Maybe he should’ve called first, was his thought as he rapped Gunther’s knocker. Gunther opened the door enrobed, like someone just awakened. For a bachelor, he lived well. His unshaven face and the extra pounds, Wes supposed, would not be liabilities in the dark. Gunther always had some blue-haired chick on his arm, some girl who’d quiver, electrified by his “opiate of the masses” talk. Usually the relationship lasted till the girl wanted him to move away from Palamoa, and Gunther steadfastly refused, citing Socrates-like noblesse oblige.
“Shouldn’t you be at work?” Gunther asked. Wes caught alcohol on his breath mingled with something from the kitchen that had once been in the sea.
He explained it to Gunther — what he’d seen, how he’d killed the film.
“You’re sure it was her?”
“Positive. I doubted it at first. I made sure.”
“A telltale birthmark? A chipped tooth?”
“It was her.”
“Come in.”
Within, sure enough, was the girl du jour, her hair not blue but with the ripped T-shirt and spiderweb stockings and the Che button and one with a red slash through a film icon.
“My oldest pal,” Gunther introduced him, and then, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe it, “a projectioneer.”
“Hey, man, I don’t judge,” said the girl, whose name turned out to be Aurora. “You’re just the hands of the system anyway, not even like the kidneys, much less the brains.”
“No offense.”
“Sorry,” she said. “You’ve had a rough night. Let me kick you when you’re down.”
Gunther spooned him some grilled scallops over salad and poured him wine, then launched into his spiel. Of course Inez had cheated on him. She was cheating on herself, living in a world of simulacra piled atop simulacra, nothing underneath, no foundation but for her makeup, sleeping her way to the top, but, as in an Escher, the top was the bottom; she was just a product of her society, her episteme, etc., etc., etc. Wes knew he should feel grateful, but the rhetoric felt canned — he wanted something about Inez and only Inez, something that would make him hate her and leave the rest of the world unaffected.
“Frankly, no woman’s worth losing your job over.” It was Aurora.
Gunther nodded in agreement. This took him aback. He’d been sure Gunther was going to seize the opportunity to recruit him for the cause. And he was on the brink of signing on for the anticinematic resistance himself, ready to plaster a wall, to disrupt a screening, to grope and be groped in the dark.
Aurora went on. “How long ago did you leave? How quickly can you get back?”
“I don’t know. . ” He, always vigilant about time, having lost it. Had it been an hour?
“This ‘backup reel’ is still. . backing you up?”
“Maybe,” said Wes, on his feet now.
Gunther sounded righteously aggrieved now. “Are you going to allow her to ruin your life, take away your means of production?”
At once he felt lucid, poised, coiled. To have allowed her betrayal to steer him astray, how foolish.
“I should go back, shouldn’t I?”
“Can you?”
“It may be too late. They may have shut me down.”
“Okay,” said Gunther, pursing his lips. “Look. Here’s what we do. You cut the film, right? No, the film was already cut. A small-scale civil disruption. Our ensemble, we’ll own up to it. I’ll make the call. We do that, you know. Monkey wrenches in the works. Switched reels, power outages. . hasn’t happened to you yet, has it?”
In Gunther’s eyes, he could see that all this time he’d protected, spared. “No, it hasn’t,” he said as Gunther and Aurora stood there and waved him, parentally, off into the downpour.
He had braced himself for almost any eventuality, but not the one he found: both films still going—as if he’d never left. Methodically, he switched the other film on the next block, then headed for the booth where he’d done the deed. He threw his full weight against the door to jar it open. Within was bedlam, since the first projector, never shut down, had been unspooling film all the while, hemorrhaging it onto the floor and the counters and every available inch — tentacles and tendrils of film curling and extending from floor to ceiling, a morass he could wade through, feeling it shudder beneath him. Like a drunk who stumbles across a highway unharmed, the film seemed to have avoided passing in front of the second projector’s lens. Thus it hadn’t eclipsed the other, had in some mysterious fashion altered nothing, and the crowd — the seats were still mostly full — watched on, blissfully ignorant. He tugged at random strands, knots, pulling on them and holding them up to the light. None yielded Inez. He could make out a house, some establishing shot, a strange beauty in its sheer repetition.
