B008J4PNHE EBOK (10 page)

filming, he felt a lump on the side of his neck, roughly the size of an almond. As cold as the rest of his body was, there was a burning sensation at the back of his eyes, and his knees seemed too loose in the sockets. “You kay dare?” Anthony asked when he saw Sam shudder and hug himself even though it was hot and humid. Sam said he thought it was a virus. The next morning he couldn’t swallow. The inside of his throat felt as though it had been scoured in his sleep. He was freezing. Bonfires were crackling behind his eyeballs. He managed to dress but collapsed outside the door. When the director didn’t show up at call time, Brooks went searching and found him lying in the hall of the apartment complex. The AD called an ambulance. While a nurse drew Sam’s blood, the director clutched Brooks’s hand. He whispered that he was afraid. Brooks reassured him that because of his art, Sam would be immortal. The AD’s hands jerked from his sides, as if trying to shake off an invisible grasp. (“I worry about you, Brooks,” Sam croaked, but Brooks said not to, that he would be immortal, too. It was all being filmed for posterity.) A doctor informed Sam that he had mononucleosis. The director slept. Brooks picked up three more days of dorm rooms for the crew, gave each person a hundred-dollar per diem to keep them busy, and shut the production down. Seventy-two hours elapsed in a trembling, bleach-speckled strip, as if Sam were watching events recorded on a VHS tape that had been left to cook in the sun.

Then his fever broke, and he checked himself out to finish the movie.

 ■ ■ ■ 

They had shot chronologically as much as possible, and
Who We Are
’s last scene was the last thing they filmed. It was shot at sunrise, leaving them time for only two takes.

The scene finds Roger as he slouches, hungover, back out to the meadow. All around him, the revelers lie in the grass, passed out. From another part of the field, a figure walks to meet him. It’s Florence-Diana-Aurora-Divinity-Florence.

“Hey,” calls Roger.

“Is that you?” She raises a hand to her eyes.

“Yeah,” he says. “Who are you today, anyway?”

Florence-Diana-Aurora-Divinity-Florence shrugs. “It doesn’t matter.” She steps over a mound in a sleeping bag, and they stand face-to-face.
They stopped being friends back in the midafternoon, forty minutes and two years ago.

Breaking the stare first, Florence-Diana-Aurora-Divinity-Florence casts a gaze around the field. The sleepers are motionless. They’re sprawled here and there at all angles, as if shaken out on the ground from high above. In the moments before full dawn, everything—the pine trees crowding the field, the discarded wrappers and crushed cups, the sneakers pointed at the sky—is coated in a hard glaze.

“Everyone looks like they’re dead, don’t they?” she says.

Roger yawns. “Maybe they are.”

The shot reverses, and the two characters are aflame in the first light, as they were in the beginning, dressed in their freshman clothes and with their freshman haircuts and soft freshman faces.

The wrap party was held at the local Hoe Bowl. In Sam’s one game, he rolled an ignominious 72. A couple of times, the director dozed off at his lane’s scorer’s table, and he spent the entire night nursing a ginger ale. He remained unwell, though not unhappy.

Olivia Das sat with him for a while. Her best aspect was a narrow, half-flirty, half-threatening gaze that suggested she was sizing you for filets. “I had such a lovely experience doing this,” she said. “I just wish that Brooks had blown off when you stuck him out in that hurricane.”

“That’s a mean thing to say,” said Sam.

“He’s a firebug, Sam! He’s the most horrible, dangerous geek I’ve ever met, and you’re very lucky he didn’t kill a bunch of us for his collection.”

“Brooks is not a serial murderer. He’s an eccentric. He took me to the hospital when I was sick.”

“Did you know he filmed a porn when you were in the hospital? One of the tech guys saw. He said it was bestial.” Olivia regarded Sam with her predatory look. “Barf, barf, barf.”

“I don’t care. And if you offer me a single detail”—he made a snipping gesture—“I’ll edit you right out of the movie.”

The actress called him a prude, smacked him in the side of the face
with a peppermint-scented kiss, rose, and twisted off in a drunken drama-girl pirouette, bob flipping.

