Ten Days in the Hills (24 page)

“But remorse isn’t what I’m trying to avoid. The destruction of the country is what I’m trying to avoid.”

“But do countries get destroyed? Germany and Russia aren’t destroyed. Hitler lasted twelve years, Stalin lasted about thirty or so, and Communism itself only lasted about seventy years. Milosevic lasted a few years. In Iran, it’s been twenty-five years, but I heard that the younger generation doesn’t pay much attention to the Islamic revolution anyway. Yes, there may be a political convulsion, but the country and most of the people outlast it.”

“But we aren’t a country like that. We are a country based on a certain set of ideas about how things are done—how governing is done and how wars are fought, and how the private and the public sectors limit each other’s power. If those ideas are destroyed, then there is no country. There is no ‘United States,’ there’s only something else, like non-Canadian North America. ‘England’ and ‘France’ are countries. ‘The United States’ is an abstraction about how to accommodate diversity and unity at the same time. When one faction seizes power and ignores everyone else and just adopts a try-and-stop-me sort of attitude, then the whole system is put at risk. I don’t see how they don’t understand that.”

“They don’t understand it because they don’t care. Or because they see the country as being based on being special or making it economically, or being victorious, or some sort of social Darwinism. Maybe it’s just tribal. For liberals, the question is between right and wrong, but for conservatives, the question is between me-and-mine and not-me-and-not-mine. And anyway, the way the government is supposed to work has often been used as a fig leaf for simply getting what you want. What do you think the motto ‘Don’t tread on me’ was all about? Independence came first, and trying to organize came second. Not being told what to do is the first and foremost American value, not checks and balances. But I see that as our salvation as well as our danger. Are they able to tell you what to do? Are they able to tell me what to do? Are they able to tell anyone at the offices of that magazine you read,
The Nation,
what to do? No, they are not. Don’t tread on me. Even if the government ends up being entirely corrupted, millions and millions of people will still adhere to the ‘Don’t tread on me’ principle. Guess what? Waldo Salt was purged by the right wing of his day, and he came back to write, yes,
Taras Bulba,
but then
Midnight Cowboy
and
Serpico
and
Coming Home.
Yes, he was gone for ten years, and for him they were ten years of trouble and hardship, but he was back for almost twenty years, and he regained everything he’d lost and more. Ulli’s parents were no doubt terrified and horrified, but they lived to have Ulli, who lived to respect and love them for the hardships they endured.”

“A lot of people in Iraq aren’t going to live.”

“You are absolutely right, and I would not have sacrificed them, either, but opinion is divided in Iraq, too. You can accept that without agreeing with the war, can’t you?”

“I can accept that.”

“You are not in danger.”

“How do you know?”

“What is it you always say, that the statistical likelihood of any given member of the Evangelical Free Church of Sedalia, Missouri, getting blown up in a terrorist attack is infinitesimal, and so why do they vote for the congressman who authorizes the Patriot Act? Well, the statistical likelihood of you, Elena, getting arrested for terrorist connections is infinitesimal, too, as is the statistical likelihood of this house being stormed by an alliance of right-wing Christians, NRA adherents, and Halliburton-employed mercenaries. I won’t say it’s impossible. I won’t say that. But I will say it’s unlikely. It’s so unlikely that we don’t have to prepare for it.”

“You’re just making my fears sound ridiculous.”

“Well, I am trying to get you to laugh.”

“Why?”

“Because my take on things is that life is more powerful than death, way more powerful, and if we think about death over and over, look what happens, I can’t get it up, and so my sense of being alive is diminished. I would rather be like Klaus. I would rather be an immovable object than an irresistible force. I think you would rather be an irresistible force. But the world is full of people that do harm in the name of doing good. If you are an immovable object, then you are less likely to do harm.”

“But you make movies. You depict things. You put stories and images on the big screen and try to have an effect. I think most people would laugh at the idea of a movie director thinking of himself as passive and undynamic.”

“Well, I have several ideas about that. In the first place, movies that I make are stories. Even when I try to make it as compelling as possible, I know they are stories and the audience knows they are stories and the actors know they are stories. The thing about a story is that it affects you if you want it to, but you can take it or leave it. It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous. Have you ever been to a meeting?”

