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Note to Self
Alina Simone


A darkly humorous reckoning of our modern condition – spam mail, internships, frenemies and hype – and the story of Anna’s quest for the meaningful life she knows she deserves.Are you a real person?Anna Krestler has been fired and needs a new job. What she doesn’t need is to check her Gmail account for new messages, or click-through to a blog on underwear that prevents cameltoe. But Anna is addicted to the internet, and no matter how much her life-coach bullies her, she can’t resist the lure of the next link.Everything changes for Anna when she chances upon a particularly cryptic online advert. Her reply is the gateway to an existential adventure that sees her swallowed whole by New York’s avant-garde art scene and the strange world of experimental cinema.Anna will do anything to impress Taj, the enigmatic filmmaker, and gradually he begins to direct every aspect of Anna’s life. But is Taj for real anyway? Is Anna? And what’s better? To be totally, obviously real, or really obviously fake?









Note to Self

ALINA SIMONE








For Joshua


Table of Contents

Title Page (#ued7a2d69-cccc-54b5-9d2d-866172b992d9)

Dedication (#u428dd2b4-a9ef-58bd-8723-0dff895119ee)

Chapter 1 (#u018c330c-ff98-5edd-a09c-dbd9aadac253)

Chapter 2 (#ua328ed13-6c6a-50fa-89d4-374c4508ee30)

Chapter 3 (#ub8fcfd79-e906-56f1-8553-f98943dc03de)

Chapter 4 (#u0acf7b67-6479-54fa-80fc-207e0c7f20d4)

Chapter 5 (#u2f2ad8e8-1a38-5944-802f-4feea4450e51)

Chapter 6 (#ua7d8ad8e-cd77-5caa-851e-2c346b50f3d0)

Chapter 7 (#ub95bc780-8b4b-5cac-b00a-d3580f460c86)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Alina Simone (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




1


Time theft. This was Anna’s first thought when she found out she was being let go. Everyone was doing it—Brandon was practically webcasting gay porn from his cube—but for some reason management had decided to unleash the mailbox scrubbers and digital hounds on her. Worse, she couldn’t deny it. The Internet had draped itself, kudzu-like, over her brain. There were disturbing signs. Or rather, signs that Leslie later pointed out were disturbing. Like the spam collection. “Spam’s not a collectible,” Leslie had said when Anna laid her confession on the table. “That’s not a thing, Anna.” And Anna had to explain because Leslie didn’t know what it was like out there—her floors were cleaned by tiny robots with cute names. Market brinksmanship had driven spammers to new poetic heights. Someone should be saving it, studying it, sorting it according to some matrix of desperation, even.

“�Tiny bubbles of discontent surround me because I’m as lonely as a shark in the deep blue ocean.’” Anna quoted from a Ukrainian escort’s solicitation she’d rescued from the filters. “Don’t you think that’s kind of beautiful?”

“Don’t you have better things to do than read spam?” Leslie countered.

That assumption, Anna had to admit, was debatable.

Of course, when Anna was called into Mr. Brohaurt’s office, she felt ill at the thought he’d discovered her little Kunstkammer of spam. Only four years older, Chad Brohaurt made forty times her annual salary and could cleave the Earth with his jawline. There was some incredibly filthy stuff in there, things she’d felt obligated to include for the sake of completeness. Sitting on his couch of real leather, she had the urge to confess, explain that she always started off clicking on something perfectly reasonable. Then one thing led to another and before she knew it, whoops! down the rabbit hole. Only it wasn’t a “rabbit hole” was it? “Rabbit hole” implied someplace whimsical and fun, an enchanting place where you could enjoy weapons-grade cocktails with a well-dressed rodent. The Internet was more like an asshole. An asshole whispering of African fruits with miraculous weight-loss properties and discounted mani-pedis in some forlorn section of Queens.

It turned out her dismissal from Pinter, Chinski and Harms had nothing to do with time theft, though. Mr. Brohaurt had sat down by the window, put a sad hand on the knee of his expensive pants. “This has nothing to do with you, Anna,” he’d said. “Everyone’s getting a haircut.” And Anna had stupidly looked out at Madison Avenue, curious about the new haircut. Of course, he’d meant budget cuts and the other white-shoe law firms. The new austerity. The end of everything.

But that was five weeks ago, and now here was Leslie’s voice calling her back to their “sesh” like the gentle chime of a laptop rebooting.

“Thirty-seven is not the end,” she was saying. “It’s really just the middle.”

Anna had taken Leslie up on her offer reluctantly. In general, she felt pretty ambivalent about time spent offline. With other people she always ended up pretending to be someone else, someone more like them. Whereas alone with the Internet, she was totally herself. There were no vagaries. She clicked on exactly what she felt like clicking on and each click defined her. Even the spam. Especially the spam. Besides, what kind of person needed a life coach? Of course, Leslie wasn’t a real Life Coach, but she was a consultant at McKinsey, which trafficked in all the same theories, or so she had assured her. But to her surprise, Anna found herself looking forward to the ritual. They met on Sundays at Café Gowanus, which she liked even though it was built on a Superfund site. The café was as clean and bright as the Apple store it might well have been, full of ambitious people with hyphenated jobs and nice clothes, hunched over their MacBooks. It was as though the sugar packets had all been secretly filled with Adderall; just being in the room gave her a charge. Each week, Leslie armed Anna with a variety of motivational sayings—Reposition Your Disposition, Negativity Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy—cranks to power her way toward a new life. It hadn’t exactly worked out that way. For now, her weeks were still powered by Triscuits and the Web, but she enjoyed the security of Leslie’s firm hand on the rudder.

“Did you think about what we talked about last time?” Leslie said.

“Yes,” Anna said, remembering only that last time they had talked about what to talk about this time. “I’m thinking of taking a class.”

She waited, but Leslie’s expression did not change. The pen stayed where it was, next to the half-eaten scone and the egg timer.

“You already have a master’s,” Leslie said.

“This is different.”

“Taking a class isn’t strategic, Anna. That’s operational.”

“It depends—” Anna began, because she already had a theory about this, but Leslie cut her off again.

“Remember: a goal without a plan is just a wish.”

“Yes, but—”

“And I’m sure you’ve already asked yourself this, so let’s pretend I’m not asking, but is this really what you need to be spending your severance on?” Leslie set her latte down inside Anna’s Core Competencies as if it were nothing more than a cocktail napkin. Which, of course, it was. They were sitting by an open window, the air off the canal as fresh as a newborn fart, with Anna’s Life Map on the table between them. “Your Core Competencies still look thin,” Leslie said, prodding the moist napkin. “Let’s go back to your experience at grad school, mine it for some strengths.”

“That was years ago,” Anna began. If anything, shouldn’t they be talking about Pinter, Chinski and Harms, where the wounds were still fresh, Google-searchable? “Why rehash that stuff now?”

“Because you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been,” Leslie said, possibly for the second time. “Start with the dissertation.”

Anna’s stomach plunged. Dissertation had the same effect on her as the word sarcoma.

How she had missed graduate student life at first! Her amorphous days tethered to an illusory sense of purpose. Setting off for a bright café like this one each morning to not write her thesis. How she missed lunches with Sveta and Evgeni (the Slavic Studies department was stuffed with Slavs perfecting their Slavism). Of course, a month after the department kicked her out the pendulum had swung hard the other way. Academia, she realized, was a sham. An intellectual sports club where she could walk the treadmills of her pointless arguments for years, mesmerized by the illusion of progress. Suddenly she wanted nothing more than to rise early each morning, get on the subway with her lunch in a bag, disgorge at the foot of some gleaming mass of glass and steel, serve as the filling in a capitalism cannoli. She had taken the job at Pinter, Chinski and Harms because it was a name that made people say “Oh!” They hadn’t heard of it, just felt as though they should have. In truth, it didn’t pay that much—not enough to live without a roommate—but there were benefits, including, Anna remembered with a twinge, tuition reimbursement. Six years later and what did she have to show for it? Aside from the cubital tunnel syndrome she’d developed dragging files from one subdirectory to another for hour after useless hour. No, she didn’t want to talk about the past, she wanted to talk about the future.

