Читать книгу Antkind: A Novel - Charlie Kaufman - Страница 21

OR, WAIT, IS that right? Or was he an African American Outsider Filmmaker whom I discovered and perhaps mentored? I am still a little foggy on details. I remember both versions of him. I do, in no uncertain terms, feel the absence of his film, the hole it has left in my brain. I know it gave me reason. I know it was like falling in love, like that feeling of something new, that realization that goes, oh yeah, there’s that in the world. The world contains that. The world contains the possibility to feel like that. And now it is gone, and I know I can no longer feel it or know for certain that such a thing exists in the world. My fire, my reason, is gone, but the massive imprint it left on my soul is still extant, just as a deep meteor crater remains at the site of its earthly collision, the meteor vaporized upon impact. The damage is all that remains of Ingo’s meteor, the hole, the emptiness, the ever-present missing thing, whose presence is its absence, whose meaning is its loss, whose value is a profound mystery that can only be guessed at. As I walk the perimeter of the negative space of Ingo’s film, something comes to me, something I read a long time ago, perhaps at Harvard, where I believe I studied:

All that is not the man describes the man, just as the negative space in a silhouette tells us every bit as much about the sitter as the positive. —DEBECCA DEMARCUS, Solving for X

DeMarcus, an Appalachian poet, woodcarver, and professor of optometry at West Virginia Wesleyan, had served as my first guide through the labyrinthine world of ma, the Japanese concept of the “space between,” the interaction between the mind and the object. Now, finally, I find myself confronted with ma, not as a poetic abstraction, but as the terrible reality at the core of my being. The film is gone, and therefore, the part of me that merged with it, that changed with it, that saw the universe in a fresh way because of it, is gone as well.

I stare out the window at the tire plant across the street. I think about tires, how they’re round and have holes in their centers. It’s analogous to the missing film. Yet the empty space in the center of a tire is useful; it allows the tire to attach to the wheel, which allows it to turn on the axle, which allows the car to move forward. This gives me some hope. Perhaps this missing film will allow me to move forward. Perhaps the missing film is the hole in the tire that is my brain.

We must look at loss in all its forms, mustn’t we? Loss of relationships, loss of love, loss of power, loss of memory, loss of status and the panic that ensues. We must accept that loss is a basic element of existence. The element of absence. All will be lost. “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain,” says replicant Batty of Blade Runner fame, in a rare moment of poetry and coherence in that inept, wrongheaded film by a director who cut his teeth in television adverts and seems unwilling or unable to recognize that the purpose of cinema is antithetical to that of selling toilet tissue. Be that as it may, this is a profound line that exists only because it was improvised by the brilliant Dutch acteur Rutger Hauer. So I am forever grateful to him and his gevoelige geest.

Another thought plays over in my head as well. There are so many things playing over in my head now that it has become difficult to pick out the separate quotes. With a little effort, I get this: “Each insect death is a loss from which we cannot recover. The world needs to be reinvented each time.” Of course! The great Hindu saint Jiva Goswami. There was a time, not that long ago, when I carelessly and selfishly regarded dead insects on my windshield as an inconvenience rather than a thousand, nay, a million tragedies. But those insects, and the hundreds of millions of their squashed fellows, need to be acknowledged. They lived. Their presence changed the world. I did not get to know them all very well. I never got to know them as individuals and now I never will, because they are forever gone, scrubbed from my windshield with my shirt, itself the dead bodies of many cotton plants I will never know. Did I treat Ingo with similar disregard? Was I ever able to see him as an essential, irreplaceable entity? Or was Ingo a means to an end for me? I am put in mind of the Jain Insect Hospital in Delhi. Jainism is, of course, an ancient and profound religious philosophy that, among many other wonderful notions, teaches of the sacredness of all life. Thus, they have a bird hospital, a cow hospital, a shrimp hospital, and the aforementioned insect hospital. There are other hospitals for other creatures in the works, but changing humanity for the good takes time and money.

I visited the insect hospital in 2006 for a feature on the movie The Ant Bully, in which I planned to take the movie to task for its unrealistic depiction of ant hospitals. I felt it was a necessary point to make, but I had to travel all the way to India to gather my proof. In the end, the piece got axed in favor of some drivel by Dinsmore about how A Bug’s Life got insect circuses wrong. But in the process I learned about the Jains and fell in love.

TONIGHT AT THE burn hospital we’re having chicken-fried steak again and Jell-O.

“There is something missing now,” I tell Edison-Hedison between mouthfuls of orange Jell-O.

Edison-Hedison nods, his own mouth full of cherry.

“In me,” I clarify. “Since I’ve come out of my coma. There is a hole in me, empty and hungry to be filled.”

“Well, I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist or any of the other psychos. In point of fact, I’ve been told on more than one occasion that I have a terrible bedside manner, that I am not compassionate, that I am distracted, abrupt, and condescending. So keep that in mind as I proceed, and take my advice with a grain of salt— I should also mention that I am also not a social worker, licensed or un—but what you describe is what everyone feels—everyone, all the time—according to my limited and anecdotal research. So take my advice: Forget about it. That hole is unfillable. Get on with your life. Go back to work. Get a hobby. Find a nice, achievable woman and settle down.”

“I already have a girlfriend. African American, I believe. You’d know who she is, I think. I think she’s famous. I believe she was the star of a popular sitcom in the nineties.”

