B008J4PNHE EBOK (53 page)

The elevator bell dinged. Tess stepped out into the lobby.

At a diner, they ate lunch and received directions to the Quentinville cemetery. The route took them a couple of miles east of the little college town, along a winding, hilly road between stands of birch trees. Near the
hilltop, their progress was abruptly stayed at a high wrought-iron gate. Sam stopped the car, and they piled out.

A laminated sign on the gate read
CLOSED
. A chain was padlocked across, and on either side of the road’s raised bed, the ground crumbled away into mucky gullies and a stretch of swampy forest where the standing water was carpeted in fluorescent green algae. Through the bars of the fence, they could see the road hooking into another turn, and farther on, the edge of the cemetery, where a few newer-looking headstones stood.

“I thought the funeral was scheduled for noon,” said Wesley.

Tess touched a fence bar. “Guess it got canceled.”

A floral arrangement had been propped against a corner of the gate: it was of a penis and testicles. The shape was edged in red roses, and the interior was filled with white roses. A substantial tribute, the arrangement came about as high Sam’s hip, and the balls had the circumference of a truck tire. The penis was definitively erect. On the rear of the arrangement was pinned a card:
In loving memory of Costas Mandell from his fans and admirers at Who We Argot
.

Perhaps because of the headstones in the distance, or the flowers, which managed to seem convincingly funereal in spite of the design, a somberness fell over the group. That Sam hadn’t really known him was unimportant. The guy, Mandell, had lived, and now he was dead. You had to respect that.

“I’ll shimmy under and try to deliver these,” said Tess.

Sam thought again what a serious, straight-ahead person she was, and he appreciated that about her. There was a gap between the bottom crossbar and the pavement, which, with a fair amount of wriggling, she slipped underneath. Once Tess was on the other side, the men squatted down, but it was obvious that they weren’t going to make it.

They carefully slid the flowers through to her. Tess tucked the arrangement under her arm and started off in search of the satyr’s final resting place. The sight was one of those that you know you’ll never see a second time: a woman on an empty road, carrying a huge flower penis under her arm, sort of like a guitar without a case but not a guitar without a case—a huge penis made of flowers. What was surprising was the melancholy of the composition: the lone figure and the vulgar flowers
and the headstone-dotted field. The sun ducked behind a cloud, and the green grounds turned pewter.

As Tess disappeared around the bend, Sam found himself wishing yet again that he had a camera.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Wesley wandered off the way they had come, searching for a bar of reception for his BlackBerry. (On the drive, he had drafted a judgment on Brooklyn Aristocrat’s Basic Jabot, and read it aloud to Sam and Tess: “This anachronistic neckwear made me feel both powerful and dissolute. You cannot wear this accessory without feeling a yearning to smoke opium and sex it. Jabot flouncing in time with your thrusts, pants around the ankles, ramming the petticoated woman of your dreams—can you imagine it? People, I can’t stop imagining it! YEAH, I’LL TAKE IT!!”

After Wesley finished reading, Tess said, “Looks like somebody just figured out what to get her dad for Hanukkah this year.”)

Sam leaned against the hood of the car and breathed the cool, fresh air and considered Costas Mandell. He was a puzzle. What did you do after you ran around in the forest in furry chaps, jerking off, screwing knotholes, pissing on leaves, massaging your taint, popping thigh zits, waving your humongous cock at the world, and never cracking a single smile? Sam could only suppose that you did what anyone else would do: went home, guzzled a beer, relaxed, watched a movie on cable. The obituary said Mandell had been an avid moviegoer. It also said he liked to fish and had emigrated from Greece. He certainly had a colossal penis. That was about the extent of what Sam had to go on. There was no way to know if Costas Mandell had been entirely proud of what he had done, or if he had been entirely sorry, or something in between.

