Because his own childhood had once seemed endless- something he’s thought about a great deal ever since overhearing that story on the ferry, perhaps apocryphal, about the nameless toddler who’d speed-dialed 911 on his father’s cellphone, obliviously, and even gleefully, ending his childhood as he knew it.
Because he had once been a child who was unconditionally loved and cherished, Patrick Kakami had been in a hurry to grow up and make what amounted to the world’s most perfect movie-the cinematic equivalent of a mother’s breath in a son’s ear at three-thirty in the morning.
A moving picture so sublime the intended viewer’s heart would fold in on itself in an origami of joy.
And now? Now Patrick was going through the motions- wind up the little art-house director and watch him make a film! How had he ended up making films and not movies, when it was good old-fashioned flicks, middlebrow and sentimental, excluding only those who didn’t believe in magic, that he so loved? When had he turned from snub-nosed, red-headed Paddy K. into “artfully stubble-headed auteur Patrick Kakami”? (“Thirty Canadians Under Thirty to Watch!” Maclean’s, January 9, 2006-he’d snuck in under the wire.) And his biggest challenge now was not to let on that he was just going through the motions but to proceed as if it all still did matter.
Look at those kids. The various PAs and gang grips milled around the craft service table-sodden, chilled, full of themselves and non-medicated bison jerky, mentally jerking off to dreams of making a film-fest splash at Sundance, Slamdance, or even Slamdunk, or hanging around the Croissette, aging French movie actresses clutching them briefly to their Dior-scented cheeks while Atom Egoyan raised two fingers in salute and the buzz on the trade-show floor grew deafening. That was why they wanted to make movies-or rather, films-not for the pleasure of the audience or because they had known love.
“P.K.!” The Steadicam guy and the stunt double, a disconcertingly pale, double-jointed woman who went by the name The Body, were playing hackeysack with a vigour born of pent-up energy (sexual? drug-induced? feigned? Can such a thing be feigned?) that Patrick himself hadn’t felt for weeks, even months. They gestured to him. Stoked. Always stoked. He put his hands to the small of his back, exaggeratedly wincing, indicating no-can-do, and tapped his watch face with what he hoped was a purposeful look.
Patrick Kakami, who had just turned thirty-three two months ago, the same age as Jesus Christ was when he died (and Alexander the Great and John Belushi, men of untethered ambition all-stoked?), felt old, much older than he had any right to. It was as if his recently replaced mitral valve had kick-started an accelerated aging process; this ticker he called his “pig heart” triggering a sped-up degeneration of living tissue. Cell death racing along like actors in a Mack Sennett picture. It was 2009. And time itself was melting, oozing over the edge of his days like Dali’s clocks.
Patrick made a deal with himself, right there, right then, feet planted in mud, rain misting his rimless glasses, his compromised heart in his mouth, as small and sour as a dried apricot, to reclaim some essential part of himself before it was too late, before the bastards (they, them) did him in.
After all, Syd Gross, whom he trusted, who was his friend, had allowed those eunuchs at CBC, their “broadcast partner,” to talk him into cutting the scene in Rain Dog that meant the most to Patrick-the scene he now thinks of in eulogy as the Rosetta Stone of the entire picture. He couldn’t even bear to think about the concessions necessitated by the Chinese co-production deal.
All around him, little dramas, micro-movies, were being played out. Gideon-spouting actor David Mathers was engaged in a flirty game of cat’s cradle with the thirteen-year-old Victoria girl who played the novitiate, Sister Incarnata. Mathers with his high beams on, the girl’s fingers hopelessly tangled, her laughter like a cat choking on cream. Gita Chapelle, rogue actress, was napping high up in Old Gnarly, one dirty bare foot dangling off her protest platform. The Body pumped her legs like pistons, tossing the footbag from one knee to the other as the nun extras gathered around her counting out loud, urging her on with her pointless task.
The light filtering through the canopy of old-growth cedars and Douglas firs made everything look as if it were being shot in stop-motion. As if all these people were puppets or Claymation figures, their movements exaggerated, grotesque.
Patrick’s skin tightened against his skull.
And the first AD still standing there, rattling the script in his face as if he hadn’t already answered her question.
Months back, before all the real problems with the production began-before the second female lead took to an enormous Douglas fir, nicknamed Old Gnarly, with a megaphone and an endless supply of energy bars and Red Bull to protest against globalization (as far as Syd knew, she was still up there, may she choke on her armpit hairs), before he had to negotiate the crazy deal points for the director of photography, a high-school pal of Kakami’s whose head had swelled to the size of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters after working on Lethal Weapon 4 as the clapper loader (just recalling the initial deal letter made Syd clutch at a phantom pain somewhere in the vicinity of his heart), before Syd found out that Kakami had gone AWOL (as in vanished without a trace, poof! as if the man had never existed-described this way to Syd by the hysterical location manager as though Kakami had performed a magic trick)-before all this, before they could secure the permit to shoot on the rainforest island, on native land, Syd Gross had had to attend a sweat lodge ceremony.
How bad could it be, he’d thought, it’s just a sauna, right? A friend of his who’d taken part in one during an Outward Bound course said it helped him relieve his aggression. “I didn’t feel like killing anyone for about a month,” he told Syd.
The only access to the island was by private boat after taking the ferry from the mainland to the Sunshine Coast and driving north, taking yet another ferry, and driving some more. Syd had been told to bring light, comfortable clothing, a gift for the elders (cloth, tobacco), and “no big-city attitude.” This was conveyed to him by a spokesman for the Sliammon People, a guy called Porgie, the same man who arrived to pick up Syd and his assistant at the dock on the reserve. (“Have your people call my People,” Porgie said afterwards, laughing at his own joke and flashing his teeth.)
Kakami was already on the island, ebullient as usual despite his media rep for a studied cool. He waved around something that looked like a gargantuan cigar. “Grossman!” He jogged towards Syd, his location manager, Drew, drifting along behind him. Drew was a thin, bald Eurasian with hypothyroid Bette Davis eyes who disturbed Syd because he couldn’t tell if this Drew person was male or female and was embarrassed to ask anyone, even Patrick.
“These beautiful people, Syd, they’ve already put us to work. Smell this!” Kakami thrust the oversized cigar thing under Syd’s nose. “I made it myself.”
He stood there grinning, like a little kid awaiting praise for a kindergarten project.
“It’s a smudge stick,” Drew told him. “You light it et voila.”
“I know what it is,” said Syd, who had no idea. Was he supposed to smoke it or use it to ream out Kakami for dragging him out to this repository of excessive greenery and spiritual wankery. You want to make a movie about nuns, what’s wrong with Montreal or Boston?
He slapped his hands together to change the subject. “So, let’s get this fucking show on the road.”