ANTKIND
A Novel
Charlie Kaufman

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Charlie Kaufman, 2020

Cover design by Jack Smyth

Charlie Kaufman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This story collection is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008319533

Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780008319496

Version: 2020-06-09

Epigraph

It is so American, fire. So like us.

Its desolation. And its eventual, brief triumph.

—LARRY LEVIS, “My Story in a Late Style of Fire”

Smoke gets in your eyes

Smoke gets in your eyes

Smoke gets in your eyes

Smoke gets in your eyes

—“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

IT LANDS WITH a thunk, from nowhere, out of time, out of order, thrown from the future or perhaps from the past, but landing here, in this place, at this moment, which could be any moment, which means, you guess, it’s no moment.

It appears to be a film.

HERBERT AND DUNHAM RIDE BICYCLES (1896)

HERBERT ’N’ ME is ridin’ bi-cycles over to Anastasia Island. They got that new bridge now. It’s November 30, 1896, and almost dark but not just yet. I don’t know ’zactly the weather because they don’t got records this far back, but it’s Florida, so it’s probably warm, no matter when. Anyways, we’s yippin’ an’ hollerin’ and whatnot, the things young boys do, on account of us being just that, and full of beans to boot. I’m about to tell a tall tale to Herbert about a ghost on account of I know he spooks easy and it’s always fun to try ’n’ get a rise outta him. Herbert an’ me, we met on account of the Sisters taking us both in when we was real little cuz we was orphan babies that got found right in the Tolomato grave yard, no lie, which is itself pretty spooky, if ya think about it. So the Sisters, they took us in and that’s how we met, and now we’re both adopted by the Widow Perkins, who is old and lonesome and she wanted some boys around to make her feel young again an’ not so alone, she says. But that’s not here nor there as we ride our bi-cycles toward Crescent Beach on account of the fishin’ is good there for croakers. It’s still not dark and we grab our poles and leave our bi-cycles and make our way down to the water.

“What’s that?” says Herbert.

I don’t rightly know, but since I been plannin’ on spookin’ him anyways, I say, “Maybe a spook, Herbert.”

Now, Herbert wants to hightail it back to town when he hears that, so I tell him I’m only just foolin’ and t’ain’t no such thing as a spook in truth, and that seems to convince him it might could be worthwhile to get closer and investigate.

Herbert agrees with some trepidatiousness to proceed to the lump, for that’s what it appears to be, a lump.

Well, sir, it is large! I’m no measurin’ expert, but I’m guessin’ it has to be twenty feet long and ten feet wide. It has four arms. It’s white and feels rubbery hard like the soles of the Colchester athletic shoes Widow Perkins bought me for my last birthday at which I was ten. Herbert won’t touch the thing, but I can’t keep my hands off it.

“What do you s’pose it is?” Herbert says.

“I don’t know, Herbert,” I say. “What has the mighty sea thrown up to us? Who can know what lurks in the inky dark, black murkiness of the sea? It’s kind of like a, what do you call it, metaphor for the human mind in all its unknowability.”

Herbert nods, bored. He’s heard this all before. Even though we’re close as real brothers, we are very different. Herbert is not interested in matters of the spirit or mind. One might say he’s more of a pragmatis’, truth be told. But he puts up with my speculatin’, and I love him for indulgin’ me. So I continue: “The Bible that the Sisters learnt us at the orphanage is chock-full of fish symbolism, and from what I heared, there’s fish in almost all mythological traditions, be they from the Orient or otherwise. Fact, from what I been told, there’s a young Swizzerland feller name of Carl Young, who believes fish is symbolic of the unconscious—is it unconscience or unconscious? I can never remember.”

Herbert shrugs.

“Anyhow,” I continue, “makes me think of that feller Jonah from the Jew Bible. He gets himself swallowed by a giant fish on account of he’s shirkin’ what God wants of him. After a spell, God has that fish vomit him out on the shore. Now we have this fish vomited out here on our shore. Is this the opposite of Jonah? Did God have some giant human feller swallow this fish just to throw him up here? I know the Bible is not s’posed to be read literal-like but more like, what do you call it, allegorical and what have you. But here we are with a giant mysterious fish-thing. And it has four arms! Like a fish dog. Or half a octopus. Or two-thirds a ant. It’s mysterious!”

I look at Herbert. He’s absently poking the monster with a stick.

“C’mon,” I say. “Let’s tie it to our bi-cycles with seaweed strands and pull it to town.”

Now, Herbert likes a task as much as anyone, so his eyes light up and we set to work. Once the whole thing is secured, we get on our bi-cycles and try to ride away. The seaweed snaps pretty quick, causing Herbert and me to fly off our bi-cycles into a ditch, which tells me the sea monster is heavier than we originally figgered. I’m no expert on weights or measurements, as I told you.

It’s Herbert’s idea to go an’ get Doc Webb from town. He’s the educatedest man in St. Augustine and an expert in the workings of the natural world. He’s also the doctor at the Blind and Deef School, and that’s where we find him, taking the temperchers of two little boys with no eyes.

“What’s up, fellas?” he asks, to us, not the blind boys, which I guess he already knows the answer to.

“We thought you might wanna know we discovered a sea monster just now on the Crescent Beach,” I say, all puffed up and such.

“Is this true, Herbert?” Doc Webb asks Herbert.

Herbert nods, then adds, “We believe it’s from the Jew Bible and such.”

This isn’t exactly true, but I’m surprised Herbert heared even that much.

“Well, I can’t investigate till tomorrow. There’s an entire dormitory of eyeless children whose vital signs need measuring and recording. Not to mention the earless children across campus.”

An’ as Doc Webb hurries off to attend to his duties, sumthin’ strikes me an’ it strikes me so hard it damn near knocks me off my feet.

“Herbert,” I say. “What if that mound of stuff was us?”

“Like how?” asks Herbert.

“Like, say there was many of us—”

“Of you and me?”

“Yes. You and me, but ’cept babies of us from the future, that get all jammed up together in their travel back in time to now, all jammed together into one, single unholy monstrosity of flesh. So that maybe it ain’t no sea monster on the beach at all, but just us?”

“You and me?”

“Just a notion. But it makes a feller wonder.”

CHAPTER 1

MY BEARD IS a wonder. It is the beard of Whitman, of Rasputin, of Darwin, yet it is uniquely mine. It’s a salt-and-pepper, steel-wool, cotton-candy confection, much too long, wispy, and unruly to be fashionable. And it is this, its very unfashionability, that makes the strongest statement. It says, I don’t care a whit (a Whitman!) about fashion. I don’t care about attractiveness. This beard is too big for my narrow face. This beard is too wide. This beard is too bottom-heavy for my bald head. It is off-putting. So if you come to me, you come to me on my terms. As I’ve been bearded thusly for three decades now, I like to think that my beard has contributed to the resurgence of beardedness, but in truth, the beards of today are a different animal, most so fastidious they require more grooming than would a simple clean shave. Or if they are full, they are full on conventionally handsome faces, the faces of faux woodsmen, the faces of home brewers of beer. The ladies like this look, these urban swells, men in masculine drag. Mine is not that. Mine is defiantly heterosexual, unkempt, rabbinical, intellectual, revolutionary. It lets you know I am not interested in fashion, that I am eccentric, that I am serious. It affords me the opportunity to judge you on your judgment of me. Do you shun me? You are shallow. Do you mock me? You are a philistine. Are you repulsed? You are … conventional.

That it conceals a port-wine stain stretching from my upper lip to my sternum is tertiary, secondary at most. This beard is my calling card. It is the thing that makes me memorable in a sea of sameness. It is the feature in concert with my owlish wire-rim glasses, my hawkish nose, my sunken blackbird eyes, and my bald-eagle pate that makes me caricaturable, both as a bird and as a human. Several framed examples from various small but prestigious film criticism publications (I refuse to be photographed for philosophical, ethical, personal, and scheduling reasons) adorn the wall of my home office. My favorite is an example of what is commonly known as the inversion illusion. When hung upside down, I appear to be a Caucasian Don King. As an inveterate boxing enthusiast and scholar, I am amused by this visual pun and indeed used the inverted version of this illustration as the author photo for my book The Lost Religion of Masculinity: Joyce Carol Oates, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, A. J. Liebling, and the Sometimes Combative History of the Literature of Boxing, the Sweet Science, and Why. The uncanny thing is that the Don King illusion works in reality as well. Many’s the time, after I perform sirsasana in yoga class, that the hens circle, clucking that I look just like that “awful boxing man.” It’s their way of flirting, I imagine, these middle-aged, frivolous creatures, who traipse, yoga mat rolled under arm or in shoulder-holster, announcing their spiritual discipline to an uncaring world—from yoga to lunch to shopping to loveless marriage bed. But I am there only for the workout. I don’t wear a special outfit or listen to the mishmash Eastern religion sermon the instructor blathers beforehand. I don’t even wear shorts and a T-shirt. Gray dress pants and a white button-down shirt for me. Belt. Black oxfords on feet. Wallet packed thickly into rear right pocket. I believe this makes my point. I am not a sheep. I am not a faddist. It’s the same outfit I wear if on some odd occasion I find myself riding a bicycle in the park for relaxation. No spandex suit with logos all over it for me. I don’t need anyone thinking I am a serious bicycle rider. I don’t need anyone thinking anything of me. I am riding a bike. That is it. If you want to think something about that, have at it, but I don’t care. I will admit that my girlfriend is the one who has gotten me on a bike and into the yoga classroom. She is a well-known TV actress, famous for her role as a wholesome but sexy mom in a 1990s sitcom and many television movies. You would certainly know who she is. You might say I, as an older, intellectual writer, am not “in her league,” but you’d be mistaken. Certainly when we met at a book signing of my prestigious small-press critical biography of—

Something (deer?) dashes in front of my car. Wait! Are there deer here? I feel like I’ve read that there are deer here. I need to look it up. The ones with fangs? Are there deer with fangs? I think there is such a thing—a deer with fangs—but I don’t know if I’ve imagined it, and if I haven’t, I don’t know why I associate them with Florida. I need to look it up when I arrive. Whatever it was, it is long gone.

I AM DRIVING through blackness toward St. Augustine. My mind has wandered into the beard monologue, as it so often does on long car trips. Trips of any kind. I’ve delivered it at book signings, at a lecture on Jean-Luc Godard at the 92nd Street Y Student Residence Dining Hall Overflow Room. People seem to enjoy it. I don’t care that they do, but they do. I’m just sharing that piece of trivia because it’s true. Truth is my master in all things, if I can be said to have a master, which I cannot. Ninety degrees, according to the outside temperature gauge on my car. Eighty-nine percent humidity, according to the perspiratory sheen on my forehead (at Harvard, I was affectionately known as the Human Hygrometer). A storm of bugs in the headlights, slapping the windshield, smeared by my wipers. My semiprofessional guess is a swarm of the aptly named lovebug—Plecia nearctica—the honeymoon fly, the double-headed bug, so called because they fly conjoined, even after the mating is complete. It is this kind of postcoital cuddling I find so enjoyable with my African American girlfriend. You would recognize her name. If the two of us could fly through the Florida night together thusly, I would in a second agree to it, even at the risk of splattering against some giant’s windshield. I find myself momentarily lost in that sensual and fatal scenario. An audible splat wakes me from this diversional road trip reverie, and I see that a particularly large and bizarre insect has smashed into the glass, smack in the center of what I estimate is the northwest quadrant of the windshield.

