I'm Trying to Reach You

by Barbara Browning

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PART I

  THE FIRST LINE OF MY NOVEL

  HARVEST MOON

  THE MAN I LOVE

  DRY YOUR EYES, BABY. IT’S OUT OF CHARACTER.

  A RIGOROUS SADNESS

  GAME CHANGE

  PART II

  BACK TO THE GARDEN

  MILK AND COOKIES

  SINGULAR PLURAL

  WHY YURI GAGARIN?

  D.O.A.

  THE GIRL FROM IPANEMA

  Acknowledgments

  NOTE ON THE COVER ARTISTS

  Also published by TWO DOLLAR RADIO

  Copyright Page

  TWO DOLLAR RADIO is a family-run outfit founded in 2005 with the mission to reaffirm the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry.

  We aim to do this by presenting bold works of literary merit, each book, individually and collectively, providing a sonic progression that we believe to be too loud to ignore.

  For Viva

  All of the moth’s videos can be viewed at:

  www.youtube.com/AhNethermostFun/

  PART I

  THE FIRST LINE OF MY NOVEL

  I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died.

  When I heard the news, the first thing I thought was, “That’s it. That’s the first line of my novel. ‘I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died.’ ” It seemed exactly right – odd, bizarre even, incongruous, an appallingly sad event viewed from an eerie state of helpless remove. It encapsulated all the feelings I’d been wanting to get off my chest, without having any actual story to attach them to.

  I’d been toying with the idea of writing fiction – probably as a way of avoiding the real task at hand, which was my academic writing. Given the economic climate and the disconcerting contraction of the university job market, the old saw “publish or perish” was taking on a new urgency. It was making me a little anxious. So sometimes when I sat down at my computer, I’d find myself fantasizing about writing a novel instead.

  That first line fell in my lap, but it was entirely true.

  I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died.

  I got the news in a text from Sven. “omg did u hear mj died.”

  All I could answer was, “no way wtf?!”

  It was 1 a.m. when I got the text. I went down to the lobby of the Arcotel where I was staying. I was there for an academic conference. It was the 15th annual meeting of PSi, Performance Studies international. The lowercase “international” is not really intended to distance the organization from any Marxist associations. But according to the official website, it’s a kind of self-ironizing deflation of any political claims the membership might make for itself. The field of performance studies is definitely left-leaning, but it tends to embrace its own failure. In fact, the conference’s theme that year was “Misperformance: Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading.”

  Still, while it can be self-deprecating, performance studies claims virtually everything as its object of study – from Indian classical dance and bel canto to the “performative” aspects of race, class, and gender. This is referred to as the broad spectrum approach. I locate myself on the more literal and slightly less fashionable end of the spectrum: I study concert dance.

  I’d arrived in Zagreb that day, somewhat flustered. There’d been a little confusion with my bag at the airport. For some reason, everybody else from my flight seemed to retrieve their stuff without incident, but after they all filed out, I was still standing there waiting for mine. Just as I was heading to the Croatia Airlines counter to get some help, I spotted it circling around, alone, on an unmarked carousel with the little purple ribbon I’d tied on it for easy identification. It looked like a forlorn dog waiting for its owner. I have no idea how it got on that other carousel. I felt vaguely responsible even though it obviously wasn’t my fault.

  Anyway, once I got to the hotel and ascertained that all my stuff was indeed in there, I collected myself, washed up, and headed out to check out the conference action. There was an opening reception being held at the Zagreb Youth Theater in the evening. The conference packet said there would be some wine and “traditional Croatian delicacies.” Also DJ Chassna would be spinning. Since I didn’t really know anything about the restaurants in town and I was trying to economize, I thought I’d call this party “dinner.” But when I got to the Zagreb Youth Theater, things looked a little bleak. Apparently quite a few people had opted out of the opening reception and the “turbo-folk” musical performance. There were a few confused-looking graduate students who’d evidently made the same “dinner” plans as me, plus some older members of the faculty of the University of Zagreb Academy of Drama Arts. There were two feuding factions at the Academy – postmodernists vs. social realists. Dan Ferguson, an acquaintance of mine working on a dissertation on the history of the flea circus, whispered this bit of gossip to me as we watched two paunchy, bearded guys tussle over a wine jug. That was apparently it for alcoholic beverages, though there were many cartons of lukewarm “juice drink.” Two long folding tables with paper spreads held plastic platters filled with what appeared to be triangular slices of Spam. There was a paper sign taped to the wall saying, in English, “CROATIAN MEAT SPECIALTIES.”

  DJ Chassna was having some trouble with her sound system. She was pretty, pierced, with a cigarette in her left hand and a cell phone in her right, texting vehemently. Probably trying to get some technical help. She looked pretty pissed off. The soundscape in the lobby of the Zagreb Youth Theater, in any event, mostly consisted of those tussling drama professors, and the shuffling, coughing, and sniffling of graduate students wondering if Spam and lukewarm juice drink were really going to tide them over for the night.

