiceover.)
“Used to be they couldn’t set foot in this neighborhood without somebody taking a shot at them,” Fred said. He couldn’t help it.
Smoking, coffee, three packs a day, ten or fifteen cups—black, he’d said. Make it six, the documentarist said, make it twenty or thirty, with sugar. A family restaurant rented after hours, a corner booth, a thousand feet of him from every angle and distance: pouring, stirring, sipping. (He didn’t take sugar but the documentarist insisted.) The makeup girl wore black, had black lips in a face so white it was almost featureless. Dabbed something cool and creamy on his skin: concealer, foundation, even eyeliner. Final touches. Then the lens like a gun barrel inches from his lips as he blew smoke in profile. The window a sheet of light. Three in the morning, five hundred frames per second. Humming like something in a machine shop.
But when he was talking the camera was padded and stared mutely.
“At your age you should think about a moisturizer,” the makeup girl said.
Sets were required. Carpenters. He’d thought this done only for fiction and fantasy, but now he sat in a white room with three walls, venetian blinds, in the chair he had placed in the classifieds, best offer. He strapped himself in under the white-hot light, blinded, sweating through the countdown, but the button they pushed was the one on the Arriflex. He’d lowered himself into the black hole of Krema II, but the subterranean chamber in which he found himself now was not underground, was better lit and warm; he did not have to grope and crawl among fallen beams and rubble. A puddle at the bottom, he dipped his hand in and brought up a chunk of masonry. Again, the documentarist said, again, as if next time it would come up gold. He didn’t remember doing it in the camp, but he remembered the documentarist saying they would get to the bottom of things, the truth, even if they had to make it up.
He’d built the chair with his own two hands, so well it had survived his house.
The water was cold.
They gave him a hammer and chisel. He chipped plaster and cement from the wall of someone’s basement on a potholed street named Park Avenue, his hands glowing, a set decorator waiting to spackle in the hole.
“Do you have any regrets?” the documentarist asked, sitting in another room. The producer never asked him anything. He sat in another state, counting.
Fred liked being on set, an enjoyable form of boredom. Most of being on set was waiting, hearing endless conversations between the documentarist and the director of photography, but he was patient and comfortable and shown every consideration. Craft service knew about his ulcer. The makeup girl smiled at his jokes. No one else did but he liked watching all the production personnel, the way they spoke to each other and the way they didn’t have to. He liked the camera assistants, the camera loader, who also clapped the clapperboard and replaced magazines like ammunition in a firefight; the key grip, his second and third, their endless rolls of duct tape; the gaffer, the best boy who was a girl, the assistant to the director who was not the assistant director with his big mouth and hat to the back, who seemed more in charge of things than the director himself.
He liked craft service: roast beef, chicken parmesan, pasta with clam sauce (red or white).
A thousand feet lasted eleven minutes.
They shot him on a scaffold, tying a noose around a sandbag, pulling a lever and dropping it through a trapdoor. The gallows had been hastily assembled and he was not allowed to participate in its construction. They shot him hanging a sandbag twelve times.
He wore the leather electrode helmet and he sits there like Knute Rockne with eyeglasses, discussing the relative conductivity of human flesh. At the editing table the documentarist decided it was over the top, but the footage is now available as a Deleted Scene on the DVD release.
He hadn’t seen her in five years. The hearing lasted ten minutes. She didn’t want anything except for it to be over. She had a lawyer, but only to draw up the paperwork. She had plastic below the knee. Fred represented himself.
“I only want what’s best for her,” he told the judge.
She had a pylon, the foot has a keel.
The five of them sat at a big table in a large room with dark, wood-paneled walls. There were windows in the walls but the wood was very dark and the light seemed far away. She’d brought her ostensible fiancé with her, a tall, withered strand of a man who leaned on a cane and had a narrow fringe of white hair clamped around the back of his skull. A pair of miniature American flags were pinned to the lapels of his suit, and he wore the blue garrison cap of a Veteran of Foreign Wars. The lawyer whispered in his good ear and he uncovered his spotted scalp.
The judge asked that they demonstrate in what way their union was irreparably damaged. She did most of the talking. She didn’t look at him once.
“He consorted with the enemy,” the old man blurted, and pulled something from his pocket. “I served under Bradley, Omar Nelson,” and he started to name the campaigns. The judge, who had seen some action himself, instructed him not to speak unless spoken to.
“I want what’s best for everyone,” Fred amended, and so did not say his wife’s fiancé looked as though he might have marched with Sherman as well.
“Took this off a private at Bastogne,” the old man said. He threw a faded cloth insignia patch on the table like a scalp. “Used my combat knife, hand to hand. So foggy I never saw his face.”
The judge ordered him out of the room.
“I can provide for all of her needs.” The old man glared at Fred as he stood, shrugging off her lawyer’s arm. He left the Breast Eagle on the table like Exhibit A.
After signing the decree of dissolution, the judge said it would become final one month after date of entry. Neither party could remarry for a period of six months. She reclaimed her maiden name as though in place of her lost limb. Outside Fred skulked in a doorway at the top of the courthouse steps, watching the woman who had been his wife help the old man down to the sidewalk. She managed very well, considering. Eventually they arrived at an old but well-kept Lincoln sedan parked dead center in front of the building. Gun-metal gray. Low compression, Fred thought, but probably it rode on air. A parking ticket flapped under the windshield wiper like a dead leaf, and the old man plucked it out and threw it into the street without looking at it. He let her drive.
The documentarist put him in a cage. It resembled a bird cage but was big enough to hold a man. There was a chair inside.
“What’s this about?” Fred said.
“Trust me,” the documentarist said.
“I’ll trust you to let me out,” Fred said, and he let them stra
p him in.
He sat before a console of mock controls like some four-eyed astronaut in a Value City suit. The makeup girl put cool moist things on his face with a soft brush, chewing now instead of smiling, and this always put him in a trance of cooperation. The gum popped and snapped in a faraway way.
The documentarist reached through the bars, put his hand on Fred’s shoulder.
“You’ve been a good sport about this,” he said.
“I’m a team player,” Fred said. “I just don’t get it.”
“You’ll understand better when you see it in context,” the documentarist said. “You might say it’s a metaphor.”
“I might not,” Fred said. “Things are what they are.”
“There’s a hotspot on his nose,” the documentarist told the makeup girl.
The A.D. hollered.
The building had once been a foundry. It had no power so they’d brought their own and the cage stood on a hydraulic scissor lift. The documentarist said “go” instead of “action.” The cage began to rise.
“This is your ascent, Fred,” the documentarist shouted. “Look straight ahead.”
Fred obliged. The documentarist shouted again and the Kliegs began to flash sporadically like he was climbing into a lightning storm. He rose past a camera on a catwalk.
“Look down,” the documentarist shouted, his hands cupped around his mouth. Genius needs no bullhorn. The diesel-driven generator chugged.
“Smile!” he said.
“Look up!”
Fred looked up. There was nothing beyond the glare of the lights, and he rose into it, beyond the storm.
In January Fred drove to Boston to see a cut that was almost final. The producer would reimburse him for mileage. He sat with the documentarist and the producer and they watched the whole thing from three chairs in front of a flatbed editing table. Fred was in the middle. He’d thought they would sit in a smoky screening room, smoking, but the documentarist didn’t trust projectors. When it was over they remained in bright silence until Fred said, “It’s longer.” Then he said, “It’s not the same.”
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