Читать книгу Foregone - Russell Banks - Страница 12

Emma’s smoky voice swirls out of the dark from somewhere near the hallway door. She says sorry to interrupt but she has to step out, she has a text on her phone that just came in and has to answer it right away. I’ll keep track and catch up later, she says. Sorry, she repeats. You go on talking, Leo, I shouldn’t’ve interrupted. Really, most of this stuff, some of it anyhow, I already know. Or versions thereof.

No, you don’t! You don’t know any of it. And you managed to fuck up Malcolm’s shot! The continuity got busted when Vincent was swinging the camera around to my right. Didn’t you notice Vincent on the dolly moving from a straight-on headshot to a profile? When he cuts your interruption, it’ll end up a jump cut and the fucking thing will look edited. Suspension of disbelief, Emma! Remember? You want it to flow like time, not memory. You want …

Please, Leo. I’m not one of your students.

No, really, Emma. I need you here listening to all this. Because you don’t already know most of this other stuff. Because I never told you most of it. Or told anyone. Some of it not even to myself. And if you’re going to interrupt or make noise going in and out of the room, then please do it when the camera’s locked, not when it’s moving. This goes for you, too, Renée.

Comment?

You know what I’m saying, Renée. Your English is as good as my French!

Calm down, Leo, Emma says. Jesus. She reminds him that he’s been talking for nearly an hour, he should take a break. He’s not used to putting out this much energy for this long a time. There’s no need for him to push himself. Malcolm can come back tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, if need be. You have to save your strength, she says. You probably shouldn’t be doing this interview at all.

Malcolm says Emma’s right. They can spread the interview over three or four or more sessions. But making the interview is a good thing, he says. It gives Leo a chance to get his own story told his own way. He’s spent a lifetime telling other people’s stories, letting them use him and his camera to document their lives. He should finally have the chance to tell his own story and use Malcolm’s camera to document it. Vincent’s camera, he corrects himself.

Yeah, Vincent’s camera, and Malcolm’s and Diana’s heavy-handed edit, Fife points out. Using that, too. Whose fucking story will it be then? he wants to know. Whose story will it be when Malcolm and Diana have sliced and diced and stitched and hitched his words and images of his face and body back into a hundred-and-twenty-minute narrative? Whose story will it be when the CBC suits tell them they have to reduce the interview to ninety minutes? Or even less. Maybe forty minutes, he says. My story? I don’t think so.

Sloan says, That is so interesting, Leo. I never thought of it that way, like a doc is no different than a fictional film. When it comes to the truth, I mean.

Diana says, Theory of cinema one-oh-one, Sloan, dear.

Excuse me?

Never mind.

Fife comes back to Emma. He says, You think you already know most of this stuff? Is that what you think? You think you know me? Well, let me assure you, no one in this room knows me any better than my nurse, Renée. And actually she knows me in ways you guys never will. She puts the catheter in my prick and takes it out, she wipes my ass and changes my diaper, she undresses me, puts me in the tub and bathes me and rubs lotion over my bedsores and dresses me again. She measures out my meds and fills and refills my drip. Renée is beside me every waking minute, and even when I’m sleeping.

Fife knows the camera is running, and he is performing for it. He can’t help himself. How old are you, Sloan? he asks.

Me? I’m twenty-two. Why?

When I was twenty-two, Sloan, I’d already been married, fathered a child, and gotten divorced. By the time I was your tender age, Sloan, I had ruined my life.

Vincent, catch this, Malcolm tells him.

Fife asks Sloan if she can imagine believing at twenty-two that she’s already ruined her life. He means destroyed her future, shut off all possibilities of ever realizing the American dream, or the Canadian dream, although he doesn’t think there actually is a Canadian dream. Imagine if Sloan at twenty-two believed that everything good that could ever happen to her had already happened. Imagine that she’s not going anywhere from here, except downhill. That she’s going to lose her job. Then her boyfriend. She’ll be evicted from her apartment and will have to sleep on a friend’s couch, until her friend kicks her out, and then she’ll be homeless, sleeping in shelters, eating at food kitchens for the destitute, and her health will start to fail, even though she’s only twenty-two …

Sloan interrupts, Is that what happened to you, Leo? Mr. Fife.

Malcolm says, Okay, we’re rolling. Right, Vincent?

Right.

Well, no, it’s not quite what happened, Fife says to Sloan. But almost. Because that’s when I met Alicia Chapman, the belle of Richmond, Virginia, slumming from Simmons College among the beatniks and bohos of Boston’s Back Bay, trolling for a man who was contemplating suicide or murder or both as a last chance to give his life meaning, a man whose mere existence would offend her wealthy, respectable, Republican parents, a man they would hire a private detective to investigate, so they could shock their daughter into beating a hasty retreat once confronted by the ugly facts of his early marriage and divorce and the abandonment of his child, among other minor crimes and misdemeanours. Even though it turned out that she shocked them instead, because she already knew all those facts, and she loved him anyhow. He had told her everything about his past by then, and if they didn’t back off, she was going to run away to South Carolina and marry him. And she did run away to South Carolina and marry him, so there, Mother and Daddy Chapman.

Sloan says, I’m sorry, I didn’t follow that.

Malcolm tells Fife to hold off and go back a little and pick up where he was saying he was twenty-two and had already ruined his life. He claps his hands in front of the camera lens. He says Fife’s name, the date and location.