The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  Suddenly the man snapped the paper shut, folded it, and jammed it into a seat pocket. He turned to Crosetti and said, “I’ve lost the ability to distinguish truth from fiction in the news, with the exception of the scores in sports. I don’t know why I bother. It just makes me angry without a reasonable outlet.”

  “You could tear the paper into shreds and stamp on the scraps.”

  The man smiled. “I could, but that sounds like something my brother might do.”

  “He has a temper. That cell phone business?”

  “Yes, and killing two people. But the strange fact is he doesn’t have a temper. He’s the mildest, longest-suffering guy in the world. I’m the one in the family with a temper.”

  “Could’ve fooled me.”

  “Yeah, but he’s not himself,” said the brother. “Violence sometimes does that. I saw it in the army a lot. People construct a persona, a mask, and they come to believe that it’s really them, down to the core, and then events happen that they never expected and the whole thing just cracks off, leaving their tender pulpy insides exposed to the harsh elements.”

  “Like post-traumatic stress?”

  The man made a dismissive gesture. “If you buy psychobabble. It suits the culture to dump a whole set of unrelated symptoms suffered by completely different kinds of people as a result of completely different kinds of events into a box with that phrase on the label. It’s about as useful and as intellectually valid as stamp collecting. My brother lived a tightly controlled existence that, while enormously successful, was cut off from the wellsprings of life by addiction. He was living a lie, as the saying goes, and such lives are in fact fairly fragile. There is no real resilience in them.”

  “What’s he addicted to?”

  “My, you’re a nosy fellow.” This was said not unkindly, and Crosetti grinned.

  “Guilty. It’s a bad habit. I excuse it by saying it’s because I want to plumb the depth of the human condition for my work.”

  “Oh, right, you’re the screenwriter. Jake mentioned something about that. Plumb your own depths then. What do you think of Tarantino?”

  “Not a plumber of depths,” said Crosetti and imitated the other man’s dismissive gesture. “What’re you doing in Europe?”

  “Family business.”

  “Connected to all this? I mean the paper chase, the secret manuscript…?”

  “Indirectly.”

  “Uh-huh. You’re a lawyer too?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You know, if you want to keep stuff mysterious, the way to do it is not to make cryptic comments but to adopt a fictitious and boring persona. James Bond always said he was a retired civil servant and that usually closed out the conversation. Just a tip from the world of movies.”

  “Okay. I’m a Jesuit priest.”

  “That works for me. I think we’re departing. We didn’t even get a safety demonstration. Is that because they don’t care or because no one can conceive of any misfortune befalling the ruling classes?”

  “The latter, I think,” said Paul. “It’s hard to remain rich without developing a defect in the sympathetic imagination.”

  Crosetti had never experienced a quicker takeoff. The engines strained briefly, the cabin tilted back like a La-Z-Boy, and they were above the clouds in what seemed like a few seconds.

  When the plane was flying level again, Crosetti said, “I assume you know the whole story thus far. I mean about the Bracegirdle letters and the cipher and all that.”

  “Well, I’ve read the letter and Jake told me a little of what you’ve learned about the nature of the cipher.”

  “What do you think?”

  “About our chances of interpreting it and finding this supposed lost play? Negligible. I mean we’d need the actual grille according to you, and what are the chances of a piece of perforated paper surviving for nearly four hundred years? And how would we even recognize it? And no cipher, no play-that seems fairly clear.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “I’m here because since this letter emerged, my brother has asked me for help for the first time in our entire lives. Twice. I want to encourage this. Jake needs a lot of help. And I owe him. He was very good to me when I was in prison and for a period afterward, although he utterly despised me. It was an act of real charity, and I want to pay him back if I can.”