Eighties music blasted from the alley’s overhead speakers. A group of blitzed crew members slid Julian down a lane clattering into the pins, where he lay for some time, like a discarded doll—a passed-out old professor doll, accessorized with urine-stained corduroys. Shards of green and pink light dripped off the mirrored ball, smearing colors over the walls, floors, and faces. Although he was seated, Sam felt wobbly. Dozens of people embraced him, kissed him, clapped him on the back. To the director’s sore ears, the voices of these well-wishers sounded distant, as though they were coming from one end of a long hall, and he was at the opposite end. He felt like he could fall asleep any time he wanted.

Anthony was in a quizzical mood. The DP kept coming over and sitting down beside Sam, gazing at him soulfully. This was off-putting, not only because Anthony was a man but because of his protruding eyeball.

“What’s up?”

Anthony yawned. “Tie-id.”

Sam said he could relate.

“You know something?” The DP scrunched his bugeye nearly closed. It made him look ancient and wise, like a sea captain. “You don’t have to be such a cun-ed all the time.”

“Anthony, I don’t understand what that means.”

Anthony gave him a friendly pat in the chest. “I think you do dare. I think you do.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

A while later Brooks passed through, dressed as if he had just wandered away from a community theater production of
Guys and Dolls
in a pin-striped vest and a porkpie hat. He pulled on the seven or eight gruesome long hairs sprouting from his chin, saying, “Yay, man, yay! We did it, right?” to anyone he could corner. When he made his way around to Sam, he inquired if the director needed anything.

“Just a couple hundred bucks,” said Sam.

Brooks reached to get his wallet.

Sam put out a hand. “Kidding.”

“Oh,” said Brooks.

“Thank you,” said Sam, “for everything. All your help.” He wanted to be more specific, to give the AD his due, express what an essential
contribution he truly had made. Gratitude was not an easy thing to articulate, though, not if you didn’t want to be honest. And if Sam were honest, he’d have to say, “The shared unease we felt toward you saved the movie, Brooks. If you were not such a rich weirdo, I couldn’t have pulled it off.”

Instead, he said, knowing it was inadequate but wanting to be kind, “It would have been really hard to do this without you.”

The little blond man laughed, nodded several times. He said, “Likewise,” and shuffled away.

A few others visited the table. The Eskimo offered Sam pot. “I want to ease your suffering,” the grip said. Sam declined. Another person asked, “Wasn’t your father in some movies back in the seventies? Why didn’t you cast him?”

“It never even occurred to me,” Sam said, not lying.

A flash came: had Anthony called him a cunt-head? Was that it? Sam couldn’t deny it, and in his weakness, he momentarily forgot his immunity to such charges. For those few seconds he allowed himself to ponder absently whether it had all been necessary, if maybe he could have relaxed a bit, loosened his hold, enjoyed himself more . . . but the idea drifted off like a chunk of flotsam. He was too sick, and anyway, it was too late.

Wyatt Smithson dropped into the booth beside him. “A question.”

Of all the actors, Wyatt had been most difficult. Confused by the script, frustrated by basic blocking, he was the only actor to whom Sam occasionally resorted to giving line readings. His guilelessness was why Sam had cast him in the role of Brunson, a character who spends the entire story trying and failing to keep pace with his own evolving emotions. He had done a damned fine job with the part, too.

But now that the production was complete, Wyatt was simply himself, in no way a bad guy but definitely something of a knob. The actor exhaled breath of beer and popcorn into Sam’s face. “A question. For you, my man.”

Sam slid down the padded bench to stand. “I’m leaving, Wyatt. I’m exhausted, and you’re wasted. What’s your question?”

Wyatt scanned around, searching for something. His eyes were shiny, and his nose was drippy. “I think I have the clap,” he said.

“That’s not a question,” said Sam. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if you do.”

Wyatt had settled on a bowling scorecard. The stiff square of paper crinkled around his nose, and he honked. “Yeah?”

“Good night, Wyatt.” The director turned.

“Wait! My question!”

He waved over his shoulder and pushed open the doors of the bowling alley.

“One thing I always wanted to know. Who are we? You know? I never got—”

The doors closed on Wyatt’s question, and Sam stepped out into the buzzing late-summer night.

 ■ ■ ■ 

The bed at his apartment beckoned to him like the promise of every good thing—Christmas and blow jobs and Starbucks—rolled up in a single package. Sam couldn’t recall ever wanting anything more, not even to make the movie.

