by Douglas Lain
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
I try to think of what it is that I want from him. I sit by the porthole, look out at the model of the moon outside, out beyond the Saran Wrap pane. I glance at the matte painting of an earthrise, and then close my eyes and try to fantasize, but the fantasies that occur to me like that, out there in space, don’t appear to me as my own. I picture Donnie dressed in his spacesuit or as a hardhat worker and realize that the image is, if anything, homoerotic, but that works for me. I imagine climbing on top of him in a crater, or covering our bodies with moon dust and kneading his flesh like dough, but it doesn’t take long before this image twists into something grotesque. My head fills with cartoon images. I picture Tom and Jerry doing 69 while floating in empty space. I picture Minnie Mouse tying up Mickey with her bow.
“I can’t think of anything,” I tell him.
Soon enough, I’m naked except for the space suit. I start by removing the thick rubber gloves for him. I unhitch the sleeve from the shoulder and slip my arm free.
“Are you even trying?” Donnie asks.
It isn’t working for him. The problem isn’t my body as compared to Jane Fonda’s perfection, but rather the problem is the physical space inside the capsule. Fonda’s striptease took place on a flat surface, and I’m trying to duplicate her actions, only in 3-D. Besides, looking around, I realize that there would be nowhere comfortable for us to fuck, even if he could get excited.
“Maybe you should hum the music from the movie as you take off your suit.”
“How does the music go?” I ask.
But even Donnie can’t remember the tune.
Rover
I sat with Stanley Kubrick in a battery-powered moon car and quietly ate my pastrami on rye. I was taking lunch on a facsimile of the rover, and was struck by how the gold foil wrapped around the legs of the lunar module matched the color of the inner layer of foil that wrapped our pastrami sandwiches. I wanted to discuss the first scene in the manuscript I’d emailed him that morning, but Kubrick was focused on eating. He was holding his sandwich with both hands and smacking his lips as he chewed, and I had to wait quietly under the umbrella-shaped antenna.
Then, when Kubrick finished his sandwich, he picked up the manuscript and started reading silently. He took small sips of coffee from a Starbucks coffee cup and mumbled the lines of dialogue under his breath.
“This isn’t what I’m after,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“If I’d wanted to make a reality television show I wouldn’t have needed a writer at all, correct?”
I took another bite of my pastrami sandwich and shook my head. “I’m not sure what you want,” I said. “You’re saying the characters are flat?”
Kubrick reached over to me then and did something I didn’t expect at all. He took my sandwich away from me. He took my pastrami sandwich and held it up over his head as though he thought I’d try to snatch it back. When I made no such move he lowered the half-wrapped sandwich back down and took a bite of it.
It was a really good sandwich. The gourmet mustard had an aftertaste that complemented rather than contradicted the sandwich’s rich, salty first impression, but Stanley Kubrick was eating it instead of me because he wanted to punish me for not taking the job seriously enough.
Stanley tapped the manuscript with his middle finger and then used his middle finger to point to the blank spaces between the lines of dialogue.
“Fuck the characterization. You’re in the wrong form here. You’ve got no idea what a manuscript should look like on the page. You’re wasting white space. There aren’t enough words here.”
Kubrick started the moon rover, and we drove off the grey sand and to the wooden tracks that encircled this first set. Kubrick drove the rover onto the tracks so that the wheels on the left side of the vehicle bounced along the wooden ties while the outer set of wheels gripped the smooth concrete floor of the WTC basement. We drove tracks away from the first lunar surface, around the giant globe of the moon, until we reached Kubrick’s second lunar-surface set. On this version there was a blue and brown weather balloon tied to a seventeen-foot-long string. This was the distant Earth, and it bobbed gently on its tether. The sun was a projector behind a plexiglass window to the south of the set.
We jumped the track and drove across the lunar surface, finally stopping at an Apollo capsule that was just as realistic as the first, only smaller. This was the set for long shots, and Kubrick and I stood just as tall as the lunar module. He reached out to it, opened the hatch, and then stuck his head inside the craft.
