14. Puking blood, he fancies himself Viking warrior rather than syphilitic artist.
15. Over a century later, museumed, his works make spectators unpleasantly cold. Some say, “We should go someplace warm.” “Starbucks?” “Tahiti!”
16. Into his Creeping Glacier series, fronds of South Pacific green keep slipping like shards from a neighboring universe. These, plus the nipples and pubes he barely conceals under walrus hide, yield countless hours of talk for critics and prudes.
Urban Planning: Case Study Number Seven
The City in the Light of Moths
The projectionist’s heart broke as the spool of the film he was screening snapped, sending a thousand frames rocketing through the room. But no, we are skipping over crucial moments: the groping for scissors; the hands, known for steadiness, atremble; and a last look through the thick glass before the lunge. The first cut missed but the second connected, and then he’d watched the life exit slowly, like some enemy combatant dying in his arms, so close he could taste its breath, watch last prayers sputter on its lips.
He’d imagined innumerable iterations of this, foiling terrorists and rescuing his block — no, the whole city. In his imaginings, they charged in in ski masks and released the radioactive xenon that glowed inside his projector, or forced him at gunpoint to put on their radical film, or one where the screen would go blindingly bright at some point, scorching every retina in the room as if they were all standing at White Sands, unprotected, followed by a sonic boom that would shred their tympana. His fantasies expanded and contracted but inevitably wound up with him as the guest of honor at some gala, Inez’s thin fingers entwined with his own under the table, “Wesssss. .” engulfed in applause.
Now he gazed down into the theater that stretched out below, “the canyon,” they called it, as if it had been shaped by wind and water and time, the backs of heads anthropomorphic rocks. The rocks were looking back up at him. Instead of irate cries, an eerie silence welled up, a thin veneer over a thousand sighs. He could win them back, he thought. Some down there knew him, some loved him, maybe not in the way he loved Inez, but still, the word suited. It would take, though, a move as boldly restorative as this was destructive, and as he glanced down he could see the film was even now tumbling into the room like floodwater.
Wes was required by law and by the powers vested in him as a projectionist to get another film flung up there as soon as possible. An audience in the lurch, in cinemus interruptus, would grow restless quickly. Uncountable other films commanded the sides of buildings for twenty miles. If he was lucky they’d pick themselves up and march out, grumbling and shaking their heads, some to return never, none happy. His wall might get its first mark, and Hatcher would rail at him: “Wes, what were you thinking! This ain’t the boondocks. The Historic District. Diplomats, power players. At a debut, no less.”
But darker possibilities loomed. The rowdy, the addicts — all it took was one or two, plus swirl in a couple of drinks — who might come right to the door, and let’s say they began pounding and yelling about tearing him apart limb from limb? He gripped the scissors tight. It wouldn’t be the first time a projectionist had been treated to vigilante justice. Technically outlawed, such violence was, but judges tended to look the other way, as if they themselves were watching a film on the wall opposite. Case in point: that dude over in District 4.1.5.E who’d twisted the lens so that the film was flipped on its side, but still, these things happen, except that out of spite or obstinacy or simple boneheadedness, he’d refused to fix it, sinking deeper into his lip’s curl when the boos and hisses reached fever pitch, and then when they’d yanked the bench slats out of the pavement and torn off the iron rests for battering, he’d still refused to right the film or even admit any wrongdoing. When they’d finished with him he’d been rearranged so that it was said that from that point on he would look at the world ever sideways.
Wes had always blamed the projectionist, but now he felt a shudder of empathy. Things happened fast. He thought of the opening of The Wild Bunch—lazy western town, women and children parading and singing down the dusty street. You knew it was about to be bad, but not how sudden and thick the blood would spurt. He reviewed his options. Under normal conditions he could change a flat in under a minute. Its seal broken, the emergency reel would hold him till he could get to the archives, and he had another film to change down the block, but he still had thirty-eight minutes to get to that.
But he stood paralyzed, stunned, not even sure whether he’d just seen what he thought he’d seen. Maybe he’d conjured the whole thing? Had that even been Inez up there?
Inez came home exhausted every evening these days, eyes bloated and hair mussed as she slipped past him into the tight apartment and made for the couch. Her stockinged feet pointed at where some ottoman ought to sit as she swigged her cognac and Coke down to the ice in the imitation snifter, while he sipped coffee and geared up for his own shift. No, she didn’t really want to talk about her day. No, nothing was different, nothing she could pinpoint. They were putting her on more projects, true. She was competent, had proved herself, and now they had her editing like three or four things at a time. She had to work through lunch and mind her crumbs at the console. She stayed late. This was how things happened, how you got shunted up the ladder. It was happening. At once she was editing a documentary about people obsessed with hats, a murder mystery about a surgeon whose twin brother has slain him and taken over his office, and a comedy with indie leanings about anarchists in love.
Such gear switching was inseparable from what she loved about the job, what she loved about Palamoa. Why they stayed — born there, they’d been suckled alike on celluloid, barely blinked a blink without a film in their peripheries. (“Film,” went the song, “you long, blinking train.”) Till he was three, Wes had fallen asleep each night with Mothlight flickering against his ceiling: semitranslucent red-pink wings that burst into petals and veiny leaves and ramifying shapes that then broke apart into a red-pink snow, all of it fluttering above him gentle as a blanket. Brakhage, the incantatory name of the filmmaker he’d later learn from his mom, just as he’d learn that she always knew he was asleep when his cries faded and she could still make out the faint crackle of silent film wending its way.
Hard to picture Inez as “Julia” then, hard to picture her milking and bailing, sidestepping shit amid the grunters and lowers on her family farm in what were then Palamoa’s outskirts. She still rose early. Everything else had shifted: Now where her farm was were the cineburbs, and Inez turned heads (human, not livestock) in stunning strapless things and camisoles you had to study closely to tell if you were seeing through them, while the handsome barn, a five o’clock shadow of paint peel, had itself made an appearance in several films. As kids do, she’d plotted escapes — New York, Ganzoneer, any elsewhere — and somehow gotten sucked right into the city’s center.
Once Palamoa had drawn ships and sailors eager to reverse scurvy and celibacy, rushing headlong for the inland markets, for memories and paid oblivion. While they got off their sails got replaced: The Palamoans redid ships from top to bottom, but it was sails that built her, giant factories attiring ships in blaring new canvas. Today’s waterfront shimmered, lobster boats sharp-hued, whitecaps whispering of depth, but for the cameras, really. Wes and Inez, like many young couples, lived out by the factories, taking advantage of the laughable rents and cheap eats. As they walked past the old buildings, they could hear the outsized machinery churning out screens, and a figure of speech had it that you could still cross an ocean with a Palamoan sail.