The furrows, p.8
The Furrows, page 8
“You’re nuts!” you say.
And I believe you.
8
I’m on a tour of a studio lot, a perk from a potential Vigil donor. I’ve been in meetings with her people for a week and it’s the day before I’m about to leave. The lot is mostly empty. I try to imagine the people who are usually here: directors, extras, stars. This is part of the point, I suppose: to look around and picture busy, beautiful faces shifting in and out of focus in front of these caramelized facades. I wonder how it would feel to work here, or even live here. There’s a movie where they did that—real people living inside a giant illusion—but I can’t remember its name. I see in my mind only Jim Carrey’s big white teeth, blank and expectant as the squares on Wheel of Fortune.
The people in this tour group don’t cohere, which is probably normal. There’s an older white guy with four strands of hair he’s combed over his pate. There are two middle-aged white women, who are sisterly in the way of sisters who live in the same town and have maintained their family culture; they wear clothing of the same genre: canvas shoes, tan slacks, flowery impressionist blurs on their blouses. There’s a family—Chicano or Salvadoran—a husband, wife, young boy, and younger girl, all with a stifled, harassed air. There’s another white guy, this one in his mid-twenties, in a business suit too hot for the weather. He wears glasses that darken into sunglasses whenever he comes out of the shade and asks endless questions in an authoritative tone. The guide, a portly Asian woman whose backward walk is pleasingly graceful and has an impressive command of our names, has to repeat the man’s queries in a shout so her answers will make sense to everyone else. There’s me. And there’s the man dressed in dark blue jeans, a pastel button-down shirt, and a black and orange baseball cap. He would seem corporate, a businessman on vacation, if it weren’t for his shoes, brilliant white hightops. His grin is wide and prolific. He’s beautiful—a category beyond handsome—and this makes me feel both susceptible and suspicious.
He sidles up to me when the tour stops in front of the fake ice-cream parlor. Under the hilly sound of the guide’s voice—up and down, up and down—he makes a joke about cherries. I conjure two alternative lives for myself. In one, his comment offends me enough that I tell him to fuck off. In the other, I flirt back until we achieve a delicious camaraderie. Instead, in this life, I smile stiffly and turn away. I always picture these forking paths of transgression but I can never rise to the occasion of slipping into one. My deviance is too buried, too inwardly directed.
By the time we get to the Ferris wheel, which is fully functioning but out of service, my demurrals have allowed a pattern to emerge between me and this man. He makes rough jokes. I smile and turn away. He’s teenagery in his teasing, not standoffish or drywitted the way I’d expect. It’s frustratingly unclear, actually, whether he’s coming on to me or not, an ambiguity that titillates me more than I want to admit.
The tour group shuffles into a Western set, a saloon. It is nothing like the slick-surfaced bar I went to last night, which had lamps that cast light upward and fountains that dribbled over stones in the background. But the set is still somehow reminiscent of a dating scene. I imagine people dressed to the nines standing at the long mahogany bar. They hold a drink in one hand and gesture with the other, as if weighing possibilities, equating pleasures.
This fake saloon, the guide says with a rote peppiness, has appeared not only in several Westerns (old and new), but also in two dance films from the eighties and an indie movie in which the characters visit a new bar retrofitted to look like an old bar. The younger white guy smiles at his phone. I feel unnerved by the desultory staleness of the place, the sawdust like talc under our feet. The tall, beautiful man leans in toward me to make another joke—I catch the word “lasso”—and I move out of earshot. I’m more skittish here, perhaps because of the aura of awkward mating rituals. He again steps toward me, sawdust wafting, and again I shift.
Too far. He doesn’t walk away but he cuts off the seeking energy he’s been sending toward me. I hadn’t meant to end the dance quite yet. As soon as it’s gone, I miss it, long for it even. I push the feeling aside—this man has me too off-kilter for a stranger—and press forward as if fascinated by the funfacts tumbling out of our guide, as if amused by the widely held difficulty of bursting through swinging doors.