In the years since his film was vandalized by Brooks Hartwig, Jr., Sam had often reflected on the day before the catastrophe struck, the afternoon when Tom and Mina visited and the movie seemed best. Earlier that day, Sam had watched the movie by himself; he hated it, disbelieved it, was sickened by it. Then, while Mina sat and wrote dismal prophesies on the head shots of the cast members, he had watched the movie with Tom and thought it was not bad. What was evident to Sam these days was that an honest accounting of his movie—the one that Brooks incinerated, that no one else would ever see—lay somewhere in between. His
beloved conceit, for instance, the speeding-time effect that blended four years into a single day, was still, at least in theory, a visually appealing idea. The evolving clothes and hairstyles, the backgrounds that had no continuity, the erratic lighting, these shifting elements aggravated the eye—in a good way, because they made you want to keep watching. What was less successful—was downright juvenile, in retrospect—was the idea that those four years were the sum total of anything. The sunrise at the end of the film was blatantly symbolic: the Dawn of Adult Understanding. Sam hadn’t felt like an adult after college graduation, and he didn’t feel like one now. He felt like himself, and understanding in general remained generally elusive.

If, therefore, you added up each column, the sum was an independent film like a lot of independent films: some interesting ideas, gestures at profundity, and actors who looked like real people as opposed to movie stars. You could easily find worse ways to expend eighty-four minutes than by watching
Who We Are,
and if you would get off your ass, you could easily find better ways.

But Sam’s version of
Who We Are
didn’t exist; Brooks’s version did. And the movie that Brooks had cut was not like any other films. It was truly different. Mandell’s performance was singular. Mandell disturbed and he astounded and he sold every baffling word. He was magic, unreal—he was a satyr. If not for Brooks, and Mandell’s performance that Brooks had captured,
Who We Are
most likely would have gone unnoticed. It was Brooks and Mandell who had made the movie special. This reality might have relieved Sam, but instead, it made him a bit envious. Sam wished he had been less sure of himself when he was twenty-two and twenty-three.

Like a siren, the memory of Booth’s crazed, guttural laughter from the night before rang in his mind—and to Sam’s surprise, even amazement—like a siren, it dispersed as suddenly as it arose. He knew that he had to be angry, yet he felt absolutely still inside. Sam didn’t know what the feeling—the lack of feeling—meant, but he was glad of it.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Tess slid the flower penis back through the gap and then herself. Although there had been a couple of fresh graves, either of which might have been Mandell’s, they had lacked headstones. “I didn’t want to risk leaving a cock-and-balls arrangement on some random person’s grave.”

Sam complimented her instinct.

They knocked around the possibility of taking it with them, but where? Another option was to leave it against the fence where they’d found it. It was hard, though, to believe that it would ultimately pass muster with the graveyard authorities. Someone would throw it out.

Sam suggested the swamp. Tess thought that was an okay gesture. Wesley was still off down the hill somewhere.

Sam gingerly descended the embankment six or seven feet, reaching the platform of a few large, slick rocks at the water’s edge. Tess handed him the arrangement, and he held her hand while she picked her way down the uneven declivity. He squatted to lay the flowers on the water’s scummy surface. “Here goes.” He shoved the arrangement off. It began to drift, cutting a wedge of clear water through the green fur.

They watched as the flowers made it through the strait between two spindly trees.

“Okay, here’s the reason,” said Tess. “Are you ready?”

“Kenneth Novey, we’re talking about? Why it’s not evil to enjoy his pain and suffering?”

“Uh-huh.”

The arrangement was about a half dozen yards out now, rotating slightly. A beard of frothy green scum had already collected around its hull. Sam put on his listening face. “Let’s hear it.”

“Don’t fall asleep, okay?” The sharp angle of her right eyebrow implied that she wasn’t attempting to lighten the mood.

“I’m really sorry about that.” There was no defense for the window escape or the ignored phone calls, either. Then there was everything with Polly, which wasn’t a direct affront to Tess but didn’t exactly cast him in a fulsome light. While they’d known each other only a couple of days, he had already racked up a karmic debt that could take years to whittle down. He had behaved poorly. She made him feel more than naked; with Tess, he didn’t even have any skin. “Really sorry.”

“You fucking should be.” Tess rubbed her index finger around an eye. Her visible exhaustion was attractive. There was a wrinkle at one corner of her mouth that he wanted to kiss. The top of her head came parallel to his chin. A single shimmering white hair ran to the left of her middle part.

“Did you hurt anybody because of it?”

He waited for her to continue, but she let the question hang until he responded.

