Читать книгу Antkind: A Novel - Charlie Kaufman - Страница 22

THE BUS HAS been double-booked. Greyhound offers four dollars off any domestic bus trip for passengers willing to take the following bus, which is at 5:30 P.M. next Thursday or Friday; they’re not certain. No takers, so they implement their “Emergency Lap Plan.” All passengers are weighed and assigned a lap buddy. Since I have lost 47 pounds in the hospital and weigh in at 94 pounds soaking wet (they don’t explain why they needed to hose us down), I am paired with a tracksuited man named Levy who is 336 pounds. He shakes my hand and tells me to call him Grabby, that everyone calls him Grabby.

“Where’d you get such a nickname?” I ask, forced casual-like.

He hesitates for a moment, then tells me that when he was a little boy, he’d always grab an extra cookie from the cookie jar. I do not believe that explanation for a minute, but I am not staying at the bus station until next Thursday or Friday.

It’s not too bad, in truth. Levy has a soft, warm, comfortable lap and keeps his hands mostly to himself. We engage in a brief, awkward conversation in which we try to find common ground:

“You watch sports?” he asks.

“No. You read?”

“No. You like cars?”

“Not much. You like movies?”

“DC, not Marvel. Marvel is shit.”

“How about travel?”

“Branson. Hunting?”

“Antique hunting!”

“Like, shooting old animals, you mean?”

After a perfectly timed pause, I say, “Yes, that’s what I mean.”

With this, we settle into our own worlds—Levy playing a videogame on a device he calls his Sega Pocket Gear, arms wrapped around me and watching the small colorful screen from over my shoulder while I try to read Molloy. It is slow going. Concentration is difficult these days under the most ideal circumstances. Levy possibly has an erection. I read the sentence “I don’t know how I got there” again and again. I can’t seem to understand it. On the surface, it seems like the simplest of sentences, but what does it mean? I suspect there are some gaps in my comprehension. Were the gaps always there? I can’t recall. That’s the thing about gaps. Will I ever be back to normal, if this is not normal? The doctors couldn’t (or wouldn’t) say. It is terrifying to lose things. I have lost time. I have lost most of my memory of Ingo’s movie.

“Shit, I lost,” says Levy.

He pauses to look contemplatively out the window for exactly three seconds, then starts a new game.

One needs to learn to let go, to pick up the pieces, to start again. My lap buddy is modeling an important life lesson. There will be other Ingos. I will discover many more never-before-seen masterpieces in my lifetime, maybe thousands. If I only keep my eyes open. And keep them open I shall!

I nod off briefly.

Look, if there is some level of memory loss or brain damage, I will exercise what is left of my mind. Just as a great athlete who loses his legs can—with grit and determination and one other thing … gumption?—become a great athlete again by utilizing those hoppy leg-things, so can I regain my edge, get my groove back as Sheila did … Was it Sheila?

“Is it When Sheila Got Her Groove Back?” I ask Levy.

“How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” he says, eyes never off his toy.

“Oh.”

“Pretty good flick,” he says.

“I was asking about the book,” I say. “I don’t see those kinds of movies.”

“I don’t know what the book was called.”

“I think it was When Sheila Got Her Groove Back,” I say. “They often change things for the movie.”

“Oh,” he says.

“Three Days of the Condor was originally Six Days of the Condor,” I remind him. “So—”

“Uh-huh,” says Levy.

We drift back into our separate worlds, he to a small green Martian (?) attempting to navigate a series of crisscrossing Martian canals (?), while I watch the passing dusky landscape. The North Carolina highway is littered with shanties. Barefoot children watch our bus, jaws agape. Have they never seen a bus? Surely this is the bus route. Are their jaws slack from malnutrition? How have we as a country failed these mouth-breathing cherubs? I feel the sudden urge to scoop them all up in my arms. Maybe that is something I could do now that the life Ingo’s movie would have afforded me is gone. Maybe I could come down here and be a teacher. Even with whatever degree of brain damage I have likely suffered, I could still be helpful in a godforsaken place like this. What sort of handicap is recalling only half of the Iliad in the instruction of children who can’t even close their mouths? I imagine myself in a one-room schoolhouse, calling attendance, bandaging boo-boos, battling the school board to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. In short, making a world of difference. Maybe all that came before in my life has led to this moment. I suppose I would have to get some sort of teaching license. But how difficult could that be? Certainly elementary in a place like this. I chuckle at my unintended pum. Is it pum or pun? No matter. Pum, I decide.

“Can you read books and such, Mr. Rosenberg?”

“Yes.”

“Can you plus and take away, Mr. Rosenberg?”

“Certainly.”

“You got yerself a teachin’ license! An’ that comes with a fishin’ license, too! Yee-haw!”

“Thank you, my good man.”

Soon Levy is dozing, and I spend the remainder of the long trip home imagining my new and simpler life. I can even envision a biopic someday. It truly feels as if I’ve finally found my calling.

