Читать книгу Antkind: A Novel - Charlie Kaufman - Страница 8

IT’S EERIE OUT here. Buzzing bugs. Frogs. I put my food and drink in the car and scrub at the windshield with wet paper towels. The bugs spread like Vaseline. Soon the paper towels are useless. The windshield is worse now than it was before. I make the somewhat frantic decision to use my shirt. The large northwest quadrant insect is hard-shelled and stuck fast. I scrape it with my left doorknob pinkie fingernail, the one I paint red in solidarity with Australia’s Polished Man movement and also to cover a minor but horribly unsightly fingernail abnormality called sailor nail. I suggest you do not look it up. The insect comes off in pieces, its insides black and shiny. The inner portion is still alive somehow, like a just-flayed man, but only barely, and I experience one of those profound moments of communion with the natural world. It’s like we acknowledge each other, this insect and I, across species, across time. I feel like he wants to say something to me. Do I see tears in his eyes? What is this creature? As an amateur entomologist, I am fairly conversant in insect varieties, but of course Florida is, in so many ways, its own thing, unlike anywhere else. Even its insects are eccentric and, I suspect, racist. I squash it in my shirt. He was suffering, as are we all. It was the right thing to do.

Then it occurs to me: Perhaps this was a drone. Not an insect at all. A miniature, crying drone. There are such things, I hear. All around us, CCTV monitoring everything. Monitoring everyone. Am I being targeted or was it just an accidental collision? Why would the government want to watch me? Or is it perhaps some nongovernmental organization? Or an individual? Would a fellow critic be able to secure or even afford such technology? Could it be Armond White? Manohla Dargis? One of my enemies? Someone who wishes me ill, who wants to “scoop” me, as it were. I have often sensed that there are forces acting against me, keeping me down. It could be that I am a thorn in the side of the machine. The entertainment industry is a trillion-dollar-a-year enterprise. This is big business, folks. And in addition to the money made, this business has a vast influence on public opinion, cultural shifts, miseducation, not to mention the entire bread and circuses aspect of it. It does not want to be exposed. I’ve often speculated as to why my career gets stalled again and again. Perhaps it is not chance. I pull the drone from my shirt, examine it, peel away the black “flesh.” Inside, I find a tiny, bony skeleton. What fresh hell is this? I ask myself, paraphrasing the great (yet embarrassingly overrated by certain teenage girls) Dorothy Parker, as I speculate as to what our society’s unholy synthesis of electronics and animal technology has wrought. Armond White is a monster. This has Armond written all over it.

I crush this nightmare drone under my foot to make certain it cannot, even in this compromised state, still record my doings, then place it in my glove box for later inspection. I am not an electronics expert, although I did take a six-week course on Atomic Layer Deposition, a thin-film application technique, because I misread the Learning Annex catalog description and thought it was a pro-ana filmmaking seminar.

I see I have been, in the end, left with a driver’s side circle about the size of a medium pizza to see through. It’ll do. I don’t want to be here anymore. I climb shirtless back into the rental car and pull onto the highway. Surprisingly, the cola isn’t bad. Not as sweet as Coke and with more of a citrus kick. I want to say grapefruit but I’m not sure. Pomelo? I perform a good deal of that lip-smacking, tongue-tapping-the-roof-of-my-mouth action to try to determine the flavor. It seems an essential component of identifying flavors, but my wife didn’t do it, and after twenty years of me doing it, she lost all sense of humor about it. What can I say, it’s how I do it. Everyone in my family tastes things this way. Three different Thanksgivings ended in the car ride home with my wife telling me she wanted a divorce. She eventually changed her mind each time, and the subsequent divorce came at my request. This mostly had to do with meeting the African American woman at a book signing for my biography William Greaves and the African American Cinema of African American Identity. She had been greatly affected by the book and had been surprised to discover I am not African American, so insightful (she said!) were my musings on her race and culture. I make a point of including neither my photograph nor my first name on my film writings. The neutral B. Rosenberg (sometimes B. Ruby Rosenberg, in tribute to the essential B. Ruby Rich) allows readers to experience the work free of preconceptions about the source. Granted, she was familiar with the groundbreaking work of celebrated African American Ultimate Frisbee champion Jalen Rosenberger, so she had read the book with a racial assumption about me. But to her credit (not as a credit to her race!), she was able to continue to appreciate the book even after she discovered my race. Even after her second assumption, that I was Jewish. She is an educated woman. I was surprised she did not know that Rosenberg (considering she knew Rosenberger is not necessarily a Jewish name!) is not necessarily a Jewish name. I mentioned that to her. And she said, “Of course I know that, but Jews are matrilineally Jewish, so it seemed conceivable to me you had a Rosenberg father and a Weinberg mother, for example.” First of all, I was in love. Secondly, I told her, no, my mother’s maiden name is not Weinberg, but rather it is Rosenberger, like Jalen, although sadly no relation according to Genealogy​.com. Or the fifteen other sources I checked. I needed her to know. Yes, it can also be a Jewish name but is not in this case. I point out that famed Nazi Alfred Rosenberg was in fact a virulent anti-Semite and I believe I am related to him distantly. So there’s that on my side, in terms of not being Jewish.

