by Douglas Lain
“You remaking Grease?”
“Mister Kubrick asked us to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“Get in,” Cage suggested.
“I don’t think so.”
Nicolas Cage fumbled with the glove compartment, spilled the contents onto the rubber mat under his feet, and then pushed aside a Styrofoam cup, a car manual, what appeared to be ball bearings, and some Kleenex, until he found the pistol.
He rolled down the window with the crank, but unevenly at first. He had to roll the window back up and then roll it down again more slowly. When this was accomplished he pointed the gun out the window at me.
“Fuck, Paula. I mean, fuck!”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” he asked. His voice was high pitched, and I realized that he was playing the scene for laughs. If the audience was laughing along with him, then his character would remain sympathetic even as he held me at gunpoint. “Get in the fucking car, Paula.”
I opened the back door and slid in to the middle of the bench seat. Cage turned around and looked exasperated.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Shut up,” he said.
“What do you want from me?”
“Just shut the fuck up, Paula!”
Cage produced a pillowcase with yellow sunflowers printed on it, from underneath the ball bearings on the floor. He pointed his gun at me—
it was a grey and black pistol, not very large—and told me to freeze.
“Don’t struggle with me, or I’ll blow your fucking brains out,” he said.
Scarlett blew another bubble and then purposely popped it with her tongue. She chewed her gum aggressively. She was overdoing it, overacting.
Nicolas Cage put the pillowcase over my head, but I could still make out their outline of the front seats, still see their two heads in silhouette. They were kissing, necking, but awkwardly, and when Cage pulled away from Johansson, a line of gum stretched between their mouths.
Starbucks
When they took the floral pillowcase off of my head, I found Nicolas Cage and Scarlett Johansson sitting across from me in overstuffed red chairs. They had changed out of their fifties-style Greaser costumes and into corporate uniforms. Scarlett was wearing the green apron with the usual Starbucks mermaid logo, while Cage wore Old Navy khakis, a button-down pink cotton shirt, and a Rolex watch.
The Starbucks didn’t have any windows that I could see, but the space was filled with enough artificial light that I had the impression that it was still daytime. The tables around us were empty, but I heard a murmuring of customers from around the corner and down stairs.
“Here’s your mocha,” Johansson said.
“I didn’t order any—” I started, but Nicolas Cage held up his finger to shush me. He wagged it back and forth at me.
“Don’t contradict Scarlett, Paula. She works very hard and puts up with shit all day, the last thing she needs is you changing your order,” he said.
“Look, you’re very good, but could you break character for a moment and tell me what’s going on?”
“Should I?” Cage asked. Scarlett sat down in one of the overstuffed chairs and took a sip out of the paper cup she’d just placed in front of me.
“Why not?”
“Okay, Paula. Okay, enough kidding around. You want information. You want to know what’s going on?”
Were they going to shoot me? If so why had they taken me to a Starbucks, to a public space?
“Oh, is Starbucks public?” Scarlett asked. “I thought it was private.”
“It’s a private corporation.”
The track lighting over my head intensified as the rest of the lights dimmed. The espresso machine stopped whirring, and I could hear the silence. Scarlett Johansson took the lid off of the coffee cup she’d been sipping from, and poured out glass marbles on the wooden table top between us.
“Those are from inside the boxes. Those are from the other side of the glass,” she told me.
“Cornell’s boxes?” I asked.
“Stanley wants you to tell us about him. About Cornell and his boxes,” Nicolas Cage said. “That’s what is going on, Paula. That’s all. He wants you to tell us about Joseph Cornell, and why you chose him.”
“Have you read my story?” I asked.
“Pretend that we haven’t,” Cage said.
“And then you’ll let me go?”
“You’ll be free to go anywhere you want.”
The Broken Assemblage
“ The Broken Assemblage” was my story about how the artist Joseph Cornell went about the process of dying in his little room, and how his sister Betty Ann coped with his demise. Her brother had been a Christian Scientist, he hadn’t really believed in the outside world, and he’d left no real instructions for how to handle the affair of his death. Most of all he’d never indicated just what it was that he wanted her to do with his artworks, or more specifically his films.
She imagined calling Peggy Guggenheim, the millionaire heiress, but Betty didn’t really want to talk to anyone who wore sunglasses shaped like television sets while posing for photographs with her toy spaniels, and while there were other collectors who might be interested, Betty couldn’t remember any of their names.
“The Broken Assemblage” was about Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Church of Christian Science, who believed that the universe was really God’s mind, and that since God was perfect and good, it only followed that sin was unreal. Betty’s brother had tried to live out his relationship to God, to fill up on the righteous thoughts of Jesus, through his art, but even he had never fully succeeded. All Betty had to do, in order to realize how far from pure Joseph had been, was to read all the women’s names in his art, to look at their photographs.
Rose Hobart, for instance, was an actress from the thirties, and her name was also the title of Joseph’s first short film. All he’d done was rearrange the sequences of an old B movie and replace the soundtrack with music from one of his favorite samba records. Her brother had edited the images of Rose Hobart to make it appear that the starlet was staring at stars reflected in a pool of water. Rose Hobart looked at her own mirror image: she glanced over her shoulder at herself.