  This Spam situation may sound egregious, but it wasn’t unthinkable as far as I was concerned. I’d finagled a small research travel grant to get to the conference, but I was living that year on a badly paying post-doc at NYU, with no guarantee of renewal. My dietary choices were often influenced by financial considerations. That evening I made do, politely nibbling at the meat delicacies with a plastic fork, pretending to be hanging around waiting for Chassna to start spinning, even though it was pretty obvious the technical difficulties would be insurmountable. After a while, even those bearded drama professors abandoned their jug of Bull’s Blood or whatever it was they were tussling over. I wiped the corners of my mouth with a paper napkin and headed back to the hotel.

  Despite my inauspicious entrée to the Zagreb scene, I was trying to appreciate the relative luxuriousness of my situation. The Zagreb Arcotel is a more upscale establishment than I was accustomed to, really – though it had a kind of Eastern European slight offness about it. Or maybe I was projecting. The rooms had hipsterish curtains and throw pillows decorated with black and white caricatures of iconic artists and intellectual figures both historical and contemporary. Richard Strauss, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf – but also Manu Chao. There was somebody who looked a little like Slavoj Žižek, but it probably wasn’t. He was smiling.

  There was also a figure that looked a little like Michael Jackson, but on closer inspection it turned out to be Egon Schiele.

  I was using my cell phone to take this picture when it started to vibrate with Sven’s incoming text. I don’t know if I was taking the picture to send to Sven or if I just wanted to remember the moment – but my little exercise in documenting my Eastern European corporate hotel room suddenly paled in comparison. The text really threw me for a loop. I stared at it for a few minutes before sending my generically inarticulate response.

  I’d had an uneasy feeling, ever since the luggage incident. But I’d been unprepared for something li
ke this. Because of the time difference I was wide awake – especially after this news flash – and that’s why I decided to go down to the lobby of the hotel, where there were a couple of big flat-screen computers set up for guests. I settled into a comfortable chair facing one of them and typed in “michael jackson.” A flood of news items appeared. I quickly combed over the most recent ones and ascertained, more or less, the global response to the situation. It was immediately evident the scale of the catastrophe. I glanced up at the several conference-goers chatting on the couches and chairs scattered around the lobby. A few had cocktails. No one seemed to be registering this cataclysmic event.

  I went to YouTube. This was, increasingly, my first resort in dealing with questions from the practical to the unfathomable. Of course the platform when it first emerged was a terrific boon to those of us who research live performance, but as you know if you’ve spent any time on the site, which surely you have, there’s all kinds of other useful information people share there. Also not so useful information, and opinions. Sometimes I’d find myself getting absorbed in the weird comments viewers would post on other people’s videos. Sven had recently begun ribbing me about the amount of time I was spending on YouTube. He wasn’t thoroughly convinced that it was “productive.”

  My first thought was to watch a couple of Jackson’s music videos, but when I typed in his name an avalanche of MJ-wannabes popped up. I started clicking through them. The vast majority had posted their work long before his demise. Instructional moonwalk videos are a genre unto themselves. There were people trying to dance like him all over the world: in Singapore, Sidney, Slippery Rock, São Paulo. A few began or ended with little testimonials. There was a really heartbreaking one posted by a young guy from Belarus. It said, “Small dancing clip for Michael Jackson. I have no possibility to be in the USA. My communication is the Internet. I hope to you will be pleasant this video audition from Michael Jackson.” He was a pretty good dancer, and the production values on his video were surprisingly good. Some friends must have helped him shoot it. There was a lot of screen text in Cyrillic, but the official YouTube description was what I just typed, in English. It seemed so sad. He’d obviously invested a lot of hope in the possibility of MJ seeing this video and asking him to perform with him. Even though this had probably always been a long shot, his prospects for such a scenario had now clearly bitten the dust.

  I sat there for two hours, from one until three, watching these wannabes. A few were genuinely virtuosic. Some were embarrassing. White people can be so unself-conscious. It’s offensive, charming, and pathetic, all at the same time.

  One was very weird. At first I couldn’t figure out how it found its way into the “michael jackson” related videos playlist. It was called “modéré satie” – and indeed, it was set to Satie’s fifth Gnossienne – one of my favorites.

  A woman in a black leotard, her dark hair pulled back, was dancing a subdued dance in an interior space – her living room? There were some peculiar paintings on the wall. One of them appeared to depict Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. The dancer wasn’t looking at the camera. Her eyes were turned down throughout her little choreography, which was also quite peculiar – not balletic, exactly, though oddly proper. She demi-pliéed in plunky time to Satie’s moderate little melody, alternately lifting her arms as if to mark the count. Her gestures became more and more idiosyncratic and mysterious, as though she were trying to communicate some information.

  Perhaps I should pause to explain that I was at this conference to deliver a paper on semaphore mime in contemporary ballet choreography. I’m a former ballet dancer. I’m learning to say that. Like many male dancers, I started my training relatively late, and ours is not a line of work known for its longevity, so my stage career, such as it was, was pretty brief – and not particularly noteworthy. My longest gig was with the Royal Swedish Ballet in Stockholm. I came in under Nils Ake-Häggbom, and stuck around for as long as it seemed to make sense. I’m trying to transition into teaching, which is why I decided a few years ago to get a doctorate in performance studies, which led to the temporary and somewhat precarious post-doc I’ve already mentioned.