  “Why were you in prison?” asked Crosetti. But the other man smiled, gave a short, low laugh, shook his head, took a thick paperback out of his flight bag, and slipped on reading glasses. Curious Crosetti glommed the title: Hans Küng’s Does God Exist?, which struck Crosetti as an odd choice for an airplane book, but what did he know about the man? He slid his laptop out of his briefcase, placed it on the solid table provided, and turned it on. To his surprise, the little icon that announced the availability of an Internet connection lit up, but of course the sort of people who flew in private jets could not bear to be cut off from the Internet while airborne. Cell phones probably worked too. He put the headphones on and slid a copy of Electric Shadows into the drive. Oh, of course, the seat had an A/C plug in too, God forbid the rich would ever have to depend on laptop batteries! He watched the movie with the usual critical discontent he felt when watching debut features by someone of his generation. And a woman, too. And a Chinese woman. Xiao Jiang was pretty good, and he tried to give her credit for it and not think bad thoughts about what she had done to get the chance. It was Cinema Paradiso against the background of the Cultural Revolution and the point seemed to be that no amount of bad art and state control could keep movies from being glamorous. The thirty-year time shifts were handled well, and the film had the typical aesthetic grace of all Chinese films, but the plot and the emotions generated by the cast seemed soap opera-ish, he thought, writing the review, a good debut from a talented director, not to be compared with Albert Crosetti, of course, who would never get a chance to write and direct a feature…

  When the film ended he brought up the Final Cut scriptwriting word-processor and started a fresh script. It wanted a title. He typed in Carolyn Rolly, and thought about films named after women: Stella Dallas. Mildred Pierce. Erin Brockovich. Annie Hall. Yes, but…He deleted it and typed The Bookbinder, an original screenplay by A. P. Crosetti. A. Patrick Crosetti. Albert P. Crosetti.

  Crosetti was a slow writer ordinarily, a big deleter, a pacer, a procrastinator, but now it wrote, as the silly expression went, itself. He had nearly the whole first act done, from the bookshop fire through the first night in the bookbinder’s loft, and the discovery of the manuscript, including the first flashback, a short scene from Carolyn’s childhood and its horrors. He read it over and found it good, suspiciously good, better than anything he’d done before, deep and dark and European, but with a higher tempo than the general run of serious Eurofilms. He checked his watch: nearly two hours had passed. Outside the window it was growing dark; the plane flew over a clotted field of Arctic clouds. He stretched, yawned, saved his work, and got up to visit the toilet. When he returned he found Mishkin in his seat in what seemed like urgent conversation with his brother.

  “Could you give us a moment?” asked Mishkin.

  “It’s your plane, boss,” said Crosetti. He retrieved his laptop and walked forward to occupy the seat vacated by Mishkin, across the narrow aisle from Mrs. M. Or ex-Mrs., he hadn’t figured out the relationship there yet. He had to pass the two children and could not help noticing that they were both supplied with the latest Apple PowerBooks. Crosetti had never known a really rich kid and wondered what their lives were like, whether they were spoiled rotten and whether they pretended to be less rich than they were, like their daddy, or whether they were so embedded in the life that they no longer gave a damn. The girl was watching a music video, rappers living out a dream of sex and violence. The boy was shooting monsters in Warcraft. Crosetti sat down in the seat vacated by Mishkin, across the aisle from the wife-or-ex, who seemed to be sleeping, with her face pressed against the window, nothing showing bu
t the curve of a blond head and a white neck emerging from a gray sweater. He set up his machine and plunged back into the fictive universe.

  The attendant came by and delivered another glass of icy champagne and dropped a menu on his table. Apparently you could have a filet mignon cordon bleu or cold Scottish salmon or a chili dog. Crosetti went for the filet and was typing again when he became aware of a peculiar sound, like a small dog barking, no, coughing-a kind of suppressed high-pitched squeak. At first he thought it was sound leakage from one of the kids’ machines, but when he looked over at Mrs. Mishkin, he observed that the sounds were coordinated with the spasmodic jerking of her shoulder and head. She was weeping.

  He said, “Excuse me, are you all right?”