She shook her head.

He was warming up now, he thought. “What they do at meetings is tell stories. You aren’t allowed to give advice or tell people what to do. You’re encouraged to tell your own story and leave it at that. The reason they do that is because alcoholics can be volatile and sometimes take offense. Telling stories is the least offensive way to communicate, because it’s the least coercive. So that’s one of my defenses. Another one is that most movies are bad and most audiences are too sophisticated to buy most movies. I would like to have made a string of movies like
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
that seem so real while you are watching them that they replace all your own feelings and opinions, but I haven’t. Even the guys who made that movie haven’t. Michael Douglas went on to make
Wall Street. Wall Street
was kind of hokey at the time, and it’s more hokey now.
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
was not hokey then, and it’s even less hokey now. What happened on the set of
Cuckoo’s Nest
was that everything clicked. The script clicked, the set clicked, the actors clicked, Forman, the director, clicked. It was like conducting a sublime performance of the Ninth Symphony. It was not work. Probably it was Nicholson who caused the click. He got along with everyone, and it seems like he’s the energy center when you look at him on the screen. But they all clicked, DeVito, Chris Lloyd, Scatman Crothers. Louise Fletcher’s performance gets better every time you look at it. When you watch William Redfield, who died after the movie came out, you know that he hates Nicholson’s character, and for the moment you can see why, and you hate Nicholson’s character, too. When the doctor comes on, who was the real doctor at that hospital, you can’t believe what a good job he is doing playing the doctor! That movie is the only thing in the entire world that makes me want to be someone else than myself. I would like to have been Milos Forman just in order to be part of that. But guess what?
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
came and went. It is not life-changing for most people who watch it. It’s a story. It may be the most perfect movie ever made, or one of them, but you can still take it or leave it. You can still get up, walk away, and make up your own mind about mental institutions, psychotherapy, electroshock, and even frontal lobotomy, not to mention euthanasia. So I don’t see what I do as coercive. In fact, I see it as objective. I offer something for the audience to contemplate, and even though we look like we are being madly active in making our offering, really our offering is as passive as a big stone lion on a pillar. Take it or leave it. And when a movie doesn’t jell like that one does, it isn’t at all hard to leave it.”

She looked at him, didn’t say anything and kept looking at him. He could not interpret this look, except that in some sense it was a look of defeat. How long had he known her? A little less than a year. Even before he met her, she’d been in full attack mode for, by her own testimony, at least fifteen months. It suddenly occurred to him, as she looked at him, that perhaps he didn’t know her at all. And so he said, “What were you like during the Clinton administration?”

She didn’t say anything, only worked her mouth a bit and pushed her hair back, as if maybe he had gone too far. She put her chin in her hand and looked out the window. More than anything, he thought, he would like to pick up that camera and film this set of gestures. Her face was alive with feelings that he couldn’t quite read, and, he thought, if he were to look at her through the camera lens, he would be able to read them and figure out what to say next. But he resisted temptation, only taking her hand with the hand he would otherwise have used to pick up the camera. After a moment, she removed her hand from his and picked up the banana skin that had been sitting on the coverlet, and smoothed the edges together, and set it neatly beside the camera box. She said, “I’m trying to encapsulate what I thought about Bill Clinton. I didn’t think he was a saint. I mean, Cassie once said he was and is a saint, but I didn’t find him attractive or unattractive. I did find him reassuring. I mean, from the very beginning of his administration, when he got in trouble for having his hair cut on the runway at LAX, and then for firing people in the White House travel office, it was apparent that they were out to get him and they weren’t going to let him do anything that was even his own business without a fight. That was a shock, but those were the terms of his presidency, and they started right away, and so everyone got used to them. It was like watching a guy walking down a road. The road runs behind a hedge. All you see are his head and shoulders, and he seems like he is having a nice walk. He’s happy, he’s smiling. Then there’s a gap in the hedge, and you realize he’s being mauled by a pack of dogs. They’ve ripped off his pants and they’re nipping at his legs and his ass and even his testicles, but he’s still progressing, not paying much attention to the dogs, keeping his mind more or less on his destination. It was reassuring. You had the feeling that, even though there was a lot of discord, the country wasn’t in danger, because he, Bill Clinton, didn’t seem afraid. They weren’t going to get him, and that was that, and so you could go about your business, and the economy could expand, and everything would be okay. I think that’s what a president does. He takes it, whatever it is, and is undaunted. You know, as soon as Bush got the nod, sometime that December, he said that the economy was going to collapse. Why would he do that? It was like the weapons of mass destruction. He wanted the economy to collapse, in order to instill fear into the citizenry, and so he began talking about it right away. Clinton never did that. So I guess during the Clinton administration I was going about my business, trying to keep Simon moving forward and trying to keep writing. Oh, and I had that call-in radio show for a while on a local public radio station where people called me for household advice, but it didn’t really go well, even when we started having authors on, though that was fun. Cookbook authors and housecleaning authors. My favorite was this woman who knew how to get all the pet stains out of your carpet and upholstery.”

