Inez must have seen things as malleable to infinity. Why scrub plates and ruin skin, when, with a slight rearrangement, you could put their dirt-bedeviled state at the front of the reel and their squeaky virginity at the end? Something like this must have been her thinking. How else could she justify such blatant neglect, like she couldn’t see the piles she was leaving, the clogs she caused?
Wes cleaned up after her in those early days, not begrudgingly — since it was her. And it was a novelty to him — he’d always prided himself on his disheveledness, his clothes creases that blurred into rumples, scornful of those who cared about such things. He was gawky and had to duck under lowhanging doorways; his glasses were scratchy, and he projected for parties and knew where to score if he didn’t already have the substances you wanted. He was a hipster. His tattoo was unique. It ran up his right arm, like something in Sharpie, a hunter done in a few strokes, sneaking up on a bright red bison. When he showed it to Inez, she traced it as if she might feel the pigments.
“Is it static?”
Wes had smiled. It looked static, all right. The renderer, a friend from the art school Wes had dropped out of, had done it seamlessly; even Wes couldn’t tell where skin became screen. He twitched and she gave a little gasp as it activated, and the hunter pursued the bison, who snorted comically twice and then ran into a cave. The skin blacked out until, with a blast from the hunter’s torch, light returned. The punch line was the bison posed against the wall of the cave, holding preternaturally still, blending in perfectly with the paintings of animals already there. It was gorgeous, actually, this last scene, worthy of the Lascaux artist him or herself.
“Wow,” she said. “Play it again, Wes.”
After he did, she pulled up her own shirt to reveal hers, not animation but black and white on the center of her back, her family’s farm somewhere off in the country done as a home movie, retrochromed to look older than it was, her grandfather holding up a fish, languorous cattle in a field. It was tasteful, and the bump of her spine, jutting in the middle and stretching the screen in odd places, only added to the charm. It made his feel like an amateur sketch. Everyone had heard the stories about tattoos jarred into motion in the act of lovemaking, the lover helpless to turn them off, and he wanted this, now, to be the case for them, and, reaching out to caress the bump, he could see her tattoo refract onto his fingers, felt himself connect to her then, something that could still happen, then.
And now he took deep breaths and strategized as to how to buy himself some time. Stress he was used to. . they’d cut back — the economy, everyone hurting, probably inevitable if you could play reality backward as he did sometimes just messing around in the booth, but regardless, positions had been cut, and now Wes often did the work of, by his calculations, his gripe-boasts to Inez, two or three men — he says men even fully cognizant that there are fantastic women projectionists, Daniella Riordan, need he say more, though it wasn’t all that common, convention no doubt instead of anything deep down in the helices. Say “projectionist” and, as with “doctor,” the synapses summon up a male.
He’s no doctor, of course, neither the prestige nor the pay nor, indeed, the malpractice, though they treated him and the M.D.’s and the shrinks as equals at the mandated trainings on cinaddiction. He still wasn’t sure where he stood on the controversy. Nervous systems so enmeshed with films that they were needed? Ask him before that party and you might’ve gotten a different answer. Some artsy guy whose name he can no longer call up goes to a film-free party and gets stuck in the bathroom — don’t ask how — and in there he just goes haywire, hyperventilating and rolling on the floor. When they pry open the door, his eyes are husks of glass, face flaring red, and his fists — these he’ll never forget — clenched so that his nails leave indentations in his palms. Random frat boy makes the mistake of suggesting he just have a drink and chill out. It takes six to pull the addict off him, face bloodied, and to drag him out to the quad, where something is showing. In minutes, he’s calmer than a monk. Before that Wes’d been 100 percent sure it was all mind, but the single incident brought matter neck and neck. It was a weird thing culturally. You could still joke about it, but a growing number got classified and wore the wrist chains and took offense if you made light. Still, that’s what the emergency reel was for. By law and as a precaution, he needed to get something up there, and so, for the first time in his career, he reached for the bright red wheel.
Wes and Inez stayed in spite of what the world had to say about them, how it typecast them, the Palamoans — gluttonous image ingesters, perpetual dupes, back floaters in a lotus sea. Get a few drinks in her and Inez fired back, a side of her that drew him originally. He loved to sit back and listen: Yeah, navel gazers and deadheads, like you’re not going to find those everywhere? Come on, could we possibly be any more disillusioned? We gaze at more navels — see more, experience more. Innies? Outies? (She’d lift up her own shirt at this point to reveal her own adorable outie.) Tonight if I want to I can see a film about gay Indians or the sex lives of Mongolian sheepherders. I mean, everywhere people eat, shit, fuck, and live their little lives, but we. . we live across history. We know elsewheres. He dug that she really did want to learn about all of those things, then, at least.
In soberer states, she’d extemporize about how Palamoans knew exactly where the cogs of illusion meshed and where the seams flickered by undetected, how life could be adjusted with the efficiency a tailor takes to a suit: a few seconds trimmed here, an inversion or two, a telling juxtaposition, voilá. Other cities may have known the wrath of monsoon and hurricane, but in Palamoa it was film, film coming down in torrents and pouring onto cutting-room floors, and it could unleash as much havoc as a force of nature, could sweep you away if you weren’t careful, leave you stunned and shell-shocked on your porch, wondering what had hit you. If anything, the Palamoans were consummate realists: none of that romantic crap for them, no waiting for rescue, no delusions of being on some grand hero’s journey. Their only deity was the mise-enscène, the frame — the smudgy/hyperlucid/eclipsed/doub/led/ fickle frame — that ushered in and closed out, made for happening and nonhappening. The line between abject cowardice and awe-inspiring courage might have everything to do with the frame and nothing at all with your heart. But, Gunther might have posed, what if you were outside the frame? Did you even exist then?
Inez could talk a streak, but for a while she shared her innermost thoughts only with Mervich, Henry H., who’d attained some celebrity with Reintegration Therapy, taking the splintered, shattered heap that contemporary life foisted on you and making you whole, gluing you back together. Guy’s all the king’s horses, Wes had thought. The treatments, from what he could gather, involved cooking and consuming a steady supply of veggie burgers sold by Mervich himself (they looked like Martian rocks) and taking long, hot baths. Mervich was a millionaire and was seeing Inez thanks to one of her work connections. But she swore by him. That went on for several months, and then one day his fees shot up inexplicably. From that day forward, Mervich’s name was non grata around the apartment, and Wes wondered but didn’t pry, sure she would share when she was ready, but that was never to make it into the frame.