“You look Jewish,” she said.

“I’ve been told. But I need you to know I’m not.”

“OK. Your Greaves book is amazing.”

She was amazing. She was all the positive African American characters on TV rolled into one, characters created to combat the negative black stereotypes we see on the news every day. She was articulate, educated, athletic, beautiful, charming, enormously sophisticated. And I suspected I had a chance with her. This would do amazing things for my self-worth, as well as my stature in the academic community. I asked her out to coffee. It’s not that I thought of her as a prop or a thing to obtain or something for my résumé. Well, I did think those things, but I wanted not to think those things. I planned to work on those unappealing thoughts, to make them go away. I knew they were wrong. And I knew they weren’t the entirety of my thoughts. So I would keep them secret and instead focus on the feelings of genuine attraction I felt for this woman. Eventually, the novelty of her African Americanness would recede, and I knew I would be left with a pure love for her, as a woman of any color, of no color: a clear woman. Although I understood that even my feelings for women in general were not pure. Attractiveness was a determining factor, which is wrong. And of course any exotic racial, cultural, or national characteristics were appealing to me. I would be as excited to show off my Cambodian or Maori or French or Icelandic or Mexican or Inuit girlfriend as I would my African American one. Almost. It was something I needed to better understand about myself. I needed to fight my instincts at every turn.

Left thumb and pinkie.

Left thumb and pinkie.

I have often felt that I am being watched. That my life is being witnessed by unseen forces, that adjustments are made as these forces see fit, to thwart me, to humiliate me. I worry that the disabled drone might still have a functioning tracking device smeared on the bottom of my shoe.

I drive to the beach and blow the drone through my Slammy’s soda straw, like a pea, into the ocean. Then I scrub my shoe with seawater. I feel suddenly so very lonely. Maybe it is the sea. The vast ocean. Maybe it is the sea that brings on these feelings. I have often felt a certain melancholic homesickness looking out at it. Am I remembering when I once lived there, forty trillion years ago, next to a hydrothermal vent, when I was just a sea slug or whatever?

I arrive in downtown St. Augustine. It’s early and still closed up. The city is, as is everything now, just more Disneyland. Magic castles. Quaint architecture. That the buildings are authentic somehow does not change the sense of falseness, of fetishization. I grieve for us, a world of tourists, for cities in drag, for our inability to be real in a real place. It is 5:00 A.M. The Slammy’s burger sits uneaten on the passenger seat. The car smells of onions and sweat. I dial my girlfriend’s cell. It’ll be 10:00 A.M. in Tunisia. Seems a safe time to call. She’s filming a movie there with a director you’ve heard of. I won’t say his name. Suffice to say, he’s a serious filmmaker and this is an important career milestone for her. So although I miss her with a heretofore unexperienced fierceness, I respect and even applaud her decision to take this role. Although I will admit I was hurt. There were some words exchanged. I am not proud of that. But our relationship is new and consequently fragile. To force an extended separation at this point is worrisome to me. That it was not worrisome to her did not go unnoticed by me. Undoubtedly, there are some very handsome African American actors from all over the world cast in this movie. She is young and beautiful and sexually liberated, so even though I am supportive of her career, even proud of it, I have insecurities. I hate myself for them, I do. But I have them. I call her often. Often she cannot pick up. They shoot at all hours. I won’t tell you the subject of the film, but it is a well-known historical event that took place at all hours. For the sake of cinematic verisimilitude, of which I am certainly one of the foremost champions, by the way—just look at my monograph Day for Day: The Lost Art of Verisimilitude in Cinema for evidence of my strong feelings on this issue—they must shoot at all hours. So it is a delightful surprise when she picks up.

“Hi, B.” (I don’t use my Christian name so as to maintain a gender-neutral identity for my work.)

“Hi, L.” (Not her real initial, to protect her privacy.) “I’m glad I caught you.”

“Yeah.”

“How’s it going? I just arrived in St. Augustine. Long drive.”

“I’m well,” she says.

She never says “I’m well.” It sounds formal somehow. Distant.

“Good,” I say. “How’s the shoot?”

“It’s going well.”

Two wells.

“Good, good.”

I say good twice. I don’t know why. I do realize the second good modifies the first good to make the whole thing less good. I know that much. It was not intentional. Is anything ever?

“So,” she says, “what’s on the agenda for today?”

“I’ll check in to the apartment. Maybe grab a few hours’ sleep. Then head down to the historical society. I have an appointment at three with the curator.”

“Cool,” she says.

She does not use the word “cool.” Cool equals this doesn’t interest me and I can’t think of anything else to say.

“I miss you,” I try.

“Miss you, too.”

Too quick. No pronoun.

“OK,” I say.

“OK?” she says.

She knows I’m upset and she’s calling me on it.

“Yeah,” I say. “Just wanted to say hi. Should probably get some shut-eye.”

