Читать книгу Foregone - Russell Banks - Страница 10

From the darkness, Malcolm says, You okay to take a break, Leo? We don’t have to change cards yet. We’re shooting 1080 by 1920. Sorry, man, this is for Sloan’s benefit. You know all that shit.

Fife says, Yeah, yeah, I’m okay to take a break.

He’s fighting off waves of nausea and thudding back pain. His body is a battlefield, as if his liver is at war with his kidneys and both have been mortally wounded. He’s woozy and suddenly confused about where he is exactly and who’s here with him. As long as he is talking into the mic and being filmed, he is able to forget his body, to wear it like loose clothing, and it doesn’t matter where he is located or who is there with him. But as soon as the camera shuts down and he goes silent, he becomes his body again, and he worries about where it is and who is near it.

I want to keep doing this, he says.

Diana says, You sure you’re not too tired?

From what? Of course I’m not too tired! It’s her voice that he snaps at. No matter what she says, it’s the shriek of an irritated blue jay.

He’s quickly sorry he was sharp with her. Nothing she can do about it, he tells himself. She’s had to overcome the unintended effect of that voice her entire life. Especially its effect on men, men who cultivate their baritone and bass and hold their time signature at 4/4, except when slowing it for emphasis to 3/4. Or dropping it all the way down to half notes for winning arguments. Men who are actors. Men like Fife.

Despite her voice, Fife likes and respects Diana. Malcolm would be nowhere without her. He’d be making local TV commercials in Winnipeg or promotional docs for Caribbean time-shares. Because of Malcolm’s sneaky little affair with Sloan, among other things, Fife feels sorry for her. He’s always felt sorry for Diana, from back when she was his student at Concordia and Malcolm was his teaching assistant and seduced her by convincing her that he was more talented than she, when Fife knew the opposite was true. Diana could have become a real filmmaker, but instead she fell in love with Malcolm and married him and became his producer and made him the filmmaker. Even then, Diana was honest, and Malcolm was not.

Same as Emma and Fife.

Why are women more honest than men? he wonders. It ought to be the other way around. Men have so much more power in the world, you’d think they could at least take a shot at being honest. What do they have to lose? Look at Sloan, who is probably convinced that she’s in love with the short, shifty, bald-headed, fifty-year-old married man, and she thinks he’s in love with her, or she wouldn’t sleep with him. Even Sloan is honest.

Of course, it’s possible that she’s just cynical and believes that Malcolm can advance her career a whole lot faster than some attractive, unmarried guy in his twenties. But Fife doesn’t think so. The girl is honest.

Alicia Chapman of Richmond, Virginia, she was honest, too. All the women Fife ever loved were honest. And from his first love to yesterday’s, he was not.

Fife says, I’m sorry, Diana. I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just, this is hard. Keeping focused. Not letting my fucked-up dying body distract me. My body wants my complete attention. Just like you and Malcolm, my body resents it when I pay attention to my remembered, hidden past.

Speaking of which, Malcolm says, we have all these questions written out that me and Diana put together for you. Like for posterity, my man. The definitive Leonard Fife interview.

The final interview.

No, c’mon, dude, don’t say that. It’s just, I mean, this story you’re telling. It’s not exactly what we planned on. I mean, it’s interesting and all, and there’s a lot of surprising material back there. The first marriage to the southern woman, Alicia, and all that, wow, that’s news. But we want to connect it to your work, man. This is supposed to be about your films.

My second marriage. Not my first.

Oh. Okay, second, then. But we’ve got questions on process, for example. Like, the Gagetown Support Base story, In the Mist, your first film. Tell about them testing Agent Orange way the fuck out there in Gagetown back in the sixties, and how the film permanently pissed off both American and Canadian governments and Dow Chemical. Or was it Monsanto? I can’t remember. And how you almost went to prison for it. It would be really interesting to learn how you first got onto that story, like when it was still totally top secret in Washington and Ottawa. You were just a kid then. What or who tipped you off to it? You never said. The Gagetown Agent Orange defoliant story is our shared history, Leo. One of Canada’s guilty secrets. The fucking Americans, testing Agent Orange on Canadian soil before using it in Vietnam, that was important for us to know about, man. We were supposedly neutral on Vietnam, as you knew better than almost anyone. People need to hear you talk about that today. Now.

Yeah, well, Fife says, Gagetown’s not top secret anymore, is it? It’s public knowledge. Half a dozen films have come out since the story broke, and as many books and parliamentary hearings and investigations have dug into it, and there’s even a batch of niggardly payouts made by the government to some of the cancer victims’ families. Forget top secret, Fife says. It’s not even a guilty secret now.

He thinks it’s funny—no, not funny, ironic—how, when a guilty secret is finally revealed, the guilt quickly dissipates and gets replaced by a cleaner, more acceptable emotion. Anger, usually followed by denial. Once their secret was out, the US and Canadian agencies that were responsible for decades of spraying Agents Orange, Purple, and White on their own soldiers at Gagetown Support Base didn’t feel guilty anymore. They felt angry. And their anger let them refuse to apologize. It let them deny they did it with intention or anticipation of the consequences. The devil made them do it. Acknowledgement without apology.

