Note to Self: A Novel

by Alina Simone

  Anna!

  I sensed that I might have scared you off the other night with my Conrad adaptation. Although I’m glad you like the idea, it seems the best course for me right now is to work that one out on my own, at least through initial drafts. However, I actually had another idea for an original feature that I think would be more suitable to our dual strengths. Here’s my pitch: A young woman, ambitious but financially strapped (aspiring actress? Or scientist/social worker to work humanist/Sundance angle?), receives a mysterious package one day containing a $20,000 couture dress. She puts it on (of course it fits her perfectly) then wanders into the night without a plan. Suddenly our heroine finds all the doors to the city’s ne-plus-ultra nightspots open to her. She is ushered into a hotel lobby where a Hugh Hefner type, mistaking her for his paid escort, whisks her into a high-stakes dinner. At which point a bunch of other shit happens, et cetera.

  The dress makes a perfect MacGuffin because of its costume-as-mask metaphor. A designer dress reifies you, puts a price tag on you, gives you access like a shibboleth, makes your body a commodity. Directorially, I much prefer masks as a time-honored theatrical tradition (from early rituals to Japanese theater to commedia dell’arte) to the cheap-ass obscene sub-Method histrionics often on display in mumblecore and indie drama in general (no offense). Moreover, what intrigues me about masks and costumes is the paradox described by Slavoj Zizek: a mask doesn’t hide, instead it reveals the true essence, because we are what we pretend to be. Knowing you, I’m sure you agree.

  Of course the ultimate archetype here is Cinderella. Can we use it and subvert it? What genre could we bounce off of? A satire? A dark fantasy/allegory? Can it be Dickensian in the way Slumdog was? Or Gogolesque instead (The Overcoat)? Or is it The Prince and the Pauper with the old switcheroo?

  I know, I know. This helps not at all. But it’s my way of showing that I’m excited. Maybe our next step should be to set up a meeting with your friend Taj? Does he have industry contacts? My college roommate used to work at UTA and I could def check in to see whether he might still be able to set us up. If at all possible, it would be great to sell this off a pitch rather than go through all the rigmarole of actually writing and selling a spec (esp in this market!) so maybe we should prioritize getting a rep first? Just a thought …

  Anyway, lots to discuss once you get back, obvs. Safe travels and thanks for getting me all revved up about getting back into film. Almost makes going into work everyday semi-bearable

  Smooches,

  Bran Flakes

  Anna had no idea what a shibboleth was. Or what had gotten into Brandon. He sounded just like one of those intolerable industry douche bags on Deadline Hollywood—one who happened to have swallowed both a Roget’s Thesaurus and Jacques Lacan’s Écrits for breakfast.

  Totes! Anna wrote back to Brandon. You know me, I’m up for anything. See you when I get back:) hugs, Annagram. She hit send, sincerely hoping that by the time she returned, Brandon’s pipe dreams would have dissipated, leaving nothing more in their wake than the toxic resin of disappointment that had drawn her to him in the first place.

  19

  Anna found Taj at the Continental ticket counter at JFK. Since she had done such a good job economizing on plane tickets, Taj insisted on a nice hotel. Despite the pinch to her wallet, Anna understood the reasoning. She was the same way. Nonfat yogurt with grape nuts for breakfast meant a club sandwich with everything for lunch. A Cobb salad for lunch earned her a liberal mound of creamy risotto for dinner. Et cetera. But secretly she hoped that the upgrade was some kind of metaphoric investment in their relationship. Even though, of course, they were splitting the cost of the room. At least, Anna assumed they were.

  When she spotted Taj by the bank of automated check-in machines, he looked both relaxed and mysteriously unencumbered. Anna, on the other hand, had already come completely undone. Her journey from the AirTrain terminal to the ticket counter had involved trying to pull an oversize suitcase behind her while fighting a losing battle with a shoulder bag that kept slipping down the length of her arm to become, in sad fact, an elbow bag. She had also made the unfortunate choice to wear a long-sleeved maroon shift that usually ingeniously cocooned her flab within an immobile and (hopefully) eloquent column, but now merely provided a vivid road map to her sweat stains. Yet, if Taj took notice of any of this, he didn’t let on. He greeted her by planting a cool kiss on her cheek. Without meaning to, Anna inhaled as Taj exhaled, as though a maître d’ had just uncorked a bottle of fine wine for her approval. His breath was a potent mix of coffee and Altoids.