“Oh! What’s her name?”

“I don’t remember. But you’d know who she is. Then maybe you could tell me.”

There is a long and terrible silence.

“I’m scared and confused,” I add.

“Well, as I previously explained, I am not qualified in any of the mental healthish arts. But I can send in a counselor.”

“I feel a slippage; things are not steady.”

“This much I can tell you: Things aren’t. Time keeps on slipping, slipping into the future, a very sensible thing Steve Miller sings in an otherwise nonsensical song. Do eagles fly to the sea? Why would they? I don’t know, I’m not an ornithologist, but I think not. But the slippage part, that’s real.”

“I think they fish there.”

“Ornithologists?”

“Eagles. In the sea,” I say.

“Maybe so. I’m not an ornithologist or, for that matter, an ichthyologist.”

“Nor am I.”

“Then I guess we’re both just bullshitting, n’est-ce pas?”

“It’s not the slipping of time into the future, which I have come to terms with, with which of I am concerned of. It is the slippage of my thoughts, my definitions, my mental landscape that terrifies me.”

“I’ll call the counselor. Unfortunately, you’ll have to make do with our grief counselor. That’s all we have. We have a lot of dying here. It is, after all, a hospital.”

“I’M NOT REALLY grieving,” I tell the grief counselor, a fat man in some sort of vestment.

“Not even lost time?”

“Maybe.”

“Lost memories?”

“Maybe.”

“The movie you say you lost, which I suspect is merely symbolic of lost memories and lost time. I suspect the movie never existed.”

I show him the single remaining frame. He holds it up to the light.

“This is not a movie,” he says. “For it is not moving.”

“It is a single frame.”

“This is a stillie,” he says. “Don’t kid a kidder.”

I massage my temples.

“I find it telling that your ‘lost movie’ and your coma were both three months long,” he says.

“I think it is a coincidence.”

“If there is one thing they teach us at grief counseling camp, it is that there is no such thing as a coincidence.”

“How would they know that? And why would that be part of grief counseling training?”

“Don’t be a baby.”

And with that admonition, I am released into the wild along with a Goodwill brown polyester suit, plastic shoes, a cardboard belt, and a paper bag holding my wallet, my single frame, and my donkey. I am returned to a world both oddly familiar and familiarly odd.

They point me in the direction of the bus station and I walk, passing a mother kneeling in front of her toddler, talking to her quietly and trying, I presume, to calm her. The child, face tear-stained, looks into her mother’s eyes. When I am half a block away, I hear the child scream, “This is not fun!” What is fun? I wonder. What does fun mean to a child? From where does the expectation come that we are to have it? I smoke the cigarette I discover in my hand.

As I wait for the bus, I struggle to cut through the fog in my head. The smoke of the movie fills my memories, but I can no longer recognize it as it curls around the goo and the tricks and silliness already there. I think stupid thoughts. Then I think them again. I am a joke machine set on automatic, generating ridiculousness. If I knew how, I would stanch the flow; I would create a space in which a dignified existence were possible, in which I could breathe. But it does not seem to be possible; I do not exist. I am a distraction. I surreptitiously study the others here, this cast of characters, my fellows at this moment, in this poorly ventilated room, in which the stink of humanity is paramount. There are too many people in the world, most of them, it would seem, in this room, offering up a panoply of body odor and diabetic urine and feces and sick. Stale cigarette smoke hangs on their clothes and mine. I look up to find a man is staring at me. Our eyes meet and he does not look away. It is a challenge, a game of chicken, and I will lose. His eyes are cold and mean and I see myself through them or I imagine I do: an urban weakling, a homosexual, a Jew. His disdain bores into me. I am ashamed of his version of me and ashamed that I care. I glance up again, hoping to discover he has moved on, but he hasn’t. His eyes on me make it even more difficult for me to think. It crosses my mind that perhaps he is mentally ill, that perhaps he is psychotic, that if I don’t keep tabs on him, I might find him, too late, upon me, beating me to death. His anger is that focused. What have I done to make this man hate me so? The answer is nothing. I have done nothing. I have lived my life ethically and still I am broken, ruined by loss and fire, reconstructed by small-town anti-Semites into parody. My one stroke of luck, the discovery of a previously unseen film of monumental historical and artistic significance, maybe by an African American, maybe by a Swede, has been all but ripped from my memory by a heady combination of mental trauma and brain damage. Why is there no sympathy for me? I have never intentionally hurt anyone. I have always gone out of my way to be decent. I am not perfect, to be certain, but there are so many who are much worse, whose days of reckoning never come. Would this man stare at them? I think not. He would see those men as manly, looking out for themselves, taking what they want. The world is not fair. I cannot remember. Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. I think that is a thing I read, but I cannot remember. As the station fills with more and more passengers, I can no longer see the staring man. I feel his eyes anyway. It surprises me that there are so many would-be travelers. It is not a holiday as far as I know. I don’t recall all the holidays but I know it’s not Thanks Day, which I am certain comes in the fall sometime and it is very hot today. It is a summer month. The people here are almost all wearing overalls sans shirts. Some are wearing overall shorts, sans shirts. Some are wearing something called shirtveralls. I know they’re called shirtveralls, somehow. How do I know that? Everything is mysterious now.