“I hired you because you know Joseph Cornell’s work,” Kubrick said. He took his head out and then reached into the craft with his right arm and produced another assemblage box from inside the rocket. It was Cornell’s dream box entitled L’Egypte de Mlle Cleo de Merode.
It was one of the few boxes that Cornell created that did not include a glass front but was instead a chest. Cornell had modeled this assemblage after a Votive cosmetic box and he’d tried to represent all of Egypt within it. The chest contained small glass jars or phials and each of these contained something of Egypt. One phial, for example, contained a photograph of the silent film star Theda Bara and was labeled “Cleopatra.” Another bottle contained curls of brown paper and was labeled “Serpents of the Nile.”
“Do you understand what I want?”
I shrugged.
“Each approach to art is also an approach to space,” Kubrick said. “And for this space mission, I need a story that is real but abstract, that is personal but objective,” he said.
“Tell me exactly what to do,” I said.
“I can’t do that. What I need from you is a new form,” Kubrick said. “You have to help me create a new kind of space.”
A New Art Form
I’d never been a fan of Stanley Kubrick. I considered him to be overrated. He was a middlebrow director who made pretentious melodramas, and I’d only ever seen maybe three of them. I’d seen The Shining, the one about Vietnam, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. In fact, that last one didn’t even count because I’d never managed to stay awake all the way to the end of it. I always fell asleep around the time the waitress walked on the ceiling, or else I’d pass out when the scientist stopped outside the lavatory to read instructions on how to use a zero-gravity toilet.
I had no idea what it was that Kubrick wanted from me. Asking me to write a new space or new form into being was not merely absurd, but sadistic. It was graduate-school talk; not what I expected from an American legend like Kubrick. So I ignored it.
I’d rewrite the script instead of rethinking it. I’d change the plot around, rearrange the characters.
In my new version it was McAuliffe’s son who had the drinking problem, and then it was McAuliffe’s son’s male lover who drank, but each draft was worse than the last, and after two weeks of rewrites I decided to do it his way
If Stanley Kubrick wanted me to create a new kind of cinema, a new sort of movie, then my first step was to figure out what kind of movies he was already making. Skimming the biographies I found that he was most famous for his perfectionism. Kubrick spent years searching for a camera lens that would allow him to shoot Barry Lyndon using nothing but natural and candle light. I read that the street sets Kubrick built for Eyes Wide Shut were tremendously detailed and expensive, almost hyperreal. Kubrick’s New York City streets were more detailed than real streets.
I watched all of his films. Clockwork Orange disturbed me, but only in the way that it was meant to disturb everyone. On the other hand, while I recognized that Doctor Strangelove was a comedy, it disturbed me in ways that were perhaps unintentional. It struck me that Kubrick had done something terrible to George C. Scott, and that something inside of Peter Sellers was broken, and I had almost worked out a way to break something in myself, but before I could figure it out, Kubrick’s sound- stages were destroyed.
Nineteen hijackers managed to get past security at Boston
’s Logan International, Dulles International, and Newark, on September 11th. And that morning I was woken early, around 6:20 a.m. Eastern, by my cell phone. The device gyrated on my glass bedside table and made a clattering noise.
“Church Street Books,” I said.
“They fucked us.”
“Mr. Kubrick?”
“It’s over. You can keep the retainer, of course,” Kubrick said.
“Okay,” I said. I glanced at the LCD screen on my cell phone to check the time, but somehow I’d turned on Tetris. An L-shaped block was falling.
While I listened to Stanley Kubrick swear at me from what I imagined was a phone booth in Times Square (Could I hear the buzz of neon lights over the traffic?), Mohammed Atta was taking a little yellow pill and staring out of the passenger side window of a BMW. Atta had had too much to drink at the Pink Pony, a strip club in Daytona, the night before. He reportedly was severely hung over, but I didn’t know any of that at the time.