By the time we reach New York, I am over it. I’ve given it a great deal of thought and decide that I can’t let the bastards win. I can’t roll over and die. I can’t give up on my dreams. I will find another unknown masterpiece (there must be millions!), which I will protect properly this time. I will immediately digitize it. I will make copies. I will get a safe-deposit box (or is it safety-deposit box?). I will hire a lawyer and send a copy to him (her, thon). I have learned a valuable lesson.

I fight my way through the central casting crowd of prostitutes, dope fiends, and sad-sack commuters at Port Authority. Someone should do a movie about New York someday. I mean, a real one. Nobody has ever come close. I know how to do it and would in a heartbeat. I know this city. I know its terrible pain and its meager triumphs. I could do it. I should do it. I will do it. Even though my single foray into filmmaking was met with an almost violent indifference, which, to be honest, verged on a conspiracy to silence me. But I feel ready to once again assume the mantle. My wounds have been sufficiently licked, and not just by Levy. I have withheld my affection from the intelligentsia long enough. I have fought back through the Mount Olympian criticism. I see a large-canvassed piece encompassing all of Manhattan, from Marble Hill to Battery Park, and across generations, from the early Dutch settlers to the Chinese and Saudi billionaires of today to the future Czech mindlords. And they’re all living there together, centuries of people jammed into twenty-three miles. Actually, a new thought: This would include the native Lenape people who lived here as well. We’re all there, packed so tightly we can’t move. And within this skewed reality, we focus on a love affair. Between two women, who, by the luck of the draw, happen to be packed in next to each other. So in this sense, the movie is about fate, but also about the melting pot, but more to the point, the salad bowl, because one of these women is African American from the 1920s and the other is a Palestinian American from the present. This is the movie I would make. And there are ways to cut costs. Mostly it would be close in on these two women, and they could both be short (not necessarily little people, but possibly, which would give the whole enterprise an added dimension of caring and diversity), so the camera, which would be at their eye level, can’t see beyond them to the massive crowd. The beginning and end sequences, which would need to show the expanse of people, could be done with CGI, which stands for Computer Generated Something. My girlfriend will play the African American woman. She is not short, but, again, CGI would shrink her up quite nicely, using computers and such.

AS I MAKE my way to 10th, I play the Ingo film’s destruction over in my head. I think about what is gone. My life’s work. My thoughts. My three months. Ingo’s life. Is it retrievable? No. It is ash. Humpty Dumpty, a parable I had never even considered as anything more than a childhood egg rhyme, has overtaken my brain. There is nothing but panic. Nothing. My life has burnt to nothing. I have been given a tiny taste of significance, and its absence is that much more devastating because of it. I try once more to recall Ingo’s film. How careful a viewer was I? Not careful at all, it turns out. Not attentive. Did my mind wander? Did I daydream about the glory awaiting me for my discovery? Yes. Is that part of Ingo’s film? I fear not. It is my own pathetic “film.” My own valueless contribution to the vain chatter of a trillion egos clutching for some table scrap of immortality. I see that now. I was an imperfect viewer. I did not give my full self.

Oh, Ingo. Dead and gone. Erased. I insinuated myself into your trust. I was your sole audience and with that came an immense responsibility to you, to the work. I cannot bring you back. I cannot bring back your life’s work. Yet I cannot live if I do not. I try to remember. My brain aches with the effort. I think back to that first day, the hardback chair, the initial frame, the first movement, the scratches on the film, the stains, the overexposure, the underexposure, the correct exposure. These accidental artifacts are no less essential elements of the film than those conscious choices made by the artist. The world gets to have its say in the piece. The world will not be denied.

And so perhaps, I consider, the world has had its say. The film erased, swept away like the sacred sand mandalas of Buddhist monks. It returns to its disorganized form of ash. Ashes to ashes. There is solace in this for me, for I have long considered Buddhism the philosophic system closest to my heart. There is a human desperation in the process of film, a human need to control, to own, to fight against the ephemerality of the world. Even the terminology of photography is fraught with humanity’s need to control, to tame. It is said that photographers “capture” a moment. One can no more capture a moment than one can stop the flow of time. This is not how the world works, and yet we convince ourselves through our ever-advancing technology that it does. But death always comes. There may be a monument to us in the form of an artwork or a tombstone, but it does not change that fact. We are in a constant state of adjustment. We adjust. We adjust. This happened, now what next? This is our question as humans and so it goes. With this balm applied to my psychic trauma, I proceed. I will remember. And my remembering will be my collaboration with Ingo. The collaboration of an African American man whose life spanned the twentieth century and a white intellectual whose life began mid-twentieth-century and will end probably sometime in the early twenty-second. There will certainly be an outcry. Cultural appropriation, they will claim. The white man once again profits from the accomplishments of the black man. To those people I have two things to say: 1) Is not Ingo’s film an appropriation? For does it not utilize a technology invented by white men? And from what I remember about Ingo’s story, it takes place entirely in the world of white people, specifically in the world of white movie comedy. Do whites own the “gags” employed by Ingo in his work? Perhaps. But I do not begrudge him this. I am flattered by his usage of our work. And, 2) There exists no one else for this job. I am, for better or worse, his sole executor. I realize this word sounds dangerously close to executioner. This is a quirk of the English language and there is nothing to be done about it. 3) Maybe Ingo was a white Swede.