No pronouns back at her and the term shut-eye. I don’t say “shut-eye.” What am I going for with that? I don’t even know. It sounds casual, tough, maybe, like I’m a gumshoe? I don’t know. I’ll have to look up the etymology later. All I know now is I hate those handsome, young African American actors over there, with their cocky bravado, their cool confidence, their meaty appendages, their well-muscled bodies. How incredibly narcissistic to spend that kind of time and energy on one’s body. Doesn’t she see that about them? Maybe not. After all, she does that herself, with her yoga and triathlons and Pilates, her boxing lessons and modern dance classes. But it’s different for women, isn’t it? We don’t like to acknowledge that in our steady societal slog toward genderlessness. But it’s the truth. Women are celebrated and rewarded for that type of preening. And now even men, more and more. Certainly the traditional American masculine ideal is strength and muscles, but not for show, not for the sake of muscles. We admired men whose muscles came from work or sport, not muscles that came as a result of the self-conscious pursuit of muscles. Is it any accident that bodybuilding has been, historically, by and large, the domain of the homosexual male? Muscles as adornment. Muscles as drag. Now, however, you’re as likely to see a well-muscled heterosexual leading man, shirtless, manicured, depilated. I’d like to pause here to say that I fully recognize that my attitudes toward the gay community are not without stereotyping and that I’m working on that. It’s complicated to be a male, especially a white male, with all this lack of sympathy, with all this incessant talk of privilege, with this constant admonition to “Sit down. You’ve had your turn. Now it is time for you to step aside and adopt the attitude of self-loathing,” an attitude I have all along been prone to anyway, by the way. Only now that it is insisted upon, I bristle. If I am to self-loathe, I want it to be my choice, or at least the result of my own psychopathology.

“OK,” she says. “Sleep well, B. Talk soon.”

Vague. Indeterminate. Formal. Passive-aggressive.

“I’ll call tomorrow,” I say. Aggressive. “Tell you how it’s going.”

“OK,” she says.

But the timing of the OK is wrong. There’s a sweet spot. Too quick, it’s forced, jumping the gun, covering for something. Too slow, annoyed, exasperated, communicating a silent sigh.

“Cool,” I say.

I never say “cool.”

“Cool,” she says.

She never says “cool.”

“Get some sleep,” she adds.

“I will. Love you.”

“Love you.”

I click off my phone, furious. A stew of heartache, jealousy, resentment, loneliness, and impotent zugzwang. I know if I were a handsome, successful, young African American gentleman, everything would be so simple. If only I were her, even. I would be beautiful and everyone would love me and be sympathetic to my plight, impressed with all I’d overcome as an African American woman in this racist society. If only, I think. Think about being able to admire myself in the mirror whenever I want, how confident I would be in social interactions. How the Slammy’s woman would smile at me, give me hundreds of free paper towels because I am a sister. Maybe we’d even sleep together. I feel a tightness in my pants. A horniness has come over me at the thought of this transformation and an affair with the sullen Slammy’s woman. I catch sight of my actual self in the rearview mirror: old, bald, scrawny, long unwieldy gray beard, glasses, hook nose, Jewish-looking. The horniness evaporates, leaving me despondent and alone.

My side hurts. A stitch? Kidney disease? Appendicitis? Cancer? It’s been hurting for some time now. On and off. When it stops hurting, I forget about it, focus on some other pain. Then it comes back and I think, Why is it coming back? I should go to a doctor but I don’t want to know if something is wrong. It would only hasten my demise. I would feel hopeless, give up. I know this. I wouldn’t be able to work. I need to work. It is the thing that keeps me alive, this hope that the next thing will be the one to get me noticed. It is always the next one.

I find the apartment building. It’s in a complex outside of town. I’m not sure what the building style would be called, but basically it looks like a giant house, three stories high, maybe eight units wide. And there are many of them on a campus of some sort, and they’re all pale yellow. There’s an empty, pitted tennis court. No net. It’s cheap. I didn’t get much of an advance on this book. On TripAdvisor, the single review of this place read: Close to walk to work to and cloe (sic) to bus route since I don’t have a car and close to restaurants. The review made me sad for this man (Woman? Trans woman? Trans man?) but also worried I’d end up as his (her, thon) neighbor and driving him (her, thon) to work and restaurants. Thon is, of course, my favorite of the available gender-neutral pronouns, probably because it has a certain pedigree, a history, an impressive prescience in that it was created in the gendered wasteland that was the middle of the nineteenth century. I have adopted thon as my own personal pronoun, but other than when I refer to myself in the third person, which happens but infrequently, it gets very little use. Of course I use it in my book-flap biography: “B. Rosenberger Rosenberg writes about film. Thon received the Milton Bradley Film Criticism Certificate of Excellence in 1998, 2003, and 2011. Thon teaches a cinema studies elective at the Howie Sherman Zoo Worker Institute in Upper Manhattan. Thon loves to cook and considers thonself a pretty decent chef. Some of the world’s greatest chefs are women.” I threw in the last sentence because, sadly, it’s still necessary to point out.