  “Did you bring your laptop?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “iPod?”

  “No.”

  “Good girl. Tablet?”

  “I don’t have a tablet.”

  “OK, give me your phone.”

  Anna handed it over and instantly regretted it, wishing she’d taken one last look at her messages. She hadn’t checked since she’d left home, had she? Which made it almost an hour and a half. Potentially some kind of record. The lengthening gaps between e-mails checked and tweets tweeted: were these not the milestones by which Internet addiction was cured? What was the equivalent of hitting dirt bottom for an Internet junkie, she now wondered. It must be dying online. Literally dying—not just murderizing one’s Gmail account. Dying in an imitation Aeron chair mid-tweet, mid-Amazon-order, mid-porn-browse, the way an alcoholic drowns in his own vomit on a flophouse floor.

  “Here’s your phone for the week,” Taj said, handing her something heavy and shaped like a deodorant stick. For a moment she just stared at the electronic relic, this destroyer of ass silhouettes. Then she opened it. There was just a number pad, a sliver of screen. “My number’s preprogrammed,” Taj continued, then, noticing her bags, “Jesus, what’d you bring? It’s only five days.”

  “I brought the AVCCAM,” Anna said. The camera was her only defense against the Internet, its thrall.

  “Oh, come on,” Taj said. Her heart sank as his mouth pulled up in a half sneer. But just as suddenly, he reversed course. “Great idea, you’ll need something to keep you busy while I take care of work stuff.”

  “What is this work stuff again?”

  “I know,” he said, ignoring her question. “You’ll do a video diary. About your recovery!”

  “Totally,” Anna echoed, unsure about this idea, its rumored greatness. “So where’s your stuff?”

  “Laptop. Couple clean shirts. Five-pack of boxers.” Taj patted his bag. “I’m good.”

  When they arrived at the gate, the departure monitor delivered the unsurprising news that their flight was delayed. Armed with bottled water and dehydrating snacks, they settled in for the wait at the terminal lounge.

  “Finally, a vacation, huh?” Taj murmured, sliding his butt down to the edge of the pleather seat, stretching out his long, skinny-jeaned legs.

  “So nice,” Anna agreed, though in truth, taking a vacation when she’d already been out of work for months actually required quite a bit of mental reconfiguring.

  “I have a little surprise for us,” Taj said.

  “What?”

  “Not here.” Taj opened his copy of New York magazine. “On the plane.” He laid the magazine across his face and closed his eyes, leaving Anna alone with her thoughts.

  Tiresome as the day had already been, Anna was still excited, girlishly grateful for this time alone with Taj, away from Lauren, the crew, and the stillborn dreams of random losers. In truth, they still barely knew each other. A part of her feared that with her antediluvian notions of what was and wasn’t fun, she might not be able to handle five days alone with Taj. Nonetheless, seeing how unperturbed Taj was, watching his chest rise and fall, Anna felt reassured. Leslie would be proud of her: at long last, she was making good on her intention statement to Live in the Now.

  * * *

  Once they had stowed their bags into the overhead compartments, settled into their seats, ignored the seat-belt and oxygen-mask demon
stration, and half-dozed through something called “cross-check,” Taj gave Anna a nudge. He raised the armrest between them, removed a wad of cocktail napkins from his pocket, and pressed it into her hand. She glanced down into the nest of tissues and there, to her surprise and horror, lay a handful of shrooms. Anna turned to Taj, eyes bright with disbelief.

  “No!”

  “Oh, but yes.” Taj smiled.

  “Security—”

  “One of the easiest things to get through.”

  “You’re nuts.”

  “Hey, if you don’t want any—”

  “Of course I want!” Anna’s own indignation came as a surprise, given she had never actually tried shrooms before.