A few yards into the parking lot, he stopped to pop the top off his bottle of antibiotics and dry-swallowed a couple of pills. The black shades of campus, the gabled roofs and the church bell tower, rose above a distant tree line. Off to his right, an engine turned over.

Sam looked and saw Brooks’s car, a yellow Porsche, the interior lit a glowing neon blue. He could see the AD in the passenger seat, and he raised a hand. Brooks didn’t respond. The AD’s attention was fixed on the lit match he was holding up in front of his face; from Sam’s position, the flame was a tiny, wavering hook.

The man in the Porsche’s driver’s seat leaned forward. This stranger, his face largely obscured by an explosion of cottony beard, gave the director a two-fingered salute. He might have been vaguely familiar. Sam didn’t feel compelled to chase the connection.

He pocketed his pills and went to his car. He drove to the apartment, the pair in the sports car forgotten long before he pulled into a space beside the big pothole. It was late, and he needed to rest.

 ■ ■ ■ 

There was a crackle as he lay down on the bed. Sam rolled on his side, dug a hand in his back pocket, and found the $587.34 bill from John Jacob Bregman of La Honda, California. The photograph of the boy holding out the empty bowl fell from the folds of the paper.

He studied the picture, the boy’s frown and his half-shut eyes. Sam asked himself if he was falling for such crude extortion. Maybe the kid was frowning at the realization that someday, someone might come
rattling his mailbox, insisting that he remit a blood debt. Maybe he just had sun in his eyes. Maybe he was about to laugh. Or maybe his little stomach was legitimately hungry. Sam clenched his teeth and stared upward. About a foot above his head on the wall, there was a nickel-sized spot of blue gunk.

Yes, he was falling for it—had fallen for it.

Sam groaned. He heaved himself to his feet. He went to find his checkbook and, while he was at it, a wet paper towel.

 ■ ■ ■ 

To create an assembly of
Who We Are,
Sam hunkered down in the film department’s clammy cell of an editing suite for two weeks before the start of Russell’s new school year.

The room was in the basement of a building that the film department shared with the theater and dance departments. Audible through the ceiling was the clangor of the teenage ballerinas attending summer camp. Their rapid footsteps and delighted screams trembled the mold-peppered ceiling panels and reverberated off the pipes, an echoing, giggling stampede.

Surrounded by a collage of wrinkled and tape-patched posters and flyers tacked up for either inspiration or ironic amusement by decades of film students (
The Godfather
was sandwiched between
Leprechaun
—“Your luck just ran out!”—and
Mary Poppins,
for example; regrettably,
New Roman Empire
was up there, too), Sam sat before the large desktop computer that ran the department’s video editing software. Here, he continued the process of sorting the hours of footage that he had begun work on during the shoot.

What he was searching for was the film that he had watched so many times in his apartment window. But the mono pulled at Sam, and he was drowsy always; he felt slow and rubbery, as if he were trying to run without knees. He truly did not feel his best.

From the poster on the wall, Booth, a black pinwheel inside each eye, stood astride the boards of Dr. Archibald “Horsefeathers” Law’s bunting-festooned wagon and dangled an oversize gold pocket watch before a crowd of hypnotized onlookers.

The film couldn’t wait, though. Wassel and Patch were pushing for a screening, and Sam wanted to keep them happy, because he needed more money for post-production—needed it for ADR (additional
dialogue recording) where the source sound was no good, for music, for festival entry fees, and for a dozen other things.

Sam applied a narrow strip of black electrical tape to his father’s unsettling eyes, but it wasn’t much of an improvement—the black visor just made Booth creepy in a slightly different way. Sam waved the poster off, refused to be distracted by it or goaded into tearing it down, and did his best to push through.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Several times a day he nodded off in the middle of work and awakened to find a crazed EEG reading jerked across his notepad and, on the computer screen, the film ahead of where he remembered, playing new scenes.

“How’s it coming, boss?”

And just when Sam was at his lowest ebb, Brooks usually appeared.

The AD was working on a project of his own, cutting actual celluloid on the antique flatbed that lived inside the walk-in closet at the rear of the editing suite. As to what he was hacking away on into the small hours of the night, Brooks offered no hints, but typically, when Sam came on in the morning, he was still at it. A rattling, snickering sound of turning reels could be heard coming from under the door, punctuated by the occasional squeak of what must have been a razor slicing off frames.