“Criminology,” Anna said. The idea had come to her while watching a TiVoed episode of True Crime.

“Huh?” Leslie said, looking up from the Venn diagram she’d begun drawing.

“The class. I know it sounds random, but in a crazy kind of way, it’s perfect. Look, it’s got something for each of my Spheres.” And to Anna’s surprise, Leslie allowed her to take the pen from her hand. “Criminology. It’s about figuring things out. It’s about writing and analysis. And when you think about it, it’s all about people.” Leslie continued to say nothing, which Anna found encouraging. “The other thing I like is how it’s sort of, you know, provocative. Because—let’s admit it—murder is interesting. �Abnormal personalities,’” Anna air-quoted. “Psychopaths, rapists, pedophiles.” Leslie looked around in alarm at the word pedophiles, but Anna kept going. “So even if you’re just moving a bunch of papers around on a desk, the serial killers still keep things jumping on a certain level—”

“If,” Leslie cut her off, “you are really serious about criminology and you’re sure that’s what you want to do, we’ll put it on the map. It’s your map, Anna. Honestly, do whatever you want. You can be a criminologist. You can be a unicorn. It’s all you. But know that this is major. OK? Something like that changes your entire Vision Statement. It’s a campaign, not something you can just stick in your Spheres.” Leslie took the pen back from Anna, who had waved it decisively all around the map without daring to make an actual mark. And as it slipped from her hand, Anna couldn’t help but notice that Leslie’s pen, which was heavy and silver and probably had her initials engraved on it somewhere, was, let’s face it, kind of obnoxious. It was—how hadn’t she noticed this earlier?—a fuck-you pen. Despite herself, Anna suddenly hated Leslie all over again. Leslie, who could sit there looking so very Whole Foods, with her curator husband and three-bedroom condo at the Emory, her job at McKinsey, those Selima Optique sunglasses—telling Anna exactly what she could and couldn’t stick in her Spheres. Anna couldn’t help but wonder if Leslie and Josh were still trying to have another baby or if things had gotten dire. She imagined Leslie wouldn’t let it go lightly. There would be egg donors, sperm spinning, even surrogacy. Wouldn’t it be just like Leslie to outsource?

“Of course, if you feel like you’ve given criminology the proper amount of consideration,” Leslie continued, “and you’re ready for Process and Learning, then let’s do it. Go ahead. Put it down.”

They both knew that Anna was not ready for Process and Learning.

And criminology wasn’t even the worst of it. Anna had spent last night jotting down ideas in the margins of The New Yorker that she’d gotten from ads—the Middle Monterey Language Academy (Make a language breakthrough!), Voyages to Antiquity (Experience the extraordinary cultures of ancient civilizations!), Vantage Press (Publish your book now!)—opportunities that had seemed so alluring, with their elegant font and refracted New Yorker glory, when she’d perused them alone at her kitchen table.

“You think I’m mean,” Leslie sighed.

“No!”

“I just want you to weigh your options before jumping into something,” she said, rising from the table. “Again. Honestly, Anna. You have a nice life. Is this the kind of thing you really want in your head before you go to sleep at night? Murder? Pedophiles?” She shook her head, shook out the pedophiles. “I’m going to run to the loo, and when I get back, I think we should start all over with some To-From statements. Stop worrying about the big picture, OK? Better to have some low-hanging fruit at this stage. Makes the whole thing look doable. Start without me and think about the �From.’” Leslie gave Anna a light squeeze on the shoulder and smiled. “Carpe diem, right?”

Leslie’s eyes were so clear and calm, so reassuringly full of goodwill that all Anna could do was smile back. And as Anna smiled, she hated herself for hating Leslie, who had, after all, sacrificed her Sunday afternoon to help Anna. Leslie was, in fact, always volunteering to help Anna, forwarding e-mail about secret sample sales, reminders about daylight saving time, status updates from people they’d both gone to high school with, whom Anna had deliberately (and at no small emotional cost) managed to ice out of her life. Leslie had canceled her Pilates class to make Anna’s whole thing look doable, but what had Anna ever done for Leslie? And on the heels of this self-doubt came another panicky thought: had these laptop people been sitting here the whole time, listening to her and Leslie? The tables at Café Gowanus were jammed right up against one another, practically overlapping. Anna turned to the couple at the neighboring table, and was relieved to find them both too deep into their screenplays to notice much else.

“What’s with the Celtx?” the man was saying. “I thought I told you to buy Final Draft.”

“It does the same exact thing,” said the woman, who looked gaunt and Vice magazinish, her cheekbones holding up her face like tent poles. “The only difference is one’s free.”

“If you think producers won’t see the glitches when you convert to PDF, you’re wrong. They’re definitely gonna think you belong in the slush if you won’t even cough up two-fifty for professional screenwriting software.”

The woman stared morosely into the screen, not saying anything as the guy retreated to his cell phone.

“I’m telling you,” he said, jabbing apps with one finger, “you send it in like that, you’ll hear crickets.”

“Whatever, MFA timewaster.”

And in that moment, with their undrunk drinks, shadows tattooed to the wall, the man’s hat struggling to contain his hair—there was something so oddly familiar about the scene. Suddenly, she had it. L’Absinthe! Only it was the modern-day equivalent of the Degas painting: L’iPad. Feeling pleased with herself, Anna took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote the words Pinter, Chinski and Harms under the word From. She underlined the words twice, stared down at the page. But a minute later, it was still blank and she couldn’t help thinking this whole exercise begged the question How many fresh starts can a person reasonably expect to make in life? Unironically, that is.

Now here was Leslie again, looking somehow refreshed. She had done something to herself in the bathroom. What was it? A fresh coat of lipstick? Or blush, the invisible kind that looks like you aren’t even trying? No. Maybe she’d removed a coat of something? Was that the trick? You refresh by stripping back, like peeling away the generic wall-to-wall carpeting to reveal the charming hardwood below? Suddenly, more than anything, more than solving the riddle of her future, all Anna wanted to know was what Leslie had done to herself in the bathroom.

“What?” Leslie said. “Is there something on my face?”

“No.” Anna pressed a glass of ice water to her cheek. “I just like your hair more the other way.”

Leslie glanced at the piece of paper, flipped it over. “You’re taking things too literally. What do both of these things have in common? Grad school and Pinter?”

“The B line?” Anna ventured.

“Stasis,” said Leslie. “I want you to stop worrying. Stop thinking.”

“OK.”

“Don’t take it as criticism.” Leslie drew a line down the middle of the page, wrote “Definitional Present” at the top of one column, and “Aspirational Future” at the top of the other.

“I know.”

“And don’t drift off on me again. This whole process will go so much better if you clear your mind.”

“OK.”

“Remember, there’s no need to rush into Implementation.”