  She made a hand gesture that could have been “give me a moment” or “mind your own business” and then blew her nose, a surprisingly hearty honk, into a wad of tissues. She turned to face him, and his first thought was “foreigner”; Crosetti had always thought there was something vague about American faces compared with those he saw in the films of other lands, and this was an example of the difference. Mishkin’s wife had the sort of interestingly constructed northern European face that seemed designed to glow in black-and-white cinematography. The tip of her nose and her eye rims were red, which rather spoiled the effect, but he could not help an entranced stare. It was one more indication that he had departed his real life and was now in a shooting script. She caught his stare and her hand flew to her face and hair in the eternal gesture of the woman caught out of toilette.

  “Oh, my God, I must look frightful!” she said.

  “No, you look fine. Is there anything I can do? I mean I don’t want to get nosy…”

  “No, it is fine. Just the normal stupidity of life in which sometimes it is necessary to cry.”

  She had the right accent too. In a couple of seconds Bergman or Fass-binder was going to come out of the cockpit and adjust the lighting. What was his next line? He groped for something suitably world weary and existential.

  “Or to drink champagne,” he said, raising his glass. “We could drown our sorrows.”

  She rewarded this small sally with a smile, which was one of the great smiles he had seen so far in his life, either on-screen or off. “Yes,” she said, “let us have champagne. Thus the sad problems of the rich can be made to dissolve.”

  The flight attendant was happy to bring a chilled bottle, and they drank some.

  “You are the writer,” she said after the first glass went down, “who discovered this terrible manuscript that has disrupted all our lives. And yet you still write away despite this. In my misery I hear you click-click-clicking. I’m sorry, I have forgotten your name…”

  Crosetti supplied this and in return was directed to call her Amalie. “What are you writing?”

  “A screenplay.”

  “Yes? And what is this screenplay about?”

  The champagne made him bold. “I’ll tell you if you tell me why you were crying.”

  She gave him a long look, so long that he was starting to think she had taken offense, but then she said, “Do you think that is a fair exchange? Truth for fiction?”

  “Fiction is truth. If it’s any good.”

  She paused again and then gave a quick nod of the head. “Yes, I see how that could be so. All right. Why do I weep? Because I love my husband and he loves me, but he is afflicted in such a way that he must sleep with other women. And there are many women who would put up with this, would have affairs of their own and keep the marriage as a social arrangement. This is called civilized in some places. Half of Italy and Latin America must do like this. But I cannot. I am a prig. I believe marriage is a sacrament. I wish to be the only one and have him be the only one, and otherwise I cannot live. Tell me, are you a religious person?”

  “Well, I was raised Catholic…”

  “That is not what I ask.”

  “You mean really religious? I’d have to say no. My mother is religious and I can see the difference.”

  “But you believe in…in what? Movies?”

  “I guess. I believe in art. I think that if there is such a thing as the Holy Spirit it works through great works of art, and yeah, some of them are movies. I believe in love too. I’m probably closer to you than to your husband.”

  “I think so. My husband cannot believe in anything. No, that is incorrect. He believes I am a saint and that his father is the very devil. But I am not, and his father is not, but he believes this because it saves him from thinking he is hurting me-she is a saint, so of course she is above such jealousies, yes? And he need not forgive his father for whatever his father has done to him, he has never said what it is. He is a good, kind man, Jake, but he wishes the world to be other than what it is. So this is why I cry. Now, what is your movie?”

  Crosetti told her, and not just about the script proper but about its basis in real life, Carolyn and their pathetically brief encounter, and about his own life and where he wanted it to go. She listened attentively, and in near silence, unlike his mother, who was full of lame ideas and not shy about sharing them. When he’d finished, Amalie said, in a tone of frank admiration, “And you have thought all of this up in your head. I am amazed by this, as I have not one creative bone in my body, except to produce children and small things, like decorations and cooking. And to make great heaps of money. Is that creative? I don’t think it is.”