The highway is empty, the nothingness on either side of me interrupted by an occasional fluorescent fast-food joint, open but without customers. No cars in the parking lots. The names are unfamiliar: Slammy’s. The Jack Knife. Mick Burger. Something sinister about these places isolated in the middle of nothing. Who are they feeding? How do they get their supplies? Do frozen-patty trucks come here from some Slammy’s warehouse somewhere? Hard to imagine. Probably a mistake to drive here from New York. I thought it would be meditative, would give me time to think about the book, about Marla, about Daisy, about Grace, about how far I seem to be from anything I’d ever envisioned for myself. How does that happen? Can I even know who I was before the world got its hands on me and turned me against myself into this … thing?

Anyway, it’s ancient history, to quote every schmo and his brother. There is no way to know. Random speculation after a meager archaeological dig. Where does this anger come from? Why am I crying? Why do I love that woman at Whole Foods? Even after they were acquired by Amazon, I still love her, even though I know Amazon is all that is wrong with this world. Well, not all. Bezos is still working on all. What am I trying to prove? What the fuck am I trying to prove? And I move further into the future, further from when this cracked clay vessel was new, when its purpose was clear, when it was designed to hold a specific long-forgotten thing. What hurt was it made to hold? What embarrassment? What loss? What, dare I speculate, joy? What unmet need forever put away? Here I am on the far side of fifty with no hair on my head and an unkempt gray beard, driving through the night to research a book about gender and cinema, a book that will pay me nothing and be read by no one. Is this what I want to be doing? Am I who I want to be? Do I really want this ridiculous face, which, according to the wags, I deserve? No. And yet, here it is. What I want is to be whole. I want to not hate myself. I want to be pretty. I want my parents to love me a million years ago in ways that they probably didn’t. Maybe they did. I think they did, but I can find no other explanation for this constant need, this unfillable hole, this conviction that I am repulsive, pathetic, disgusting. I search every face for some indication to the contrary. Pleadingly. I want them to look at me the way I look at those women, the ones who walk by not seeing me. Haughty and autonomous. Maybe this is why I have the beard. It is protesting too much. It says, I don’t need you to love me, to be attracted to me, and here’s how I will demonstrate that. I will look like a ridiculous intellectual. I will look dirty, as if perhaps I smell. When I was younger, I held out some hope that I would transform into something attractive. The ugly duckling lie they force-feed sad, unattractive children the way they force-feed corn to the pâté geese. I went to the gym. I ran. I bought some hip clothing. Wide belts were in fashion. I bought the widest belts I could find. I had to go all the way to Lindenhurst to procure them. I had my loops specially enlarged by a tailor in Weehawken who did similar work for David Soul. But the hair disappeared and the face got old and there was no point in denying it, so I went the other way. Maybe I could look wise. Maybe my rheumy eyes behind thick magnifying lenses would appear thoughtful and even kind. This was the best I could hope for. And it certainly got me seen. No doubt there were snickers behind my back, but my persistence illustrated my defiance of the standard model, my independence.

And it worked in some small ways. My current girlfriend, the one who ended my marriage, is an actress, beautiful, the star of a nineties sitcom, you’d definitely know her. I believe she was attracted to my rebellious, intellectual look. And to my last book. She is African American, not that that’s important, but I certainly never expected it to happen. I never imagined there’d be any interest in me from an African American woman. I am in no way, shape, or form a supermasculine menial, and she is quite beautiful and fifteen years my junior. She read my book on William Greaves and his film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm. She wrote a fan letter. You’d know who she is. She’s very beautiful. I won’t say her name. We met, and suddenly my difficult marriage became an unbearable one. This African American woman was everything I had ever wanted and didn’t think possible. She’s been in several movies as well. Movies I’ve explored in my own writings. Movies in which I’ve given her favorable mention. She is obviously well-read. She is funny, and our conversation is like lightning: witty, intense, emotionally naked. Often we talk through the night, fueled by coffee, cigarettes (which I gave up years ago but inexplicably find myself smoking when with her), and sex. I didn’t know I could get erections like this anymore. The first night I couldn’t get it up because I imagined she was comparing me to the stereotypical African American man’s anatomy and I was self-conscious and ashamed. But we talked through that. She explained to me that she’d been with both meagerly and well-endowed black men, that there was something inherently racist about my assumption, that I needed to investigate it straight on. She went on to say that size is not important anyway. It is how a man uses his penis, his mouth, his hands. It is the love with which he engages that is the ultimate aphrodisiac, she explained. She ended by saying I needed to check my privilege, which did not seem to be the issue at hand, but about that she was undoubtedly correct. She is a wise African American woman and exceedingly sensual. Everything she does in the world, from tasting, to bathing, to looking, to sex, is done with the most immediacy I’ve ever witnessed from another human. I have much to learn from her.

Over the decades, I have erected walls that must be torn down. She’s told me this, and I am trying. I’m taking yoga with her and I always make sure to position myself behind her so I can watch her amazing African American ass. It’s hard to believe I get to touch that. And she’s enrolled us in some sort of tantric weekend retreat, which happens in July and about which I am nervous. Ejaculatory mastery is important, but I’m not certain how comfortable I will be engaging tantrically with strangers. My girlfriend has participated in this workshop before and says it is life-changing, but I am not comfortable being naked among strangers. It is not only my penis-size issue, which I’m working on (that is to say, I’m working on my concern), but it is my body-hair issue. It is not considered attractive these days for men (or women, let’s not get started on that sexist double standard, on that adult-woman-pretending-to-be-prepubescent societal nightmare) to have body hair at all, let alone excessive body hair. I refuse to participate in the culture of waxing or depilation. I view it as vain and unmanly, so consequently I am left self-conscious. My girlfriend says the workshop will do wonders for our sex life and that is a good thing, but I can’t help thinking this means she is dissatisfied. She says she is not, that this is about spiritual communion and freedom from fear, and I guess I accept that. It’s just this relationship means the world to me due to its newness and, I admit, its exotic nature. There’s a lot to think about and the lovebugs keep slapping the windshield. The wipers don’t seem to be working anymore. They just spread the bugs around. I look for a gas station or even a Slammy’s where I could get some water and a napkin. But there is nothing. Just blackness.

Tell me how it begins.

In a car. I am driving. Me but not me. You know what I mean? Night. Dark. Black, really. An empty black highway lined with black trees. Constellations of moths and hard-shelled insects in my headlights smack the windshield, leave their insides. I fiddle with the radio dial. I’m nervous, jittery. Too much coffee? First Starbucks, then Dunkin’ Donuts. Of course Dunkin’ Donuts makes the better coffee. Starbucks is the smart coffee for dumb people. It’s the Christopher Nolan of coffee. Dunkin’ Donuts is lowbrow, authentic. It is the simple, real pleasure of a Judd Apatow movie. Not showing off. Actual. Human. Don’t compete with me, Christopher Nolan. You will always lose. I know who you are, and I know I am the smarter of us. Nothing on the dial for a long span. Then staticky Cuban pop. My fingers tap the wheel. Out of my control. Everything is moving, alive. Heart pounding, blood coursing. Sweat beading on brow, sliding. Then a preacher: “You will keep on hearing but not understand, and you will keep on seeing but not perceive.” Then nothing. Then the preacher. Then nothing. Bugs continue to splat in the staticky nothing. Then the preach—I turn off the preacher. The tires hum. It is so dark. Starting to drizzle. How is that done? How does he make the rain fall? A miracle of craft. Another illusion. The beauty of the world created through practice, over decades, through trial and error. Up ahead, a fluorescent blast of light. Fast-food joint. Slammy’s. Slammy’s in the middle of nothing. In the middle of nowhere. In the middle of drizzle and windshield wipers and bugs and black. Slammy’s. The parking lot is empty; the restaurant is empty. Open but empty. I’ve never heard of Slammy’s in the real world. There’s something disquieting about unfamiliar fast-food places. They’re like off-brand canned goods on a supermarket shelf. Neelon’s Genuine Tuna Fish scares me whenever I see it. I never get used to it. I can never bring myself to buy Neelon’s Genuine Tuna Fish, even though it promises it’s line caught, dolphin safe, canned in spring water, new and improved texture. There have been several of these mystery fast-food places along this road: The Jack Knife. Morkus Flats. Ipp’s. All empty. All glowing. Who eats there? Maybe these restaurants are less foreboding during daylight.

In any event, I slow and pull into the lot. The bugs on my windshield have almost completely obscured my vision. I see but do not perceive anything—but bugs. I hear but do not understand—bugs. I need napkins and water. An African American teenager in a carnival-colored uniform pokes her head suspiciously out from the kitchen at the sound of my tires on their gravel. I park and make my way toward her. She watches me, heavy-lidded.

“Welcome to Slammy’s,” she says, clearly meaning nothing of the kind. “How may I help you?”

“Hello. I just need to use the facilities,” I say as I head for the head.

I chuckle at my mental play on words. I make a note to use this somewhere, perhaps at my upcoming lecture for the International Society of Antique Movie Projector Enthusiasts (ISAMPE). They’re a fun crowd.

The men’s room is a nightmare. One wonders what people do in public restrooms that results in feces spread on the walls. And it is not an uncommon occurrence. Yet how? The stench is unbearable, and there are no paper towels, only one of those hand-blower machines, which I despise because it means there is no way for me to turn the doorknob without touching the doorknob, which I never want to touch.

I turn it using my left hand’s thumb and pinkie.

“Left thumb and pinkie,” I say, to cement in my brain which fingers I should not rub my eyes with or stick in my mouth or nose until I can find proper soap and water.

“I was just hoping for some water and paper towels. For my windshield,” I say to the African American teenager.

“You gotta purchase something.”

“OK. What do you recommend then?”

“I recommend you gotta purchase something, sir.”

“All right. I’ll have a Coke.”

“Size?”

“Large.”

“Small, Medium, Biggy.”

“Biggy Coke? That’s a thing?”

“Yes. Biggy Coke.”

“Biggy Coke, then.”

“We don’t have Coke.”

“OK. What do you have?”

“Slammy’s Original Boardwalk Cola. Slammy’s Original Boardwalk Root—”

“OK. Cola.”

“What size?”

“Large.”

“Biggy?”

“Yes, Biggy. Sorry.”

“What else?”

I want her to like me. I want her to know I’m not some privileged asshole racist Jew northerner. First of all, I have an African American girlfriend. I want her to know that. I don’t know how to bring it up in the context of this conversation, this early in our relationship. But I feel her loathing and want her to know I’m not the enemy. I also want her to know I am not Jewish. There is an historical tension between the African American and Jewish communities. It has been my curse to look Jewish. It’s why I use my credit card whenever I can. I will use it to buy the Slammy’s cola. Maybe then my wallet can accidentally open to the photo of my African American girlfriend. And she’ll see my last name is Rosenberg. Not a Jewish name. Well, not only a Jewish name. Will she even know that it’s not only? It’s wrong for me to assume she’s uneducated. That’s racist. I need to check my privilege at the door, as my African American girlfriend is fond of saying. Still, I have come across many people of various racial and ethnical makeups who have not known that Rosenberg is not a Jewish name, well, not only. I’ve assumed they knew. But later in conversation, they would bring up the Holocaust or dreidels or gefilte fish, trying to be nice, to connect. And I use that opportunity to tell them that Rosenberg is in fact a German—

“What else?” she repeats.

“Do I need to purchase something else to get paper towels?”

“Five-dollar minum,” she says and points to some imaginary sign.

I want to tell her the word is minimum, but I hold my tongue. There will be time enough for that once we become friends. I look above her at the menu: “How’s the Slammy’s burger?”

