B008J4PNHE EBOK (17 page)

A rush of air filled Sam’s lungs, and a wild giggle swirled up his throat. Everything was going to be okay. “I don’t believe you. This is a practical joke. Amazing, Brooks. You totally had me.” The director blurted a laugh. “I mean, incredible. And I definitely deserved it. I’ve been an asshole. You got me.”

“Sam.”
Brooks teased the name out, speaking it the way people in bad movies said,
“See? Food,”
when they were trying to befriend a non–English speaker or a feral child.
“Sam.”

The ax struck the door again. Furniture legs groaned.

Tears were rolling down Sam’s cheeks. God, what a prank! “But seriously,
what did you do with all the film, the DVDs, the transfers? And the editing equipment and the hard drive?” The sheer involvement of the ruse was breathtaking! Brooks must have gone to the trouble of finding junk computer equipment to destroy. “I mean, Julian’s going to want his stuff back. School starts on Monday.”

“Sam, all that matters,” said Brooks, “is our movie. Forget about that stuff. It’s all gone, right? So what’s the point, right? Nothing matters except the final cut, right?”

There was a last crash—the door coming down—and something made of glass shattered. Brooks wailed, “I told you I was sorry, Mom!” and the connection cut.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Sam went back inside to pay. When he stepped out again, he walked across the lot in no hurry.

The hard drive was crisped. The DVDs were melted plastic. The reels were gone. Brooks had put a match to them—a kitchen match, undoubtedly. The exact parameters of the devastation were not yet clear to Sam—there was the DVD at Bummer City—but he could perceive the shape. Soon it would be entirely visible. So what was the rush? The rain soaked his shoulders, and the muddy water covered his sneaker tops.

The loose two-for-one banner snapped outward from its remaining tie, flopping and waving spastically. The sight bothered Sam. It made him think of hair-metal rockers, of some guy in spandex and heavy makeup wagging his tongue around a microphone. Something about the banner’s flapping seemed ambiguously dangerous, too. Sam decided to fix it. He set his coffee on the hood of his car and went over.

The plastic length was like a section of tarp, heavy and less flexible than it appeared. Sam pulled the loose side of it straight, toward the island of gas pumps and the stanchion from which it had broken free. The plastic rectangle captured the wind like a sail and bowed. Sam’s wet sneaker soles slid on the wet surface of the cement island, then slipped, and he sat down. The gusting banner towed him, ass bouncing along the cement as he kicked his sneakers for purchase, carrying him over the lip of the island and, with a splash, into the deep water of the parking lot.

“Hey, Wassel.” Sam had parked his car, badly, and lurched through the rain to the door.

Wassel took in the director’s appearance. “Hey, Aquaman.”

“Oh, boy, look at you.” A pretty young woman had joined them in the entryway of the house in Astoria. She wore tight black jeans and a man’s dress shirt. “I’m Greta,” she said, and stuck out her hand. “I’m the boys’ assistant.”

Sam said he was pleased and held up his muddy hands in a
don’t shoot
gesture. It had crossed his mind that he might just as well turn the car around and retreat to the apartment, go to bed—whatever Brooks put on the DVD, whether it was the short about the taxidermist or some hodgepodge of scenes from
Who We Are
or something else, it was an apocalypse, and Sam didn’t believe he needed to know anything more than that. He didn’t turn around, though. He followed the signs, crossed the bridge, and resigned himself to the baseline comfort of knowing that once this was done—once they’d seen whatever Brooks wanted them to see, viewed the corpse on the steel table—there was nothing else to do.

“I fell down,” Sam explained.

“Yeah, you did,” said Wassel. “You fell right down in the mud.” His Esso work shirt identified him as
MERLE, ASST. MECHANIC
.

Greta went to find Sam something to wear.

The two men waited in the entryway. On the wall was a lobby card for a movie titled
Cannibals of the Yukon
. The artwork showed a grizzled 49er’s head, elaborately mustached and sucking on a cheroot, cut off from the body and served up in a bed of parsley atop a gold salver.

“Say. You okay there, brother?” asked Wassel.

“I’m uneasy about the condition of the film,” said Sam. The details were exhausting and irrelevant. Once the DVD was playing, he was confident that the situation would swiftly become clear enough.

Wassel chucked him on the shoulder. “No worries! We know it’s just a rough cut.”