  “It’s certainly useful,” said Crosetti, who had nothing of that talent.

  “I suppose. But in the end it is a low art, like plumbing. And one has always the nagging feelings that it is undeserved. As it is. This is why the rich find it so difficult to enter heaven.”

  At this point the attendant emerged from behind her curtain and began the dinner service. Amalie made her children take off their earphones and have what she called a civilized dinner. The seats swiveled around so that Crosetti found himself facing the little boy across a wide wood-grained table, which had been laid with a cloth and real china and silverware and a little vase with a baby white rose in it. Apparently Mishkin had decided to eat with his brother instead of with his family. After a few minutes, Crosetti could appreciate why. Neither of the kids shut up for a second during the meal, which for the boy was, remarkably, a bowl of Cheerios. The girl’s conversation consisted largely of wheedling-things to buy, places to go, what she might be allowed to do in Switzerland, what she refused to submit to. Amalie was firm with her, but in an exhausted way that, in Crosetti’s opinion, presaged tears and screaming fights amid the lofty Alps. The boy responded to a polite question about the computer game he was playing with a continuous stream of information about his entire history in the Warcraft universe, every feature of his game persona, every treasure he had won, every monster fought. The spiel was uninterruptable by any of the conventional sociolinguistic dodges and the boredom was so intense it nearly sucked the flavor out of the excellent filet and the Chambertin. Crosetti wanted to stab the child with his steak knife.

  His mother must have picked up the vibrations, because she said, “Niko, remember we agreed that after you talk you have to let the other person talk too.” The boy stopped in the middle of his sentence like a switched-off radio and said to Crosetti, “Now you have to say something.”

  “Could we talk about stuff besides Warcraft?” said Crosetti.

  “Yes. How many pennies are there in a cubic foot of pennies?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Forty-nine thousand, one hundred and fifty-two. How many are there in a cubic meter?”

  “No, now it’s my turn. What’s your favorite movie?”

  It took a while to figure this out, especially as Niko felt it necessary to review the plotlines of his choices, but eventually they settled on the original Jurassic Park. Of course the boy had it on his hard disk (he had watched it forty-six times, he announced), and Crosetti made him run it with the promise that he would tell him how they did all the effects, and he brought out the special little p
lug that enabled two people to use their headsets at once off a single computer. After that it was dweeb vs. dweeb, and Crosetti felt that he had not disgraced himself as a purveyor of tedious facts.

  The pilot announced their descent into Biggin Hill airport, and they reversed their seats and buckled in. The attendant distributed hot towels. Amalie smiled at Crosetti and said, “Thank you for bearing with Niko. That was very good of you.”

  “No problem.”

  “It is for most people. Niko is unlovable, but even unlovable people need love. It is a wretched fate to love them, but I think perhaps you are one of us who shares that fate.”

  Crosetti couldn’t think of anything to say to this, but found himself thinking about Rolly. Certainly unlovable, but did he love her? And did it matter if he did, as it was unlikely that he would ever meet her again?

  The plane landed gently and taxied briefly through the small airport to the terminal. A blowing rain beat against the windows of the jet. Crosetti and the Mishkin brothers gathered up their carry-ons and outer garments. Crosetti got a handshake and an unexpected kiss on the cheek from Amalie Mishkin, who said, “Thank you for talking with me, and with Niko. And now you will go off to whatever insane adventure Jake will take you to and we will not see you again. I hope you will make your movie, Crosetti.”

  Then Jake Mishkin stopped in the aisle, looming behind him; Crosetti got a strong third-wheel feeling and quickly left the plane. The terminal was small, clean, efficient, and a small staff of uniformed ladies carried him through customs and immigration with the sort of service now available only to the very rich, and which Crosetti had never before experienced. A Mercedes limo waited outside along with a fellow carrying a vast umbrella. Crosetti entered the vehicle and within ten minutes was joined by Paul and Jake Mishkin. The car drove off.