She looks at her nails, waiting.

“I’ll have that.”

“Anything else?”

“No. That’ll do it.”

“$5.37.”

I take out my wallet, photo of my girlfriend on display. You’d recognize her. She starred as a wholesome yet sexy young mother on a 1990s sitcom. I won’t say her name, but she’s beautiful and smart and funny and wise and African American. She prefers to be referred to as black, but I can’t bring myself to go against my training like that. I’m working on it. The girl behind the counter doesn’t look at my wallet. I hand her the credit card. She takes it, studies it, then hands it back to me.

“No credit cards,” she says.

Why did she take it? I hand her six dollars. She counts out the change, counts it out again, then puts it on the counter. Why won’t she touch my hand?

“Can I also get some paper towels and a cup of water?”

She sighs as if I have asked her to help me move this weekend and disappears into the back, which I guess is where they keep the water and paper towels. A young African American man in the same carnival suit sticks his head out and looks at me. I smile and nod. He disappears. The girl returns with a bag, two small paper cups of water, and three sheets of paper towel.

“Could I have some more paper towels? There’s a lot of bugs on the windshield.”

She looks at me incredulously for a very long time—I want to say five minutes?—then turns and disappears into the back. I really need her to like me. What can I do to change her mind? Does she know I wrote an entire book about the work of groundbreaking African American filmmaker William Greaves, whose documentary/narrative Symbiopsychotaxiplasm was so ahead of its time, I dubbed Greaves the Vincent van Gogh of American cinema? Although I realize now there is something inherently racist in validating an African American artist by comparing him to a white European male artist. Dead, too. I forgot to think dead and also heterosexual. And there’s one more … cis. Does she even know that I wrote that book, though? Is there any way to bring it up here? I am not a racist. Far from it. She returns with three more paper towels. They must come out of the dispenser in threes.

“Do you know who William Greaves is?” I say, testing the waters.

The young man sticks his head out again, threateningly, as if I’d just propositioned the girl.

“Never mind,” I say. “Thanks for the towels and water.”

I turn to leave. Someone releases a long whistling sigh. Either she or the guy. Maybe there is a third African American in the back who’s in charge of sighing. I don’t look back to see. I am hurt. I am lonely. I want to be loved. The instant I exit Slammy’s, the door locks behind me. The interior lights turn off, leaving the parking lot a dim red. I look back. A neon CLOSED sign in the window. Where did they go? Don’t they need light to pack up? Do they have cars?

CHAPTER 2

IT’S EERIE OUT here. Buzzing bugs. Frogs. I put my food and drink in the car and scrub at the windshield with wet paper towels. The bugs spread like Vaseline. Soon the paper towels are useless. The windshield is worse now than it was before. I make the somewhat frantic decision to use my shirt. The large northwest quadrant insect is hard-shelled and stuck fast. I scrape it with my left doorknob pinkie fingernail, the one I paint red in solidarity with Australia’s Polished Man movement and also to cover a minor but horribly unsightly fingernail abnormality called sailor nail. I suggest you do not look it up. The insect comes off in pieces, its insides black and shiny. The inner portion is still alive somehow, like a just-flayed man, but only barely, and I experience one of those profound moments of communion with the natural world. It’s like we acknowledge each other, this insect and I, across species, across time. I feel like he wants to say something to me. Do I see tears in his eyes? What is this creature? As an amateur entomologist, I am fairly conversant in insect varieties, but of course Florida is, in so many ways, its own thing, unlike anywhere else. Even its insects are eccentric and, I suspect, racist. I squash it in my shirt. He was suffering, as are we all. It was the right thing to do.

Then it occurs to me: Perhaps this was a drone. Not an insect at all. A miniature, crying drone. There are such things, I hear. All around us, CCTV monitoring everything. Monitoring everyone. Am I being targeted or was it just an accidental collision? Why would the government want to watch me? Or is it perhaps some nongovernmental organization? Or an individual? Would a fellow critic be able to secure or even afford such technology? Could it be Armond White? Manohla Dargis? One of my enemies? Someone who wishes me ill, who wants to “scoop” me, as it were. I have often sensed that there are forces acting against me, keeping me down. It could be that I am a thorn in the side of the machine. The entertainment industry is a trillion-dollar-a-year enterprise. This is big business, folks. And in addition to the money made, this business has a vast influence on public opinion, cultural shifts, miseducation, not to mention the entire bread and circuses aspect of it. It does not want to be exposed. I’ve often speculated as to why my career gets stalled again and again. Perhaps it is not chance. I pull the drone from my shirt, examine it, peel away the black “flesh.” Inside, I find a tiny, bony skeleton. What fresh hell is this? I ask myself, paraphrasing the great (yet embarrassingly overrated by certain teenage girls) Dorothy Parker, as I speculate as to what our society’s unholy synthesis of electronics and animal technology has wrought. Armond White is a monster. This has Armond written all over it.

I crush this nightmare drone under my foot to make certain it cannot, even in this compromised state, still record my doings, then place it in my glove box for later inspection. I am not an electronics expert, although I did take a six-week course on Atomic Layer Deposition, a thin-film application technique, because I misread the Learning Annex catalog description and thought it was a pro-ana filmmaking seminar.

I see I have been, in the end, left with a driver’s side circle about the size of a medium pizza to see through. It’ll do. I don’t want to be here anymore. I climb shirtless back into the rental car and pull onto the highway. Surprisingly, the cola isn’t bad. Not as sweet as Coke and with more of a citrus kick. I want to say grapefruit but I’m not sure. Pomelo? I perform a good deal of that lip-smacking, tongue-tapping-the-roof-of-my-mouth action to try to determine the flavor. It seems an essential component of identifying flavors, but my wife didn’t do it, and after twenty years of me doing it, she lost all sense of humor about it. What can I say, it’s how I do it. Everyone in my family tastes things this way. Three different Thanksgivings ended in the car ride home with my wife telling me she wanted a divorce. She eventually changed her mind each time, and the subsequent divorce came at my request. This mostly had to do with meeting the African American woman at a book signing for my biography William Greaves and the African American Cinema of African American Identity. She had been greatly affected by the book and had been surprised to discover I am not African American, so insightful (she said!) were my musings on her race and culture. I make a point of including neither my photograph nor my first name on my film writings. The neutral B. Rosenberg (sometimes B. Ruby Rosenberg, in tribute to the essential B. Ruby Rich) allows readers to experience the work free of preconceptions about the source. Granted, she was familiar with the groundbreaking work of celebrated African American Ultimate Frisbee champion Jalen Rosenberger, so she had read the book with a racial assumption about me. But to her credit (not as a credit to her race!), she was able to continue to appreciate the book even after she discovered my race. Even after her second assumption, that I was Jewish. She is an educated woman. I was surprised she did not know that Rosenberg (considering she knew Rosenberger is not necessarily a Jewish name!) is not necessarily a Jewish name. I mentioned that to her. And she said, “Of course I know that, but Jews are matrilineally Jewish, so it seemed conceivable to me you had a Rosenberg father and a Weinberg mother, for example.” First of all, I was in love. Secondly, I told her, no, my mother’s maiden name is not Weinberg, but rather it is Rosenberger, like Jalen, although sadly no relation according to Genealogy​.com. Or the fifteen other sources I checked. I needed her to know. Yes, it can also be a Jewish name but is not in this case. I point out that famed Nazi Alfred Rosenberg was in fact a virulent anti-Semite and I believe I am related to him distantly. So there’s that on my side, in terms of not being Jewish.

“You look Jewish,” she said.

“I’ve been told. But I need you to know I’m not.”

“OK. Your Greaves book is amazing.”

She was amazing. She was all the positive African American characters on TV rolled into one, characters created to combat the negative black stereotypes we see on the news every day. She was articulate, educated, athletic, beautiful, charming, enormously sophisticated. And I suspected I had a chance with her. This would do amazing things for my self-worth, as well as my stature in the academic community. I asked her out to coffee. It’s not that I thought of her as a prop or a thing to obtain or something for my résumé. Well, I did think those things, but I wanted not to think those things. I planned to work on those unappealing thoughts, to make them go away. I knew they were wrong. And I knew they weren’t the entirety of my thoughts. So I would keep them secret and instead focus on the feelings of genuine attraction I felt for this woman. Eventually, the novelty of her African Americanness would recede, and I knew I would be left with a pure love for her, as a woman of any color, of no color: a clear woman. Although I understood that even my feelings for women in general were not pure. Attractiveness was a determining factor, which is wrong. And of course any exotic racial, cultural, or national characteristics were appealing to me. I would be as excited to show off my Cambodian or Maori or French or Icelandic or Mexican or Inuit girlfriend as I would my African American one. Almost. It was something I needed to better understand about myself. I needed to fight my instincts at every turn.

Left thumb and pinkie.

Left thumb and pinkie.

I have often felt that I am being watched. That my life is being witnessed by unseen forces, that adjustments are made as these forces see fit, to thwart me, to humiliate me. I worry that the disabled drone might still have a functioning tracking device smeared on the bottom of my shoe.

I drive to the beach and blow the drone through my Slammy’s soda straw, like a pea, into the ocean. Then I scrub my shoe with seawater. I feel suddenly so very lonely. Maybe it is the sea. The vast ocean. Maybe it is the sea that brings on these feelings. I have often felt a certain melancholic homesickness looking out at it. Am I remembering when I once lived there, forty trillion years ago, next to a hydrothermal vent, when I was just a sea slug or whatever?

I arrive in downtown St. Augustine. It’s early and still closed up. The city is, as is everything now, just more Disneyland. Magic castles. Quaint architecture. That the buildings are authentic somehow does not change the sense of falseness, of fetishization. I grieve for us, a world of tourists, for cities in drag, for our inability to be real in a real place. It is 5:00 A.M. The Slammy’s burger sits uneaten on the passenger seat. The car smells of onions and sweat. I dial my girlfriend’s cell. It’ll be 10:00 A.M. in Tunisia. Seems a safe time to call. She’s filming a movie there with a director you’ve heard of. I won’t say his name. Suffice to say, he’s a serious filmmaker and this is an important career milestone for her. So although I miss her with a heretofore unexperienced fierceness, I respect and even applaud her decision to take this role. Although I will admit I was hurt. There were some words exchanged. I am not proud of that. But our relationship is new and consequently fragile. To force an extended separation at this point is worrisome to me. That it was not worrisome to her did not go unnoticed by me. Undoubtedly, there are some very handsome African American actors from all over the world cast in this movie. She is young and beautiful and sexually liberated, so even though I am supportive of her career, even proud of it, I have insecurities. I hate myself for them, I do. But I have them. I call her often. Often she cannot pick up. They shoot at all hours. I won’t tell you the subject of the film, but it is a well-known historical event that took place at all hours. For the sake of cinematic verisimilitude, of which I am certainly one of the foremost champions, by the way—just look at my monograph Day for Day: The Lost Art of Verisimilitude in Cinema for evidence of my strong feelings on this issue—they must shoot at all hours. So it is a delightful surprise when she picks up.

“Hi, B.” (I don’t use my Christian name so as to maintain a gender-neutral identity for my work.)

“Hi, L.” (Not her real initial, to protect her privacy.) “I’m glad I caught you.”

“Yeah.”

“How’s it going? I just arrived in St. Augustine. Long drive.”

“I’m well,” she says.

She never says “I’m well.” It sounds formal somehow. Distant.

“Good,” I say. “How’s the shoot?”

“It’s going well.”

Two wells.

“Good, good.”

