PAUL: S-Situational, yeah, that’s the way it, it comes. Like, so situational. Something, something hollows ow, out the tunnel, and then it a-all, it all whacks you a-at once. A-all at once, it’s there in front and, and it’s there in back, and if there a-are words, they’re a-all at once. It’s, it’s in your fingers, or it’s, it’s right at your fingers, you, you can just reach it, and, and, it’s between your, your legs too, it’s buh, buh…
BARBARA: That’s okay, Paulie. I understand.
DIPIO (off-screen): But why the tongue, please? Why the tongue?
Whitman’s hands kept accelerating: first ballet, then jazz. To watch him go, snipping out the overlap in the two interviews Barbara had brought him, you’d think anyone could do this. Anyone could make it interesting. But the young pro had an idea behind every cut and paste, and he shared a lot of his thinking, while also getting off snide remarks about “movies that should go on a diet.” Barb was left feeling like a hayseed, a dumbo American, because she’d never heard of most of the films he was complaining about.
But then, she’d asked for this. Naturally, when she’d told Chris and John Junior she needed the equipment for a couple of afternoons — she too needed to make a document, a picture about Paul — once again the teenagers had sworn up and down that their younger brother was a big part of their own project.
“Hey. This isn’t just another teen movie.”
“Mom like, think of Casablanca. ‘The problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this world.’”
But Barb had never cared for that movie, to her it played as if the whole point of the Second World War had been to make Humphrey Bogart’s love life more interesting, and she’d been under no illusions about what her two oldest would do with raw footage of the middle child talking. They’d tear it apart. They’d warp their younger brother’s hard-won articulations in whatever way might serve their own purposes. What could she expect, from teenage boys? If Barbara let them handle the interviews, or if she gave them the interviews unedited, Paul would get lost in translation. Once more he’d go neglected, in the name of some greater, foggier good.
PAUL (squinting off): Their tongue, wow. But it’s, it’s like I say, this never hap, happens in words, or, or never words lined up a-and getting somewhere. It’s never like a, it never adds up to a, a, a story.
(BARBARA nods, upright, propped on railing)
PAUL: The tongue is like the tentacle. Wh-when that feeling is row, is rolling, it comes, it comes o-out at the tongue, (eyes shift to BARBARA)
BARBARA: This is what we’re here for, Paulie. It’s nothing bad or crazy.
PAUL: Can’t, can’t you understand, that’s where I catch it? The tongue. It’s, it’s the place where I, I get hold of the trouble. Can’t you, why can’t you j-just feel it?
“You know after I edit,” Whitman said, “I can download straight to the web.”
He made an acrobat of the cursor, swinging it from icon to icon along the top of the screen. He assured Barb she’d leave here with the edited file in her scan-disk stick, and a DVD as well if she wanted. “But streaming video, that’s instant gratification.”
The mother didn’t respond, thinking differently. What her youngest boy had felt, during his episodes, no longer sounded so strange. This time around the mother noticed how his descriptions fit the testimonies that had turned up in the reading she’d done, ten days ago now. She saw what the boy had to say carpentered into a single fifteen- or twenty-minute burst, stinging but confined, and as she watched, Barbara understood better than before how Mr. Paul had been living with an invisible talent like her own, the talent to link up, now and again, with the Universal Horsepower. She understood that the absence of healthier exercise for the boy’s spirit-muscle had forced up these recent eruptions; the miracles had worked as a safety valve, an overflow. And while Barb got the picture, all at once like this, she suffered its wallop, sure. But then the picture was over — the cry from Paul’s heart shrank into an icon on the monitor. Soon enough that icon would disappear inside another, and neither would appear larger than the tip of her pinkie. Likewise the entire family’s transoceanic event, in which an untreatable sickness on one side of the Atlantic had turned into an unknowable medicine on the other, would be reduced to a moment’s chatter between satellites.
Barbara’s footage, in other words, was only another item for the local closets. After all, what city in the world was so full of discards? She remembered the trunk in the Nazionale, and she wondered just which shelf or cellar would wind up storing the business on Whitman’s screen. This longhaired artiste had composed another storytelling platter, on which was depicted a slender hero who, despite his frail youth and stark robes, possessed the touch that could restore life. He was the Anti-Siren, this creature. But after he dropped in, after he sent the shock of recovery through a few broken bodies, he went away. Paul would go away, him and his well-intentioned family, and Barb couldn’t have found a more powerful proof than this: his face collapsing to fit into a file within a file. Lively as their Neapolitan crisis might’ve seemed, in the end it was only another scrap for the display case, catalogued and wired to an alarm.
A storytelling platter, Barbara thought, or another version of the movie cliché. Another couple of Anglos felt a bit better about themselves, thanks to their trip to Italy.
PAUL: The only one, really, the only wuh, one I’ve really been a-able to talk to, uhh, talk to about it is Ruh, Ruh. (swallows) It’s Romy.
BARBARA (straightening): She talks to you?
PAUL: I used to, used to talk to her. (twitches) She knows a-about the lick, the licking and flowing and all. I, I used to, a-and she said when she, when she st-still had her broken back, she could sit in her wheelchair and feel the rest of her, really, like flowing. She sat there, and she said it was like she was a, a s-seabird, a seabird who’d gone over the land a-and tried to dive for food in a, in a well. She was a seabird in a well, can’t you just feel it? A well isn’t for seabirds, it’s too, she can’t—
BARBARA: She’s been tricked. The things she trusted, now they hurt her.
PAUL: Oh, oh, okay.
BARBARA: The things she trusted, suddenly they left her useless. She felt like she was no good to anyone, I’m saying. Just baggage, garbage.
PAUL: But she, Mom — that’s not, not it. No. She wasn’t g-garbage, she was, she was still a bird. R-Romy I mean. Garbage? She w-was still a, a bird, she could feel it, she could even, even h-hear it. She heard her like feathers, the, the rustling. The wind.
DIPIO (off-screen): The body remembers. Come si dice, the limb like a ghost?
PAUL: Romy, Romy understands. She was a-always flying. And we, we’ve a-always got that, I’m saying, we’ve all got that ex, ex, extra rustle a-and flowing.
(Blinks at BARBARA, at camera, lowers head. BARBARA touches boy’s shoulder. Inaudible murmur.)
PAUL: We’ve all got them, ah, always, really. Alter, alter, like feathers and wings, a-alternative body parts. You know? Alter, alter… they’re flowing a-and it’s all this life, a-always. (head comes up, eyes enlarged) It’s never gar, garbage. Never you, useless. It’s always w-whispering and a-alive and coming on, like a, a thousand words a-at once. If you tried you, you could feel it. You could a-all feel it.