“The Broken Assemblage” was the story of Joseph Cornell eating store-bought jelly rolls and drinking cherry flavor Kool-Aid while working on his final film with Stan Brakhage. Cornell wrote down equations made of words on scraps of paper. He wrote, “Collage=Reality,” and “metaphysics and purity.”
Stan Brakhage was the filmmaker whose movies were all out of focus because he purposively broke his glasses in order to get a more authentic view of the universe. Stan Brakhage and Betty’s brother were both children. They’d held onto something in childhood on purpose, and now that Joseph was dead, it was up to Betty to pick up all the broken pieces he’d left behind.
On the tiny screen in Joseph’s room, the fold-up slide projector screen where the projected images of Rose Hobart were flickering, the actress was talking to a swami, and Betty found that she couldn’t help but admire her brother’s taste. The woman was quite lovely, and he had done something quite strange with her image. Lifted out of the usual flow of the movies, these scenes had a reality to them. He’d captured something about movies, something about what it meant to look at a movie that you forgot when you got caught up in the plot, and it really was beautiful and strange to see it. To sit in his studio, to find a half-eaten Hershey’s chocolate bar on his nightstand, to watch his fantasies, it was as if he was still alive, or more like he was beyond life. There was something permanent about what was on the screen. Real life could never duplicate the quality.
My story “The Broken Assemblage” was a fantasy story, a strange tale about how Betty’s own desires came into the world when she broke the glass on one of her brother’s boxes. In the story, I intimated that she broke the “Soap Bubble” assemblage precisely because she came to understand th
at reality and desire are all mixed together. After watching her brother’s film, she knew that his art was a way to keep reality, desire, and all the seductive images of the world at a safe distance. Betty wanted her desire to be in the world, so she broke the pane of glass on the box and let the ideas out into the air.
What I told Nicolas Cage and Scarlett Johansson was that, in the story, Betty’s desires seemed less real to her after they’d been let out of the box. That she had broken open an assemblage entitled “Bebe Marie” and let the little girl doll inside the box free. She’d broken the frame, and then she found that the structures of her own life, all the little distances that had held her identity together, fell apart.
Betty’s husband died shortly after Joseph’s death, and her next-door neighbor’s house burned down, which led to a series of misfortunes that shortly required Betty to move.
Betty ended up living in a state-assisted nursing home. Only a decade after her brother’s death, she no longer knew her own name or how old she was, but was more and more convinced, every day, that she was a little girl. She was more and more convinced that she was lost in the woods, just like the girl in her brother’s assemblage box had appeared to be.
I told Nicolas Cage and Scarlett Johansson that breaking the old frames wasn’t a real option, but they didn’t believe me. And when I insisted that finding a new space, a new form, had not involved seeking unmediated reality, when I insisted that I had given up on getting beyond the frame—well, they didn’t seem to believe that either.
No Exit
I’m walking on the moon with Donnie, he’s dressed in blue jeans and a black, turtleneck, long-sleeved shirt, while I’m fogging up the glass visor in my space helmet with each breath. I’m following him as he follows the wooden tracks around the lunar surface, then behind matte paintings, and then to the giant globe. Donnie is trying to work out exactly where we are and I keep telling him that we’re in the basement of the World Trade Center.
“That’s impossible,” he says.
If we’re not in the basement of the World Trade Center, then we’re near the Fra Mauro crater. I try to explain it to him, but Donnie can’t hear me through the safety glass on my space helmet. He stands on the tracks, and then steps into the space between the tracks, into one of Joseph Cornell’s dream boxes.
When Nicolas Cage and Scarlett Johansson left us down here, they made sure to show me how all the dream boxes were already broken. The glass windows on each surreal display were cracked, shattered, or missing. And so there was nothing separating the necessary reality of Joseph Cornell’s Christian mind from the contingent unreality of the stage set for us by Stanley Kubrick. Nicolas Cage and Scarlett Johansson told me that my new kind of writing was what gave me this chance to live directly. They themselves were just actors, always pretending, but since I’d be living on the moon, I’d get the chance to be real. I would be really real.
Donnie reaches out toward the moon and points to a crater several hundred miles north of our position. I bounce slowly down the track and try to tell him that he’s pointing in the wrong direction, but as I said before, he can’t hear me.
The space suit I’m wearing is heavy, but not as heavy as the real suits the astronauts wore. The original spacesuits weighed about 200 pounds on the moon and were made out of the twenty-five layers of plastic, fiberglass, and metal. My suit is skin tight, except for the fishbowl-style helmet and the white backpack I’m carrying. And Donnie is only protected from the vacuum of space by his black turtleneck shirt and blue jeans.
Back on the lunar surface I detach a high-tech scoop from the side of the lunar model and dig into the lunar sand absently. I keep digging until I hit the concrete floor.
“Where are we?” Donnie asks.
But he’s asking the wrong question. The question isn’t where are we, but who are we? Who are we that we could have ended up trapped so far down underground, all the way down here on the moon.
“You said there was an elevator?” Donnie said.