  “Then shut up and thank me,” said Taj. He shook a single shroom into her hand and palmed the rest. It felt eerily light and dry, like a long-forgotten cat turd. Anna thought about the last time she had done drugs. It had been in Amsterdam, the trip she’d sold her eggs for back in college. The “grand tour.” Some globe-trotting young Aussies at the hostel had offered her a giant pot cookie, which she’d taken back to her room and downed with a hot cocoa from the vending machine in the corridor. Scarcely had a smooth and miraculous mellowing taken hold, before she’d even had a chance to reach for her Pocket Rocket, did her heart start racing. The panic attack lasted a full day, during which her cracked psyche did nothing but circle the drain of a single terrifying thought: everyone she knew was going to die. She would die. Her mother and father would die. Leslie, her college friends, all the nice polylingual young people running the hostel, all the nice polylingual people living in Amsterdam, all of Europe … A holocaust of death, inevitable and horrible, loomed over the entire population of the planet and for some reason this was calmly accepted as a fact of life by everyone. Everyone except Anna. Should she run screaming through the well-lit, crimeless streets to warn everyone of the horror to come? In the end, she’d simply planted herself on the floor next to the vending machine to bring her message of death to an exclusive audience of tourists with the pot munchies. When the jackhammer of paranoia finally subsided, a full day had passed. She awoke in her room at the hostel, realizing she was supposed to be at the Museé de l’Art Wallon in Liège, Belgium, patching the woeful holes in her knowledge of northern Flemish Renaissance art.

  That was fifteen years ago, and she’d sworn never to touch drugs again. Now Anna casually slipped the shroom into her mouth as though she were covering a yawn. Taj turned toward the window. He coughed convincingly into his closed fist the way men do, and a moment later Anna noticed his jaw muscles working. For the next forty minutes, Anna pretended to read an article about a paternity suit involving some horrible reality-show star, all the while anxiously waiting to feel something. Wasn’t that the irony of so-called recreational drugs? One took them in hopes of reaching a higher plane of enlightenment, then ended up sitting there, waiting and worrying that you imbibed too little, or too much, or had simply somehow done it wrong. Inevitably, she would have to make the humiliating admission that she’d somehow incorrectly followed the instructions when the instructions were simply: put this in you.

  The best thing to do now, Anna decided, was to take a good, long pee. She stepped into the aisle and began her journey, during which nothing even remotely Hunter Thompsonesque took place. She entered the little stainless-steel privy. That word had suddenly arrived, unbidden, in her head: privy. Wasn’t it British for bathroom? What about water closet? Was that also a British term for bathroom? Or was that French? Closets filled with water, now there was a crazy image! Closets full of waterfalls, geysers, tidal waves! She giggled at the ludicrousness of the very idea: a water closet. The door folded shut behind her and Anna was greeted by the universal soundtrack of airplane bathrooms the world over: a demonic sucking noise emanating from deep within the toilet bowl. She locked the door behind her and the light flipped on automatically. Ingenious! Click! Flip. Click! Flip. Click! Flip. Click! She sensed she would never cease to marvel at this particular feat of engineering, yet couldn’t deny her bladder was calling. She sat down and did her business, then reached for the toilet paper. Her fingerprints, she noticed, left puckered little whorls on the tissue. Like shriveled-up balloons or medical diagrams of cochlea or congealed soup scum, Anna free-associated. She brought the roll up to her face for a closer look. Then came the impatient smack of someone’s bare palm on metal and Anna realized she must do something with this toilet paper, dry herself, and return to her seat. She finished up, stuffing the roll of toilet paper under her shirt to bring back to Taj. Wait until he saw this!

  Her journey back down the aisle was directed by Terry Gilliam. Even in the gloom of the main cabin, the upturned faces of economy-class passengers, held captive by Jennifer Aniston’s sarong-wrapped thighs on their screens, stood out in sharp relief. She stopped at every row to smile at strangers who didn’t smile back. Drawn to the hideously bright glow emanating from the galley kitchen, Anna made her way to the back of the plane, where she watched the stewardesses restock the beverage cart until they shooed her away. It was almost ten minutes before she arrived back at her seat to find Taj clicking through the channels on his monitor, wearing a beatific smile. Anna slid in next to him. The toilet paper fell to the floor and she didn’t bother to pick it up. She watched the images stream across the screen, almost faster than perception, then turned to study Taj’s face—the angry child’s scribble of a unibrow, those uneven eyes, his mouth, Taj’s mouth, slightly open, half smiling.

  “You have really nice teeth,” she blurted. At least it felt like blurting, but in fact, the words took an inordinately long time to leave her mouth. Was she still speaking?

  “So do you,” Taj said without turning around.