When the tour moves on to the hangar-like structure of the soundstage and the guide begins to hold forth on its uses, history, peculiarities, I head to the ladies’ room I glimpsed next to the saloon, more for the brief peace of solitude than out of any pressing need. I take my time, reapply my lipstick, linger on my face in the murky mirror, trying to see what the man would have seen, trying to see the trace of my yearning. I leave the bathroom, then the building, and inhale the air outside deeply—I always hold my breath in public restrooms.
Across the faux-cobbled street, a marquee curves toward me. It’s a movie theater set or maybe a large screening room. It’s garish and I wonder how I didn’t notice it before. Warmth emanates distantly from it, the goggle-eyed bulbs around its edges lit up despite the sun. The marquee sign reads T H E G R I F T E R S, the E’s reversed for some kind of noir effect, and beneath, T R U E R O M A N C E. The empty glass-paned ticket booth looks like a tiny lighthouse. I walk toward it, my footsteps muffled by flat red carpet. I look up at the rash of bulbs embedded in the overhang. Some of them are out and for a moment, I seek an inverse constellation, but there’s no discernible pattern. I peer through scratched plexiglass at the old, lurid posters, the curves of the movie star bodies, the movie star fonts. I assume the theater is locked: the guide has been expertly unlocking doors all afternoon with a bulky set of keys.
So I’m surprised when one of the doors opens, and even more surprised that I pushed at it in the first place. The lobby is dark but for the faint glow of an electric sign: a red-and-white-striped box with an orgasmic spray of popcorn. There’s another booth-like object in here, also glass-paned from the waist up, but harboring a mass grave of stuffed animals and a dangling silver claw that looks like it should be swinging. I remember this game from bowling alleys. I search my purse for change for too long before it occurs to me that the machine’s fake, a prop, and will likely just swallow my money.
I step into the theater itself, the door with its porthole window rocking closed behind me. It smells musty and sweet, like buttery dust. Blinking at the darkness as if to dispel it, I walk down the easy slope. As my eyes adjust, I can make out a mechanical mess on the floor, right beneath the screen. It’s film equipment: rivets and spools and ladders, objects I can decipher as microphones and lamps. The screen itself is blank, framed on either side by plush curtains. I turn to look up into the darkness behind me and see that the projection booth is alive with light. Maybe there’s someone here. Maybe there’s a screening. Maybe that’s why I decide to sit down.
I find the spot I always want and never get because I never buy tickets in time: right in the middle of the theater. The wooden chairs are in rows of about a dozen. They have no arms, and their seats are flipped up like they’re hugging their knees. I use my ass to push one open and sit. The sound of the hinge creaking and the seat clunking flat is loud in the dark. The screen seems to ripple. The theater is just big enough to give the impression of an audience. A camera could pan around a couple dozen extras crunching snacks, gazing at the screen instead of the movie stars! right there! pretending, in all their beauty, to watch a movie, which is, of course, a movie of themselves in a theater watching a movie…
I lean back and close my eyes. There’s a cinematic sense of anticipation but maybe everyone feels this way nowadays. Life seems both monotonous and constantly interrupted, a punctuated heartmonitor line of events, with maybe some befores and afters on either side of the peaks. Time doesn’t creep like a worm or fly like an arrow anymore. It erupts. It turns over. Shocks. Revolutions. Cycles. On TV, online, in the prosthetic minds we carry in our hands. It’s as if something immense or catastrophic is always on the cusp of happening. Everything feels asymptotically dramatic, on the verge, as if only a disaster could undo that universal first disaster: being born at all. We are all heroes of cataclysm now.
I think of something Caleb, my secret admirer from St. Ant’s, my aspiring rapist, once said. He had confessed that he often walked around wanting to punch people in the face.
“You fantasize about starting shit?”
“No, it’s like—I’m a hero. I save people. I stop someone from hurting someone else. It’s always like some fucked-up situation, and I just walk up and knock someone out.”
“Dude. You’re such a dude.”
“Girls don’t wanna be a hero?”