Anna was about to agree again. To agree as many times, in fact, and for however long, as Leslie wanted her to, when a man balancing two lattes bumped into the table, spilling his coffee. They both looked up. He wore the standard hipster uniform—a T-shirt featuring a bleak water tower and skinny jeans—yet somehow radiated the unmistakable air of a cherry picker. There’sunread e-mailin that man’s in-box, Anna thought. His cell phone was probably vibrating against his balls at this very moment. Lately it had become hard to separate what Anna really wanted from the things she felt obligated to manufacture for Leslie’s consent, but now she experienced a moment of clarity. The thing she wanted more than anything else, the answer to every To statement, was simply: e-mail. More e-mail, better e-mail. Looking up at the man, she lost herself to a fantasy of his in-box: booty calls, exclusive invites, jokey messages from intelligent colleagues about inspired, time-sensitive projects. E-mail like that one she’d received from Columbia years ago informing her she’d been accepted to the Department of Slavic Languages. Con-gratu-fucking-lations. Her heart beat faster now, just thinking about that e-mail. What she wouldn’t give to feel the adrenaline rush of that first virgin click again.

Since leaving Pinter, Chinski and Harms, Anna had kept a solitary unread e-mail in her in-box. It sat there like a goldfish in its parenthetical bowl, keeping her from feeling lonely. When she went to lunch, she turned off her phone just to ride the high of withdrawal, and while she ate tried to guess the number of messages that would be waiting for her back home. Often the number was still one. She would then sit in front of Gmail for a minute or ten, willing the 1 to change to a 2. And sometimes, as if by sheer magic, it did.

“Excuse me,” the man said, executing a deft, Zumba-like move to prevent more spillage.

“No problem,” Anna said, wondering how many Google search results there were for his name. Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? More? She looked back down at her Life Map, watching as the slow latte river blurred the word objective, coming menacingly close to the little star-shaped icon. The one representing her.




2


Thirty-seven is not the end, Anna decided. No, forty-three is more like the end. Strike that. Forty … six. Or maybe the end just kept zooming away from you the older you got, like the outer bounds of the universe expanding from the blastula where hope was first born? Of course, there were always exceptions; she’d read once that the Marquis de Sade didn’t really get his perv on until he was fifty-one. Still, ignoring the outliers, Anna had only, let’s face it, ten years max to get her shit together. The clock was ticking. Many different clocks were ticking, in fact, if she really stopped to consider it. But stopping to consider the orchestra of ticking clocks was pointless and only paralyzed her. Still, there was a reason that store was called Forever 21, not Forever 37. Maybe she had already pissed away her quotient of potential. Who else was a late bloomer? Well, there was always Grandma Moses. And some people said Jesus didn’t do his best work until after he was dead.

Anna and Leslie had decided to wrap up their life-coaching session early. Anna had made enough progress for one day, and besides, Leslie had to pick Dora up somewhere or drop Dora off somewhere, and everyone knows that as soon as someone mentions their child that’s the end of it. They absolve you of all social responsibility, children do. Like cancer, or church. But Anna hadn’t particularly wanted to go right back to Sunset Park after Café Gowanus, to the back issues of InStyle scattered on the sofa where she’d fallen asleep last night and the refrigerator full of dubious bodega produce. The walk back to the subway was a dismal one—Third Avenue wasn’t much to look at—yet surprisingly it was here, in the long shadow of a Dunkin Donuts that simultaneously managed to be a Pizza Hut and also a Taco Bell, that the idea struck her: What if I wrote a book about women who were late bloomers?

From there, the plan unfolded quickly. If she used the rest of her savings, the severance, the money from Aunt Clara, her tax refund, she could take a trip around the country, or even the world. She would find and interview the heroic women late of bloom—unlikely political candidates, entrepreneurs, madams, all those makers of organic kimchi and knitters of artisanal tampons fleeing unhappy jobs at hedge funds. She could picture herself sharing confidences with these women in taxicabs, on Vermont porches, in ashrams, touring a factory floor in matching hard hats. They would remain friends after that first initial interview, so touched and flattered would the women be at having been elevated to exemplar status. And, of course, as a late-blooming woman herself (nowhere near forty-six, of course, but still …), there was a beautifully seamless logic to Anna taking on such a project. She would bloom late while documenting late bloomers. It would be so meta. This fit her Core Competencies perfectly, and if Leslie were still here, Anna would tell her, yeah, go for it, change her Vision Statement or stick it in her fucking Spheres, whatever. She was ready for Process and Learning!

The feeling lasted until Anna got home and checked Amazon only to find there was already a book about women who were late bloomers. It was called Late Bloomers and—this killed her—it was written by a man. A man who was clearly already in full bloom (this was his fifth book) and could just as easily have written about human beatboxers or ironic leitmotifs in London street art or heirloom fucking melons. This man, whose name was Lars Stråtchuk, with a little circle above the a (he wasn’t even American!), had quite literally stolen her future. A future Anna had already inhabited for two sparkling hours, where she moved purposely through each day and her work had weight and meaning. She did not want to go back. Already she felt the apartment closing in on her, the late-afternoon light muddying the corners, the drapes and the stained IKEA carpet letting go of the day’s heat, filling the air with their stale breath, making her tired. But first there would be a comfort snack. A tub of Sabra hummus and pita chips. Or a pint of blueberries with cottage cheese. She would eat with her mother’s familiar remonstrations ping-ponging around her head.

Eating that will only make you hungry.

Fruit has more calories than chocolate.

I guarantee those nuts will taste better if you eat just one.

Anything you eat after six o’clock turns right to fat.

No, Anna decided, she wasn’t going to do it. No couch. No snacks. Since Pinter, Chinski and Harms let her go five weeks ago, she’d spent the bulk of her time couching and snacking. Surfing the Web, actually. Presumably looking for jobs, but not really. Occasionally looking for love. Mostly just reading stuff. The day began with the refreshing of three tabs: The Daily Beast, New York magazine, and Gawker. From there, a kaleidoscope of options opened up, like snowmelt cutting innumerable channels down the side of a mountain. Hours later, she could end up anywhere: Deadline Hollywood, Art Fag City, or just somebody’s Tumblr, reading about that new underwear that prevents cameltoe. Meanwhile, she couldn’t help but notice, the things she always said she would do once she finally left Pinter weren’t getting done. They’d been crushed by freedom. Her freedom. The sheer quantity of time at her disposal and the weighty responsibility of her own untapped potential made doing any one thing impossible.

She woke up in the mornings already exhausted by the possibilities. And, of course, the question arose of whether it was depression or merely situational. Leslie didn’t think it was depression. Leslie’s own postpartum depression had been serious, life-threatening. She knew all about the drugs and the research, the ins and outs of serotonin uptake, the interaction effects of different kinds of therapy, and she’d discussed all these things with Anna. Admittedly, Anna was kind of into the idea of it being depression. Then none of it would be her fault. She remembered something about her gap insurance covering mental health, and, of course, there would be the reassuring routine of regular appointments someplace uptown, which would get her out of the house. But gap insurance probably covered only a few months of sessions. Plus the medicine made you fat, didn’t it? It destroyed your sex drive. One was faced with a miserable choice between sad, sexed up, and thin or fat, sexless, and happy. Of course, Anna was already fat, definitely sexless, and probably sad. But taking the drugs would rob her of hope. They would slap a cruel ceiling on her Aspirational Future. If she could never be thin, and would always be sexless, how could she ever be happy? It was a thicket of catch-22 situations. But if the two hours she had spent in the future, working on late bloomers, had taught her anything, it was that living in hope is a beautiful thing. There was no better feeling. In fact, the feeling was even better than the doing, because when she stopped to think about it, Anna had to admit she didn’t much like to write. Ergo the unwritten thesis. And the thought of writing an entire book, ass-to-chair, day after day, sounded lonely. Worse than lonely, actually. It sounded fucking miserable. But being on the cusp of writing a book—or, better still, having already written a book—was something else. She’d gotten such a charge picturing herself telling Leslie, changing her Facebook status, moderating her lively new blog on LateBloomers.com as she crowdsourced suggestions for Late Bloomers, Volume II …

Without quite realizing it, Anna was surfing. She had sorted the Amazon comments for Stråtchuk’s Late Bloomers so that the one-star reviews came up first, and a link in one of those comments had led her to another website about late bloomers, which was called Kurinji, after (the header announced) a rare Indian shrub that takes up to twelve years to bloom. Now Anna started reading the home page Q&A with Paul Gilman, a filmmaker from Los Angeles, who, at age forty-six(!), had become an impresario of the microcinema scene before going on to bigger and better things. Anna read through his bio and—no surprise—learned that the first forty-five years of Gilman’s life had been noticeably devoid of promise: a ho-hum upbringing in the exurbs of Kansas City (he didn’t even bother to clarify which one), a so-so college career, a drift from one forgettable white-collar job to another, an unsurprising failure to start a family. Now Gilman had a house in Brentwood. He had recently married a young actress (they’d met during his fellowship at Cannes) and was expecting twins.