I say good twice. I don’t know why. I do realize the second good modifies the first good to make the whole thing less good. I know that much. It was not intentional. Is anything ever?

“So,” she says, “what’s on the agenda for today?”

“I’ll check in to the apartment. Maybe grab a few hours’ sleep. Then head down to the historical society. I have an appointment at three with the curator.”

“Cool,” she says.

She does not use the word “cool.” Cool equals this doesn’t interest me and I can’t think of anything else to say.

“I miss you,” I try.

“Miss you, too.”

Too quick. No pronoun.

“OK,” I say.

“OK?” she says.

She knows I’m upset and she’s calling me on it.

“Yeah,” I say. “Just wanted to say hi. Should probably get some shut-eye.”

No pronouns back at her and the term shut-eye. I don’t say “shut-eye.” What am I going for with that? I don’t even know. It sounds casual, tough, maybe, like I’m a gumshoe? I don’t know. I’ll have to look up the etymology later. All I know now is I hate those handsome, young African American actors over there, with their cocky bravado, their cool confidence, their meaty appendages, their well-muscled bodies. How incredibly narcissistic to spend that kind of time and energy on one’s body. Doesn’t she see that about them? Maybe not. After all, she does that herself, with her yoga and triathlons and Pilates, her boxing lessons and modern dance classes. But it’s different for women, isn’t it? We don’t like to acknowledge that in our steady societal slog toward genderlessness. But it’s the truth. Women are celebrated and rewarded for that type of preening. And now even men, more and more. Certainly the traditional American masculine ideal is strength and muscles, but not for show, not for the sake of muscles. We admired men whose muscles came from work or sport, not muscles that came as a result of the self-conscious pursuit of muscles. Is it any accident that bodybuilding has been, historically, by and large, the domain of the homosexual male? Muscles as adornment. Muscles as drag. Now, however, you’re as likely to see a well-muscled heterosexual leading man, shirtless, manicured, depilated. I’d like to pause here to say that I fully recognize that my attitudes toward the gay community are not without stereotyping and that I’m working on that. It’s complicated to be a male, especially a white male, with all this lack of sympathy, with all this incessant talk of privilege, with this constant admonition to “Sit down. You’ve had your turn. Now it is time for you to step aside and adopt the attitude of self-loathing,” an attitude I have all along been prone to anyway, by the way. Only now that it is insisted upon, I bristle. If I am to self-loathe, I want it to be my choice, or at least the result of my own psychopathology.

“OK,” she says. “Sleep well, B. Talk soon.”

Vague. Indeterminate. Formal. Passive-aggressive.

“I’ll call tomorrow,” I say. Aggressive. “Tell you how it’s going.”

“OK,” she says.

But the timing of the OK is wrong. There’s a sweet spot. Too quick, it’s forced, jumping the gun, covering for something. Too slow, annoyed, exasperated, communicating a silent sigh.

“Cool,” I say.

I never say “cool.”

“Cool,” she says.

She never says “cool.”

“Get some sleep,” she adds.

“I will. Love you.”

“Love you.”

I click off my phone, furious. A stew of heartache, jealousy, resentment, loneliness, and impotent zugzwang. I know if I were a handsome, successful, young African American gentleman, everything would be so simple. If only I were her, even. I would be beautiful and everyone would love me and be sympathetic to my plight, impressed with all I’d overcome as an African American woman in this racist society. If only, I think. Think about being able to admire myself in the mirror whenever I want, how confident I would be in social interactions. How the Slammy’s woman would smile at me, give me hundreds of free paper towels because I am a sister. Maybe we’d even sleep together. I feel a tightness in my pants. A horniness has come over me at the thought of this transformation and an affair with the sullen Slammy’s woman. I catch sight of my actual self in the rearview mirror: old, bald, scrawny, long unwieldy gray beard, glasses, hook nose, Jewish-looking. The horniness evaporates, leaving me despondent and alone.

My side hurts. A stitch? Kidney disease? Appendicitis? Cancer? It’s been hurting for some time now. On and off. When it stops hurting, I forget about it, focus on some other pain. Then it comes back and I think, Why is it coming back? I should go to a doctor but I don’t want to know if something is wrong. It would only hasten my demise. I would feel hopeless, give up. I know this. I wouldn’t be able to work. I need to work. It is the thing that keeps me alive, this hope that the next thing will be the one to get me noticed. It is always the next one.

I find the apartment building. It’s in a complex outside of town. I’m not sure what the building style would be called, but basically it looks like a giant house, three stories high, maybe eight units wide. And there are many of them on a campus of some sort, and they’re all pale yellow. There’s an empty, pitted tennis court. No net. It’s cheap. I didn’t get much of an advance on this book. On TripAdvisor, the single review of this place read: Close to walk to work to and cloe (sic) to bus route since I don’t have a car and close to restaurants. The review made me sad for this man (Woman? Trans woman? Trans man?) but also worried I’d end up as his (her, thon) neighbor and driving him (her, thon) to work and restaurants. Thon is, of course, my favorite of the available gender-neutral pronouns, probably because it has a certain pedigree, a history, an impressive prescience in that it was created in the gendered wasteland that was the middle of the nineteenth century. I have adopted thon as my own personal pronoun, but other than when I refer to myself in the third person, which happens but infrequently, it gets very little use. Of course I use it in my book-flap biography: “B. Rosenberger Rosenberg writes about film. Thon received the Milton Bradley Film Criticism Certificate of Excellence in 1998, 2003, and 2011. Thon teaches a cinema studies elective at the Howie Sherman Zoo Worker Institute in Upper Manhattan. Thon loves to cook and considers thonself a pretty decent chef. Some of the world’s greatest chefs are women.” I threw in the last sentence because, sadly, it’s still necessary to point out.

CHAPTER 3

IT’S EIGHT O’CLOCK. I knock on the super’s door. An old man, reed thin and ramrod straight, answers. By way of greeting, he hands me a stained xeroxed sheet of paper. I read lips, it says. Please enunciate and don’t turn away from me or cover your mouth while talking. You don’t need to talk loudly or slowly. If you have a foreign accent, indicate which one in the space provided below, as the accent will affect the way your lips move while forming certain words. I am adept at Spanish accents (Cuban and Mexican only), Mandarin, Hebrew, French, Vietnamese, and Dutch. All other accents will make lipreading almost impossible for me and might require paper and pencil, which I am happy to provide for a small fee.

I write American accent on the page and hand it back to him.

He studies it for an oddly long time. I have time to count to thirty in my head and I do this, with all the Mississippis attendant. He looks up, nods. I tell him I am B. and I am here for the apartment. He nods. That’s when I come up with my experiment. I don’t know why I come up with it. Perhaps it is due to some residual hostility I’m feeling from my phone call—but I decide to see what will happen if I just mouth the words to him. I mouth, “Is the apartment ready?” He nods, walks away, returns with a key, and points me upstairs. It works just fine. I mouth, “Thank you.” He nods, smiles, then writes on his paper, Why are you just mouthing?

Taken aback, I hesitate, then mouth, “As an experiment. How can you tell?”

You are not breathing when you talk.

“Interesting!” I smile. Interesting, indeed. I am learning a great deal about the deaf community already.

Later, I’ll practice breathing while I mouth things to him. It’ll take some work, but I think I can do it. Practice makes perfect.

The apartment is as expected. Nondescript. Pale yellow bedspread and curtains. It seems clean. Lysol. There’s a single brown egg in the refrigerator. I pull the curtains. Sunlight makes the room golden.

Left thumb and pinkie!

The bathroom is clean. I unwrap the hotel-sized bar of Ivory soap, wash my hands. Relief. Finding a decent bathroom on the road is always an ordeal.

ON MY BACK on the still-made bed, I stare at the ceiling while practicing simultaneous mouthing and breathing. I discover mouth-breathing while mouthing creates a voice, a whisper-like sound: a deaf person whispering. I experiment with nose-breathing and mouthing words. It’s silent. Takes a little practice. Puts me in mind of learning, as a child, to rub my abdomen and pat my head. I was so goddamn proud of that. I was an idiot, I think. Just like all the other idiot kids. Not the exception. A good student but never the top student. Number two. Number three. I was not a chess prodigy. No one ever approached my mother in a mall and said they were a casting agent and I should be in movies. No adult ever sexually abused me. Only one girl ever sent me a mash note and she was a second-tier girl, not the prettiest or smartest, not even that quirky brooding artistic girl Melliflua Vanistroski. No, the girl who loved me was nondescript. Unloved, certainly. She seemed unsure of herself. She had no discernible personality. Her hair was brown. Her eyes were brown. Her skin was white. Her nose was not cute.

This reminds me and I try the nose-breathing mouthing once again. This time on the exhale, I notice smoke pouring from my nostrils. Odd. I look at my right hand and see a cigarette there. Odd. I did not light a cigarette. I did not have a cigarette. I gave up smoking five months ago. Odd. How did this thing get into my hand? I must admit it does taste good. But quitting was so difficult that I must have somehow unconsciously started up again. I have no recollection of buying cigarettes, lighting one up, inhaling its smoke. Addiction is a powerful beast. I will tear the cigarettes up, throw them out. After I finish this one. It was a tough night and I need to relax. Now fully aware of my little white paper-tubed friend, I suck the smoke deep into my lungs, release it, watch it meander and curl toward the ceiling.

The last cigarette I consciously had was 9 August 1995. The day Jerry Garcia died. Smoker. Heart attack.

The other last cigarette was Christmas 1995 (December). Dean Martin’s death. Lung cancer. Dean Martin, whose astounding, mold-breaking turn in Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Kiss Me, Stupid preceded Charlie Kaufman’s “novel” idea of having an actor lampoon himself by only thirty years.

I feel myself dozing to neuronal strains of “That’s Amore.”

I’M IN MY apartment but it’s a hospital but I live there but it’s piled with clothing. It’s dark. I’m writing something. A book? I write the word unvicissitudinously in a sentence. I stare at the word. I can’t remember the meaning. I attempt to dissect it into its Latinate components to figure it out. Unvic. Issit. Udinou. Sly. These are not words. Well, sly is. But the other words are not words. I am almost positive. A doctor enters with photos pasted on foam core. They are me in profile with different noses.

“These are your options,” he says.

I study the labeled photos. Pug. Button. Roman. Greek. African American. Japanese.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Do I need a new nose? Is the African American nose different from the African African nose?”

Suddenly, I realize—within the dream—that I have been calling the actors in my girlfriend’s movie African Americans, even though they are from other countries. I am mortified. Did she hear me say this? I am a horrible racist!

“Why do I need a new nose?” I say. “Won’t that make me a lie?”

“The surgery is scheduled,” he explains. “It will be a hardship for many people if you cancel. The staff has made time. The noses have been ordered. Think of others for once.”

He is right. I need to think of others. For once.

“Which nose do you favor?” I ask.

“For you? The Fabray.”

He rifles through the cards, pulls out the photo of me with a Nanette Fabray nose.

I like it. It’s small. It’s cute. I don’t think it fits my face, though.

He tells me that this could be the first of many procedures, that over time it would make sense as I was transformed.

“Um …”

“Your face is the face you present to the world,” he says. “Make sure it’s right.”

I nod, although with uncertainty. He puts a check mark on the Fabray nose profile and hands it off to a man in surgical scrubs and a mask.

