Читать книгу Antkind: A Novel - Charlie Kaufman - Страница 20

MY EYES OPEN and squint at brilliant, blurry whiteness. Far away, chimes sound from underwater. Am I underwater? Where am I? A blurry face floats into my field of vision and looks at me. Am I standing? If so, how is this face appearing sideways?

“Hello, sleepyhead,” it says.

It is a woman (pardon my assumption, but I am foggy and have not the energy for nonbinariness), and I understand I am lying on my back. I still do not know where I am.

“Where am I?” I ask, in order to find out.

“You’re in the burn unit of the Burns and Schreiber Burn Hospital in Burnsville, North Carolina.”

I take this in for a long while.

“Am I burned, then?”

“Yes.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Three months. You’ve been in a medically induced coma, which is fortunate because most of your painful treatments have already been attended to.”

“Is my name … Molloy?”

“No, honey. Oh, dear. You don’t remember who you are?”

“I thought perhaps I was a comedian named Molloy.”

“No. Your name is Balaam Rosenberg.”

“Oh. Right. Except I go by B. so as not to wield my maleness as a weapon.”

I say this to her by rote. It is a blurry statement without weight or meaning.

“I see,” she says.

I don’t think she does. Nor do I, frankly, at the moment. She checks my pulse.

“Am I disfigured?” I ask, suddenly terrified.

“We don’t know what you looked like before you came here, so it’s hard for us to tell. There are no photographs of you online, only an upside-down caricature of you on the jacket of an obscure book we were able to order from Alibris for six cents. We studied your driver’s license photo, but it is very small. For some reason, smaller than is typical. We didn’t want to reconstruct your face to be very small. So we did the best we could, scaling it up using a piece of graph paper. Here, have a look.”

She holds a mirror to my face. I am afraid but force myself to look. I am pleasantly surprised. The beard is gone but so is the port-wine stain. It’s not bad. I don’t think you could tell I’d been in a fire. My nose does look bigger.

“My nose does look bigger,” I say.

“Does it? We had to rebuild your nose. We couldn’t tell from the driver’s license, which wasn’t a profile, of course. We just guesstimated based on your religious heritage that it would look like this.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning what?” I ask.

“Oh. Well, Rosenberger Rosenberg—we just assumed—”

“I am not Jewish, if that’s what you just assumed.”

Then I hesitate. I don’t think I am. I feel certain I am not. I’m a little foggy about things, but of that I am fairly certain.

“I’m sorry, sir. That is our mistake. We did take the liberty of circumcising you, thinking it had been an oversight on the part of your parents and family mohel not to have had a bris performed, and we also needed skin to graft for your nose.”

“Wait, what?”

“I’m sorry, sir. Let me get the doctor. He can explain it better.”

“So my nose is made from penis foreskin?”

“Just part of it. Because the nose is on the larger side we needed more than just your foreskin, as your penis, while maybe not technically a micropenis, is a little on the small side. I’ll get the doctor. He can explain the whole procedure.”

She hurries from the room. I study my new face in the hand mirror. It could have been worse. They did an excellent job with the grafts. I don’t look like a burn victim. And the port-wine stain is gone. I might even look a bit younger. I am about to train the hand mirror on my penis when the doctor walks briskly into the room.

“Mr. Rosenberg. Hello. I’m Doctor Edison-Hedison.”

He shakes my hand, squirts some antibacterial gel into his hands from the wall dispenser, and rubs them together, also briskly.

“How are we feeling today?”

“I’m OK. I don’t remember much.”

“Well, you’ve been in a medically induced coma for three months. Your memory should or shouldn’t come back at some point or not.”

He looks into my eyes with a bright light.

“Mm-hm,” he says.

“Did you say my memory should not come back?”

“It’s been known to not happen. Studies show there can be long-term, deleterious effects to the brain from induced comas. Well, any type of coma, actually. But we hope not. We surely hope not.”

“I don’t even remember how I was burned,” I say.

“Um, a truck fire, I believe,” he says vaguely, then calls off: “Bernice?”

The nurse enters.

“How was Mr. Rosenstein burned?”

“Berger,” she says.

“Burgers,” he repeats to me. “Some sort of grease fire while you were grilling, I suspect.”