Patch appeared. He had been upstairs working on his state quarter collection. “Finally got a Delaware from the Denver mint.”

Wassel gave him a high five.

“There’s a Philadelphia mint, and there’s a Denver mint, and around these parts, it’s mostly Philadelphia.” Patch registered Sam’s immobile expression and mistook his not giving a shit for lack of comprehension. “So a Delaware quarter from the Denver mint is a crucial score.”

“I don’t care about state quarters. I don’t even think about them.” Sam didn’t mean to say it aloud, but now that it was out, he felt no regret.

The producers exchanged glances. Water plinked from the tails of Sam’s shirt. Patch cleared his throat. Wassel said, “Hey, no kidding, we are psyched to see this film of yours. Psyched to the utmost.”

Patch seconded. “One fucking word:
Ricksavini
.”

Greta reappeared with a black garbage bag. “It was all I could find.”

They cut a neckhole in the bottom of the garbage bag, and Sam drew it over his head and wore it like a tunic. The four of them trooped down to the screening room, the director last in line, rustling.

 ■ ■ ■ 

A dozen plush red seats faced a wall-sized screen. In the rear, on a raised platform, a DVD projector was mounted. On one side of the room was a concession stand appointed with a popcorn maker, a variety of candy, and in a row between the Milk Duds and the M&M’s, several neat packets of cocaine.

Greta started a batch of popcorn. Patch chopped some coke on the glass counter of the concession stand. Wassel slipped the DVD from its sleeve and inserted it in the projector. While the popcorn began to rattle and ricochet in the pan, they took turns snorting up lines with a rolled buck.

“You want to introduce the fucker?” Wassel lifted his head, squeezed the bridge of his nose. He passed the rolled bill to the director.

Sam took it, dropped his head, did a couple of bumps. Ice crackled along the ridges and valleys of his brain. He felt the ecstasy of unnecessary cells breaking away, of fresh, sleek contours emerging and emerging and emerging. He suddenly comprehended what it was to be a crystal, and then he was a crystal.

“The real butter,” said Patch to Greta.

“Yup,” she replied, first sweeping the leftover coke dust off the counter and onto the fresh bucket of popcorn.

“Sure,” said Sam. “I’ll introduce the fucker.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

Standing before the screen, damp-legged, draped in a trash bag, Sam addressed his audience of three. Wassel, Patch, and Greta sat smiling, shiny-lipped, powder ringing their nostrils.

“I honestly doubt that words can do justice to what you are about to see. All I know is that I wrote a script and we filmed it. It was a story about how we start off trying to make something new, but by the time we figure out what that means, we’ve lost the spark. We’re already locked on some track, the same as our parents.

“I really started working on this film when I was a kid, when I saw a whole bunch of my toys die crossing my rug. That changed me, I think.

“Then my parents divorced. My dad wasn’t around much, and when he was, he lied and he let me down. So what, right? Your dad was a prick. Join the club, right? But a while ago, my mom took me to the bus station, and then she died, and maybe that doesn’t matter to you, but it’s kind of a big deal to me.

“So I made a film.

“Probably not this film. What we’re going to watch now, I don’t know. Something upsetting, I bet, but I don’t know. As far as my film goes, I want to dedicate it to my mother, who sometimes frustrated me but deserved a lot more than she got.”

Sam thumped down into his front-row seat. The other three clapped.
“Ricksavini,”
said Patch. Wassel pronounced that it was time to fire the bitch up. “Rock and roll,” Greta exclaimed through a mouthful of popcorn.

 ■ ■ ■ 

For the first five minutes, everything was—normal.

The camera, positioned in the center of the quad, swings rightward. We take in the dark dorms, the great trees shrouded and blue in the predawn, and above the archway of the library, the illuminated clockface, arms arranged at four o’clock. At the next cut, the camera is in the center of the quad again, but it is morning. When we swing right this time, dawn is coloring in the panes of the dorm windows, and the library clock reads six o’clock.

Cut to Roger asleep in a tangle of sheets. Cut to Kira, slapping her snooze button. We shuffle through the rest of the characters, all in bed: Florence, awake, smilingly immersed in a copy of
The Da Vinci Code
; Claire, sleeping, hugging her pillow tight; Hugh, crashed out in
his clothes, holding an empty Heineken bottle; Brunson yawning as he does curls in his boxer shorts. Cut back to Roger, no longer alone in bed, Claire asleep against his chest, hugging him tight. Cut back to Kira, slapping the snooze button again, and where before her wrist was bare, now it’s tattooed with a bleeding heart. We find Florence again, now reading Wittgenstein, a grim set to her mouth; Hugh continues to sleep but in a different position, buck-naked and facedown amid a scattering of Pabst cans; and Brunson is performing pull-ups in his doorway, hair damp with sweat.