I’m walking in the woods. My face is bandaged. Completely, except for my eyes. I wonder how I’m going to eat. Or breathe. My hand is in my pocket fiddling with my keys. I realize my key chain is my old nose. I recognize it by feel. That small mole on the wing of the nostril. I think, It’s nice of them to give me a souvenir. On the path, a dog runs toward me. I panic, tense my body. It’s a German shepherd. He is followed at some distance by a jogging woman. She sees my panic, says nothing to me, does not smile apologetically or even acknowledge me. In fact, she seems angry.

“B.,” she says. “Come.” The dog’s name is the same as mine. We share a highly unusual name. She runs past me without any acknowledgment. Her dog is off leash, which I’m sure must be illegal. She is in the wrong and I could call the authorities, if I were so inclined. I have the power. She is in the wrong.

“Thank you for that,” I say, bitingly, as she passes. As sarcastically as I can. She doesn’t even turn. Does she have earphones in? I think back to seeing her from the front. No. She does not have earphones in. She heard me and ignored me.

“How about a sorry? Fucking cunt,” I say, not loud enough for her to hear probably. But so angry. I feel invisible. I hope she didn’t hear me. She does not care about me. She thinks I’m unattractive, not worth the flirt or even common courtesy. I hate her. Then I hate myself for hating her. For caring. For being angry. Why couldn’t she be decent, though? Why are people so awful? I hate people. I hope she didn’t hear me. Why am I not attractive to her? At least she should have sympathy for me because of my bandaged face. People with bandaged faces get sympathy; that’s the societal rule. She was pretty, in that female runner sort of way, that taking care of business, women are tough kind of way. That running bra, tank top way. Maybe the long gray beard sticking out from beneath the bandages made her dislike me. Should I have made the first move to be friendly? I might have said, as an icebreaker, that her dog and I share the same highly unusual name. Why is she nice to her dog and not me? I could easily be her dog. Then she would love me. Then I could stick my nose into her crotch and she would just giggle and push me away. Or let me have a little sniff. All in good fun, if one is a dog. My new nose. The Nanette Fabray. I imagine her dog with a Fabray nose as I fixate on her sweating runner’s crotch. Women sweat from their crotches more than do men; I read that. Looking back at her running along the trail, I watch her ass. I am lonely. She would never love me. I continue my walk. A woodpecker lands on the trunk of a tree near me. I stop and we look at each other. I speak to him in that baby voice reserved for babies and animals.

“Hello, woodpecker. Hi there. Hi there. How are you today? Hello. Hello.”

He hops onto the far side of the tree. Nothing. Asshole.

EVELYN, WHOM I loved once upon a time, who is gone, with whom there was a chance of something human, if such a thing was ever possible in my existence—Evelyn, who is long gone, who, even now, I think perhaps today will call, but she doesn’t, she won’t, she can’t, she doesn’t want to, she’s no longer interested, she’s dead, she’s laughing right now with somebody else, she’s old and unattractive, she’s still amazingly youthful, she doesn’t think of me at all, she went back to school and now she’s a psychologist, a lawyer, the head of acquisitions for an art museum. There’s no way to know. She has no online presence. Maybe she is dead, goes by a different name, a married name. I could hire a private detective, but to what end? Haven’t I done enough damage? Shouldn’t there come a time when I shrivel into a less egregious presence in the world? Perhaps I should consider meditation. I’ve always found myself most aligned with the Eastern religious philosophies. And as one becomes less focused on the I, one would probably become more attractive. The wrinkles won’t go away, but they will become attractive wrinkles. George Clooney billion-dollar eye crinkles.

CHAPTER 4

I PULL UP TO the St. Augustine Society for the Preservation of St. Augustine Film History (SASFPSAFH) building, which is a minor monstrosity, figuratively as well as literally, designed to resemble a mash-up of the requisite Spanish architecture and the head of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, perhaps the most famous of the St. Augustine–associated cinema; in actuality, it was almost entirely shot in nearby Palatka. The building has no windows other than the Creature’s eyes, which are on the third floor, so it’s dark in the lobby when I meet the Society’s curator, Euridice Snaptem, a roly-poly little woman with a disproportionately small head and fingers.

“So you’re a man,” is the first thing she says to me. “I’ve read your work, of course, but your gender has always been a mystery to me. Truth is, I figured you for a woman.”

“Well, I take that as a compliment,” I say, to say something, and because no one respects women more than I.

“I’m not sure I meant it that way, but …” she says and performs some vague and impatient “no matter” gesture with her hands. “Anyway, this way.”

And she leads me down the hall and some stairs.

“The vault is in the chin,” she says. “We say it’s in the chin because it’s in the chin of the Creature. You may have noticed that the building is in the form of the head of the Creature from the Black Lagoon; the movie was filmed in nearby Palatka. Anyway, your materials are already set up. Nothing can be removed from the chin. When you’re ready to screen the print, make your way from the chin to the first floor, left gill. Follow the signs. Don’t forget to lock the chin. Left gill is Screening Room One. It’s the left side from the Creature’s POV, so, in other words, as if you are the Creature. But everything is clearly marked. If you get lost, call me on my cell and I’ll come fetch you. You shouldn’t have to, though. Everything is clearly marked. The left gill is always left unlocked. Don’t lock it when you’re through. For fire safety reasons.”

She unlocks the chin, I enter, and she closes the door behind me, leaving me alone with the requested materials. I see three CCTV cameras mounted on the walls. This place means business.

My monograph, which is to be entitled At Last, I Am Becoming: Gender and Transformation in American Cinema, will be, perhaps self-evidently, a critical examination of the history of transgenderism in American cinema. The first documented film to explore this terrain was, surprisingly, 1914’s A Florida Enchantment, shot right here in St. Augustine. The film’s logline: Young woman ingests a magic seed that transforms her into a cisgender heteronormative man—or at least cisgender heteronormative manlike, with all the attendant cisgender heteronormative mannerisms (man-nerisms!) and desires. Her fiancé eventually tries a magic seed as well and finds himself mincing about in a bonnet and a dress, chased by angry townsfolk. The film is a fascinating time capsule and will set the tone for my entire book.

I get down to business, poring over the notebooks of director Sidney Drew. What is it to be a woman and why? he wrote, presciently, one hundred years ago to the day. This is the thing we must uncover with this motion picture. Is it a simple accident of fate or is it a calling, perhaps the highest calling, to be a woman? That a simple magical seed can alter this biological marvel we call the human female, is all the evidence one needs that human nature is malleable. It is imaginable that in some distant future time, scientists will devise such a seed, although they will likely call it a tablet or perhaps it will come in the form of an unction. How many of those fortunate enough to be on Earth at that time will partake of that tablet or unction or maybe poultice? I believe many will champ at the bit to find out for themselves how the other half experiences the world. Tiresias, of ancient Grecian mythological renown, had just such a transformation thrust upon him by the goddess Hera and lived as a woman for many years, after which he concluded that the female enjoys nine times the sexual pleasure of the male. I would certainly ingest this tablet, or spread this unction within my anus, or drape this poultice over the root of my phallus or wherever was advised by my primary care physician. My curiosity would drive me to do so.

I pinch my nasal bridge between thumb and forefinger. Drew’s notebook is feeling like a disappointment, muddled, incoherent, and fetishizing. I find it telling that Sidney Drew performed a stage act as half of the team Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew, with his wife’s identity as Gladys Rankin completely erased. After Rankin’s death, she was replaced in the act by Drew’s second wife, Lucille McVey, who became (drumroll, please!) Mrs. Drew in the act, herself erased as was her predecessor. Did Drew hope to be erased himself by taking the pill, to become nothing more than an extension of a man? I suspect he didn’t think that far into his new fantasy female incarnation. I sift through the documents on the desk until I come upon Edith Storey’s notebook. She was the female actor (I prefer the nongendered “actist,” but according to my editor, the time has not yet come for that) who played Miss (Ms.) Lillian Travers, the FTM in the film. I open it at random to find: I have discreetly studied the movements of men. They have a tendency to swing their broad shoulders as they walk. It is quite unlike we ladies, who sashay. I will attempt to adopt that masculine gait, for it strikes me as confident and strong, in other words masculine.

I worry that Ms. Storey might be as unenlightened as her director. I sigh and treat myself to a smallish break to check email. To check Facebook. To check Twitter. To check the various Internet sites I frequent: Clipboard, Chapstick, Nimrod, William’s Anomalies, Punching Bag, The Clerk Report, Peptide, Hollywood Blabb, Pimbleton’s, Work-a-Doodle, Chim-Chim-Cheree, Poli-Techs, Boop Archives, and Ladies Only.

I write in my journal:

Dear Diary, I am 58 years old today and no one has sent an email. My girlfriend may be shooting and there is a significant time difference, so I am not at this moment without hope. Only 43 Facebook Happy Birthdays. An average number of Facebook Happy Birthdays is 79. I am down 36, the age of Jesus when he died, plus 3. Coincidence? I feel alone.

This reductionistic approach of Drew and Storey to the understanding of gender is a bugbear of mine. Can we truly boil our musings on gender down to what amounts to a skeletal distinction? What about the hippy men among us? Are we not men, those of slightly wider hippage? What about women with broad shoulders? Can we reduce gender designation to genitalia? What about the intersexed? Can we reduce it to XY vs. XX? What about the XXY among us? The XYY? The YYY? The XYXYX? Those rare but no less human Z’s? Current scientific evidence teaches us there is no clear demarcation and that any attempt to regiment gender is nothing more than biological Fascism. Hitler would be proud.

Email break.

Facebook break.

Nothing.

I know that if I were to have a child today, I would raise it as a theyby—no gender announcements; the gender would not be disclosed to anyone including the theyby itself. This wonderful option was not available when we had our children, and I believe my children suffered greatly.

MY LAVISHLY HAIRED brother, Lavoisier, has once again neglected to offer me a simple “Happy birthday.” Has he ever been with an African American woman? I seriously doubt it. So for all his obvious success and sexual flag planting, which is in itself a problematic treatment of women, he is not a rebel. He has remained safely within the prescribed racial confines. Has he ever been with a man, even? Not him! Despite his full head of hair and an extremely successful wine distributorship. I am the rebel. Not that I have been with a man, but I would. I fall in love with people, not body parts. I would be with a man! Or even, I wouldn’t even ask. Let it be a surprise.

In order to suppress my rage, I dig deeper into the pile of documents. I bury my rage in research. My time will come if only I stick to the path. The vault, I discover, contains director Drew’s sketched diagrams, handwritten excerpts from the poetry of Whitman, hip-to-shoulder ratios for both males and females. One must consider the possible motivations of Drew. Was he (she) (thon) wrestling him(her)(thon)self with issues of gender dysmorphia, dysphoria, distransia, distendia? This dis list within which we all must sadly live goes on, sadly. Such is the human animal. What a pathetic existence. We are none of us fully aligned with our physical selves, with our assigned identities. Our face is the face we show to the world, as my dream doctor said. Our body is also the face we show to the world. As is our genitalia. If, in my heart, I see myself or at least believe myself to be a waifish twenty-year-old waifu with freakishly large, soulfully sad eyes, pouty lips, perhaps an adorable “boy” haircut, smallish perky breasts—my breast size might well vary depending on my mood—then am I not that? Perhaps some days I feel voluptuous and soft, hippy even (more so than I currently am), with an ample, grabbable (but only with my consent!) ass. Perhaps some days I’m a runner, lithe and small breasted. Perhaps on those days I’m a tomboy. I call men “buddy” and it charms them. Perhaps I’m a secretary, making sure everyone is taken care of. Getting coffee. Baking cookies to bring to the office. If these are the ways I see myself, then these are the ways I insist on being seen. Shouldn’t we all be seen as we want to be seen? What kind of culture does not allow people the freedom to be seen as they wish? This is the transgender struggle. And Western culture has, throughout its history, forced it underground, into the sewers and dark alleys. Why do those townspeople in A Florida Enchantment chase the husband? Why are they threatened by a person’s choice of clothing, by thon’s mannerisms? Of course the movie is not fully enlightened. In addition to the unenlightened gender explorations, the movie features a troubling racial component. Each of the African American characters is portrayed by a white actor in African American face. In addition, there is a troubling inconsistency in makeup application. Whereas most of the characters are simply wearing dark makeup and wigs, there are some who seem to be painted as minstrel characters, accentuating the lips with lighter makeup. But even that is not the most fascinating and disturbing aspect of racial depiction. When Lillian (now Lawrence) decides she (he) wants a valet instead of a maid, and she (he) forces (!) a pill on her (his) maid, Jane, the maid’s transformation (albeit with an added alcoholic component) is violent. She doesn’t become a man, the movie tells us, she becomes a black man, a savage. Whereas Lawrence flirts and sweet-talks his female conquests, the masculinized Jane beats a male competitor nearly to death to win the woman in whom he is now interested.

