Layman's Report

by Eugene Marten

  “The title,” he said.

  “We needed to make changes,” the producer said.

  “The elephant,” Fred said.

  “That was a find,” the producer said.

  “We still have some mixing to do,” the documentarist said. “And the music is scratch.” He saw nothing wrong with the title.

  “But at Harvard,” Fred said.

  “That was a rough cut,” the documentarist said. To raise funding for additional footage. Postproduction.

  “More additional footage,” Fred said.

  “This is a much more balanced point of view,” the producer said. “It’s complete.”

  But at Harvard it had seemed complete enough and there was a great burst of applause after the screening. The Q&A had not gone quite as well, not for the documentarist, who seemed uncomfortable, even defensive, as if they’d applauded for the wrong reasons and now were asking the wrong questions. When they thanked him he didn’t seem to want to be thanked.

  At Harvard Fred walked through the Yard, told the audience the freshman dorms looked like the barrack blocks without barbed wire. Only the students laughed. One of them had concerns about the First Amendment. Sophomore, pre-law, innate goodness and round brown eyes. She’d called Fred the most humane character in the film. Now they’d made him someone else.

  “If it ain’t broke,” he said, “don’t break it.”

  The producer corrected him and Fred said, “I know what I said.” He turned to the documentarist. “This is what you do to raise money?”

  “This is the film I wanted to make, Fred,” the documentarist said.

  “But the elephant,” Fred said. Like some kind of goddamn sacrifice.

  “The elephant’s going to Park City,” the producer said, and Fred said, “Then it’ll be going there without me,” and he signed something, and he told them how far he’d driven and how much he’d spent on gas, and they compensated him and didn’t try to talk him out of or into anything else.

  Nineteen days later, the temperature just above zero at two in the morning, Fred woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. As if a loud shout had woken him, but there was only the rumbling of the boilers and the producer’s last name, silently burning a hole in his belly. He was awake the rest of the night. When he got out of bed he called the documentarist, listened to an answering machine and hung up. When his shift was over he called again and again did not leave a message. Called his supervisor instead. A family emergency, he said—the captain was a family man. Take as much time as you need, the captain said, and even gave Fred a lift downtown to the Greyhound station.

  He’d signed something.

  He didn’t want to take his car into the mountains.

  By the time they pulled into Salt Lake Central Station, they’d boarded a number of passengers who seemed to comprise the steerage class of the festival: latecomers, the curious, fanatics of modest means who could afford neither airfare nor accommodations in Park City. And Fred. It was just daybreak. A woman hugging a battered square case sat across the aisle from him. He’d slept little in the last day and a half and this apparently made him the ideal listener: she told him she’d made a documentary short about a landless Indian tribe with only five members. One of them, her husband, rode beside her wearing a tracksuit and cowboy hat. Fred said hello but the husband did not speak; he had taken a vow of silence. Their plight had not qualified for competition but she was hoping to arrange her own screening in town, rent or beg a space, basement or backroom, pass out tickets on Main Street. A sixteen-millimeter projector stowed in the luggage bin below. Fred dozed and she shook him awake. There were no buses into Park City—did he wish to split a cab with them? A few minutes later he found himself in the front seat of an SUV with the inside door latches sawed off. They crawled from the city in morning rush hour then broke out into the mountains, the outer ranges the color of ash, peaks still clear of snow. There was no sun but the gray day brightened ahead. The driver was quiet as the tribesman. The woman was smiling. She looked at Fred and asked why he’d come to the festival.

  He thought. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  Fred thought again. “To tell the truth.”

  “Well me too,” she said as if challenged.

  He glanced at her husband, who wore headphones. “How long’s it been since he spoke?”

  “Eight years,” she said. He would not break his silence till the government had granted his tribe sovereignty.

  “What do they do then?” Fred said. “Build a casino?”

  “That isn’t their way,” the woman said quietly, and Fred said nothing and the mountains closed in.

  They twisted through gorges and he craned his neck to look up the walls but couldn’t see out of the pit. Then everything opened up again and in the distance to the right a ski ramp was fixed to the lower slope like a giant playground slide. No one was jumping; everyone was here to see movies. The mountains were empty. The filmmaker asked Fred where he would be staying, and in truth he had not thought this far ahead. There seemed to be no future after the premiere. It was as though he would be permanently awakened then, and what would it matter where he lay his head?

  He told her he’d made arrangements.

  Park City was a town of old, rustic, Western-style buildings and dwellings becoming rustic and Western in a modern, expensive way. Hills covered with evergreens and bare brown trees. There was snow on the ground but the roads were just plowed. The cab driver got out and opened the passenger door at the corner of a street where Swedish miners had once lived. Icicles dripping points of light. The filmmaker wished him luck though she sounded uncertain as to why. Her husband waved.

  The festival box office was housed in the corner building across the street from a restaurant with an outdoor fireplace. The fire burned but had no one yet to warm. Fred went inside. An indoor mini-mall, the box office on the first floor. It was a big room with tables and computers and people behind the tables at the computers. Everyone else was standing in a long line switching back behind posts and chains. The people at the computers weren’t selling many tickets. They were constantly shaking their heads, and then the people from the line would walk away also shaking their heads, perhaps to console themselves at the fire across the street. A festival of discontent. Then a cheerful young woman in a fashionably oversized sweater said, “Who’s next?” and it was Fred’s turn to be disappointed.