K: You are known for your improvisational style.

GILMAN: I never use scripts. A script only imposes moral constraints on the actor. What I’m interested in is the uninhibited id. I take the actors and put them in a box. Then it’s up to them to break out of the box. Sometimes literally.

K: Up until recently, you didn’t exactly work with actors in the technical sense.

GILMAN: Right. Nonprofessionals.

K: How did you find them?

GILMAN: Craigslist. I would put up an ad for actors, no experience needed. I didn’t care about age or size or race. I didn’t ask for headshots. This was back when I still lived in Kansas City. It’s not like Los Angeles, where you put something like that out and—

K: Everyone’s straight from the Formica factory.

GILMAN (laughs): Right. These were real people. Actuaries. Teachers. Cooks. Whatever. People who needed the extra cash. I paid fifty a session. Sometimes I’d go to their house. Sometimes I’d tell them to meet me somewhere. The pay phone in front of the Cash America pawn. Or the loading dock behind the rug warehouse downtown. I’d drive over with my camera and see them waiting for me on the street. Then I’d drive around the block a couple of times, figuring out how they’d fit into the scene. After that, I’d make up a story on the spot.

K: Both Calista at the Cum ’n’ Go and Rurik, Rurik, Traffic Cop have this really visceral, really frenetic quality. How did you edit those movies?

GILMAN: I edited all of my films in-camera.

K: Just record, then stop?

GILMAN: Exactly. Stop or pause. It is what it is. And since I’d never met the actors before, anything could happen. My one rule is that while I’m shooting, I won’t talk. This one woman I hired, she worked at the hospital and came to meet me straight from work, still in her scrubs. I told her, “Here’s the story: you’re an EMT and you just responded to a call about a car accident that involved your husband. His back was broken in two places. He sustained internal injuries and the doctors have no idea whether he’s going to live. You leave the hospital. You’re on your way back to your car and you can’t remember where you left it. You’re lost in the parking lot”—we were in a parking lot—“and you call your mother on your cell to tell her what happened. Action!”

K: This sounds like Clean Rite Meltdown.

GILMAN: It ended up that way—

K: Spoiler alert.

GILMAN (laughs): Right. The woman wouldn’t do the scene. She wouldn’t do any of it. She just started screaming at me that she didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. Her face right up in the camera, calling me every kind of name. Went on about how she knew “the scam I was running” and her boyfriend had my license plate number, blah blah. Amazing stuff. The whole movie turned out to be just that one continuous shot of her face—

K: Clean Rite showed at Sundance?

GILMAN: It did. It’s in MoMA’s permanent collection now.

K: You’ve certainly come a long way. Can you say something about working with Johnny Depp?

GILMAN: Johnny is just an amazingly brilliant guy. Amazingly brilliant.

K: Any last words for aspiring filmmakers?

GILMAN: Get a camera. Let the rest take care of itself.

When Anna finished reading, she noticed it was dark. It was dark and now she was hungry. She got herself a bag of rice cakes and a tub of salsa and went back to the computer, where she searched Gilman on IMDb, and read the Variety reviews for Calista at the Cum ’n’ Go and Rurik, Rurik, Traffic Cop and Clean Rite Meltdown. When the rice cakes were gone, Anna switched to vegetable chips (baked, not fried) and googled Gilman’s wife for no reason. And when her roommate, Brie, came home from kickball practice, it was well after six and Anna’s food was turning into fat. She was watching Can’t They Always Make More? on YouTube and still hadn’t turned the lights on.

“Hey,” Brie said. She threw her cleats in the corner, setting off a small dirt-clod explosion. “Can you believe all I had for dinner was a glass of Merlot?”

“Good practice?” Anna said.

“Gotta poop.”

“The postkickball poop!” Anna said, laughing nervously as though this were a perfectly normal thing for her to say. Something one of Brie’s much-younger friends might say.

“Uh-huh,” Brie said, breezing past Anna on her way to the bathroom.

Anna hit pause, got up, and turned the lights on. She threw away the plastic bag from the rice cakes and wiped the salsa ring on the table. She checked inside the bag of veggie chips. How many had she eaten? From the hallway, she could hear a flush and the sound of running water. Then Brie was back, wiping her hands on the butt of her shorts.

“What are you watching?” Brie said, head already in the refrigerator.

“This movie, Can’t They Always Make More?”

“I didn’t know you were into Gilman.”

“I love Gilman,” Anna found herself saying, unsure of whether she really loved Gilman or whether she was just happy to have something to talk about with Brie.

“You know that one, Rurik at the Drive-In?”

“Rurik, Rurik, Traffic Cop?”

“Yeah. Totally craptastic!”

“I know, right?” Anna said uncertainly. She always had trouble getting a read on Brie. Even when she wanted to kiss her ass, she could never predict where exactly Brie’s ass was going to be. It’s like she was always running around the room, lips at ass level, chasing after her. Maybe it was just the fact that Brie was still young enough to make declarative statements. She could still put periods, even exclamation marks, at the end of a sentence, whereas Anna had already changed her mind so many times about so many things it was all question marks and ellipses for her from here on in.

“But in a good way,” Brie said, reaching into the refrigerator for a cold quesadilla. “I love how he’s not afraid to just, like, let his movies be bad, you know?”

“It’s a style,” Anna said, pushing the bag of chips toward Brie.

“I love that one with the candy hearts. Oh, wait. I think I’m thinking of the girl.” She dipped the edge of the stiff quesadilla into Anna’s salsa. “You know, the other one? Who makes the movies on her cell phone?”

“I don’t think so.”

“They all hang out together,” Brie said. “God, what’s their name?”

Anna didn’t know.

“Shit. I feel like I just read about them on Daily Intel the other day. This is going to kill me,” Brie said. “I should text Rishi.” Brie went over to her bag and started unzipping various pockets.

“I just love the way, with his movies, it just is what it is, you know?” Anna said, feeling like she was finally finding her groove in this conversation. “He just lets things happen.”

But Brie wasn’t listening. “Shit,” she said, zipping and unzipping. “Where’s my cell phone?”

“Did you bring a jacket?” Anna said, standing up.

“Shit.” Brie was pulling things out of her bag, throwing them on the floor.

Anna made an effort to look concerned. “Should I check the bathroom?” she said.

“No. Fuck. It’s either on the bus or back at the park.”

“You’ll find it …,” Anna said, hoping she wouldn’t have to offer to go back to McCarren Park with Brie to hunt around in the dark grass for her cell phone.

“I can’t believe this,” Brie said, shaking her bag empty over the floor. Crumbs, bobby pins, pennies, receipts, pen caps, one of those inexplicable plastic Japanese toys with a head that was all teeth, a chewed-off thumbnail. Chinese fortunes—too many to count—drifted down like parade streamers.