I INHALE ITS velvety smoke deep into my lungs. Wait. I have no recollection of lighting this cigarette. And there are NO SMOKING signs everywhere. Of course there can be no smoking in a film library. I know that. It would be obvious to the smallest of children, even those with no background in filmic studies or oxidation-reduction reactions. I stub the cigarette out, but only after I finish it and another one.

I take a break to add to my running list of words (and/or concepts) to be included in this or future monographs:

coterie

playful

insouciance

hausfrau

endemic

nervous onion

emotional tourniquet

Guy Debord

cultural priapism

societal zugzwang

Magister Ludi

impish neglect

Why can’t I focus on the task at hand? I need to get back to it.

dendroarchaeology

pilgarlic

Shooty Babitt

theybies

Leiomy Maldonado

2008 Passover margarine shortage

CHAPTER 5

BACK IN MY St. Augustine rental, hard at work writing about the wardrobe design in Enchantment. I’m whimsically entitling this section “Return to Gender, a Dress Unsewn,” which is a play on the song “Return to Sender”—written by the great African American songwriters Scott and Blackwell—which contains the lyric: “Return to sender, address unknown.” I am not above being playful in my work.

A violent yelling comes from the apartment of my neighbor directly across the hall.

“Fucking fuck. You fucking little bastard. You sheeny kike little fucker. Do what I tell you to!”

I am taken aback. What poor Jewish soul is the recipient of this abuse? As much as I am not a Jew, I will not tolerate anti-Semitism in any of its many forms. Should I summon the police? Should I mind my business? Certainly a domestic squabble is not a cause for police intervention. And certainly we each of us lose our temper at times. I am new in town. Do I want a 911 call to be my introduction to the neighborhood? Furthermore, due to the general belief that I am a Jew myself, perhaps my interference will be seen as “a Jew protecting a Jew,” which many see as Jews sticking together and therefore frown upon. In that way, it might do more harm than good to the local Jewish community. I must carefully consider all of the potential repercussions.

Then there is a thwack. Then breaking glass. Then a thwack.

I cannot in good conscience not get involved. Remember Kitty Genovese. Or, more to the point, remember Harlan Ellison calling the do-nothing witnesses “thirty-six motherfuckers.” I don’t want to be called a motherfucker by Ellison, even though it turns out he was wrong and the Genovese witnesses were misrepresented and besides by all accounts Ellison was an obnoxious fellow. The point is everyone still thinks the witnesses were not misrepresented, that Ellison was right. And as we all know, perception is everything. Just ask anyone ever wrongly accused of child molestation. Do they ever get their lives back? The answer is no, and I say that as a sympathizer. To be clear, I say it as a sympathizer of the wrongfully accused, not of child molesters, and certainly not as a Nazi sympathizer, if that’s what you’re thinking for some reason. Although I will say that there is a witch hunt mentality in our society in regard to any and all perceived aberrations. We have become a country of politically correct sheep. I realize this view opens me up to criticism from others and, more important, even from myself. Then again, perhaps the definition of courage is forging ahead in the face of self-criticism. But let me take this opportunity to reiterate that I do not support any form of abuse of children, physical, emotional, or sexual. However, I would just add, as a matter of fact, that there is a popular misunderstanding of the term pedophilia. It specifically and only refers to sexual attraction to prepubescent children. Interest in young teens is hebephilia and interest in teens older than fifteen is ephebophilia. Look it up.

I decide I will wait for one more indication of my neighbor’s violent abuse and, if it happens, act.

“FUCK YOU, HEBREW!” he screams.

I grab my key, leave my room, knock on his door.

A very old man answers.

“Oh, it’s you,” he says, quietly.

“Excuse me, I could not help but hear some commotion through our common wall. Is everything all right with everyone over here?” I say, trying to look past him into the dark apartment. I am worried that perhaps someone is abusing this elderly Jew standing before me.

“I am alone,” he tells me. “I live alone. I have always lived alone. I am an old man,” he adds, as if it were germane, as if this were not obvious.

“I heard yelling, someone called a kike. Who were you talking to, if not someone? Or who was talking to you, if you were the one not talking to someone?”

“I was talking to you,” he says, enigmatically.

“First of all, I am not a Jew,” I say, reflexively, defensively. “And besides, I was not in your apartment when you were or someone was calling someone or you a one.”

“I know,” he says. “I’m glad we’re able to finally talk in a civilized manner.”

“I’m sure I do not know what you are saying,” I say. “You and I have never before met. In fact, this is my first visit to St. Augustine.”

“I am old and lonely,” he asserts once more, for no apparent reason.

Then it hits me: OK, here we go. Old man wants a friend. How many times have I found myself in this situation? There should be a psychiatric term for old people.

“I am old and lonely and I do not have much time,” he continues. “Perhaps I have wasted my life in isolation. As a young man, I did not have the confidence to speak to the ladies. Then the years passed, as they must, as they will. And here I am today, never having known the love of a woman, never even having had a friend. And here you are in the flesh, finally. Someone to talk to, someone with whom to share my life and work.”

“Listen,” I say, “I’m in Florida for a very short period and I have a lot of work to do while here. I understand and appreciate your loneliness. Certainly I am on the road to old age myself, as are we all, and, consequently, I just don’t have the time to take away from my writing.”

“Oh? What are you writing about?” he asks, an odd, obnoxious little smile on his odd and uniformly pale face.

“I’m researching a little-known silent movie shot in St. Augustine in 1914.”

“A Florida Enchantment,” he says. It is not a question.

“How do you know?” I ask.

“I was the little boy in it. Ingo Cutbirth. My name is in the credits.”

“There is no little boy in it,” I say, racking my brain to make certain. I am an expert on the film, of course, having viewed it several thousand times, not only forward, but backward, something I do with films that interest me. It allows me to look at the film as a formal construction rather than a story, of course, much like copying a face upside down so that one’s preconceptions of “nose” and “eyes” and et chetera don’t get in the way of following the actual lines. But in addition, I, as contemporary physics teaches us, believe the arrow of time is illusory, cause and effect a story we tell ourselves. The truth is there are infinite versions of each story, the first the simple narrative convention: This happens, then this happens because of it. The second version is that events are quantized and separate and occur independently and can, nay must, be viewed in every conceivable order to understand their full implication. Of course the great intellectual of cinema Rene Chauvin explored this very notion in its most simple iteration in his film Moutarde, which must be viewed in both directions and centers on a pivotal moment located in the very center of the film between husband Gerard and wife Claire. In the “forward” version of the film, Claire serves Gerard a plate of sausages. He asks if there is any mustard in the house, and Claire says, “Oh, I am so sorry, Gerard. I went to the market today, but I forgot to pick up mustard. I will get some tomorrow.” “Don’t worry, my dear,” he says, and they kiss. The next shot finds Claire at the market, with a sweet smile on her face, lovingly choosing a jar of mustard for her husband. In the reverse juxtaposition, we see Claire lovingly picking up a jar of mustard followed by denying to her husband that she bought any. A devious Claire. Why is she denying her husband his mustard? Of course everything that happens after (or before) these two scenes is colored by this treachery or, in reverse, this act of kindness. That the movie ends (or begins) with the death of Claire, making her a ghost in the reverse version of the movie, only serves to further complicate the story. Chauvin’s experiment, which shook the film world to its very core, should in theory work if the scenes were rearranged at random, allowing for even more complex and varied interpretations of this quantized world. In any event (I’ll stop nattering), I view all worthwhile films this way, as well as once with the monitor upside down, which forces me to not take gravity for granted as a force in the film. For when we talk about figurative gravity in a film, we often forget that literal gravity is essential to truly understanding the human condition. We are none of us immune to the burden it imposes on us, nor should we be ungrateful for its gift of keeping us from flying off into space and exploding in the cosmic vacuum, or whatever happens in space (I am not a scientist, although I did minor in horror vacui studies at Harvard). The truly great and introspective characters in cinema have an awareness of this duality, and it is only revealed to us by watching them move while upside down, where every step is both a prayer and a commination.

The old man is staring at me.

“I am unseen,” he says. “In the Enchantment film. It is from my point of view. The director was experimenting with form. I stood under the camera for every shot. I was a smallish boy with a flattish head, so I easily fit. I’m in the credits. Unseen Boy—Ingo Cutbirth.”

“Of course!” I say.

Suddenly the movie makes sense. The boy! Of course! The unseen boy! The narrator! The dreamer of the dream. How this changes everything! How many new questions there now are. Why a boy? Why did the director choose a—

“Wait. How old were you in 1914?”

“Six,” he says.

Why did the director choose a six-year-old, a boy clearly not yet sexually developed, to have this dream, this fantasy, about an adult woman? This seems—

“Wait. You were born in 1908?”

“Nineteen-fourteen was a time of change,” the old man says, ignoring my question. “We knew we had three years left before we would enter the First World War and that the Second World War was scheduled to begin shortly thereafter. The Germans are nothing if not punctual. So—”

“How did you know what the future would bring?” I ask.

“There were prognosticators,” he tells me. “Those who understood the quantized nature of time. Physics was a burgeoning field and everyone was jumping on the bandwagon. Painters, writers, even fortune-tellers. Things are not as they seem.”

“I know that,” I say. “I just told you that! Have you read my book on Mustard?”

“I’m not much of a foodie.”

“The film Moutarde.”

“Oh,” he says. “Not yet, but it’s on my night table.”

“Really?”

“Of course.”

“Why of course?” I ask.

He hesitates, then says a little too quickly: “I have a long-standing interest in film. Anyhoo, my point is that the world was changing. Women were questioning their societal roles. Men were soon to be dying on foreign battlefields. The art of cinema, while not in its infancy, was certainly in its young adolescence, the Hebe period, as it was called, I believe.”

“Hebe? As in a Jewish slur?”

“As in hebephilia,” he says.

“Ah. Yes. Love of Jews? No, that’s not it. But the term is familiar. I simply can’t put my finger on it.”

“And because of that there was all sorts of exploration, growing pains, testing the limits imposed by theater and literature, the mother and father of film, respectively.”

“Are you a cinephile?” I ask, suddenly impressed with this withered, white papery Jew (?) before me.

“If by cinephile you mean someone sexually excited by film or film stock, then yes.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant a lover of the art of film.”

“I am that as—”

“In the platonic sense, I mean.”

“Oh. I am that as well. Some films I love as friends, some in a deeper way.”

