The two of them cackle wildly.
“Dat ain’t true,” says Awinita from where she’s standing in the doorway.
“Huh?” says Deena.
Awinita looks at them impassively, not moving. Speaks simply.
“I tought it was notin’,” she says, “but it ain’t. You take deir dick, deir pain comes along wid it. Dey leave de pain behind. Dey go off, and de pain stays behind wit you.”
FADE TO GRAY.
Amidst moving shadows, a monster shakes in evil, soundless laughter. Other shapes surge and swarm before our eyes, shivering darkly. There is a shooting star.
Maybe that shooting star is you, Milo darling? Maybe it’s your soul suddenly entering your body? Awinita has just passed the critical three-month point of her pregnancy.
• • • • •
6. cream. . chrism
VIII. SAUDADE
Powerful nostalgia or lack. The term is virtually untranslatable.
Milo, 1970–75
WE NEED to think about what we want to keep in and keep out from now on, Milo, baby. As it stands, we’ve got something like, uh, ballpark estimate. . seven hours of film. Sure, there are a coupla precedents in the history of the medium — sublime trilogies such as Satyajit Ray’s Apu or Fritz Lang’s Doctor Mabuse. . But still, we have to be careful. Wouldn’t want the audience’s attention to wander, now, would we? Especially in this next sequence, which deals with the most chaotic period in your whole life. .
MAYBE START OFF with news footage from the spring of 1970, during which the Front de Liberation du Québec sets off one bomb after another, killing six people and inflicting considerable material damage on symbols of English domination in the province. Windsor Station in Montreal (through which Neil dragged little Milo the day they first met), monument to Queen Victoria, Dominion Bank, Queen’s Printing Press, Loyola College, private mailboxes in the cushy Anglo suburb of Westmount, Bank of Nova Scotia, Royal Air Force. . Milo can be seen gleaning these events, sometimes on TV as he chats and laughs with prostitutes in sleazy bars, more often over the transistor that keeps him company as he shoots up in the men’s room of the Voyageur bus station, wanders through the dark back streets of Old Montreal, and sleeps out under bridges.
A summer’s night. High on heroin, Milo sinks onto his back in the grass, looks up at the night sky and sees a shooting star. (Right, Milo, you’re the shooting star. Yeah, I get the joke, you’re the star of the film and you’re shooting up. Great, very good, very funny.) Segue from the shooting star into the whiteness of his heroin heaven at age eighteen. Not a bland, colorless, boring white — no, a divine, milky, creamy white; a frothy, nourishing, tepid white, sweet as fresh cow’s milk — not buttery, not fatty and stomach-turning, no, the milk and honey of the River Jordan! The drug picks him up in its soft white arms and gives him the sublime, melting, liquid sensation of being held and rocked and soothed and sung to, comforted and cuddled and kissed forever and ever, amen.
Yes, Astuto, I know how much you loved heroin.
One day in May, the whiteness in Milo’s brain turns into that of a flock of Canadian geese that fills the entire sky. Pan to the young man staring up at them. Clinging to his arm is a pert and pretty, dark-haired girl by the name of Viviane, also looking up. Their mouths are open in amazement. Milo recites a few lines from “The Wild Swans at Coole.”
De trees are in deir autumn beauty,
De woodland paths are dry,
Under de October twilight de water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon de brimming water among de stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
Viviane looks at him adoringly.
“Sounds beautiful!” she says. “Who’s it by?”
“Yeats.”
“Never heard of him.”
“A great Irish poet from the beginning of the century. Good friend of my grandfather’s.”
“Boy, that grandfather of yours sure made a big impression on you. You talk about him all the time. You gonna introduce me to your folks one of these days?”
“Absolutely.”
Milo grins broadly. . and, to keep her from asking more questions, plants a fierce kiss on her mouth. Just then, in a deafening beating of wings, the wild geese alight in the field next to them and the couple bursts apart. It’s as if they had caused the event — as if a thousand large white birds had landed just to watch them kiss. They contemplate this living, threshing sea of whiteness at close range.
CUT to a red Chevy convertible, Viviane at the wheel, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail, speeding through the state of Nevada. As the sun beats down on his face, Milo leans back in the passenger seat with his feet on the dashboard.
CUT to the two of them making torrid love in a small hotel room in Reno, Viviane on top.
CUT to a private home in L.A., a couple of deck chairs by a swimming pool. Dressed in a skimpy bikini, Viviane is sipping a gin and tonic through a straw and letting a tall, dark, handsome stranger talk her up. Milo and their host are playing chess at a table under a pergola a few yards away. From time to time, Milo glances over to check out the scene next to the swimming pool, and the host watches him watching. When Viviane and the stranger rise and glide toward the house hand in hand, Milo moves his queen.
“Well, well,” the host says. “I wonder where that lovely girlfriend of yours has wandered off to.”
“Checkmate,” says Milo.
CUT to Milo running alone on the beach as the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean. A long, searingly beautiful shot.
He and Viviane hug each other good-bye. She puts her suitcase into the trunk of a white Chrysler convertible and the handsome stranger drives her away.
Milo and his host at midnight, next to a campfire on the beach. After dropping a couple of tabs of psilocybin, they make sublime love in the sand. The camera politely turns upward to film more shooting stars overhead, but we gather from the sound track that Milo’s sex pushing warmly into him is making the host so happy that he weeps. Milo shouts when he comes — a gorgeous shout.
(Important decision that summer: you take advantage of the hospitality and kindness of this wealthy Californian to shake your drug habit. Even in the ideal conditions your host provides for you, your withdrawal — like your mother’s twenty years earlier — lasts a full month and is undiluted hell. . but you wade through it, Astuto wonder, and come out on the other side. I love you for that, though I admit I haven’t got the slightest idea how to film it.)
At summer’s end, Milo drives Viviane’s red car back east through Canada. Stops in Saskatchewan to pick up a female hitchhiker with carrot-colored hair. The girl is wearing blue jean cutoffs, a bright pink shirt knotted above her midriff, dirty old sandals and a black Stetson, pulled down past her eyebrows so the wind won’t blow it off. Milo chats with her as country-western music blares from the radio (Patsy Cline? yeah, let’s say Patsy Cline). The girl laughs a lot, crinkling her eyes at his jokes. Her name is Roxanne. Milo and Roxanne make love in a cheap motel room. Close-up on the bedside table: we recognize a packet of birth control pills. Times have changed.
Milo moves his things into Roxanne’s dark little apartment in East Toronto.
CUT to an interview with the dean at the University of Toronto.
“Yes, Mr. Noirlac, I’ve grasped the fact that your girlfriend is registered in the nursing program here, but I’m afraid that does not qualify you ipso facto for our theater program. We absolutely must have access to your school record, at least some sort of proof that you graduated high school.”