Читать книгу Antkind: A Novel - Charlie Kaufman - Страница 9

IT’S EIGHT O’CLOCK. I knock on the super’s door. An old man, reed thin and ramrod straight, answers. By way of greeting, he hands me a stained xeroxed sheet of paper. I read lips, it says. Please enunciate and don’t turn away from me or cover your mouth while talking. You don’t need to talk loudly or slowly. If you have a foreign accent, indicate which one in the space provided below, as the accent will affect the way your lips move while forming certain words. I am adept at Spanish accents (Cuban and Mexican only), Mandarin, Hebrew, French, Vietnamese, and Dutch. All other accents will make lipreading almost impossible for me and might require paper and pencil, which I am happy to provide for a small fee.

I write American accent on the page and hand it back to him.

He studies it for an oddly long time. I have time to count to thirty in my head and I do this, with all the Mississippis attendant. He looks up, nods. I tell him I am B. and I am here for the apartment. He nods. That’s when I come up with my experiment. I don’t know why I come up with it. Perhaps it is due to some residual hostility I’m feeling from my phone call—but I decide to see what will happen if I just mouth the words to him. I mouth, “Is the apartment ready?” He nods, walks away, returns with a key, and points me upstairs. It works just fine. I mouth, “Thank you.” He nods, smiles, then writes on his paper, Why are you just mouthing?

Taken aback, I hesitate, then mouth, “As an experiment. How can you tell?”

You are not breathing when you talk.

“Interesting!” I smile. Interesting, indeed. I am learning a great deal about the deaf community already.

Later, I’ll practice breathing while I mouth things to him. It’ll take some work, but I think I can do it. Practice makes perfect.

The apartment is as expected. Nondescript. Pale yellow bedspread and curtains. It seems clean. Lysol. There’s a single brown egg in the refrigerator. I pull the curtains. Sunlight makes the room golden.

Left thumb and pinkie!

The bathroom is clean. I unwrap the hotel-sized bar of Ivory soap, wash my hands. Relief. Finding a decent bathroom on the road is always an ordeal.

ON MY BACK on the still-made bed, I stare at the ceiling while practicing simultaneous mouthing and breathing. I discover mouth-breathing while mouthing creates a voice, a whisper-like sound: a deaf person whispering. I experiment with nose-breathing and mouthing words. It’s silent. Takes a little practice. Puts me in mind of learning, as a child, to rub my abdomen and pat my head. I was so goddamn proud of that. I was an idiot, I think. Just like all the other idiot kids. Not the exception. A good student but never the top student. Number two. Number three. I was not a chess prodigy. No one ever approached my mother in a mall and said they were a casting agent and I should be in movies. No adult ever sexually abused me. Only one girl ever sent me a mash note and she was a second-tier girl, not the prettiest or smartest, not even that quirky brooding artistic girl Melliflua Vanistroski. No, the girl who loved me was nondescript. Unloved, certainly. She seemed unsure of herself. She had no discernible personality. Her hair was brown. Her eyes were brown. Her skin was white. Her nose was not cute.

This reminds me and I try the nose-breathing mouthing once again. This time on the exhale, I notice smoke pouring from my nostrils. Odd. I look at my right hand and see a cigarette there. Odd. I did not light a cigarette. I did not have a cigarette. I gave up smoking five months ago. Odd. How did this thing get into my hand? I must admit it does taste good. But quitting was so difficult that I must have somehow unconsciously started up again. I have no recollection of buying cigarettes, lighting one up, inhaling its smoke. Addiction is a powerful beast. I will tear the cigarettes up, throw them out. After I finish this one. It was a tough night and I need to relax. Now fully aware of my little white paper-tubed friend, I suck the smoke deep into my lungs, release it, watch it meander and curl toward the ceiling.

The last cigarette I consciously had was 9 August 1995. The day Jerry Garcia died. Smoker. Heart attack.

The other last cigarette was Christmas 1995 (December). Dean Martin’s death. Lung cancer. Dean Martin, whose astounding, mold-breaking turn in Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Kiss Me, Stupid preceded Charlie Kaufman’s “novel” idea of having an actor lampoon himself by only thirty years.

I feel myself dozing to neuronal strains of “That’s Amore.”

I’M IN MY apartment but it’s a hospital but I live there but it’s piled with clothing. It’s dark. I’m writing something. A book? I write the word unvicissitudinously in a sentence. I stare at the word. I can’t remember the meaning. I attempt to dissect it into its Latinate components to figure it out. Unvic. Issit. Udinou. Sly. These are not words. Well, sly is. But the other words are not words. I am almost positive. A doctor enters with photos pasted on foam core. They are me in profile with different noses.

“These are your options,” he says.