Well. I often imagine violence, yes. But it’s a knife sliding steadily into the back of my neck or the dead center of my forehead, or dragging under the tender swell of my breast. Does that make me a hero, of a kind? The name Hero comes from a woman, as I learned in a women’s rights class. She was a priestess who threw herself into the sea when her son drowned. Or was it her lover? Either way, hero should be a mourning word. I think of my mother, hero to thousands of women, mourning for her loss, suffering for theirs.
“Hey.”
My eyes snap open and I freeze. Am I imagining it? It feels like when you hear a voice call your name right when you’re about to fall asleep…
“I didn’t mean to—”
“Who’s there?” My voice sounds cowed.
“I’m right behind you.”
I turn. The beautiful man from the tour is sitting there. I stand up, my purse strap already on my shoulder. He tilts his head and crosses his arms.
“I’m not trying to bother you.” His voice says he doesn’t mean it.
“Listen,” I say, “this is a little creepy, you following me in here like this.”
“Actually, I was here first. Seems like you’re the one following me.”
“Yeah, okay, whatever.” I roll my eyes. “Why don’t I leave you to it then?” I sidle my way down the narrow row, my knees bumping the chairs in my haste, knockknocking on the wood as if for good luck.
“Wait.”
“What?” I turn to him.
“C, right?”
He smiles and I know. It’s Wayne.
* * *
—
Everything buckles: my knees under me, the seats beside me, the floor beneath us, the air in my lungs, all of it breaks up and out. There’s a trundling sound of staccato blows, then a highpitched squeal. The projection booth shatters tinnily above us and I’m on my hands and knees, searching for purchase, for solid ground across which to crawl. An alarm barks rhythmically and I hear the man calling for me in the pauses between blasts. I feel a touch. It’s his hand groping along my body to find my arm, which he grabs, pulling me to my feet. We’re in the main aisle now, his face in mine, he’s yelling: “We have to get out of here!” His mouth is so close, I can smell his breath: almond, berry, a darker earthy scent.
A boom slams the air and we hear the groaning thunderousness again, trailed by creaking, cracking noises. He pulls me along, the ground is unsteady beneath us, the earth’s center has melted, everything shifts and we stagger. The edge of a seat bites into my side. My foot catches something metal and I stumble, twisting my body at the last second to avoid tumbling headfirst. My purse slips from my shoulder. I curse and let go of his hand to reach for it and when I turn back, he’s gone. There’s a scrim of smoke ahead of me in the aisle and he has disappeared into it. I taste blood in my mouth and a heavy, broken thing crashes down and lands in the aisle in front of me—the smooth stomach and crosshatched tail of a mermaid statue. I look up to see where it fell from. A baroque chandelier is swinging with abandon.
I understand that I can see more than I should be able to—it’s too bright for this space—at the exact moment that I feel the heat and smell the smoke. I scramble to my feet. The theater is coming into focus, blooming in the light of the flames. There are frescoes on the walls. The curtains are pink felt. There are unusable balconies above, from which delicate burning trash drifts down now, like autumn leaves. I hear a shout. The man is standing by a neon E X I T sign, spectral in the smoke. His hands are cupped around his mouth but I can’t make out a word.
The rows of seats to my side erupt upward in an arc, giving off a sound like a bowling ball hitting pins. That’s when he runs back to me, his arms outstretched as if in a parody or a dream. It’s him. I know it. The knowledge spins through me like the gyred light in a marble held up to the sun. Swaying, I turn my head and look back down to the front of the theater, where the screen is flapping and twisting as flames clamor up its edges. He reaches me and grabs my hand. The fire begins to roll toward us, rising in a towering wheel that swiftly surmounts the intervening space, closing in as we run.
9
My little brother died when I was twelve. He was seven. We were at the park, just the two of us. This was allowed. This was every Sunday. In the late afternoon, before dinner, the two of us would walk alone together to the park a few blocks from our house in Pikesville. It was a paltry park—a rusty playground and a sandpit surrounded by messy green, one end edged by a grove of pine trees—but it served its purpose. Wayne and I would throw a Frisbee around or kick a soccer ball between us as evening grew its shadows on the unkempt grass.