Fife wonders if that’s the reason he’s returning, not to his Canadian past, where Malcolm and Diana want him to go, but to his distant American past, where no one wants him to go, where his own guilty secrets were embalmed and mummified and, until now, for all intents and purposes permanently entombed. He wonders if by means of disinterring his past, he’s trying to swap out guilt for anger and denial. As if to say, Yes, it’s true, I did all those bad things, I’m guilty as charged. But, people, it wasn’t my fault, I had a terrible childhood, I was the victim of circumstances. The devil made me do it. Everything is contingent. And now, since I’ve confessed and can be angry at my parents and at circumstances and at the devil, at my fate, now everyone has to forgive me. Acknowledgement without apology.

There’s lots he could tell the camera about making In the Mist that would satisfy Malcolm and Diana and impress Vincent, their impressionable DP, and might make Sloan reconsider her attachment to Malcolm. Fife is under no illusion that it would invite her to transfer her affection and admiration over to him, a sick and dying old man who hasn’t tried to seduce a pretty young woman in a decade. He believes the implicit comparison between him and Malcolm as filmmakers would diminish Malcolm in her eyes. That would please Fife. Sick and dying and old, maybe, but he still competes with other men for the affections and admiration of young women. It’s in his DNA. Like everything else that’s wrong with him, it’s not his fault, right? Acknowledgement without apology.

Sloan thinks Malcolm is a guerrilla filmmaker. It’s what he calls himself, despite having bankrolled his soft-stroking films—thanks to Diana’s money-raising skills—with support, as they like to call it, from multinational corporations and government film boards and private foundations and millionaires. Fife could show Sloan how a real guerrilla filmmaker works. He could tell her mic and Vincent’s camera the truth of how and why he was led to uncover the Gagetown spraying, instead of sitting here telling them who he was before he became a Canadian.

He could tell them how he first heard about the mysteriously desiccated crops up there in Gagetown, New Brunswick, from the US Navy deserter who’d become a truck farmer on land adjacent to the support base. The deserter was called Ralph Dennis, a tall, pear-shaped Oklahoman in his early thirties with a gentle smile and hippie spectacles and a permanent peach-coloured blush on his cheeks. Fife met him late one mid-April night at the Montreal Council to Aid War Resisters down on Alymer Street, where he went for help finding his first job in Canada. There’s a blousy, wet snow falling, the kind that marks the start of spring more than the end of winter. In front of a three-story greystone town house, tight to the sidewalk, outside the painted yellow door of the Yellow Door coffeehouse near McGill, where the Montreal Council keeps office space on the second floor, Fife enters and Ralph Dennis exits, and the two literally bump into each other.

Fife apologizes, and the man apologizes back, and Fife recognizes his Oklahoma drawl, though he thinks it’s probably Arkansas or Missouri, possibly Tennessee. It’s definitely not Anglo- or French Canadian. Fife thinks of himself as an expert on American accents. He asks the man if he’s American.

One hundred percent. I guess you must be one of us, too, the man says. It’s more a question than an observation.

Yes.

The fellow asks Fife where he’s from, and Fife hesitates and then says New England.

Just up here for a visit?

Yes. Sort of. His answer hangs in the air a few seconds.

They’re closing up inside, but there’s still time for a coffee. Care for a coffee, brother?

Fife follows the man inside, where they shake hands and introduce themselves by name. Ralph Dennis says he works part-time as a volunteer for the Council to Aid War Resisters, and Fife says that’s who he came to see.

I figured. You speak any French?

Not really. I can kind of read it. From a year of high school French.

Level of education?

Again he hesitates. A little college. Not much.

No degrees then. You got a trade? Some kind of professional skill?

Fife shakes his head no.

So you’re one of the guys with talents, but no skills. You don’t speak French. And you don’t own any property here?

No.

It don’t look good, brother. You need to get landed status to stay in Canada, and you’re not going to get it in Quebec. You’ll have to go to an English-speaking province, where they have a use for Anglos with talents but no skills. After you get landed, you can pretty much go anywhere in the country, if you want. Ralph says that during the summer months he manages a truck farm in Gagetown, New Brunswick, for an absentee owner. Mostly it’s cucumbers for pickling trucked to Fredericton, the provincial capital. The owner runs a big canned food corporation out of Ottawa, he says. Ralph likes working in winter with the Resisters here in Montreal, but he’s in the process of opening an office in Fredericton and from now on will stay up there in New Brunswick year-round. A lot of your fellow New Englanders have started coming over from Maine, he says.

An hour later Fife has a job. He follows Ralph Dennis back up to Gagetown and goes to work that summer as a labourer on the cucumber farm. In his downtime, he studies French from a high school textbook, and at Ralph’s suggestion that he try to shape his talents into a skill, maybe journalism, he borrows Ralph’s portable Sony cassette recorder and starts taping interviews with Ralph and his neighbours.