Releasing it, he flicked the switches, and both projectors fell silent. Soon enough this would become a crime scene. Maybe Gunther had already called, the authorities on their way. His time was waning. He flipped on the streetlights and could see their faces—Again? — and, film trailing behind him, he hoisted the giant reel and carried it down the stairs into the canyon.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “we’re all the victims of a minor disaster tonight.” He urged them not to panic. The anticinemites, it would appear, had struck. He searched their eyes for fear, rage, but found none, so, emboldened, he went on. Maybe they could help him find the spot where the film had been torn asunder. Together, they could salvage it, reconstruct it. Maybe — he heard a new intensity infuse his voice — they could stand up to whoever had done this, show the film, damn it, through to its end. Wordlessly, then, they began to rise to their feet, some quicker than others, and reach out, tentatively at first, then with growing resolve, for the film, each of them taking a small strand, positioning their fingers carefully, pinching at the edges. To disentangle it, they had to spread out, and the line that began to form went in both directions, up the stairs, down the block. He could envision a whole new way of watching a film, walking beside it, even zooming along at twenty-four frames per second — what a ride that would be! Their arms were outstretched: matronly women, businessmen with sleeves rolled up, a woman in a wheelchair, familiar faces and new ones, arms with wrist chains and bare ones. Even Gunther, it struck him, could get behind this. In the lamplight, they resembled nothing more than mourners bearing aloft a long, winding casket. All films, he thought — everyone — should be held like this once. Eventually they’d locate the end, the fatal wound, and remembering as much, he made himself slow in his movements, as if he might prolong this forever, might never find Inez, might instead slip inside one of the intervening frames and dwell there indefinitely, unknowing.
The Conversations
The first of the Conversations had taken place at once in Rome, in Vegas, and in Hoboken. No one knew then what they were, of course; they just seemed the talk of talkers, mundane as could be, the little dramas that unfold in the lives of all in front of the private audience of the participants and whoever else happens to be within earshot.
In Rome: a couple argued over whether or not it was safe to rent a motorbike and go zipping around the city. She cited the blind curves and the age of the cobblestones and the profusion of stray cats who might straggle their ways across his path, and reminded him that he himself admitted he shut his eyes sometimes when he sneezed on their own wide, clearly demarcated American highways, seconds when he might as well have been in an alternate universe, might as well have been tripping out again like he did in his frenzied youth, which she was glad she’d only come onstage for at the curtain call — and as an afterthought, she almost added, What about the possibility of a flashback? She didn’t approve, left the room when he so much as broke out the pink Colman’s mustard tin in which he stored his joint-making sundries. Now they were going around and around like the ceiling fan in the café, and the waiter, a squat, dark-skinned older man with a Father Guido Sarducci mustache and enviable teeth, was ready to spike their cappuccinos with a local liqueur in order to placate them just a touch, take the edge off their bickering. He, the waiter, didn’t follow the news all that closely, being mostly consumed, when he wasn’t working, with his collection of vintage early-twentieth-century opera 78s, his Gigli and Tamagno, but he knew enough to note that the griping of Americans had led them to the brink of global economic collapse and that this wasn’t good for him, or anybody, and here again this American couple was demonstrating that most characteristic trait that marred their nation: noncompromise en extremis adolescenti. She should let him go off and ride his bike and pump up his virility, since that is what it was all about (though the motorbikes, in his opinion, were unbecoming and puggish), and meanwhile she should go off and flirt with some of the local men (ahem) to make herself feel better, preferably as her guy rode by on his motorbike at the nexus of a moment when he’d catch her in the act and — if he were to crash, then, at least it would be noble and meaningful. He was about to offer them a free dessert, which would surely catch them off guard — a tiramisu that the chef had recently perfected, its admixture of custard and mascarpone so sublime that he himself had eaten some left behind by a couple earlier that day, she who was dieting and he who was diabetic, and he’d laughed, the waiter, unapologetically downing the residue in the kitchen in the presence of the chef, honoring him rather than scraping his art into the trash. The tiramisu he was bringing them he had taken from the refrigerator and had sensibly lopped off half, still sizable enough to serve as a full portion in many places, Merulana, where he used to work, among them, that pen of miserly oafs and fifth-rate thugs, and now he proudly bore the dish toward the bickerers, anticipating their broadening smiles of surprise and then, shortly after, when the spoons met their mouths, the murmurs of pleasure that would inevitably follow, and he was making his approach when the Conversation ruptured and blew apart the room, glass counters raining down shards, chairs left spinning from warped overhead fans, bodies reduced to semiskinned skeletons that would still be smoldering when the sirens came.