One time, we flew a kite, a flashy silky thing shaped like a fish that Grandma Lu had given Wayne for his birthday. It took a while to get the hang of it but we had a good hour watching it shimmy in the breeze before it got stuck in a tree. Wayne and I circled, gawping up at it for a while, then shrugged and left it for the birds. When we got home, our mother was livid. She stomped around, raging about how much it had cost and how I was older and should have known better. I was certainly old enough to know the real reason that our mother was mad. Without fail, Grandma Lu would ask about it—a special gift for her special boy—on her next visit. And our mother would have to answer.
This Sunday was different because of the carousel. Our mother had read about it in the local weekly paper, The Bee’s Wax.
“Well, would you look at that,” she said at breakfast. “There’s a carousel at the park this week. It’s on its way to the state fair in Annapolis. They had it in New Jersey for repairs and I guess they figured they’d make some money hiring it out on its way back.”
“Is it broken?” Wayne’s eyes widened.
“No, honeybaby, not anymore. They fixed it.”
“Is it fast?” Wayne’s eyes narrowed.
“For you it is,” I mumbled.
Wayne was quiet but his body buzzed. My father smiled.
“Why don’t you two go check it out this afternoon?”
I sighed. The park was beginning to lose interest for me. Wayne was the ideal playground age: still young enough to enjoy the swingsets and slides, just old enough to feel a new authority over the other kids. These days, he released his energy with the steady concentration of something battery-operated. He would stalk the perimeter of the equipment, command and advise the smaller kids, find a king’s peace seated alone in the sandpit. I would leave him there and take melancholy strolls next to the woods. If it was early fall, the season beginning to singe the trees, I might hunt for a perfect leaf.
I had a vague idea that this Sunday would be like that but when we got to the park that afternoon, it was less empty than we’d ever seen it. The carousel had drawn a crowd. Enterprising vendors had set up stalls for those summery foods that all seem to have an essential ingredient of air: cotton candy, soda, beer, popcorn. Mothers herded their toddlers and fathers stood in clusters, chomping at the nothing-food. The kids were in a frenzy at the mere prospect of riding a carousel. There was already a line for it, impatient children snaking around the adults’ legs or stomping alongside.
I looked on in despair. No one my age was here—it was all grown-ups or babies. I lamented, not for the first time, our mother’s tendency to delegate to me the duty of taking care of Wayne. He was tugging at my hand now, leaning toward the spectacle. Past the crowd, we could make out the peaked roof of the carousel, chains of bulbs lining its edges and stripes. If you squinted, the strings of light seemed to form a giant dewy spiderweb over it. We heard delighted screaming, a tinny song that sounded French to my quasi-educated ears, and a booming voice calling us to come-one-come-all in a circusy accent.
Wayne, canny as always, made a proposal. I would stand in the line and he would play on the monkeybars until I got to the front. To sweeten the deal, he gave me his allowance. I used our combined money to buy some cotton candy, a sticky pink afro bursting from a paper cone speckled with tiny images of Spider-Man. I plucked tufts off with my fingers. Wayne plucked tufts off with his mouth. When we were done, he carefully folded the cone and put it in his pocket, then headed off to the playground.
The sun was settling down. I waited in line, my lips tight with sugar. It felt as if I were on hold on the telephone, my mind unaware that it was unaware. I remember a slight undercurrent of desire running through me, but it could have been thirst or exhaustion or being twelve. The man in front of me began calling for his daughter, turning haltingly. The girl’s rhyming name, Elaine, made me wonder after Wayne.
I rocked up onto my tiptoes to search among the bobbing bodies at the playground for his green T-shirt. There he was, his solid round skull stippled with his close shave. We hadn’t brushed the naps curling at the nape today. Our mother always forgot that kind of thing. His brown bronzed by the end of summer, Wayne was a creature for my watching, for my keep. He turned and looked at me and a piece of his face crumbled off like sand.