  He told her the name of the film and, smiling and shaking, she told him it was sold out.

  “The board,” Fred said, pointing to the big board on the wall behind the tables. It announced the day’s screenings and said there were still tickets available.

  “I know,” the young woman said apologetically. “It needs updated. We’re so understaffed.”

  “Standing room?” Fred said.

  “Waitlist,” she said.

  “Weightless.”

  She repeated herself and carefully explained the routine.

  “Doesn’t sound like I’d have much of a shot,” he said.

  “People get in all the time,” she encouraged.

  Was there a supervisor he could talk to? A manager?

  “There’s a coordinator!” she said as if only just realizing. “He gets in at noon.”

  Probably another line. Fred looked at his watch.

  “What if I told you,” he said then, and she listened patiently, even sympathetically, then told him what she would ask him if he told her that.

  “It’s a long story,” he said.

  “Then all I can tell you is waitlist,” she said. She seemed disappointed, as though she’d encountered this ruse before. She brightened: “Or come back after noon if you want to talk to someone.”

  Fred lowered his voice. “I can prove it,” he said and opened his wallet.

  “Sir,” she said, disappointed in a different way, as if he were about to expose himself which in a way he was. “You’ll have to come back after noon and prov
e it to the coordinator. I don’t know what else to tell you.” She whispered emphatically: “It’s sold out.”

  He put his wallet back, grabbed his lapels. “This is the coat I wore to the camps.”

  “It certainly looks warm enough,” she said. “You can show it to the coordinator after lunch. Or try the waitlist.”

  “Are you a volunteer or are they paying you not to help people?” Fred said. “Can you at least tell me where I can get a cup of coffee?”

  “Anywhere on Main Street,” the young woman said. “You might meet some interesting people there.”

  “God save us from interesting people,” Fred said, and the young woman reloaded her all-purpose smile, her demeanor impenetrable. Then she was smiling past him, loudly but hopefully: “Next? Whoever’s next, step down please!”

  He left and walked up the block, passed a restaurant he didn’t know was owned by Robert Redford. He didn’t know who owned the restaurant but he knew who Robert Redford was—Robert Redford ran the festival and he wondered if at any moment he might turn a corner and see Robert Redford at the center of some knot of activity, calmly delegating as a good administrator does, because Robert Redford was also the Sundance Kid, a killer but kindhearted by nature, and one of the stars of one of the few films Fred liked or even remembered.

  A decent, approachable man. Someone who would want to help.

  He did not see Robert Redford but it was still early and there was plenty of coffee on Main Street. There were plenty of bars and restaurants, gift shops, boutiques, pizzerias, hotels, galleries, walls covered with posters, festival banners waving from streetlight poles, and he walked uphill past them into a pub and ordered a cup. He did not normally drink coffee in bars but felt a need to hide in the dark. A man and a woman sat next to him, wearing name badges on lanyards. The man was a director and the woman was a journalist. Fred smoked and drank his coffee in the dimness, smelling beer and breakfast, watching the young bartender pour two different colors of beer into a schooner. A dollar bill was pinned high to the wall behind the bar, and after the dollar a unit of currency each from visitors of other countries. They fluttered like wings when someone opened the door. When someone told a dirty joke, the bartender rang a bell. Fred asked him what it would be like in there later.

  “Come back tonight,” the bartender said with a slight brogue, “and you can see Courtney Love show her breasts.”

  “Courtney who?” Fred said.

  “Good for you,” the man on the other side of Fred said. The bartender gave the Black and Tan to the director, who was being interviewed by the journalist. Dark over light.

  “You’ve made a feature film with a budget of four hundred dollars. How is that accomplished?” the journalist asked.

  “It’s essentially home movie footage reconfigured into a metanarrative.” The director was eating peanuts and throwing the shells on the floor. “We shot extra scenes to fill in certain gaps but I defy anyone to tell the difference. To spend money would have compromised authenticity.”

  “You also appear in the film. How did you like playing yourself?”

  “I’m always playing myself,” the director said.

  “I’m always playing with myself too,” the guy on the other side of Fred said. “Come back tonight and you can see me punch out QT.”

  “I thought Courtney Love punches out QT,” the bartender said.

  “Then we have to see his tits,” the man said, and the bartender rang the bell though it wasn’t much of a joke. Fred didn’t know who QT was either. He knew who Mao Tse Tung was, smiling faintly in purple from a five-yuan note.