“I’ll be back,” Brie said, standing up. She grabbed her wallet from the pile on the floor. “Can you stick this back in the fridge for me?” She nodded at the half-eaten quesadilla she’d set down on the couch.

Anna took the quesadilla, opening the door for Brie.

“If Rishi calls the landline, tell him what happened,” said Brie. Before the door eased shut behind her, she passed a reflexive hand over the light switch, leaving Anna in the dark once more.




3


Anna felt her way back across the room toward the laptop glow. She yanked the cord out of the wall, letting it drag behind her as she made her way down the hall. Even though Brie was gone, Anna still made sure the bedroom door was closed before pulling off her pants. She slid her bra out from under her T-shirt and dropped it on the pile on the floor. The bra didn’t have far to fall; the pile was almost as high as the bureau. Taking care of the pile was “on the list,” though the list itself was a kind of bureau-high pile, wasn’t it? Anna lay down on top of the comforter, pulled the laptop onto her bare thighs, and finger-typed Gilman into Hulu. Of course, Clean Rite Meltdown came up first, followed by Rurik and the film she’d just seen. But here was another one she hadn’t watched yet, Age of Consent.

Anna clicked on the title. And as the movie loaded, she wondered how Gilman made any money when everything was always free, right here, on the Internet. How did anyone make any money on the Internet when even Anna had never clicked on a banner ad in her life? Except that one time, for the free pair of Uggs. And in return for filling out some endless form about her customer preferences, what did she get? Nothing but aggressive, filter-eluding spam—not the kind worth collecting—for mortgage refinancing and “authentic quality pharmaceuticals.” Never again, she thought, and hit play.

There were no credits. No theme music. A black screen with the title faded in and faded out too fast. Then there was a man, sitting on a bed, with a paper bag over his head. The man had on khaki shorts and a bright blue T-shirt. The words Sun Microsystems stretched across the roll of fat in his lap in huge white letters. Daylight struggled against the shades, which were pulled all the way down. A lamp with a crooked shade tossed a warped football of light across the wall. The room reminded Anna of one of those shabby motor inns where you drive right up to the door and all the windows face the parking lot. Other than the lamp, the only decorations were the radiator and a potted ivy on the windowsill that may have been plastic.

“This is where I keep my collection,” the man said. Two eye-holes had been punched into the bag, also a slit for the mouth, through which wet lips and a swatch of mustache were visible. “Under the bed.” He bent down, felt around, and pulled out a large plastic bag.

“Does it matter which one we start with? No? OK, so this one is Penthouse Forum,” he began, taking out a magazine and laying it on the bedspread. “It’s, like, just letters about celebrity fantasies and shit like that. It’s not that interesting, actually. It’s kind of a joke. Look at this. Every letter always starts out with the same horseshit line. �I never thought these letters were real, until I decided to write one myself,’” the man mimicked in a low, husky voice, then laughed from inside the bag. “Almost like parodies of letters, you know? And the celebrities are … where is it …” The man started flipping through the magazine. “Yeah, man, check this one out,” he held up a page and the camera zoomed in on a photo of Andie MacDowell wearing a red dress, smiling hard. “Who’s gonna jerk off to some has-been MILF that’s not even showing her vah jay jay, right? Who’s gonna jerk off to Andie MacDowell? Would you, man?” he snorted. “I think I saw this same photo later, too, in a Campari ad. I guess it doesn’t matter, though. If I’m already horny almost anything will work. It’s like I’m just looking for that final, uh, you know, push.” The man put the magazine back in the bag. “So that’s Forum. But they have ads for these nine-hundred numbers, too,” he said. “Sometimes I use those. OK, next.” The man reached in and grabbed a bunch more magazines. “So then I got some of these multipacks. Why? Because they’re cheaper. They’re, like, old issues of things that’re combined into different groupings. Like, �butts’ or �dildos’ or whatever. And I have a thing for, you know, the young ones. I mean, you can’t sell any images of girls under eighteen, but these girls are total jail-bait, I bet. I like this one.” He held up the cover of a magazine with a young girl whose mouth had the permanently doughnuted look of a blow-up doll. “L’age légal.” The man began turning the pages, this time slowly and deliberately, and the camera moved in close. There were pictures of hairless girls, wearing an inch of lipstick, their lingerie pulled to one side so their tits could pop out. Page after page, they kept moving their panties aside and looking perpetually shocked at the discovery of their own business. It was kind of amazing. Anna couldn’t help but think, I mean, don’t they get bored? It could be, like, their eighteenth shoot of the day and they still have to be all, Whoa! What’s this …? Well, hello! Look who’s here? Unbelievable. I would make the crappiest porn star ever, Anna thought, as she shifted the laptop, which was now burning the tops of her thighs, to the pillow next to her head.

“I’ll be your tampon any day,” the man said to a cherubic blonde who happened to be going down on another blonde, who was busy plunging a dildo into a brunette whose entire face had been swallowed in the gutter of the two-page spread. He flipped through the rest of the magazine quickly, until it was done, then tossed it aside.

“Purely Anal,” the man announced, shaking his head with what might have been delight. His head made a loud rustling sound inside the bag.

“This one’s kind of embarrassing. See this lady?” The man flipped the page. There was a picture of a disembodied white cock squirting onto the face of a black woman. “She’s always wearing sunglasses. See? Every picture.” The man turned the page and there was the same lady, giving a blow job, indeed wearing the same sunglasses. “It’s kind of cool, though. Almost a cult thing. This is a good one, actually, this issue. I think this is the one that, uh, deserves a reading.” The man hesitated. He stuck one of his hands up the bag to scratch his face, then reached down and readjusted himself. “Now I’m supposed to read this, right?” He stood up on the bed. For a second the camera zoomed in on his athletic socks, which had blue and white stripes at the top, then tilted queasily upward. The man was shifting uncertainly from foot to foot on top of the bed, his head close to the low ceiling, holding L’age légal away from his face at arm’s length with one hand.

“Halt!” he bellowed suddenly, in a labored Shakespearean baritone. “In this enseamed Greyhound station bathroom? But it is so dirty here, dear lass! Nay? Perchance, you cannot wait? My hot throbbing cock is bursting its seams and your loins cannot withstand it! Kneel then, by the porcelain throne yonder, as my hands caress your rock-hard nipples, as you take me unto yourself and my hot foaming jizz rushes like a cresting wave over your fair brow. Forsooth, your knees be raw, but thou art fucking me like a crazy bitch, a deeper and harder banging I hath ne’er imagined. Thy pussy, so wet, so fucking wet and—” The man, overcome with laughter, sat back down and bounced awkwardly a few times on the bed.

“Sorry, man. I couldn’t help it. I know I promised, but the writing in these things is pretty ridic, you know? Porn mags aren’t really about the writing. Sometimes I’ll be reading and, like, notice that I’m going along, correcting the grammar in my head? I’ll be like, �What the fuck?’ Psht.” He crossed his legs and went back to flipping through L’age légal. “Anyway, the other weird thing about this magazine? It totally isn’t purely anal. Look. Blow job. Fucking. Head. Head. Three-way.” The man kept flipping. “Anal. Only now we get to anal. The whole thing’s supposed to be anal and there’s, like, barely any butt action at all! But I kind of like the weirdness of it, like they’re tricking you into thinking it’s all anal. Even though,” he added, sotto voce, “I am really into anal sex.