“Pardon?” Sam asked.

“When you watched the show? When you watched the reenactment of the awful way that the man died? Kenneth Novey.”

“I guess not.”

“Then it’s fine. If it’s not hurting anyone, then it’s fine. Who does it hurt? Kenneth Novey doesn’t care. He’s history. The rest of us have to keep ourselves amused somehow.”

“What if it hurts my soul?”

“Uh-uh. If you want to travel that street, best of luck, but I’m staying right here. We’re blood and bones and organs. We don’t have souls. When our bodies stop, we’re gone.”

Sam didn’t want to make her angry, but he wasn’t persuaded. It was too simple and too easy. “I feel like I have a soul. Or at least like I have to proceed on the assumption that I have a soul.”

“Look, something terrible happened, yes. The guy got a bad, horrible, nasty deal, and he died. And we made a frivolous, trashy show about it. We sensationalized a tragedy, and you were captivated by it. But did it inspire you to go out and kill someone? Did you go out and burn down an orphanage? Did you go out and punch a kitten?”

Sam shook his head.

“Of course you didn’t. Because it was a diversion. It was an entertainment. It was a fantasy, a cheesy reenactment that probably didn’t so much as scrape against the reality of the guy. Maybe it was a travesty. Probably it was a travesty. But it was just a show.

“So it struck you funny. So what? Can’t you laugh? Why shouldn’t that be okay? Did you laugh at the man’s misery? No. I’ll tell you why you laughed: you laughed at his predicament. You laughed at how unfair and stupid and grotesque his predicament was. You laughed because you had to. How else are you supposed to react to exhibit number ten trillion and one that however random and mean you think life can be, it can always be far more random and way, way more mean than you could ever imagine? By curling up in a ball? By hitting yourself in the face? By kicking furniture? What would that achieve?”

She jabbed her hands deep into the pockets of her vest. He couldn’t tell if she was furious with him or with herself. “You want something
to feel guilty about? Let me help you. Feel guilty about people living beneath underpasses. Feel guilty about shortchanging some poor waitress’s tip. Feel guilty about throwing out plastic bottles. Feel guilty about something real, something current. Don’t feel guilty about some freaky, unlucky, terrible fucking thing that happened, and that no one could have seen coming, and that’s over and done with. Give to charity. Tip appropriately. Recycle.

“Listen. Sam. You’re allowed not to feel shitty about everything. You know? If you want to have a soul, fine. Have a soul. Care about something you can change. Get over yourself, man.”

The flowers had stopped about twenty yards out. The arrangement’s scrotum was snared against a half-submerged, splintered log that jutted at a forty-five-degree angle from the swamp.

“Yes,” he said, and thought of his father’s wild laughter in the study, and felt his heart continue to beat, steady and unconcerned. She was right, obviously. His priorities were a mess.

Sam raised his hands in surrender. “I got it. Point made.”

“And you know what else?” Tess looked at him as if she wanted him to explode. He thought she made a beautiful Fury. “If it’s such a bad show, why don’t you make one that’s better? If you think it’s cavalier about death, that it makes a joke out of something that’s sacred, that it lets the audience get away with something, then make your own. Punish us. Give us the truth.”

“Okay.”

“Thank you! Christ!” Tess inhaled. She blinked. She made a brisk
come here
wave. He moved closer, and she wrapped her arms around him, and he put his arms around her. Her hair smelled like coconut. He could feel her breath between the buttons of his shirt.

“Sorry to change the subject, but are you at all surprised that there was a florist around here who does penis-shaped arrangements?” Tess’s voice was muffled by his chest.

“No,” said Sam, but then again, he supposed there wasn’t too much that surprised him anymore.

Since there was no pressing reason to go home, they drove back to Quentinville, to the Russell campus, with the idea that they could walk around, maybe peek in the windows of their old dorm rooms. But as soon as they parked (in the same overflow lot where Sam had filmed Roger and Claire’s handle-pulling fallout), Tess objected. “What are we doing? All the people here are so young. Do we really want to expose ourselves to that?”

“They can’t hurt us,” said Wesley.

Sam asked if they could at least drive around. While Tess didn’t seem thrilled about that, either, she acquiesced.