  “I don’t. My front teeth are all bent.”

  “Look at this crazy lady dancing!” Taj’s eyes were still glued to the screen.

  “My mom wanted me to get braces in high school but I said no. My incisors are terrible. Here, feel them,” Anna said, baring her teeth.

  Taj turned to look at her. “You are totally fucked up.”

  “You’re fucked up. Here, feel my teeth and I’ll feel yours.” She pulled her lips back and opened her mouth.

  “OK.”

  The air had somehow turned to Jell-O. She watched Taj’s hand as it traversed distant galaxies before arriving in front of her face. He gripped her two front teeth between his thumb and forefinger. She pushed a finger between his lips and politely tapped on one of his teeth until he opened his mouth.

  “Ur ight,” Taj said, squeezing her front teeth lightly between his fingers. “Dey are crookt.”

  “Ee? An urs are fo fmooth and ftraight.”

  “Da hottom row’s ewen worf!” he said, feeling around.

  “I dow!”

  The elderly couple across the aisle shot them a look of concern. Anna and Taj both nodded, attempting smiles without letting go of each other’s teeth. They stayed that way for a while, silently running their fingers through each other’s mouth in wonder until Anna, of course, started giggling. Soon they were both laughing hysterically. They dropped their hands to focus on laughing. By now, Anna’s eyes were streaming. The woman in front of them pressed a disapproving eye to the crack between the seats.

  “Can I poke your zit?” Taj asked.

  “What zit?” Anna gasped.

  “That one,” he poked.

  “No, don’t!”

  Taj reached forward and poked her zit again.

  “I said don’t!”

  “But it makes you so happy!” he said, giving her another zit poke. Despite herself, Anna could only shake her head, helpless with laughter.

  “See?” he said, poking.

  “No,” Anna wheezed, her voice a mere rush of air. “Don’t.”

  And then just like that, without warning, she was no longer laughing; she was crying. Really crying.

  “Hey,” Taj said, still laughing, but laughing with worried eyes.

  “Stop—” Anna so
bbed. She couldn’t get out another word. Why was Taj laughing at her?

  “I can’t stop.” Taj laughed. “I’m sorry.”

  Everything was suddenly irrevocably wrong. She stared at Taj. Idontknowyou, Idontknowyou, Idontknow—

  “Y-y-y-you—”

  He took her face between his hands, his grin a sad clown’s rictus. Anna kept crying. He kissed her. Was he kissing her to get her to stop crying or to stop himself from laughing? Anna didn’t know. Their lips burbled against each other’s. But she kissed him back and Taj kept kissing her. They stayed that way long enough for Anna to get a headache, the kind only horny teenagers get. They kissed until the stewardess announced they had hit turbulence so Anna and Taj would have to lower the armrest between them and buckle their seat belts. But once fastened, they leaned in and kept on kissing. Even though the armrest was digging hard into Anna’s ribs.

  Even after it almost started to hurt.

  20

  They awoke to the jarring thwack of dozens of plastic window shades rising and the pilot informing them they were now flying over Bakersfield, before dropping a parcel of useless facts into the intercom: the barometric pressure was just above 6 percent, it was −38 degrees outside, they were traveling at a wind speed of 444 miles per hour. Without the benefit of drugs, Anna came to with a horrible itching sensation behind her eyes and the feeling that a cat had thrown up in her mouth. Taj looked no better. He had produced a pair of sunglasses from his tote and was staring morosely out the window at the wing of the plane thoroughly obliterating their view.

  “Hey,” Anna said to the back of the seat facing her.

  “Hey,” Taj muttered starboard.

  That was as much as either of them could manage. Soon the stewardess dropped off trays of rehydrated oatmeal, a bun, and fake cheese that no one wanted. Their landing and exodus from LAX passed in similarly cheerless style as they shuffled comatose through the landing line, then off to pick up Anna’s suitcases, finally making their way to the cab stand only to confront shit weather: a lid of clouds sitting low in the sky and a dull rain. After an hour grinding their way through traffic—an almost physically impossibly slow journey during which nothing was said—they were at last deposited at their hotel, a converted piano factory in the subgentrified wilderness between Echo Park and Silver Lake. In trying to find them a place, Anna had kept confusing these names: Echo Lake, Silver Park. All places that sounded like they belonged on a map of Narnia.