Читать книгу Antkind: A Novel - Charlie Kaufman - Страница 17

INGO CUTBIRTH HAS no known next of kin. He has, it turns out, requested burial at the St. Glinglin Cemetery just south of Twelve Mile Swamp, behind the Tastee Freez and in front of the Frosty Freez. The apartment manager hands me an envelope with four hundred dollars. Oddly, it has my name on it. It’s not at all clear to me why I’m in charge of the funeral, but the truth is, control over Ingo, his legacy, and his belongings is precisely what I want. So even though the four hundred dollars in crumpled ones does not begin to cover the costs of casket, headstone, minister, burial, and reception at Tastee Freez (note: check to see if Frosty Freez can do better), I will gladly pay the difference with a substantial loan from my sister, who married rich. I know there will in the future be countless pilgrimages to Ingo’s grave. I want to make sure the destination is satisfying to these yet-unborn acolytes, of which there will surely be thousands, maybe millions, maybe more. I need an epitaph. Something profound. Something that expresses the cultural significance of Cutbirth but also inextricably ties me to him, to the Cutbirth phenomenon. Pope’s epitaph for Newton comes immediately to mind: Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light. Love, Pope. Perhaps I could construct some similar sentiment. As Spacetime is both invisible and essential, so was Cutbirth. Love, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg. Or The Unsung has Sung. Love, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg. Or A Solitary Man Who Moved Millions. Love, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg. Or On the 32,850th Day Cutbirth Rested. Love, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg. Or The World Was Never Meant for One as African American as You. Love, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg.

I settle on the Unsung one but add And Thus the Heart of the World Is Broken. Love, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg. I hire a photographer to document the funeral. I know I’ll be alone there with the hired Baptist minister (Ingo must’ve been a Baptist!) and this will put me in good stead down the road, cementing our connection in the mind of the public. I am Brod now. I am Brod, my entire life mapped out: executor, biographer, analyst, confidant, emergency contact. Friend. I schedule the funeral for a day during which a torrential downpour is anticipated, the umbrellas and mud being highly cinematic, funereal, illustrative of profound grief, hardship, loneliness. In addition, it will not be difficult for me to appear grief-stricken on the day, not only because I will be, but tears do not always come for me, even though I have taken several acting for directors classes, two acting for critics classes, and one acting for audiences class. With the rain, my face will be wet and I don’t have to worry about verisimilitude. I rent a rain machine from a local film production supply house, just in case.

AFTER I RETURN from Ingo’s funeral and a delicious Frosty Freez frappé, I think about Ingo’s imminent journey from the Unseen to the Seen and all those Unseen he attempted to bring with him. I confirm I must defy Ingo’s wishes—just as Max Brod denied Kafka’s—and search through Ingo’s boxes to find the Unseen. They are, I believe, the negative space defining the positive space of Ingo’s film, and they must now and forever be recognized and celebrated for all they have done. Perhaps there is a second movie to be made with them. Perhaps now is their time. For we live in the future now. Perhaps this is what Ingo would have wanted. I could make that movie. Nobody, not even a puppet, deserves to live and die in obscurity, to live a life unseen. I think about the small laminated card I carry for inspiration in my wallet: Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen—George Jean Nathan. As a critic, I sit in the dark, unseen. But I exist (I exist!), and my time has come. I will bring these unfortunates with me. By studying the film ad infinitum, I will understand who these Unseen are, down to the individual. I will be the Howard Zinn of Ingo’s world, not that unseen African Americans need a Jewish historian to make them visible. But still, I will be it. Even though I am not Jewish.

On the drive back from the funeral it occurs to me that there needs to be something more exciting at Ingo’s gravesite. If the pilgrims are to feel satisfied with their choice of vacation pilgrimage, if the Yelp ratings are to draw the proper crowds, there needs to be some sort of entertainment value. This is, after all, America. Don’t kid yourself. What I envision is a giant slide, say, one hundred feet tall if it’s a day. On one side will be a sequence of stone slabs, each one carved with Ingo’s face, each with a slightly altered expression. As the acolyte slides, he (she, thon) looks sideward and, through the magic of granite cinema, Ingo’s face appears to move. Perhaps Ingo smiles. Yes, I am aware that Alfred Hitchcock’s resting place features such an attraction, but his has him winking. Now that it has been revealed he was sexually abusive, protesters are insisting it be taken down and replaced with a slide in honor of women, created by women. A tribute to women whose careers and lives were negatively impacted by that monstrous misogynist. (Perhaps Tippi Hedren winking? It’s not for me, a man, to say.) And I say it’s about time (though that’s not for me to say, either). Tear Hitchcock down. He was toxically masculine. Don’t soften his brutal legacy by having elfin delight Toby Jones play him. From here on out, Harvey Weinstein should be forced to play Hitchcock in an endless tour of one-man performances, just as James O’Neill was forced to spend his later years portraying the Count of Monte Crisco to atone for something or other to do with vegetable shortening. I make some calls, not about the Weinstein idea (although perhaps later). I call a stone carver, a water slide carver, and the zoning commissioner. I call my sister to borrow a lot more money.