Under Sam’s ribs, something shifted and he remembered to exhale.

The split second of false relief: it was the stock trick of every shlockmeister who ever snapped a magazine into a camera. It was the hunted woman at the foot of the dock, her back to the glassy lake; it was the good man catching the rail of the caboose, pulling himself up with an
oh ye of little faith
wink to his faithful sidekick; it was the war-torn lovers ten years after the Blitz, jostling shoulders in the flower market, gazing at each other as if they’d each been shaken awake from the same nightmare.

A title card announced:

In Association with Bummer City Productions

A Dolan & Hartwig Film

The murderer’s gray hand rips the water and grabs her ankle; a puff of smoke rises from the embankment, the good man keeps grinning even as the hole opens in his throat and black blood leaks out and the sniper’s rifle reports; his wife appears, her husband appears, and not a word passes between them before they move apart forever.

And Sam fell for it.

In this one context, at least, he knew that his father had raised him better.

 ■ ■ ■ 

There is a stationary shot of a forest, a shot Sam didn’t film. It is of an elm grove that lies beyond the field where the festival is held. A faraway figure bounds between trees.

Back to Brunson as he skips down the steps of his dorm, carrying a six-pack. “Getting an early start?” asks Kira. She lies on a blanket in the
grass with her boyfriend and plays with his fingers as she speaks. “Who says I ever stopped?” Brunson replies. “Today’s the day we find out who’s who, separate the bros from the chaff. Know what I’m saying?”

At that, the film cuts back to the elm grove. The focus slams forward—a seamless programmed zoom, the kind of technological flash that Sam would never sanction—and the viewer rushes over the deadfall, moving at bullet speed toward the figure.

“I already know all about you, Brunson.” We’re in the quad again. Kira calls after the receding figure. “I know who you are.” He flips her the bird without turning or stopping.

A creature dances in the clearing between the trees, white hair and white beard blown out in masses of curls and corkscrews; eyes sunken in charcoal-colored eye shadow; a pair of goatish horns are somehow attached to its head. The animal’s hooves clump across the Acadian stage. It plays a pan flute as it gambols—“The Huckster’s Lament,” naturally, the short flats teasing the long sharps, the musical equivalent of a cat chasing its tail—and its furry brown shanks bounce and shake like Chinese dragons on parade. It is a satyr, and the only thing that it wears is the furry leggings.

Sam recognized him then—the maintenance man, the man from Brooks’s car.

The jig brings the satyr around in a circle to face the camera head-on. The satyr’s penis swings, actually swings, like a bell clapper against the insides of his knees; the penis is as gnarly as a tree root, as long as a hatchet handle, an instrument so appalling that it cannot really be described, only compared to other things.

For everything that he couldn’t understand about what Brooks had done, the director in Sam could grasp at least this: the desire to put a wonder to print.

The satyr ceases to play and stops with one hoof hanging in the air; the hoof must be some kind of shoe covering designed to look like a hoof, and to make hoof beat–like noises. He lowers his panpipe. His white-haired ball sack dangles gruesomely. His penis—exists. It is there. “Who are we?” asks the satyr.

Behind Sam, Patch made a wordless noise, expressive of discomfort. “This, like, troubles me. So, so much,” he managed. Popcorn crunched between someone’s teeth.

The animal of pleasure and darkness and myth closes his deep-set eyes. “We are all Jezebels.” His regret is heartfelt. He isn’t a bad actor.

There is a crinkly noise as the satyr begins to urinate on the forest floor. This, too, somehow suggests ruefulness.

For another seventy-one minutes, it goes on. During this time the satyr discovers an issue of
Hustler
beneath a rock and masturbates to a photograph of a nude woman wearing a bear’s head, sits in the crook of a tree to pop the zits on his thighs, weeps and whispers and moans and dances, rolls around in the dirt and leaves, plays his pan flute some more, engages in intercourse with a log, and otherwise surrenders his every human inhibition. His convulsions are intercut with the anxious lives of Sam’s college students, as if he is their dream, or vice versa.