“God, we have a lot to get through, man. This is a lot.” He paused, pulling another handful of porn out of the bag. “This bag is totally gonna rip soon, too. Want to know something weird? I bet my mom knows I have this stuff. She cleans in here. She must have found them by now. When my brother still lived at home, he kept his pornos under the bed, too. He’s the one who showed me. I could move them, I guess. Hide them better. But I like to be able to just reach under the bed, you know? It’s all about the easy access. And, OK, this is gonna sound really fucked up, but sometimes? Sometimes I think about my mom finding this stuff as I’m jerking off. Like, I picture my mom finding it and it gets me off that she pictures me getting off or something. Isn’t that fucking sick? You should bleep that out, dude. I can’t even believe I told you that. OK, but here are two more: Tight and Young and Tight. Young and Tight sounds like it would be good, right? But I actually like Tight better. It’s pretty disgusting.” He opened up an issue of Tight and flipped through it in silent contemplation. “I haven’t actually bought porn for a couple months, so these are all getting kinda stale. I mean, it’s not like I’ve squeezed everything I can out of every picture or anything. But I definitely could use another hit, you know? Whoa—I love this one. Check this out, man.” He held the magazine out to the camera, reading the title out loud. “�The fragile beauty of young anal lesbians.’” He shook his head laughing again. “Hilarious.”

Then the man stood up but the camera stayed where it was and Anna could see only his midriff, his khaki shorts, and a roll of fat.

“Hey, do you want some cheese?” a voice asked from above. Then the midriff walked off camera and there was just the bed, the pile of porn, a lonely tentacle of ivy snaking down the wall. The sun hacked at the edges of the shades. The camera jumped to the ceiling, then cut out with a stab of static.

The scene reopened with the man’s ass backlit by the refrigerator. Asslit, Anna couldn’t help but think. He emerged holding a wedge of cheese on a plate, then made his way over to the sink to grab a cutting board. As the man rummaged in a drawer, the camera drifted around the room until it settled on a milk crate of empty beer bottles in the corner. The milk crate was set on top of another milk crate, also full of empties.

“Hey, you want some of this, man?” The camera swung back to the man, who was holding out a piece of cheese stuck to the flat end of a knife. “It’s Emmentaler. Good shit, seriously. I got it at the farmers’ market fresh. These two guys have, like, some kind of artisanal cheese farm out in Ashby and they truck it in on the weekends. Try it, man. It’s straight outta the sheep or whatever.” He waved the knife in front of the camera again. “Come on, man. It’s been all day, you must be hungry. At least have a glass of water or something …? OK, right. I forgot your whole thing.” The man snorted. “Who’s gonna watch this movie anyways? Me and cheese and butt fucking. Not exactly Avatar, man. You gonna have this in 3-D, too? Charge like sixteen bucks?” The man stuck the cheese into his mouth hole and chewed. “That’s not a bad name, by the way. Me and Cheese and Butt Fucking. You should remember that.”

He started walking back to his room and the camera followed.

“I was thinking of getting one of those pictures of the black lady in the sunglasses custom framed,” the man called over his shoulder. “With, like, a backing and glass and a really, really nice wood frame? Just as a joke. That’s only for when I get my own place, though,” he added. “Not while I’m still living here.”

Back in his room, he sat down on the bed and crossed his legs. “Back to work, right? OK. This one’s just, like, a catalog. They have a lot of ads for, you know, toys and videos. The place I go is basically a video store, by the way. Sugar’s. I remember going in there for the first time. It’s actually not far from here. You probably drove past it. Right after that Sunoco station at the exit? I was kind of scared. I walked in, looked around, and was like—whoa, these people are gross. Every time I go in, I’m thinking to myself, I’m definitely the least gross guy in here.” The man paused for a moment. “I almost got a toy for Kylie. But that was right before things got weird with us. We had butt sex once. Well, kind of …” The man trailed off. “Anyway, if you want to see that other stuff, it’s up in the closet. I’ve got some vintage, too, where it’s not all girls with Barbie doll parts—”

Then the camera suddenly swung to the door. A voice was calling from just outside.

“Snickers just left skid marks on the kitchen floor again,” a little girl yelled. “You better clean it before Mom gets home.”

“You clean it,” the guy barked from inside the bag. Then, to the camera, “Fucking cat.”

“I’m gonna tell Mom you told me to walk to my lesson—” the girl’s voice called back.

“Get outta here, Kay. I’m busy doing something.”

“—and she won’t let you have the car on weekends anymore.” The door opened and a girl who looked maybe eight or nine walked in. She had lank brown hair and was wearing a long black robe, plastic glasses, and a maroon tie over a flowered tank top. A Harry Potter costume, Anna realized. The girl held a wand in one hand; the other hand stayed on the doorknob.

“Shit, Kay. I told you, don’t come in here.” The man began frantically pushing the magazines off the bed and into the crack between the wall and the radiator. Kay’s eyes went wide.

“Why are you wearing that thing?” she asked, stepping into the room.

“It’s just a game, Kay. Get out.”

“Who is that man?”

There was the metallic clung sound of magazine spines hitting the radiator on their way to the floor. Kay turned and pointed her wand at the camera. “Are you the one who called last night and hung up?”

“Leave him alone, Kay.”

“I could hear you breathing, you know,” she said to the camera, moving the wand in slow circles. “I command you—answer me!”

Having finished with the magazines, the man now stood and walked over to Kay.

“Answer me.” Her voice edged up, high and shrill. “What are you doing? You’re in my house. What are you doing in my house?”

“Hey, movie over, man. Movie’s over. Cut!” The bag was crooked on the man’s head, slanted to one side so that only one eye lined up with its hole.

“Silencio!” Kay screamed, whirling around to face the man with the bag on his head. She was crying now.

“Hey, turn that thing off, man,” the man said to the camera. “C’mon, Kay.” He got up and went over to the girl. “It’s just a friend.”

“W-what’s the bag on y-your head for?” Kay was really sobbing now. The man kneeled down. He put a hand on Kay’s shoulder, then twisted around to face the camera again.

“I said turn it the fuck off, man. Now. Can’t you see it’s fucking scaring her? C’mere, Kay,” the man said. He pulled Kay stiffly into his arms and the camera zoomed in on Kay’s face, tears leaking from her eyes, which were squeezed shut. It zoomed in on her mouth as she licked the tears and snot from her upper lip.

“Why wond ee s-say s-someting?” Kay sobbed. But her face was invisible as the camera jerked over to the man’s fingers on Kay’s shoulder. You could see the hair on his knuckles and the back of his hand. He squeezed her shoulder. And then the camera moved to Kay’s flowered top. To a single purple flower with a yellow dot inside. Closer and closer, until its pixilated center filled the screen. Until the whole screen was just one raw, hideous, quivering pixel sun.

“It’s just a friend,” came the man’s voice from somewhere, a little hoarse. “It’s just a friend.”

Then the screen went dark and the word FIN appeared. As if from a great distance, the sad strains of an acoustic guitar struggling to stay in tune could be heard. A Will Oldham song. Anna realized that she was crying. She read the credits, which were short and consisted mainly of Gilman. Later she would try many times to explain this Road-to-Damascus moment to herself, but would always come up short. All she knew was it felt as though she’d slipped a hand between the sofa cushions to find a new world among the lost coins and the unsightly crumbs. An underworld you could traverse unencumbered by the opinions of anyone else, where you could just be yourself. The opposite of pop culture. Unpopular culture. A place she might just belong.

It felt like a significant discovery, even though she didn’t really know what it meant. And she was suddenly very tired. The lights were already off. The cars going by on the street below sounded like rain, like waves, like the soundtrack to some Gilman movie about the impossibility of sleep. She pushed the computer out of kicking distance, off to one side, then turned around and shut her eyes.

The laptop battery would die overnight, but she didn’t even care.




4


Anna emerged from the subway to find that a new public art exhibit had been installed in City Hall Park. A tourist stopped in front of the same sculpture that stopped Anna. He was wearing flip-flops and holding a bag from the 9/11 memorial gift shop.