“Did you say that you don’t want me to finish the rewrite? Am I fired?”
“The project is cancelled,” Kubrick said. “They went the other way. Apparently the moon was just a contingency plan,” Kubrick said.
Donnie rolled away from me on the futon, leaving a damp spot on my pillow. I looked at him. Donnie hadn’t landed an editing gig for almost a year, and yet he always slept like a baby.
“Would you at least look at what I came up with? Maybe you could use it for another project?” I asked.
“Use what?” Kubrick asked.
The genre. I’d written the script from multiple points of view, but the effect was a single voice that could be acted out in space by multiple players.
“Shit,” Kubrick said.
“You want me to email it to you?”
“No. Don’t email me anything. I don’t want to see it. Burn it. Burn everything.”
“What time is it?” I asked
“Don’t go into work today, Paula. Take a sick day,” Kubrick said.
“Am I fired?”
But Kubrick didn’t answer. Instead he hung up the phone, and I listened to the dial tone. I waited for the buzz in my ear to offer some kind of answer about what was going on.
I closed my eyes and lay back down, still half asleep, even, with my cheek on a pillow wet with Donnie’s saliva.
Hypnagogic, I imagined sending an email to the sun. I imagined pressing Send and watching the code flying through space. I watched the ones and zeros burn as they touched the edge where the sun was hot. I imagined the sun as a golf ball, and thought about Buzz Aldrin getting drunk on the lunar surface. I imagined that Buzz was sweating.
After September 11th
For the first two weeks, the streets around Church and Murray were impassable, but even after Church Street was cleared of the debris—the broken filing cabinets, personal computers, and pulverized concrete—almost no customers visited the Church Street bookstore. Only the cork message board in the back of the store, next to the wire racks of the Village Voice, was getting us any foot traffic. The bulletin board was covered over with snapshots of the dead: photocopies of Polaroids, yearbook pictures, school photos, images scanned from drivers’ licenses, and so on. Accompanying the photographs here were handwritten questions like “Have you seen our Johnny?” and demands like “Call this number if you see this girl!” accompanying the photographs.
Everyone wanted to believe that some of the people in the photographs might just be lost. They were dazed and confused and wandering the streets, but otherwise unscathed. I looked at the faces, the smiling dead men, women, and children. Most of them, their bodies, would never be recovered. I wondered how long it would take their families to give up looking.
For the first few days after the bookstore reopened, the space by the bulletin board was taken over by a stream of people who otherwise did not fit the usual demographic mix. There were older people and fat people in the store. There were black, yellow, brown, and red people.
But by the third day the demographics sorted themselves out, and the photographs that went up on the bulletin board were more glamorous. Our usual customers were students from the New School, or from NYU. Artists stopped in with illuminated color photographs. A dead woman looked at herself in a hotel bathroom mirror, and a handsome young man in his clean white suit stood in contrast to the spectrum of red and brown in the wood wall behind him.
Very little was required of me. The bookstore owner, a Slovenian immigrant named Slavi, spent hours standing by the cracked display window, next to his first edition copy of The House at Pooh Corner, staring out at the empty street. After awhile he wiped his nose with his hand, looked at his fingers for evidence, and then turned to me and asked, “Do you think customers will only want to buy from Americans now?”
I shrugged at him and retreated into reading. I didn’t know the answer to his question, and he didn’t really want an answer in any case. He just wanted to enjoy repeating the question.
While we waited, I read a book about the Marx Brothers. I flipped through a coffee-table book entitled The Marx Brothers Scrapbook, and watched another mourning family open the front door and wander to the bulletin board.
I read my book:
“Why a duck?” Chico asked. “Why not a chicken?”
Groucho answered, “No, viaduct. You know, like a bridge over water?”
“Ah, I see.”
“Good.”
“One thing though.”
“Yes.”
“Why a duck?”