“No,” corrects the nurse. “His name is Rosenberger. He was burned in a truck fire.”

“Rosenberg, I think,” I say.

“I thought it was a truck fire,” says the doctor, pleased with himself. “That’s what I said!”

“I don’t think I have a truck,” I say.

“It was a rental,” says the nurse. “The cashier at the Slammy’s—”

“I love me some Slammy’s,” says the doctor.

“The cashier,” repeats the nurse, checking her notes, “Radeeka Howard told the firemen you told her you had a movie in the truck. She called you a ‘crazy Jew who wouldn’t leave me alone.’ That’s neither here nor there, but it’s in the report, so I thought you should know.”

I rack my brain. I do remember something about a film. I was hauling it to New York, but I cannot recall any more than that.

“Was anything saved from the fire?”

The nurse unlocks a cabinet, removes a small plastic bag, and hands it to me. Inside it, a singed doll. A donkey, I think. Or a jackass. I don’t recall the distinction. Or a mule? It has hinged legs, tail, and head. Burro? I study it, trying to recall something, anything. Nothing comes. There’s one more thing in the bag: a single frame of film. I hold it up to the light. It shows a fat man in a checkered suit and derby hat. He smiles, coyly, childishly, grotesquely into the camera. Right above his head there seems to be an iron bar. Motion blur suggests it is moving toward him at significant velocity. Is someone about to hit him in the head with an iron bar? If so, he is at this moment blissfully unaware of his impending doom. As are we all in our daily lives, I muse. A word pops into my head, as if from nowhere, as if from some deep, hidden place. I say it aloud:

“Molloy.”

What does it mean? From whence does it come, to drop unbidden into my consciousness like a speeding metal bar? I recall that Molloy is a character in the eponymously named Molloy by S. Barclay Beckett. It is a book I have never read, even though I have heard of it sixty-three times, I believe, and have pretended to have read it many of those times. Could that be the Molloy I am thinking of? It is a mystery. Perhaps I will find my answers there. Then I recall that when I woke from my coma, I asked if my name was Molloy. Molloy, it seems, is some sort of key to all of this.

“Do you happen to have a copy of the novel Molloy in the burn center library?” I ask.

“We do not,” says the nurse. “Since this is a hospital, our patient library contains only books that take place in hospitals. So we do have Malone Dies, by the same author, which takes place in a hospital, if that is of interest to you.”

“It is not. Doesn’t Molloy appear in the same volume as Malone Dies and The Unnamable, though?”

“Yes. But we cut those two out of the volume as they do not pertain to hospitals. Our library only contains books that pertain to hospitals. We could order it for you from Amazon, if you like. Hopefully it’ll arrive before you are released in five days. We don’t have Prime.”

“Yes, please,” I say.

AS I LIE here for the next five days, waiting for my release, I think. When I’m not focusing on how much more I can now see my nose between my eyes, I prod the newly empty space in my brain as if it were the site of an extracted tooth and the thing I’m prodding it with is my tongue. My psychic tongue. I’m prodding and poking it with my brain tongue. This empty space, this leerstelle, is what remains of my passion, which was Ingo’s film.

Memories come back piecemeal, not of the film itself, but of all that surrounded it. Ingo was a big, dull Swede, lumpy, unformed, hulking. Oddly, he had a full head of hair: white, neatly cut, conservative. But other than the hair, he was a golem with a snub nose and rubbery lips. It is difficult to imagine he was ever handsome or even presentable. We are informed by our desire scientists that symmetrical features are the most attractive. Ingo was not symmetrical. His snub nose was a messy, right-leaning blob. His watery eyes were of various smallnesses. His pale lips seemed to be trying to escape to the left. And yet with all this going on, his face was not even interesting. If I momentarily looked away, I found it difficult to recall. Growing up must have been lonely for Ingo. Women are distrustful of pretty and even handsome men, but they still desire them. And an unmemorable face connotes a character deficit. It lacks ambition. It reeks of conformity. Although I have never been seen as conventionally handsome (except by my mother ha ha!), I have been considered memorable, and because of that, I have a certain appeal to the ladies. Perhaps they see the intelligence in my eyes or the compassion in my mouth. I pride myself on my humility, so I feel a certain embarrassment even speculating about such things. Perhaps it is the mindful furrow of my brow. None of this is for me to say. My impressive forehead? But in Ingo, there were no such indications of character; there was only an emptiness, a blankness. I do not mean to suggest that he appeared as an automaton, for an automaton can be imbued with the appearance of personality. But Ingo was a sculpture abandoned mid-creation. And now it was too late. The sculpture was crumbling from age. It was turning to dust. What was he leaving behind? What had he to show for his lengthy time on this planet? The answer is nothing. It would be sad if only it were possible to feel for this creature, but his countenance did not allow for it. And because of this, we feel only anger. Ingo did not care enough to allow us to feel fully human by feeling pity for him. His small, unmemorable eyes pleaded “love me” but offered nothing for us to love. It was ungenerous and it made my blood boil. I felt the urge to haul off and punch him. As a student of the art of boxing, I can, of course, throw a decent punch. So even though he towered over me, I knew I could fell him. But I would not hit Ingo, and in this way I was the bigger man.