I wander Ingo’s apartment, feeling oddly free here for the first time. He is not watching. No one is watching. I sift through boxes. This is wrong. It is as if I am looking through the recesses of a man’s mind, an intensely private man. And yet I am Ingo’s voice in the world now. His has been forever silenced. If I am to do the necessary work of curating, of illuminating his psyche, work that is necessary because the world needs Ingo, perhaps now more than ever, then I must in essence become Ingo. There is no other way. His boxes are filled with bodies, hundreds, probably thousands, of little bodies, possibly millions of bodies, beautifully crafted with articulated skeletal systems, with malleable faces, dressed in perfectly realized, tiny costumes, no detail too small for Ingo’s attention: policemen, bankers, surgeons, matrons, soldiers, sailors, Mudd and Molloy at various ages. They’re all here, all the characters from the film, all the background actors, individually and lovingly enshrouded in tissue paper like those Chinese white pears at Christmas (or Thonnukah). Here, too, I find the miniature streetlamps, automobiles cataloged by era, dogs and cats, tiny trompe l’oeil newspapers constructed with internal wires so they can be animated to appear to blow through the city streets on a windy day, trees with individually articulable branches and leaves, an organ-grinder, his monkey, fire hydrants, their monkeys, telephone poles, beer bottles, cutlery, boxes of shoes and handbags, city buses and cable cars, railroad tracks, pigeons, robots, a claw shovel, Richard Nixon, stained glass, the Central Park carousel, atom bombs, newsstands, thimbles the size of grains of sand, bartenders, all the white cast members of Hamilton, paratroopers, Macy’s Thanksgiving parade floats. Pretty much anything one could imagine or see in the world is to be found in these boxes. One particularly large box contains only one character: a beautiful young man, perhaps twenty-five, chiseled features, the movie star looks of a Rock Hudson or a Troy Donahue. This puppet is by far the largest I’ve come across. Perhaps nine or ten times the size of any of the others. Is he a giant in this movie? As of this point, maybe a sixth of the way through the film, I have come across no such character. I carefully wrap him back up, replace him in his cardboard coffin, and sit, overwhelmed by the craftsmanship, the care, the love with which these sculptures have been built and protected by Ingo, the respect he has afforded them. I am glad I have embarked on building Ingo a proper memorial. I am glad he will at last be treated with the same respect by me that he has shown his “children” (or as Ingo would sometimes call them, depending on his personality that day, his “chirren”).

I am surprised to feel a single tear rolling down my face. I reach for it with my tongue, taste the salt of my own tender humanity. I am reminded that we all began in the sea. I am reminded that we are all brothers in that way, we were all fish brothers (sisters, thons) at one time, and now we are all human brothers. Or sisters. Or siblings, for the nonbinary and gender neutral among us, who we must remember are also our brothers, or rather siblings, as I said. I espy another box, separate from the rest, almost hidden, it seems, behind a sofa gray with age. This is important, I determine. We always conceal that which is most dear to us, for fear of revealing our deepest, most private thoughts, the thoughts that could be corrupted, contaminated by exposure to others, to the world. I will care for Ingo’s secret. I will hold it close and protect it. I will share it with the world, of course, because that is the work with which I have been charged, but I will make certain it, whatever it is, is fully comprehended. Finally Ingo will be granted the understanding he has always, undoubtedly, craved. As do we all crave. I only wish I could have a me to protect and cherish and share me with the world, with joy and compassion, after I die, the way I will share Ingo. But, alas, there is only one me.

I open this hidden box. It is filled with notebooks, yellowed with age. Jackpot. Ingo in his own words. I will read these books with the greatest care and empathy, then put his words into my words, so as to be better understood by others, and share them with the world (others). The original documents will be archived, of course, for scholars to pore over for generations, but just as any complex text needs interpretation for laypeople to appreciate it, so I’m sure must the inarticulate ramblings of an idiot savant–cum–misunderstood cinematic genius. I remove the top notebook, open it at random, and read aloud:

“We are hidden away. Not just the Negro, but the insane, the infirm, the destitute, the vile, the criminal. We are housed in slums, in jails, in institutions, in hobo jungles. We are all of us hidden from view, leaving only the comedy of whiteness to be seen. My goal is to hold up a mirror to society, but a mirror can only see what can be seen. My camera is such a mirror, but that doesn’t mean the Unseen ceases to exist. It is simply hidden away from the camera lens. And so I shall animate the Unseen as well, all the lives that come and go unnoticed. I shall animate them, remember them, but not record them. And as such my camera shall be the truest of mirrors and this film shall reflect the world as no other. It is as with the blind children in my workplace. Hidden away in an institution, they do not see, and we the sighted cannot bear to see them not seeing. It is unsightly. They remind us of our own vulnerability. If these unfortunate people walk among us, we cannot go on with human comedy unimpeded, and above all else, it is required that we do. Therefore, we must pretend in order that we may entertain.”

I close the notebook and sit in silence for a long while. These incoherent ramblings will be hard to decipher. Still, one cannot expect such a task to be easy. Ingo is, after all, an outsider artist. Most likely he suffers the same communication problems as all autodidacts. But I have my life’s work laid out in front of me. Ingo! I am forever grateful to you, dear idiot Ingo, for presenting me with this herculean task, and I know that wherever you are, you are grateful to me as well.

And what of the giant? Time will undoubtedly tell.

I scour the apartment but cannot find the unseen puppets. Ingo’s commitment to this concept is total. Perhaps their existence is a fiction? In point of fact, the entire enterprise seems unlikely. But no. I take pride in being a student of human nature, of body language, and even the somewhat modern art of hand choreography (I had the great pleasure of interviewing the lovely Irish hand dancer/choreographer Suzanne Cleary for my monograph Hands as Dramatic Implements: From Shadow Puppetry to Bresson and Back) and it is obvious to me that Ingo was telling the truth. I continue my search, looking for hidden panels, trapdoors, false walls, dropped ceilings. I am thorough, as is my way in all things. The only item of any interest I uncover is a yellowed hand-drawn map of the property on which this apartment was built. There is an x on it. Could it be? A map of a mass unmarked grave? Well, whatever it is, it bears investigation.

I procure a pickax and a spade from an ironmonger and get to digging. The day is hot and humid. As an active fencer and inveterate swordsman, my level of physical fitness is likely unparalleled by anyone in my age bracket, but even for me this is grueling work. That I have neither sought nor gotten the approval of the premises manager only adds a level of stress to the entire endeavor, which cannot be heart healthy. Still I persist. After what seems like forty-five minutes of shoveling but was probably only forty-four, I hit something hard. It is the calvarium of a head, a tiny head. Pay dirt. I pull out my archaeological tools, the ones I always carry on my person—trowel, soft-bristle toothbrush, and professional dental tools (sickle probe, periodontal probe, lip retractor)—for the delicate work and begin. Within five hours, I have uncovered what I estimate to be roughly a thousand puppets of all races and ethnicities, of all ages, some dressed as household servants, some as coal miners, some as assembly-line workers, soldiers, newsies, prostitutes, farmhands, one I believe was a zookeeper, but I am uncertain because the uniform had been partially eaten by a fungus. And there is no end in sight. The Unseen no longer. Soon we shall all step out of the darkness, together. Out of the darkened theater. Into the light. We will be seen. I will be their leader, but not because I am the white savior, no, not that, but because I am the only one of us who is not inanimate. I call my girlfriend to tell her the news. It goes to voicemail once again. I punch a wall and get back to the movie, strictly adhering to Ingo’s prescribed schedule and rules (although I do use his bathroom, which is thoroughly disgusting but proximate). It is unfortunate that I now need to change the reels myself. I thought about hiring a local schoolboy to do it for me (a sort of Shabbas goy), but I worry about his leaking to the press. The next two months and twenty days have a cumulative effect on my psyche. Any boundaries between the movie and me dissolve. I am both infinitely stronger and infinitely weaker than when I started this film. Just as the Campotini ant is enslaved by the fungus O. unilateralis, so I have been enlisted to monomaniacally do the bidding of Ingo’s movie. Weak-willed yet undeterrable, I will make certain it is properly disseminated, appreciated, celebrated. It has become my life’s work; that much is clear. And though, as with the ant, it will most certainly end with my head exploding, metaphorically (one hopes!), I do not care. I do not care. I stack the film reels in my apartment. I take what remains of his sets, of his puppets as well. All of it almost fills up my back room, the one I formerly used for sewing projects. As I survey the space, I cannot help but let my mind wander to the future adulation I will perhaps receive, the lectures, the Nobel for Criticism, the Pulitzer for Profound Insight. I am energized in entirely new ways. I cannot lie; there is a sexual component to all of this. I masturbate. I try my girlfriend again. I punch the wall.