“What?” Max relaxed, and then he leaned over and picked up the camera after all. Elena put her hands behind her head.

He turned on the camera again and looked through the viewfinder at her. He focused only on her face, so that it filled the frame. She smiled. Through the camera lens, he could read that smile perfectly. It was amused and nostalgic and friendly. He picked up one of the tapes that were sitting on the bedside table and inserted it. The camera made its dinging noises and came on. He said, “Ready?”

She nodded.

The camera, of course, had autofocus.

“Well, I had this author on the radio, and we weren’t getting any calls, so I asked her how she got into the pet-stain cleaning-expertise business. She was British and little and cute, and I’d already realized she was the sort of person who would say anything, so she said, ‘Well!’ and licked her lips and told me this story.” Elena licked her lips. He closed in on them. She went on: “She was out at a bar in Pasadena with some girlfriends, and she got hit on by a guy who was very cute. It turned out he lived in a guesthouse in Arcadia, not far from Santa Anita Race Track. They left the bar and went to his place, and hopped into bed, and made love a couple of times.” He backed away from her, then got off the bed and went across the room, until he had all of her in the frame. She stretched a bit, and then pulled up her knees. “When they had stopped wailing in ecstasy the second time—remember, she was saying this on the radio at ten-thirty in the morning—they realized that there was someone else shouting or screaming outside in the dark, and also there was a tremendous squawking, and the guy said, ‘Uh, there’s something wrong with the chickens.’” She sat up. “So he jumped out of bed, and she did, too, and they got on some clothes and ran outside. Just then, the guy who owned the main house, who bred fighting cocks, ran out of the house with no clothes on and a couple of shotguns under one arm and a big flashlight in the other hand. He sees the two of them, and he hollers that a raccoon has been in the chicken house. This is right in town! So the naked guy runs around the yard, shining the flashlight up in the trees, and, sure enough, there’s a raccoon up on one of the the branches, and as soon as the raccoon is discovered, it starts throwing chicken heads at the naked man, and he starts shooting at the raccoon, but of course he can’t both hold the flashlight and shoot the gun, not to mention also keep loading the gun, so he gets the girl to hold the flashlight and the guy to load the second gun, while he tries to shoot the raccoon. The raccoon, by the way, escaped once he ran out of chicken heads. So, a week later, the girl got married to this cute guy in Vegas, because, she said on the radio, ‘that first night was so utterly brilliant!’ And he had seven dogs, ‘and, my dear, not all of them were trained!’—not to mention that they brought in dead things and devoured them under the chairs, though never chickens! She got to be an expert at getting organic stains out of clothing, curtains, and carpets. So she wrote the book and got on my show.” She put her head back, and he focused on her throat as she said, “Oh, I loved her. Her book had pen-and-ink drawings of dogs peeing and pooping in the house, and dragging in rodent bodies with X’s for eyes, with little thought balloons coming out of their heads with comments like ‘She said she’d be home at three,’ and ‘She’ll never see it,’ and ‘She’ll think that damned cat did it.’ It was so funny.”