  I was supposed to be revising my dissertation into a book. I had recently been granted a post-doctoral fellowship to support this project. The major revision I’d thus far accomplished was changing the title. The dissertation had been called, Semaphoric Mime from the Ballet Blanc to William Forsythe: A Derridean Analysis. By “Derridean,” I meant to indicate that even when a dance appeared to be relaying a very clear message, it was always already saying something altogether different. I knew that title might be a bit off-putting to a general audience, so the book was going to be: I’m Trying to Reach You. This seemed to have more crossover potential, although the manuscript was probably a little over-specialized for the lay reader, and maybe a tad theoretical. I knew I had to take out some of the extended endnotes, which had nearly the same word count as the actual text, but so far I’d only managed to excise a few commas. I have a slightly pathological attachment to the idea of the “hors-texte.”

  So, it’s not exactly as though I believe in singular interpretations, like I could “get” this little Satie choreography if I only had a key. But the dance looked like a message in a bottle. It seemed to have some sort of secret code – the big mystery, of course, being what the hell it had to do with Michael Jackson.

  Some of the references were pretty clear: the mudra-like hand gestures (“okay”), which morphed into antlers, and then something like a map of her ovaries; a little Charlie Chaplin walk, ending with a swat at her ankles; a delicate circling of her index finger over her head, as though it were a phonograph needle sounding the clunky little score. And then I saw it: looking down at her feet, she swiveled to the side, and discreetly moonwalked backwards across the floor.

  It definitely wasn’t virtuosic, but it did have a hint of the uncanny, as the moonwalk inevitably does.

  The video ended with her head still down, arms open in a gesture of apparent offering. Then it faded to black. I hit “replay.” And then again. Maybe I’d just listened to “Billie Jean” and “Smooth Criminal” one too many times. It’s possible I’d lost all my critical faculties. But at that moment, all I wanted to do was hear this moderate little piano solo, and watch this moderate little chamber dance.

  The video had been posted by somebody called “falserebelmoth.” It had only clocked 6 views, and several of those, as you can see, were mine. I scrolled down to the comments. There was only one, from somebody called “GoFreeVassals”: “Kind, icy, slim one… I am raw with lament.” That was odd. And yet accurate – as a description of the dancer, and also the response she was producing in me.

  I was staring at this comment when I had the disconcerting sense that someone was looking over my shoulder. By this time, all of the other occupants of the hotel lounge seemed to have made their way back to their rooms, alone or in pairs. Aside from a custodial worker vacuuming near the bar, I thought I was alone. I slowly turned to see who was behind me, and to my surprise, it was Jimmy Stewart. Of course it couldn’t be, really. Jimmy Stewart was dead. But this guy really looked like him – say, around the Vertigo period, or shortly thereafter. He was graying, but still rakish. He didn’t even look at me. He was staring fixedly, almost menacingly, at the flat screen of the computer I was using. He pulled some reading glasses out of his pocket and perched them near the end of his nose, leaning over my shoulder to read that weird comment. He was wearing a short-sleeved white dress shirt, neatly tucked into a pair of twill plaid tennis shorts. His white socks were pulled up, and he was carrying what appeared to be a teeny tiny tennis racquet in a case.

  I felt a little self-conscious, and also, frankly, put out by Jimmy Stewart’s evident disregard for my personal space. I turned back around and clicked the browser closed. When I glanced back over my shoulder again, Jimmy Stewart was gone. I glimpsed him heading out into the Zagreb night with his tiny racquet gripped firmly before him. He carr
ied it like a threat.

  I went back up to my room, brushed my teeth, and put on my pajamas. I texted Sven (“xoxoxo”), climbed into the big, flat hotel bed, stared for a minute at the dark, and then went out like a light.

  There was something of an international incident the next day. PSi, despite its self-abnegating tendencies, appeared to have provoked some local tensions. It had nothing to do with those feuding drama professors, who were ultimately – even the postmodernists – regular “theater people,” not the kind that leaked out into the streets confusing your average Joe about the blurry boundaries between “life” and “art.” No, the incident had to do with another set – a group of conceptual artists whose work was being reenacted by an ensemble of actors for the benefit of conference-goers. Their effort, they explained, was not to rewrite the “official” narrative of performance art in Croatia, which, they explained, didn’t really even exist: the recent period of political instability and competing state ideologies had only allowed for an unreliable trail of “legends, lies, accusations, cli-chés, etc.” So who knows if any of this is true, but they were ostensibly reenacting the work of people like:

  * Sandra Sterle, who, in 2008 supposedly performed Nausea, in which she deliberately vomited to the tune of “Dalmatianac nosi lančić oko vrata” (“A Dalmatian Man Wears a Chain around His Neck”).

  * Siniša Labrović, who in 2007 reputedly performed Artist Licking the Heels of the Members of the Audience, drawing attention to a Croatian proverb implying subservience, though this act was held to reposition Labrović in a position of “psychological supremacy.”