I almost didn’t recognize him at first, even though he was wearing the same exact blue suit he’d been in the first time. He smiled at me with the same mischievous grin, but when I spoke to him, he pretended not to hear me. Instead he strolled between the bookshelves and looked at cookbooks. Then he moved to literature. He took his time pulling trade paperbacks from the shelves and putting them back. He turned the corner and moved down another row, further away from the register. Finally he seemed to find what he was looking for and he approached me.
“Is this a first edition?” he asked.
I looked down at the book he’d selected—it was a beaten up paperback version of JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. I turned the book over and found that, far from being a first edition, it had been printed in 1997. A new copy of Catcher in the Rye would have cost 5.95, but this was used and priced at two dollars.
“No, that’s a first edition and I’d like to buy it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What does a first edition of Catcher in the Rye list for? You have a blue book?”
Slavi kept a current edition of the Rare Book Price Guide in a drawer by the register, and it listed a first edition of Catcher in the Rye at ten thousand dollars. I read the price out to Kubrick.
Kubrick wrote the check, but handed me a five-dollar bill. He turned to look out the plate glass windows at the front of the shop, but had to lean to the left in order to see past the owner. I put his book into a plastic bag for him.
“They made a mistake,” he said. “But I won’t make the same mistake they did. You’re a talented writer, Paula. You should continue in that direction. Don’t get sidetracked by this. Just take this money, and then you and we will be good and you’ll be free of this whole nasty business.”
“What nasty business is that?”
Stanley Kubrick smiled at me. I’d asked the wrong question and made him angry, and his smile was the best, maybe the only, way he knew to express that fact to me. It was a smile that indicated that a certain kind of violence was being suppressed.
“Take the money, Paula. And then maybe take the time to write another novel.”
“What was the mistake that they made, and why does their mistake mean that you should pay me $10,000?” I asked.
“Did you delete the manuscript you wrote for me?” Kubrick asked.
I smiled at him this time, leaned across the counter, and then reached out and took the check out of his hand. I waved the check in
his face. It was a dramatic gesture, like something out of a movie.
“What does this bribe mean, Stan?”
“Write your novel, and send it to an agent. I’ll write her name down for you.”
Stanley Kubrick wrote the name “Nicole Aragi” on page one of the Catcher in the Rye, put the book back in its plastic bag, and then handed the bag over to me.
“How did you know ahead of time?”
“Careful what you ask me, Paula,” Kubrick said.
“Did the attacks have anything to do with what we were doing? Were the attacks a way of making a new space?”
Kubrick stopped smiling. He grabbed his check out of my hands, tore it up into pieces, and then stuffed the pieces into his trouser pocket. He took the plastic bag from me, removed the Catcher in the Rye, and then walked back to the bookshelf where he’d found the book.
Stanley stood in the aisle for a moment, shrugged at me, and wiped his nose with his hand. He adjusted his beard with the palm of this same hand, pulling down on his chin, and then moved to the exit. He stepped around the owner, turned around one last time as if he had a parting thought, and then left. Kubrick stepped out the door and onto Church street, and by the time I got out from behind the register and across the store to the door to go after him, he’d disappeared down Vesey Street.
A Lime Green Convertible
When I spotted it rolling slowly down Broadway, my stomach clenched and I started shaking. It was probably a Ford Mustang convertible, definitely lime green, and I stopped outside of a Walgreens on the corner of Broadway and Warren, turned my back to the street, and stared at the display of Liquid Soaps and disinfectants behind glass. The anti-bacterial soap was the color of piss, and the bottles glowed in the October sun.
“Paula?” Nicolas Cage called my name from behind the passenger side window while Scarlett Johansson looked out the windshield and held the steering wheel with both hands. She blew a pink bubble with her sugar-free gum.
Johansson was wearing a green sweater and a poodle skirt, and she had her hair up. Now, rather than looking like Molly Ringwald, she looked like Olivia Newton-John. Nicolas Cage, on the other hand, looked only like himself, even though he was obviously dressed up like John Travolta. He was wearing a leather jacket and tight jeans, and he too wore his hair up, but in a pompadour.