  He drank two more cups and when he left there were no more seats at the bar. Traffic had thickened and slowed steadily while he was inside, was doing nothing now but burning gas. He went back the way he’d come, trudging down in the same hat and coat he’d worn to the camps, but not the same boots. He passed under a ski lift, a net stretched across the road beneath it but there was no one on the lift to drop anything or themselves. It was quieter here, the street lined with small houses. He didn’t know where it led but it seemed to be getting away from the festival. A small park to his right. A public restroom there but the door was locked and he unzipped his pants behind it. Someone shouted. Fred didn’t know if the shout was directed at him but it cut him short and he turned around, stumbled down a snowy embankment to a cinder walking path. He took it back toward town, passing under small bridges. A jogger overtook him but it was Fred who was out of breath, the air entering his lungs in thin sheets with sharp edges. On his right were lodges and houses, people drinking in a heated outdoor pool. One of them wore only a cowboy hat, and Fred looked away. On the other side was a stream, above that a busy-sounding highway, and in the trees and on the ground he saw a bird with the head of a crow, a white belly, dark green wings, a long tail. He saw a harried woman leading children on a scavenger hunt. Every day is someone’s birthday.

  “Have you seen the shoe tree?” she asked almost desperately, but all he’d seen in the trees were the strange-looking birds. The ones on the ground pecking at a pale carcass.

  The path took him to the bus station. He found a men’s room and finished what he’d started, then sat down in the waiting room to warm up. Pale wooden walls, a Native American motif. Pale wooden racks filled with tourist information: he read a brochure about an old silver mine on Bald Mountain, now converted into a museum. It had been the site of a great disaster and was haunted by the ghosts of miners looking for body parts lost in the explosion. The shaft was fifteen hundred feet deep. The shuttle was free. For once the dead were on his side.

  The bus was so crowded you could stand without hanging on to anything. Everyone else was wearing badges on lanyards. They spoke English but it was the dialect of cinema, and apparently you needed a badge to understand it. It was a short ride. The mine was a cluster of battered sheds with the roof of the hoist house peaking above them. Everyone got off the bus and went to the entrance. Fred couldn’t get in. The museum had been appropriated for a filmmakers’ conference and you needed a festival pass.

  “What kind of conference?” Fred asked the man at the door.

  “The Future of Digital Filmmaking,” the man at the door said.

  A woman with long blond hair, riding a horse through a tunnel two hundred feet underground.

  Waiting for the shuttle back, Fred looked down on Park City from halfway up the mountain. He could see only the outskirts, a scattering of distant rooftops and then only the mountains again. A hot air balloon like a bright-colored moon hung motionless over the town, and from this height he looked dead ahead at it, on equal terms.

  When he got back to the bus station he’d given up the idea of pleading his case at the box office—its purpose seemed only to turn people away—and headed instead back to the main drag of the festival. He had not seen a mob like this since he’d stepped out of the courthouse in Toronto, but this was another kind of riot. Traffic was stranded, SUVs and somehow a stretch limo, all remaining space in the street and sidewalk dense with three kinds of people: those who wore their names on strings, those who didn’t, and those who didn’t have to, breathing the same thin air. Winter tans. It was getting colder, clouds were gathering, he dropped the earflaps of his cap and shoved his gloved hands in his pockets, worked his way past the theater where his life story would premiere. Obelisks pilastered to its façade, a figurehead of the Sphinx looking out over the tiled ticket booth, over a young woman with a microphone and cameraman shining a bright light in the faces of strangers. She asked them about their clothes. She was very pretty but so was everyone else, and everyone was also handsome and beautiful and fascinating, and often in black and cowboy hats and sometimes wore miniskirts and high heels, or a badge that said “I am not George Clooney” and looked like someone whose name you should know, but Fred, who was not entirely immune to the disease of celebrity, by which even the best of us are sometimes infected, Fred was only interested in two faces: the one that belonged to the docum
entarist, which he wished to avoid, and that of Robert Redford, a weathered face etched in providence and grace, a face that might even recognize yours and the film to which it belonged, and having done so would assure it a berth at the premiere where hundreds would see it for the first time, at the festival he’d named for the role in which he’d starred, as you were starring in yours, and who knew what else you might have in common?

  For the hell of it he was about to ask a volunteer if she knew where Robert Redford was. Then it began to snow. He was hungry. Someone shoved a flyer in his hands. He followed the directions on the flyer and wound up in the basement of a bar above Main Street, sitting on a folding chair next to a space heater. There was a VCR and a big-screen TV on which were showing a number of short subjects that had been deemed unsuitable for the main festival. Fred dozed through four or five of these but admission was not charged and there were free hot dogs, and he half-expected to see among the tiny drunken audience the filmmaker whose husband had taken a vow of silence, but he didn’t.

  Around six he went to the Egyptian. The girl at the box office had said they would start passing out the cards an hour before showtime, so he got there an hour before that. He was not the first and was soon not the last. The entrances were closed. Rail barriers pushed the line to the edge of the sidewalk. The snow had stopped falling but the drifts blew hard. The cold was epic, Stalingrad or Jack London. The line tried to keep warm by marching and jumping in place, and by talking about the festival, about films and directors and juries and awards. Then they talked about how cold it was. Fred savored his secret as if it would keep him alive. He kept an eye out for the documentarist, for a limo, flashbulbs—wasn’t this a premiere? The marquee bore only the name of the festival. Film students with badges calling them crowd liaisons came out periodically to walk up and down the line, running through the waitlist drill and making sure no one needed medical attention. After a while they just walked up and down the line then fled back inside.