I study the labeled photos. Pug. Button. Roman. Greek. African American. Japanese.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Do I need a new nose? Is the African American nose different from the African African nose?”

Suddenly, I realize—within the dream—that I have been calling the actors in my girlfriend’s movie African Americans, even though they are from other countries. I am mortified. Did she hear me say this? I am a horrible racist!

“Why do I need a new nose?” I say. “Won’t that make me a lie?”

“The surgery is scheduled,” he explains. “It will be a hardship for many people if you cancel. The staff has made time. The noses have been ordered. Think of others for once.”

He is right. I need to think of others. For once.

“Which nose do you favor?” I ask.

“For you? The Fabray.”

He rifles through the cards, pulls out the photo of me with a Nanette Fabray nose.

I like it. It’s small. It’s cute. I don’t think it fits my face, though.

He tells me that this could be the first of many procedures, that over time it would make sense as I was transformed.

“Um …”

“Your face is the face you present to the world,” he says. “Make sure it’s right.”

I nod, although with uncertainty. He puts a check mark on the Fabray nose profile and hands it off to a man in surgical scrubs and a mask.

I’m walking in the woods. My face is bandaged. Completely, except for my eyes. I wonder how I’m going to eat. Or breathe. My hand is in my pocket fiddling with my keys. I realize my key chain is my old nose. I recognize it by feel. That small mole on the wing of the nostril. I think, It’s nice of them to give me a souvenir. On the path, a dog runs toward me. I panic, tense my body. It’s a German shepherd. He is followed at some distance by a jogging woman. She sees my panic, says nothing to me, does not smile apologetically or even acknowledge me. In fact, she seems angry.

“B.,” she says. “Come.” The dog’s name is the same as mine. We share a highly unusual name. She runs past me without any acknowledgment. Her dog is off leash, which I’m sure must be illegal. She is in the wrong and I could call the authorities, if I were so inclined. I have the power. She is in the wrong.

“Thank you for that,” I say, bitingly, as she passes. As sarcastically as I can. She doesn’t even turn. Does she have earphones in? I think back to seeing her from the front. No. She does not have earphones in. She heard me and ignored me.

“How about a sorry? Fucking cunt,” I say, not loud enough for her to hear probably. But so angry. I feel invisible. I hope she didn’t hear me. She does not care about me. She thinks I’m unattractive, not worth the flirt or even common courtesy. I hate her. Then I hate myself for hating her. For caring. For being angry. Why couldn’t she be decent, though? Why are people so awful? I hate people. I hope she didn’t hear me. Why am I not attractive to her? At least she should have sympathy for me because of my bandaged face. People with bandaged faces get sympathy; that’s the societal rule. She was pretty, in that female runner sort of way, that taking care of business, women are tough kind of way. That running bra, tank top way. Maybe the long gray beard sticking out from beneath the bandages made her dislike me. Should I have made the first move to be friendly? I might have said, as an icebreaker, that her dog and I share the same highly unusual name. Why is she nice to her dog and not me? I could easily be her dog. Then she would love me. Then I could stick my nose into her crotch and she would just giggle and push me away. Or let me have a little sniff. All in good fun, if one is a dog. My new nose. The Nanette Fabray. I imagine her dog with a Fabray nose as I fixate on her sweating runner’s crotch. Women sweat from their crotches more than do men; I read that. Looking back at her running along the trail, I watch her ass. I am lonely. She would never love me. I continue my walk. A woodpecker lands on the trunk of a tree near me. I stop and we look at each other. I speak to him in that baby voice reserved for babies and animals.

“Hello, woodpecker. Hi there. Hi there. How are you today? Hello. Hello.”

He hops onto the far side of the tree. Nothing. Asshole.

EVELYN, WHOM I loved once upon a time, who is gone, with whom there was a chance of something human, if such a thing was ever possible in my existence—Evelyn, who is long gone, who, even now, I think perhaps today will call, but she doesn’t, she won’t, she can’t, she doesn’t want to, she’s no longer interested, she’s dead, she’s laughing right now with somebody else, she’s old and unattractive, she’s still amazingly youthful, she doesn’t think of me at all, she went back to school and now she’s a psychologist, a lawyer, the head of acquisitions for an art museum. There’s no way to know. She has no online presence. Maybe she is dead, goes by a different name, a married name. I could hire a private detective, but to what end? Haven’t I done enough damage? Shouldn’t there come a time when I shrivel into a less egregious presence in the world? Perhaps I should consider meditation. I’ve always found myself most aligned with the Eastern religious philosophies. And as one becomes less focused on the I, one would probably become more attractive. The wrinkles won’t go away, but they will become attractive wrinkles. George Clooney billion-dollar eye crinkles.