I rose above his arrogance. I would not play his game. He told me he was a filmmaker of sorts. It is all I could do to not laugh in his unformed face. I do not mean to brag but I can detect an artist on sight. It is my version of gaydar (which I also have). Artdar. This is not based on physical appearance. Both a Sam Shepard and a Charles Bukowski are equally conspicuous to me. It is in the eyes, or, in those rare instances where they have no eyes, it is in their fingertips. This is the case with blind filmmaker Kertes Onegin, who astonishingly acts as his own cinematographer (he does employ a focus puller, but she is also blind). His technique of “feeling the scene” as the actors perform (his films are all in extreme close-up and include his hand in every shot) creates an intimacy unlike any I have ever before seen in any film, and it has made him a target of the #MeToo movement (blind edition). Onegin’s movie снова нашел (Found Again), which explores a rekindled romance between two pensioners separated for forty years, is arguably the most erotic film ever made. That the bodies making love are old and that there is a fifth hand delicately describing the contours of these bodies adds in exponential measure to the experience of the filmgoer. I conducted extensive interviews with Onegin for my monograph Onegin’s Feelies. During our conversations, he required we sit within touching distance and would caress my face throughout, sometimes sticking his fingers in my mouth “to see how wet.” I remember thinking, this is the most true conversation I’ve ever had and also the least true and also again the most true. I will admit there was even an erotic component to it, and although I am not a homosexual by inclination, I did submit to this eyeless genius, this typhlotic Rembrandt late one evening after too much retsina. I do not regret this, for how can one regret true communion? Ingo had none of this to offer. Not in his soft, soggy eyes, like old grapes, not in his pruny, sausage-shaped fingers, like old plums. You are no Onegin! I screamed in my head. You are not my dear, dear Kertes! as I waited for that inevitable question:

“Would you watch my film?”

Let me say, quite bluntly, I am not an admirer of the cartoon in any of its myriad forms. It is to me cloying and sentimental. It is not film in its essence, which, to my mind, is the capturing of a moment. Animation is the manufacture of a moment, and, while one can admire the skills of the illustrators or computer fellows or clay manipulators, one cannot fully invest. It is always at arm’s length. From the very first motion picture recording, the magic was in the commitment to the tether of the ephemeral. Never before in human history had this been possible. Certainly there had existed still photographs for quite a while and that was miracle enough, but whereas a still photograph stops time, kills it, a moving photograph captures it alive. A butterfly in an enclosed habitat, not skewered and mounted on a pinning block. From the very early days, there have of course been the tricksters, the illusionists (among whom I must, with great sadness, count the animators). And certainly innovators such as Méliès have their minions, but, for me, he has never been a satisfying genius. It must be noted that Méliès was a stage magician and his interest was not in revealing life but rather using this new form to further his repertoire of chicanery. That is to say, his work is antithetical to honesty, to the bare-faced vulnerability I most require in my cinema-going experiences.

So it was with great surprise that my attitude was changed by Ingo’s film. It is animation as I have never experienced. Soulful, heartbreaking, profoundly felt. That it is accomplished in such a manner has made me rethink not only how life is lived and the physics of time, but as well, in a metaphysical sense, who we are and the existence of God. That Ingo accomplishes such a true thing not only with the illusion that is stop-motion animation but with the very artificial subject of “movies” gives me pause, undoubtedly the longest pause of my life. I only wish I could remember it.