Although I had never put it that way for myself, I understand what he means. And I feel a sudden kinship. I should add here that I have always been violently repulsed by the elderly. I know this is not a societally acceptable reaction and therefore I have kept it to myself. So now as I approach my own doddery, I find that repulsion more and more directed inwardly. Rather than discovering empathy for them, I find I hate them and myself all the more and that I look longingly and jealously at the young, at the taut of skin, at the sharp of mind, at the perfect of form, at the cocky of spirit, at the tattooed of arm, at the pierced of wherever. Granted I see them as stupid and shallow, in their baseball caps with factory-flat bills, stickers still adhered, in their ignorance of international affairs, in their inability to see me, to be sexually attracted to me, to admire me. “You, too, will get old and die,” I have on occasion screamed at groups of teens who have called out “baldy” or “beardy” or “baldo” or “beardo” or “baldhead” or “beard face” at me from the safety of the 7-Eleven parking lot. At times I have screamed it at teens who have said nothing to me. Whom I am not repulsed by are the elderly genius directors amongst us. The Godards, the Melvilles, the Renaiseseses. Although I am not homosexual by inclination, I do feel a certain romantic interest in these men. Perhaps because I see them as father figures, as godlike, as paterfamiliases, if you will. Perhaps because I would like them to see me, to love me and admire me the way I love and admire them. How to achieve that? Well, certainly if I could write a monograph elucidating their work in ways never before elucidated in the history of film history that would help. Perhaps if I could even show them things about their work they themselves had never considered. But this has not happened, and as they have died off one by one, the possibility of it happening has diminished greatly. I have often thought it unfair that pulchritudinous young women can gain access to older, successful, brilliant male artists for no reason other than the artist’s wanting to fuck them. Whereas I have sweated and strained to understand their work, to shed light on it. I have, in my highly insightful way, adored them, and yet nothing. This is the height of sexism. Why can’t they love me? Why couldn’t my father love me just for being me? It was always about proving my worth to him. Never because I was cute or sexy. And as a child, I was both, I believe. Imagine a holy synthesis of Brandon Cruz from The Courtship of Eddie’s Father and Mayim Bialik of Blossom fame and you’re imagining me as a boy. I was the epitome of pulchritudinous. I know it’s impolitic to celebrate Man-Boy love, but the Greeks, the greatest generation (with apologies to those of you who fought the Nazis), with the most geniuses per square foot in the history of the world, seemed to do all right with it. To be clear, I am not condoning such an uneven power dynamic in any relationship, and I fully believe children must be protected from predators. The only thing I am saying is that if Alain Resnais had taken an interest in me as a little boy, I would have been flattered. Obviously that ship sailed a long time ago.

It pops into my mind, for no clear reason, that sometimes I imagine myself as solid through and through. No bones, no blood. No organs. Rubber perhaps, with a skeleton of metal. It would be an ideal construction for a being. No longer any worry about kidney disease, for my kidneys would be solid rubber and solid rubber is impervious to kidney disease. I have looked this up. Just as when I have dental issues, I consider how much better a world it would be if people had beaks, and I mean instead of teeth, not in addition to them as have Hegel and Schlegel. Beaks in addition to teeth would solve no problems, obviously.

I refocus on my previous train of thought: The old man is still old, however, and, let’s face it, no Alain Resnais. If I am to cozy up to an old man, he must be a certified genius, a poet, an artist. As I in my youth had hoped to be as an old man in my own future and still do in the future from now, but with less time to get there. But as of now, I am simply a celebrator of geniuses, an apologist for great men who are anti-Semites and racists, for brilliant artists who abuse women. These quirks of character must be forgiven in our geniuses is my unpopular opinion. Artists must have the freedom to express and explore the darkest regions of their psyches. As Persephone must spend half the year in the underworld, so must these men delve deep within themselves (and young women sometimes!) to bring us the fruit we so need for our sustenance. The pomegranate—symbol of life, of death, of royalty, of fecundity, of Jesus’s suffering, of virility, and so much more—is of course the fruit associated with Persephone. It chains her forever, albeit intermittently, to the underworld. Do we despise her for this? No, we celebrate her, because when she emerges, she brings us the spring. A field must lie fallow sometimes if we are to have any hope of an eventual renewal. A genius must sometimes be a racist if we are to hope for elucidation. History is generously peppered with geniuses who despised the Jews, who dismissed the blacks, who objectified women. Are we to bury their great works because of this? The answer is a resounding no, we are not to. We are, all of us, human. We are, all of us, imperfect. Prejudice is evolutionarily implanted in our genes. We need to know The Tiger is a dangerous animal. We need not know that all tigers are not. Identifying the personalities of individual tigers does not serve our need to survive. Granted, it might make us more enlightened individuals and friends with some tigers, and I am all for that. I applaud that, but one must recognize that there is a tribal instinct in humans and it is at its base an instinct for survival. So accept that, mourn it, decry it, rail against it, but recognize it is a very human trait and have patience with it. Have compassion. Thank you and good night. This is an impromptu speech I delivered to a great deal of heckling in the Bates College copier room when I was a visiting critic in their film department, where my job was to sit in the back during student film screenings, tap my pen impatiently against my notebook, and sigh.

The old man stares. I am not certain how long we have been in his doorway. I search for clues: Was it light before? It is dark now. I don’t recall. Perhaps it was light before. Certainly it was light at some point today. Of this I am almost certain.

“Anyhoo,” I say.

He asks if I would like to come in. He tells me again that he has spent his life in isolation, brimming with social anxiety, and that he has decided to change his ways at this very late stage. He realizes now that his phobias greatly limited his joie de vivre. Never has he felt the embrace of a woman, shared a beer with a male buddy, seen a football match with a buddy, had a buddy, played pool with a buddy. This is actually, he confides with some embarrassment, the first time he’s even said the word buddy. He likes the word, it turns out, he tells me. It’s friendly, he explains. It’s got a nice nose to it, as they say about those wines with nice noses to them.

I tell him I’m busy.

He nods sadly.

Then I think, Be nice; he’s an old man. Then I think, Not too nice; I don’t want him to think every time I bump into him, I’m going to stop for a long conversation. Then I think, Someday I’ll be old, what if no one wants to talk to me. Then I think, Oh no, karma: What if I’m not nice to him, maybe something bad will happen to me. Then I think of that movie where Meg Ryan turns into an old man. Not that I believe in that sort of magical nonsense, but the movie does make some valid points. And not that Meg Ryan is by any stretch of the imagination old now, but it does make one remember about how she was once the girl next door and how we as a society keep trading in our old models for new ones. Then I think, This old man was once young—as young as Meg Ryan used to be. But no one can see that now. We are stuck in the present. An old man is old. A young man is young. A boy is a boy. We can’t see life as a journey. Where we are now is not where we started. It is not where we’re going. It is essential to see this old man not just as a reminder of my own mortality, but as a person, someone who might have had or might still be having a fascinating life with fascinating thoughts.

“I have errands,” I say.

“OK. I wasn’t sure you were going to say anything. It’s odd the way you keep staring at me for so long.”

“I had fallen into a fugue state,” I say, covering. Then I think, That movie was called A Kiss to Remember. Then I think, No, that’s not it.

“I envy you young people your fugue states and jelly bracelets. Your Eyebobs.”

“Our what?”

“Eyebobs? No Eyebobs yet?”

“I don’t even know what that sentence means.”

“Sometimes I get ahead of things. See, I have these dreams.”

Oh boy, I think.

“Why do you say that?” he asks.

“What?”

“Oh boy.”

“I said that? I thought I thought it.”

“You both thought it and said it, if we are to be completely accurate.”

You cagey bastard, I think (say?). I’d best be off.

I am about to turn and go, am actually in process. I am literally turning, but slowly for some reason, in slow motion it seems, for some reason, very, very slowly, when I notice something.

He massages his temples and it occurs to me that his face might be covered with makeup. On his smudged temples, darker skin is revealed. Suddenly I suspect perhaps he is African American and wearing Caucasian American makeup, more commonly called whiteface or paleface or cracker countenance or trash visage or clown white.

“Are you African American?” I ask.

“No!” he screams and slams his door.

But I believe he is. And now I want to know him. More than anything, I want to know him. I pound on his door.

“I want to visit,” I say. “I’ve changed my mind. Helloooo?”

“Go away, kike,” he yells.

“I am not Jewish,” I explain to the wood between us.

There is no response. He doesn’t believe me. It has been said that people are only really seeing themselves when looking at others. Perhaps because he is in denial regarding his own ethnic heritage, he assumes I am in denial about my own. But I am not Jewish. I am not. I will put together a slideshow for him of those who appear to be Jewish but are not. Ringo Starr will be featured. Ringo Starr is not Jewish even though he has a prominent nose. It occurs to me his name is almost the same name as Ingo’s name, which is Ingo. The difference is the R, which is the first letter of my surname. R + Ingo = Ringo. I imagine it inside a heart on a tree. I explain all this to him through the door.

“R plus Ingo equals Ringo,” I repeat. It feels almost cosmic, somehow meant to be. Perhaps our eventual communion will form a new star in the firmament. I go on to explain that Ringo’s last name is Starr and that is why I suggested our relationship might form a new star.

Damn. I should have agreed to visit with him in the first place. When I had the chance. What was I thinking? Even if he had been white, humoring him would have been such a small price to pay to get in his good graces, so I could interview him about his experience on Enchantment. Sometimes I don’t know what I am thinking or why or even when. My mind travels a thousand miles an hour, careening wildly from topic to topic. It is a thing I must work on, stilling this monkey mind, as the Buddhists call my mind, even though its monkey-ness is a by-product of my intelligence. But due to this intellect, I am a monkey on a string, the butt of some constant cosmic joke of the gods.

“Go away,” he says.

CHAPTER 6

I GIVE UP FOR now. Back in my apartment, I find I cannot focus on work. I write a poem for my blog Poems and Curios:

Home.

Finally home.

Suddenly home.

Never home.

Always home.

Without home.

Going home.

Goodbye home.

Broken home.

Leaving home.

O, Home, where did you go?

O, Homo.

Oh.

Conclusion: Home is a word of great power.

Research: Is this so in other languages? Is there a language in which there is no word for home? How might a person from such a culture think? Where would they say they live? Reread Whorf!!! This could be important!!!

I watch the screen for several hours, constantly refreshing, waiting for the comments to appear. They do not.

I knock on his door again, prepared to make my case. It opens. Now without makeup, I see he is ancient and African American. Oh, the lessons I could learn from him, the places we’ll go. But he is odd and distant minus his makeup, even odder and distanter. I attempt to show him I mean him no harm. Oh, the things he must have seen as an African American. The places he must’ve gone in his long and relentlessly African American lifetime. He was born in 1908. Perhaps his parents had even been slaves. Certainly his grandparents. He is a frail, hunched giant. He wears those new beige orthopedic Nikes everybody is going on about. Air Garry Marshalls. Several elderly people have been killed by several other elderly people down here in Florida for these shoes.

“I mean you no harm,” I explain.

He says nothing. Perhaps he didn’t hear me.

“I mean you no harm,” I tell him again, this time louder.

He bares his gums at me.

“Perhaps I could have you over for tea,” I say.

No response.

“I have written a monograph on William Greaves. The great avant-garde African American filmmaker.”

I’m grasping at straws. It is not fair to me that he is suspicious of all white people. I understand from whence that instinct comes, but still. I am not that guy, as the kids say, and I am making every effort.

“I have an African American girlfriend,” I tell him as the door closes.