Donnie reaches out for me. He puts his hand on my space helmet and leaves a palm print there. He is so sure of himself with his hipster glasses and five o’clock shadow. He’s accustomed to selecting between images, and I see him looking at me, at the reflection of the moon’s surface on the glass bowl I’m wearing, and he’s beginning to realize that he doesn’t have a choice anymore. This image is real.
“Shit, Paula,” he says. “Where the fuck are we?”
The Last Apollo Mission is underway, there is no such thing as up, but I don’t have the heart to tell him. Instead I tell him there might be light out there, a green light for an emergency exit. I mouth the words to him so that he can read my lips. I look at Donnie from inside my glass helmet, and for a moment it almost seems as though he’s understood.
“Where are we?” He asks it again, and again. And we circle around again, down the wood tracks, over the dream boxes, and then back. All the way back to the moon.
Gregory Feeley is known as both a critic and a fiction writer. His book reviews and critical essays have appeared in a variety of journals and newspapers, including The Washington Post and Foundation. His first novel The Oxygen Barons was published in 1990, and since then he’s published short stories and novels of alternative history.
“Giliad” is a nonlinear tale that weaves past and present, game and reality, into a fiction about 9/11 and what it means for Western Civilization. SFSite.com described the story as follows: “The different viewpoints might appear to be disparate, but watch the skill of the transitions as the narrative shifts smoothly from one voice to the next, glides from present to past tense and then back again. The story is a brilliantly told Götterdämerung, its layers constructed so tightly that when the reader does finally perceive the whole there’s a sense of the floor dropping away, revealing new possibilities of meaning.”
GILIAD
Gregory Feeley
Trent’s pleasure in being asked to ßeta-test Ziggurat deeply annoyed Leslie, who watched without comment as he slid in the CD but left when summer-movie music began to vibrate from the speakers as cuneiform characters appeared on the screen and slowly turned into the company’s name. She was in the kitchen when he called her to come see something, and had nearly finished preparing lunch when he appeared at the door. “No, I’m not interested,” she answered, ignoring his crestfallen expression. “Go role-play as Sargon, but don’t tell me it’s history. And that anachronistic Greek letter is pretty dumb.”
“They’re just showing off their HTML,” he protested, hurt. “You say you hate not being able to underline in email.” He took a sandwich, an act he made seem like a peace offering. “Was there really a king named Sargon?”
Leslie sighed. “Yes and he’s certain to appear in the game, since his name sounds like someone out of Star Trek.” Trent laughed. “You know what else they’ll put in?”
“Gilgamesh?” he guessed after a second. Trent hated being made to feel he was being tested.
“Beer,” she answered, handing him a bottle. “The Sumerians invented it.”
“Really?” His pleasure at some bauble of fact was unmediated, like a child’s. “And there were seven cities vying for supremacy?”
“In Sargon’s time? I don’t know.” Leslie thought. “Uruk, then Kish . . .”
“Nippur, Eridu, Ur, Lagash, and Umma.” Leslie looked skeptical, and he added, “I know, it depends on when.”
“These are independent city-states? Then this would be before Sargon, or sometime after.” She sighed. “I’ll look it up, okay? But I don’t want to deal with your game.”
When she entered the office, however, a color map of the Tigris-Euphrates valley was glowing on the monitor. Trent was nowhere to be seen. Leslie pulled down her Cambridge Ancient History, and as she turned back toward the desk a half dozen cities appeared within the lopsided gourd formed by the two rivers. She stepped closer and saw that the symbols marking the sites were ragged-sloped triangles, ziggurats. Kish was nearest
the stem, with the rest farther south; but after a second a constellation of features began to appear: the word AKKAD materialized just beneath the bottleneck, while stylized inverted V’s, ominous as the peaks of Mordor in Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth, rose to the east and became The Zagros Mountains. ELAMITES, AMORITES and GUTIANS threatened from the periphery. Leslie glanced at the speakers and noticed that the volume had been turned down.
Not wanting to sit with her back to the monitor as it cycled through these changes, she took her book into the bedroom. She could hear tapping from the living room, where the laptop was plugged in by the couch. She sat in the armchair—the squeak of sprawling across the bed would doubtless bring Trent—and browsed through the pages on Mesopotamia.
Reading history will send you repeatedly to the bookcase to consult other sources on the subject, unless the author has managed to catch you in the spell of his narrative (which means you are not reading history). This volume was so introductory that Leslie would have found herself standing up with every page, save that she did not own the books to consult. Finally she went to the back hallway and searched the double-shelved rows to locate an old paperback, History Begins at Sumer. Anecdotal and lacking an index, it led readers by the hand through successive “firsts”—first library catalogue; first farmer’s almanac—with little discussion or analysis. She wondered whether the game designers had quarried it for local color.
Returning the books to the office, Leslie saw that the screen now showed a stylized face with dark holes for eyes and the corrugated beard of an Assyrian sculpture. She recognized it as a bronze head thought to be of Sargon, with its damaged eye-hole digitally restored. The image stared out at the viewer, its probable accompaniment muted.
“That’s somebody,” said Trent, who had appeared at the doorway.