“What kind of fucking shit is this?” the man said, more to himself than anyone else, as he held up his iPhone and took a picture. It was an inadvertently accurate question—the sculpture honestly did look like shit. Anna found a plaque over by the water fountain that explained the installation, which was called Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu, and Shitsuke. The artist was a Japanese sculptor by the name of Mitsuri Yagihashi.

“I have always been fascinated by rituals of hygiene,” Yagihashi was quoted as saying, “and the relationship between purity and paranoia. In Japan, one’s cleanliness is considered a reflection of one’s inner state. These five shrines were cast from the dung of macaque monkeys indigenous to Japan, then covered in gold leaf. I consider them �taboo’ structures.” Yagihashi’s quote was followed by a lengthy paragraph by Joseph Fierhoff, the director of the New Museum and chairman of the city’s Arts in the Parks Fund, who described Yagihashi’s work as “drawing on his country’s rich folk art traditions” and “a response to Japan’s famous �toilet culture.’”

On the whole, Anna had to admit, the sculptures didn’t seem to really transcend the raw materials they came from. They didn’t look much like shrines to her. They looked like enormous gold-colored turd balls grouped in random clusters. Which wasn’t to say that the park didn’t seem kind of cheerful, improbably strewn with golden turd-ball clusters. But what was most impressive here, Anna couldn’t help thinking, was the fact that they had been installed in City Hall Park at all. The sculptures sucked, true, but Joseph Fierhoff found the shitty shrines or whatever impressive and so did the Arts in the Parks commission and a number of other top-tier cultural institutions. They almost became, in a sense, monuments to artistic ambition. Monuments to themselves. This was Gilman and Yagihashi’s great trick, Anna realized. They had figured out how to make a job out of simply being themselves, turned their perverse, narcissistic, possibly enlightened selves into marketable commodities. Maybe this was all art really was—being yourself. Seen in this new light, the turd balls lifted Anna’s spirits considerably as she cut through the park toward J&R, dispelling any final misgivings she still had about buying the camera.

Brandon, had told her it didn’t matter what camera Gilman used, that nowadays it didn’t make sense to invest in anything but HD.

“Why hamstring yourself with technology?” he’d asked. “You think your Gilman guy doesn’t convert all his crap footage to HD before he screens it at Cannes or whatever? Everyone does. That’s why I’m right, right? Look, if you want to go analog, then go all the way. Real film. Super 8. But for fuck’s sake, don’t half-ass it.”

Anna didn’t want to half-ass it. And she trusted Brandon, who had studied film for a year at USC before transferring to Hunter. So she got back online right away after talking to him. The cheapest HD camera she could find on CNET reviews was a Panasonic HDC-TM700 for $794.29, but when she sent the link to Brandon, he’d immediately shot that option down as well.

“A big NO on the HDC-TM700!” Brandon replied in an e-mail. “It does have some nice features. But mostly it’s just a cheap piece of junk. It lacks external audio inputs and all you really need (are you paying attention?) is GOOD AUDIO. It’s amazing what a professional soundtrack can do even for shit footage like Gilman’s. In your case, I would actually recommend a camera with two mic inputs: one for a boom and one for a lavalier. You might try the VIXIA HF S10 or JVC GZ-HD6.”

It made sense. She remembered the jarring sound of the bag rustling whenever the guy in Age of Consent moved his head, how real it sounded and how it seemed to bring you right into the scene. But when Anna went back to CNET, she found that even the VIXIA HF S10 and the JVC GZ-HD6 had only one mic input; all the cameras with two mic inputs were in a different price range altogether. Plus, boom mic and lavalier units were, of course, sold separately, and together added about seven hundred to the total cost. When Anna finished pricing everything out and sent the links to Brandon, he agreed that even with a minimally acceptable package, she was looking at close to $3,200. Or “thirty-two bucks,” as he had put it.

B&H, Brandon had assured her, would give Anna a better deal than J&R, but all the clerks at B&H were Hasids and Anna found this too distracting. The last time she’d gone there (two Christmases ago, to buy a digital camera for her mother) she could think of little else but the Hasids, who seemed so happy and prosperous living under such terrible constraints. The Hasid who had helped her that day had red hair and blue eyes, and, of course, Anna couldn’t help but thinking this was unusual for a Jew. She couldn’t stop herself from wondering how many children he had, or from staring overmuch at his yarmulke. And the salesman’s benign comparison of wide-angle focal lengths did nothing to camouflage his contempt for her lifestyle. She was sure of it, that if all the Hasids at B&H had any say, they would agree that Anna, a woman, shouldn’t be there discussing megapixels and LCD screen resolution in the first place. That her hair should not be dyed. That her dress should not be so low-cut and should instead remind men of Soviet architecture. That she should be at home, making things nice for the husband and children she didn’t (but should) have. She knew Hasids didn’t have sex until they were married, until after they’d had children even, and could only imagine what the red-haired Hasid would think if he knew that she’d had phone sex—regular phone sex, not even the brave video-chat kind—with a man she’d met on the Internet.

No, the winner of this double-consonant-ampersand contest could only be J&R. Even if it was cheaper, B&H was out of the question.

The salesman who ended up helping her at J&R was named Khuleh. He was from Oman and, unlike the Hasids of B&H, who spoke with the clear diction and authoritative tones of asylum attendants, Anna understood none of what Khuleh said. She did understand that he was trying to sell her a different camera, because he had picked up the box for a Kodak Zi8 and started waving it slowly in front of her face.

“Goolex!” Khuleh insisted. “Goolex.” Whatever that meant.

This only made Anna angry, because she knew all about the Kodak Zi8, which didn’t have any mic inputs whatsoever and was just an overpriced pocket cam for tourists. Anna pointed instead at the box for the Panasonic 3MOX AVCCAM.

“I want this one,” she said.

But Khuleh kept waving the Zi8 at her, so she picked up the AVCCAM box and waved it at Khuleh, realizing that now they had become two people waving boxes at each other, executing some complex, consumer form of Butoh in the camcorder aisle of J&R. Finally, Khuleh, conceding which side his bread was buttered on, stopped waving the Zi8 and took the AVCCAM box from Anna. He filled out an order form and Anna went downstairs to the cashiers. With New York sales tax everything came to almost thirty-five hundred. And when Anna handed half of Aunt Clara’s money over to the cashier, she kept reminding herself of the little things she skimped on. I don’t have cable, Anna thought. I’ve never downloaded a ringtone. After running the card, the cashier made a big thing of explaining J&R’s return policy, which was sternly worded and seemed to indict Anna as a money launderer or a pedophile before her goods were even in the bag.

She made it as far as the park, as far as the smiling Chinese family posing for a snapshot in front of Seiso, the tottering turd sculpture that looked not unlike a man on a horse, when she realized the box was too heavy and flagged a cab back to Brooklyn. An additional thirty dollars, Anna could not help but notice.

When she got home, she set the box down in front of the hallway closet and went to fix herself lunch. Brie wouldn’t be home until past seven—on Tuesdays she worked as an intern at Condé Nast’s ad sales department. The rest of the week, Brie had a different internship, at a small music management company downtown. Anna did not really understand how Brie survived when her per diems barely covered lunch and didn’t include a Metrocard. But Brie had told her these internships were highly competitive. They took only five people at Condé Nast per semester, and had it not been for Brie’s prior internship at Women’s Wear Daily, she could never have snagged this one. The music management position was even more exclusive; Brie had to wrangle that one through inside connections. It was amazing to Anna that Brie worked so hard just for the privilege of working hard. But what did Anna know? She was, after all, ten years older than Brie. In her day, people had simply gone out and gotten jobs after college or some kind of paid fellowship. Still, Anna was willing to concede that those were simpler times—before 2007 and the collapse of hope.