“I’ll watch for three minutes,” I remember saying. “If it then seems worth my time, I will watch more.”

“In any event, it’s kept me busy,” he said, as he led me to a chair facing the small movie screen.

“I’ll sit after three minutes,” I told him. “If I choose to continue.”

Ingo hovered over me as the film started.

Some of it is coming back now, fuzzily.

It is silent, of course, as his work on it had commenced in 1916. Perhaps sound will be added eventually, I postulate, thus reflecting the coming changes in cinema and technology. That might make it an interesting curio, if nothing else. However, I’m afraid I will never know because, of course, it will be terrib— Wait! The first shot surprises me. It is not terrible, and I must admit I am a tad disappointed. Mostly because I cannot in good conscience quit after three minutes, but also, if I am to be entirely honest, I do not want to have been wrong. I don’t want this to be good. But the first shot is good or at least not bad. Yes, the animation is crude, as all stop-motion animation was in the early days, but there is something startling in the immediacy of the imagery, in its vulnerability, in the mise-en-scène. I am put in mind of Hegel, the philosopher not the cartoon crow. Surely this mountain of desiccated pale flesh could not be a reader of philosophy, and yet …

Three minutes come and go. I cannot look away. I am witnessing something, the first human to pull himself from the primordial ooze of animal unconsciousness to marvel at the beauty of a sunrise. And Ingo witnesses me witnessing it. I am distrustful. Is there a long-dead animator whose life’s work Ingo had stolen to play off as his own? Did Ingo murder him (her, thon)? Was I to be his next victim? Would my as-yet-unpublished monographs soon bear his name as author? But I cannot turn away. I cannot run. In a flash, the first nineteen hours pass. Ingo turns on the lights.

“Now sleep,” he says. “I will wake you in five hours and we will begin again.”

My world is now upside down and I do as I am told. As Ingo predicted, my night is fevered, the characters in the movie ripping into my dreams, infecting them with their gags and punch lines. Where does the movie end and my mind begin? I can no longer say. And I laugh and laugh in my dreams until blood pours from my torn esophagus like so much rainwater from a gutter on a stormy night. In the morning, the movie picks up not where it ended last night but where my dream ended. Or so it seems. How could this be? Perhaps it is a trick of psychology. Perhaps Ingo understood that the human brain will always fill in blanks, will want to weave disparate parts into a cohesive whole. Could Ingo have studied the work of Pudovkin? I refuse to believe he was educated in the montage theory of Soviet cinema. Yet the seamless blending of Ingo’s movie and my life seems to belie my conviction. It is as if the melding of cinema and dream has turned me into another character in Ingo’s film. I am the one who watches, and so I dutifully play my role and continue to watch the film.

The weeks pass. I neglect my monograph. I neglect my relationship. Ingo hovers.

As much as I feel I should not pull myself away from this experience, there are things in my life to which I need to attend. Perhaps five hours’ sleep plus an additional two hours to eat, bathe, and take care of personal and professional obligations. The remaining seventeen hours a day would belong to this nameless film.

“This is not ideal,” Ingo tells me.

A very different Ingo from the Ingo of a few weeks ago: confident now, demanding, an exacting artist who knows just how his film is to be experienced, oddly handsome now, his snub nose at a jaunty and dashing angle, like an admiral’s cap. I have to admire this new and emboldened Ingo. Am I perhaps a little sexually excited by him now? I will acknowledge that I do very much want to please him. But, no, I will take my two extra hours a day. I must assert myself. Wouldn’t Ingo respect me more if I don’t make myself his doormat? I tell him I must. He nods assent, but I have disappointed him.

“Your film is magnificent,” I say: an olive branch.

I cannot bear to see this look in his eyes, eyes that see right through me to my soul. I’m sorry, Daddy, flashes in my sleep-deprived brain. Is this even happening? Is this part of the movie? I can no longer tell. I decide I must not disappoint Ingo. I will continue with his prescribed regimen. And then a strange thing happens: Ingo dies. I try to revive him by yelling his name over and over, but to no avail. I call the police.