I spend hours at my peephole. It is not healthy. He never leaves his apartment. I hatch and discard plan after plan. Might I borrow some ingredient or other for a pie? I’m going to the grocery store, does he need anything? Does he know a good barber? When is trash day again? Do you smell that?

Then his door opens. He peeks out into the hall, looks directly at my door. Is he trying to avoid me? It seems almost cruel at this point. But I remain hidden, watching. I don’t want to step out until he is well into the hall, until he has closed his door behind him and cannot get back into his apartment in time if I happen to appear. He emerges, closes his door. I do as well.

“Oh, hello,” I say. “I’m B. We’ve met. When you were wearing your costume. We even chatted.”

He doesn’t respond.

“I’m the fellow with the African American girlfriend. Perhaps you recall me.”

He shuffles slowly toward the staircase in his beige boat-like orthopedic kicks.

“Anyway, I was thinking since we are neighbors, we should exchange keys. In case of emergency.”

I fear this is too much too soon. I attempt to backpedal.

“Or just tea. Not saying we should exchange tea, but rather enjoy a cup together.”

Nothing.

Then something miraculous happens. He falls down the stairs. It’s a brutal tumble as if he has been pushed, and I worry someone will think he was pushed and then think that I pushed him. Which I did not and would never. I would never do that. I make a mad dash back into my apartment and close the door, waiting for another tenant, alerted by the noise of his tumble, his moans, to come to the old man’s aid. I will arrive second. That’s my alibi. Then I realize the other tenants in the building are either deaf or blind or some combination of the two. It is my great good fortune that the sad man with no car (deaf) happens to enter the building at this very moment.

“I’ll take him to the hospital!” I scream from my doorway. “I have a car!”

He doesn’t hear me of course and begins dragging Ingo toward what I assume is the nearest bus stop. I run down the stairs and roughly shake the neighbor by the arm to get his attention. He looks up at me.

“I’ll take him to the hospital. I have a car,” I mouth (using my now-perfected nose-breathing technique). He nods. I worry that this carless sad man will in the future ask for car favors now that he has been made aware of my carfulness, but this is my only opportunity and I must seize it, as Saul Bellow (Jewish and wonderful!) teaches us in his book Seize Today.

On the road to urgent care, I try to engage again.

“I am B.,” I tell him. “Perhaps you recall we chatted.”

I explain that B. is my first initial, which I use professionally as well as personally so as not to clutter my film writings with the gender assumptions of my multitudinous readers, or of those in my personal life, either.

He says nothing.

“I didn’t push you,” I say, almost shrieking it. In case there is some confusion about that.

I need him to know.

“My girlfriend is African American,” I fully shriek.

I need him to know that as well.

He glances over at me, then looks straight ahead and speaks:

“And he went up from thence unto Beth-el; and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him: ‘Go up, thou baldhead; go up, thou baldhead.’ And he looked behind him and saw them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she-bears out of the wood, and tore forty and two children of them. 2 Kings 2:23–24.”

“Jesus. That’s the Bible?” I say. “Jesus. What the hell?”

I wonder if he is mocking my baldness. Or threatening me with bears.

AT THE DESK I watch as he fills out the forms. He is 119! Wasn’t he just 116? No matter, a fall at either of those ages is understandable, and not anyone’s fault, certainly not mine. I did not push him. Truly, the miracle is that he is at his age still ambulatory. It is remarkable, and he should be grateful I saved him, rather than pointing fingers.

I put myself down as his emergency contact while he is distracted searching for his Medicare card. The attendant asks if I am his son. This thrills me. I am vindicated. Wait till I tell my girlfriend.

“No,” I say. “Just a friend.”

Not that an interracial friendship is a small thing.

In the car ride home, Ingo has become oddly chatty. Perhaps it is the painkillers. Perhaps it is that I saved his life, but in either case, I am happy to at long last be his friend. As an amateur Franz Boas in the making, cultural anthropology has long been my great passion, and here, practically dropped into my lap, is a receptacle of history. I turn on (with Ingo’s permission) my Nagra II reel-to-reel audio recorder, from 1953, itself a piece of history.

“November 4, 2019. I’m here in St. Augustine, Florida, with Ingo Cutbirth, an African American gentleman. What year were you born, Mr. Cutbirth?”

“I was born 1900.”

“So you’re 119 years old,” I say.

“Yes sir.”

“I thought you said 1908?”

“Nineteen hundred.”

“OK. What are some of your earliest memories?”

“From the past or from the future?” he asks.

“What do you mean, ‘from the future’?”

“Well, memories go either way.”

“Either way?”

“Yes. Rememorying the future is more or less the same thing as past rememorying; it gets foggy the more far you go away from the time you’re at. In either direction.”

I am at a crossroads here. Do I want to go down the path of this man’s craziness or steer him toward a more reasonable discussion? I have to say, as a student of fabulism, I am, at least presently, feeling the pull of Ingo’s future memories. And of course that his speech patterns have again changed is not lost on me. I am, after all, also a student of speech patterns, having studied with Roger K. Moore of the University of Sheffield while penning my monograph Patterns of Speech, from Stammer to Yammer, from Stutter to Mutter, from Drone to Intone.

Oh, also, From Mumble to Grumble.

“Can you give me an example of something you remember that hasn’t yet happened?”

“In the future, everybody talking about Brainio. That’s a for example, if you must know.”

“Brainio?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you elaborate?”

“Can I a-what-ah-late?”

“What is Brainio?”

“Brainio everywhere you look. Brainio. Brainio.”

“But what is it?”

“Brainio. It’s like a radio or a TV set, except it’s in a person brain.”

“Oh, like shows are broadcast directly into a person’s head?”

“Everybody talking about Brainio.”

“In the future.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you have Brainio in your head in the future?” I ask.

“No. I’m dead when there’s Brainio.”

“Oh.”

“I’m a hunnerd twenny-nine now. What the fuck you think?”

“Yes. Right. So you can remember things that happen after you die?”

“Just a few and not very good. Brainio is what they call it. Evy’body talkin’ ’bout it.”

“Yes. What other things can you remember from the future?” I ask.

“Future cars.”

“What do they look like?”

“Silver. Evy’body talkin’ ’bout them silver cars all the time. Silver cars this. Silver cars that.”

“What do they say about them?”

“I got me a future car, that sort of thing. Look, it’s silver. It’s all a little foggy. Because it’s the future.”

“Do these future cars have any unusual characteristics or abilities?”

“Fly. Also they be a boat, too, if you want.”

I suddenly suspect this avenue of inquiry will go nowhere, so I back up.

“How about we talk about your past for a bit now.”

“Makes no nevermind to me.”

“OK, good. Are you still working, Ingo?”

“Retired.”

“And what type of work did you do?”

“Janitor at the School for the Blind, Deaf, and Dumb right here in St. Augustine.”

“When did you start work there?”

“Six A.M. Evvy day. Rain an’ shine.”

“No, I’m sorry, I meant what year?”

“Oh. Gosh. Nineteen twenty, I believe. Thereabouts.”

“And you worked there your whole life?”

“Till 1995.”

“That’s seventy-five years.”

“I never counted.”

“It is,” I say.

“If you say.”

“It is.”

“I’ll take your word.”

“It is.”

“OK then.”

“You want me to show you on a calculator?”

“Forgot my Eyebobs at the bottom of them stairs.”

“Did you like your job?”

“Sure. Nice people. Treat me nice.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“I like being around the blinds and the deafs.”

“Why is that?”

“Hard to explain,” he says.

“Could you try?”

“I like the deafs and the blinds because they don’t use their eyes and ears what to judge a man.”

“I see.”

“Though I gotta say, the blinds judge a man’s sound and the deafs judge a man’s looks. The deaf/blinds are the best in that regard, but the halfsies are still better than all those that can see and hear. The wholies. Those are the ones make me most uncomf’able.”

“So you’re self-conscious?”

“What’s that? Self-what-sis?”

“You worry about people judging you?”

“I don’t care for judging. ’Ceptin’ the Lord doin’ it.”

“Who does?”

“What’s that?”

“I’m agreeing with you that it’s unpleasant to feel judged.”

“I see.”

“Have you ever been married? Had children?”

“No. I been pretty busy. And anyway, the gals never cared much for me, it seem. I’m not saying I blame ’em. There’s no explaining why someone likes someone. Some say it’s chemicals, how a person smell because of certain chemicals he got. But I don’t know. I’ve never smelled any chemicals and yet I have liked certain gals. So I don’t know.”

“Did you ever ask any of them on a date?”

“No. I can tell they don’t want me to. With their eyes they’re saying, please don’t ask me on a date. The ones that ain’t blind. The blind ones say it with their ears. And so I just keep walking when I see that look or those ears. But it doesn’t mean I don’t like them. It’s just a secret. And I think about them to myself. Make up stories about them.”

“Do you write stories?”

“Not ’zactly.”

“What do you mean, not exactly?”

“Well, I do make up stories but they’re just for me. They keep me company. I get lonely. Always have. I have my television set and my TV Guide, but sometimes I make up stories just for me. Too bad Brainio don’t exist yet. I’ll be dead ’fore there’s Brainio. You know how Brainio works?”

“Um, no. I just heard of it for the first time a few minutes ago,” I say.

“Brainio goes into a person brain through invisible rays and the like.”

“Like radio waves?”

“That sounds right, though I’m no science-tist. And these invisible rays they tell you a story that you get to see in your brain. But it’s not like the television set where you have one story and evy’body watches. Brainio mixes up with your own ideas, and then the story you watch is like you and Brainio making it up together.”

“Like a custom-made story.”

“What’s that?”

“Making it up together.”

“That’s what I said. And you’re in it, too. Did I say that part? You can be in the story. If that’s what you want.”

“That sounds like a fascinating invention. And not a little terrifying,” I say.

“Yeah. I wish I could be alive for Brainio.”

“Would you be in your Brainio stories?”

“No. I don’t much like looking at myself.”

“Even in Brainio?”

“Even there, I expect.”

“But you could make yourself look like anything you want in Brainio.”

“Yeah. But then it’s not me.”

“That makes sense.”

“I do wish I would be alive when Brainio comes about. It would be so much faster and easier.”

“Faster and easier than what?”

“Than the story I’m making up now. Brainio makes stories fast. That’s one of the things everyone is saying in the future about Brainio,” Ingo says.

“Can you tell me the story you’re making up?”

He grows silent and stares off as he had yesterday. I wait. Is he considering telling me? I feel he might be. He licks his lips as if about to talk, but he remains staring off.

“I can’t tell it to you.”

I am crestfallen.

“Maybe I can show it to you,” he says.

“Are you a painter, then? You’ll show me pictures?”

“I do some painting. And building. And other arts and crafts and such. Sewing. And many such arts and crafts as is necessary.”

“Fascinating! I’d love to see this work! Is it on display in a gallery or—”

“In my apartment. I have to project it for you.”

“It’s a film?”

“Yes, I’m making a motion picture.”

This is too good to be true: ancient, reclusive, eccentric, likely psychotic African American filmmaker. Outsider art, undoubtedly. I have stumbled upon something magnificent. Visions of Darger dance in my head. Now for the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question:

“Have many people seen your film?”

“What’s that now?”

“Have you shown your film to a lot of people?”

Please say no.

“It’s not for other people. It just for me. Nobody else ever seen it,” he says.

How could I have stumbled upon this? No matter how crude, how amateurish, no matter how painful to watch, I can spin this into anthropological gold. I can dine out on this for the rest of my life. Finally I can pry open the prudish legs of Cahiers du Cinéma.

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