Most of their conversations keep coming around to the mysterious waves of silver mist that in the last year have begun drifting off the base whenever the wind shifts to the east. Crops and gardens and animals have begun to sicken and die, and all the locals are convinced that it has something to do with the mist. The Canadian military has admitted that in order to clear the brush for manoeuvres they’ve been spraying some kind of defoliant, but no one at the base will tell the locals what’s in it. Ralph loans Fife his 35 mm Leica Rangefinder and asks him to take pictures of the dead fields and gardens and the stumbling, maddened calves and sheep.

We may need a record of all this someday, Ralph explains.

Fife visits the farmers and farm workers in and around Gagetown in Ralph’s pickup and spends endless early-morning and evening hours out by the fence that surrounds the vast acreage of the base, where he shoots black-and-white stills of the helicopters, the famous American Hueys, while they spray the land below and the Canadian troops reconnoitering in the dense brush and among the low conifers. He shoots pictures of the empty orange barrels of 2,4,5-T dumped into bulldozed ditches near the fence. He works alone and tells no one, except Ralph Dennis, what he’s recording, because he doesn’t know yet what he’s recording.

He could tell Sloan and Vincent and Malcolm and Diana and the rest of the world that it isn’t until four years later, hunkered down in his rented room in Pointe-Saint-Charles in Montreal, that he finally figures out what he taped and photographed in Gagetown. Ralph Dennis and his neighbours have long since stopped trying to grow anything in their poisoned fields. Ralph fell in love and married a local woman. He gave up his work with the Resisters and moved with his new wife to Winnipeg, which he calls Tulsa North. He’s homesick, and Winnipeg is as close to home as he can get without going to jail, he explains. He lets Fife keep the photographs and taped interviews that he made back in the summer of ’68.

Fife is no longer trying to write a novel and poetry by now. Most of his friends and lovers in Montreal are aspiring writers and artists and folksingers and filmmakers, and all of them seem more talented and purposeful than he. He supports himself, barely, by writing English-language book reviews and freelance cultural essays for the Montreal Star and the Gazette. He likes to say that he dabbles in several of the arts, but practises none. As when, on a borrowed Cine-Kodak Model B-16 editing viewer, he merges the taped interviews and black-and-white stills from Gagetown with archival newspaper and TV clips and charts pilfered from the Grande Bibliothèque and a soundtrack of pirated Byrds, Dylan, and Doors songs. He thinks he’s making an avant-garde metafictional film with nonmoving images and tape recordings and TV news footage, a covertly autobiographical cinematic collage about his first months in Canada, more or less for his own amusement, he claims. Six months into the project, alone in his room one night, discouraged and frustrated and about to give up on anything that can be called creative, he runs the hour-long film from start to end. He pretends that it was made by a stranger, and suddenly he realizes that it isn’t autobiographical at all. He sees that, if he doesn’t think it’s by him or about him, he can nudge it rather easily into becoming a suspenseful, dramatic exposé of a crime. Without intending to until he’s nearly abandoned it, he has made In the Mist, the film that kick-starts his career as an investigative documentary filmmaker, the film that five years later, once he gets it shown on Canadian TV, becomes an unacknowledged inspiration for Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

He can tell all that to Malcolm and his crew. It’s the story they want to hear from him. And he won’t have to mention that his story of the origins of In the Mist is paved over a lie. He can let the lie stay buried beneath the truth, and it will continue to be his guilty secret. And why not? It’s still stable enough to support the truth. He’s gotten away with it for fifty years. He can easily keep it buried for the few weeks or days he has left to live, and no one will be the wiser.

It’s the cancer that has freed him to dig up and expose the lie. There’s no longer any undone future work to protect and promote. No unrealized career ambitions. No one left to impress. Nothing to win or lose. He hasn’t a future anymore, and without a future, there’s nothing his past can sabotage or undo.

Nothing, except her. Emma. Her love and respect and admiration. Acquired illegitimately and under false pretenses, starting with In the Mist, which first brought them together. At Concordia, where she studied under him, her final thesis was “In the Mist” and “Man with a Movie Camera”: Metacinema and Reflexivity in the Films of Leonard Fife and Dziga Vertov.

This is his last chance to stop lying to Emma, his last chance to hand back to her in public everything she gave to him in private. If he dies without having told her the truth of how he came to be the man she thinks he is, the man she has loved and worked with all these years, and tells it in public like this, before the world, on-camera, miked, to be edited, soundtracked, packaged, sold, and distributed all across Canada and even in the States and maybe Europe as well, if he dies without having told her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, then she’ll have loved and married and been the forty-year partner of a purely fictional character. He’ll have turned her into a fool. He will have taken everything from her and given nothing back. Her love and marriage and professional partnership will have been wasted.

He mustn’t let that happen to her. Not after everything else he’s done to her.

Fife speaks into the darkness. Emma? Are you still here, Emma?

We ready to go, Vincent? Malcolm asks.

Ready.

Malcolm claps his hands in front of the camera. Okay, Leonard Fife interview. April 1, 2018. Montreal.

Fife speaks into the darkness again. Emma? Are you there, Emma?

Yes, Leo. I’m still here.