My task laid out before me, I find a bench in Port Authority (why am I back here?) and sit, a legal pad in front of me—I only write longhand. On legal pads. Call me a dinosaur, but I do not put stock in word processing machines. Writing must be a visceral experience for me. There must be smudges. There must be crossed-out passages; the violence of the slash reminds me of my passion in the moment of self-rebuke. Was I tired or sad when I wrote this or that? The slant of my handwriting tells me so. The forensics available to an analyst of handwriting are limitless. I begin.

A man roller-skates. No, a man walks in a windstorm. He travels from screen left to screen right. Some objects blow by. He loses his hat. Maybe there is a child. Maybe there is a blob falling from the sky …

It is not working. Four hours of struggle have yielded meager results. I cannot remember. My limited human wiring, designed primarily for fight or flight, for remembering which berries are edible, for vanquishing my enemies, will not allow it.

Wait. The film was lost in a tsunami, I suddenly recall. I jumped in after it, even though I don’t like to swim, and was batted about like actist Naomi Watts, until the Coast Guard rescued me and took me to Morton Downey Drowning Hospital in Doctor Phillips, Florida, where Dr. Flip Phipps induced a coma and reconstructed my nose, both of which for reasons that remain unclear. What about the fire? Wasn’t there a fire? Yes, there was a fire. How can both versions of the film’s destruction be true? I don’t know, but there I am, driving north from Doctor Phillips, the roads empty. Whole towns have been evacuated because Hurricane Button (named after signer of the Declaration of Independence Button Gwinnett?) is expected to make landfall soon. So I am speeding to try to keep ahead of it. According to Saffir-Simpson, Button is currently a tropical storm, which puts it at seventy-three miles an hour tops. I go seventy-four to keep in front of it. My radio is tuned to weather. If the storm gets upgraded, I will go faster. I should have left yesterday, but I was in a funk and could not leave the hospital.

Today is different. Today I have a fire under me. I need to be back in New York. All hope for my Ingo project dashed, I need to reimmerse myself in the life of New York City. There are movies to see, art openings to attend, inexpensive ethnic restaurants to discover. But most important, my African American girlfriend is now back. Our contact has been scant for a few months now, both of us focused on our work. The perils of the long-distance relationship! But if I drive straight through, I can be home by ten. The thought of her welcoming arms, and dare I say, vagina, keeps me focused. That and Button, which the radio tells me is now expected to make landfall south of Myrtle Beach. The tolls are slowing me down. In my rearview mirror, the sky looks bad. I play a game to pass the time, attempt to name the states in order along the coast between Florida and New York. Georgia comes next, then South Carolina, North Carolina, then South Virginia, West Virginia, North Virginia … Napierville. Delaware. Vagina. Mary. Pencil. New Jersey. New York. The game doesn’t take long enough. I’m still in Florida. I entertain myself with imaginings of my reunion with my girlfriend, the commingling of our bodies, her rich brown skin, an almost chocolate brown against my pinkish white hue, an almost Turkish delight, both glistening with perspiration. I am quite carnal by nature, which is not at all at odds with my intellectual tendencies. Popular culture would have you believe that the “nerds” and the “geeks” and the “dweebs” and the “dorks” and the “pencil necks” are hopeless when it comes to matters of the heart and body, but just as a more educated palate can better appreciate the subtle distinctions between various varietal wines, a person educated in the arts of seduction and sex can and will prove to be a superior lover. For example, since I can instruct my lover in the art of pompoir and kabazzah, I stand a better chance than one’s typical dime-store lothario of engaging in a mutually satisfying and often explosive sexual encounter. These techniques have the extra added benefit for the female of putting the male in an entirely passive position, thus giving the power to her. Of course, empowering the female is often sexually liberating for them, but also I love to be controlled by a strong woman. If that strong woman happens to be African American, well, I am in heaven.

So I imagine my girlfriend on top of me, my yoni, I mean my lingam, completely in her hands, metaphorically, because in kabazzah, my lingam is completely in her yoni, and she contracts her vaginal walls and pulls in her abdomen in slow, powerful undulations. She is a belly dancer astride my member. This imagery alone is enough to cause an erection, and I must shift my focus or I am in danger of ejaculating during a hurricane, which the National Weather Service strongly advises against.

Finally safely in New Jersey, car parked at my lot in Harrison, I PATH it home. New York smells the same and most intensely the same at Port Authority. I fight my way through the central casting crowd of prostitutes, dope fiends, and sad-sack commuters. Someone should do a movie about New York someday. I mean, a real one. Nobody has ever come close. I sit down with my legal pad and attempt to write it here and now. I cannot.