She put a frozen saag paneer dinner in the microwave for four minutes on high, and while that was cooking, ate half an avocado. But with a minute and a half still left to go, the avocado was already gone, so Anna got herself a bowl of seedless grapes and sat down to check her Gmail. She had eleven messages, which was good for a Tuesday. But then, heart sinking, she realized only one was real—from Brandon—and the rest were just Flavorpill bulletins, auto reminders about various depressing things she’d pay to forget, and a bulk-mailed greeting from a woman in the contracts department of Pinter, Chinski and Harms, smugly enjoying her overseas “vacay.”

The microwave pinged and Anna, feeling already full, looked over at the box, still sitting by the door. J&R didn’t have a bag big enough for it, so the AVCCAM box sat naked on the floor, its sides splattered with pictures of itself, its features announcing themselves in garish cartoon letters. Next to the AVCCAM box lay a large plastic bag that contained the two smaller boxes with her sound gear: an AV-JEFE CM520 professional lavalier mic with Shure mini 4-pin XLR connector and a Sennheiser MKE 400 compact video camera shotgun microphone.

The microwave pinged again, and Anna got up to fetch the saag paneer. This one didn’t come with rice, so she got herself a roll of sourdough bread. She ate straight from the plastic container while reading The Daily Beast’s “Cheat Sheet” on her laptop. When she finished eating, she clicked over to Daily Intel, then Fishbowl NY, then back over to her e-mail, where there were no new messages in her in-box. She considered checking Newser (though she didn’t much trust Michael Wolff), or PopEater (even though it always made her feel guilty afterward). Then Anna wondered whether The Daily Beast’s “Cheat Sheet” had refreshed in the past half hour, whether it was worth maybe checking back in. But then she caught herself and remembered the box.

She had cleared her entire day for that camera, so why was it that now, after all the hassle and money spent, with the camera finally home, she did not want to open the box? It was because, Anna knew, inside the box, the camera would be broken into its many subcomponents. And each component would have to be assembled according to very specific instructions that would be meticulously outlined in an instructional booklet divided into eight chapters, and translated into French, Japanese, German, and Russian. Annoyingly, there would also be a separate disk with software that might or might not be compatible with her operating system. There would be many small plastic bags inside the box, with little coiled cables inside each bag. Each cable would look exactly the same, but of course their inputs and outputs, their minute, electronic genitalia, would differ ever so slightly. The cables would be molded into perfect little bows and held in place with a single twist tie. Unwrapping them would make Anna feel guilty. Ripping the small plastic bags open would make her feel guilty. Throwing away the cardboard backings would make her feel guilty. She pictured herself with the components and the bags and the cables all spread out in a big, guilt-inducing, Earth-destroying pile before her, and she pictured the tiny font of the instructional booklet, which she would dutifully struggle to follow before tossing it aside to just follow her instincts instead. Inevitably, she would unpack everything only to find that something was missing. Or that she had an extra component left over. She would turn on the camera to find that it wouldn’t turn on. Or that a little red light wouldn’t stop blinking. There would be visits to the “troubleshooting” section of the AVCCAM website, and calls to an 800 call center in Tehran where a man insisting his name was Pierce would walk her through the installation process in lightly accented and unfailingly polite English. And Anna would think overmuch about his fate, and life under an oppressive regime where female circumcision might still be allowed and people were put to death for stealing soccer balls. And she would find herself wondering whether “Pierce” might be able to use his connections at Panasonic to perhaps secure an HIB visa, and bring his family over to the States, so his kids could excel at math and science and brainy sports like squash, and eventually get accepted to an Ivy or at least a good tier-two school like Tufts. But all the while, even as she planned Pierce’s immigration, Anna would be cursing his ineptitude, his inability to figure out why the fucking red light kept blinking and how to please, please, please, just make it stop.




5


From very, very far away, like the tremor of the subway running down Fourth Avenue four stories below her apartment, Anna sensed it. The box, the bags, the responsibility the things inside them imposed upon her, had begun to feel oppressive. Her enthusiasm was already waning. And, realizing this, Anna felt three things at once. The first was an overpowering urge to do nothing, to sit at her computer and surf and surf and surf until she ended up somewhere truly well and gone. Somewhere deep in the eighteenth century, learning about religious motifs in Sorbian military garb or laser-guided excavation techniques used to unearth Pygmy artifacts. The second was to go back to J&R, endure their enhanced interrogation techniques, return the camera, return the mics, and put Aunt Clara’s money back in the bank. And last, of course, was to beat back the weak-willed default of quitting. To at least try to try.

Anna got up and busied herself with the apartment, which was something. She watered the ten-dollar plants from IKEA and shook the crumbs from the fleece blanket covering the couch. She swept the crumbs off the floor, then swept the other parts of the floor that didn’t require moving any furniture. And as she moved her little pile of dirt around the table legs, then around the apartment, Anna considered the Middle Way. This was her thing lately—taking China as an example. She had learned about it while reading an article on Chinese economic reform. The philosophy, as far as Anna understood it, was based on precepts of Buddhism and the idea of “paradoxical integration,” which posited that two completely opposite-seeming states might, in fact, be interdependent. And even though Anna was not in any way endorsing China, which Mediabistro often pointed out was evilly suppressing bloggers, this idea resonated with her on many levels. She considered her own life and decided maybe embracing limitless potential—like being a good drunk—required first building tolerance. Not everyone could be Obama, she reminded herself. Come to think of it, not everyone could even be Gilman. She couldn’t instantly vault to these heights, would instead have to shuffle toward her goals, crab-like. Maybe this is what Leslie meant by Process and Learning?

And it suddenly occurred to Anna that she could solve this problem, the problem of the camera in the box, and what to do now, the same way she had solved so many other problems: on craigslist. Craigslist! Where Anna had found a rare Fiesta teapot in Burnt Caramel and Brie. Where she hadn’t found Ray from Arizona (she preferred OkCupid for that kind of thing) but where she had admittedly, on her horniest days, scrolled through the “casual encounters” section and given herself over to the (surprisingly compelling) fantasy of an anonymous fuck in the back of a Chase ATM lobby. Now that she considered craigslist, it all seemed so obvious. Wouldn’t there be filmmakers there, looking for other filmmakers? Of course the filmmakers will be there, Anna thought. Everyone’s there.

Once Anna was on craigslist, things fell into place. Immediately, she sized up her options and realized there were a number of ways to go. She could start with “tv/film/video” under “jobs” or she could start with “talent” under “gigs.” The pragmatist in her knew it was probably better to dip a toe in the water with a “gig,” but Anna couldn’t help thinking that money wouldn’t hurt. That—hello?—she didn’t have a job. Alternatively, she could get the lay of the land in the “film” section under “discussion forums.” Follow some threads, get a sense for the lingo, and come off sounding more like a pro. Then again, meh? Why waste her time in some pointless forum for loser filmmaker wannabes? Who had time for that stuff, anyway? Anna clicked into the jobs sections and felt that familiar high. The ads fanned down the page in a long, reassuring list.

Right away she got distracted by something that shouldn’t have even been there in the first place. “Pretty Girls Needed for Thursday Foot Fetish Event.” OK, she had to click on that one. Just out of curiosity. “We are looking for very attractive girls with pretty feet,” the ad said, “to have their feet massaged and kissed at our weekly foot fetish events.” Anna looked down at her feet. She slipped off a shoe and, without even thinking about it, began considering her biggish veins. Crap, she thought, jamming her shoe back on. What did that ad even have to do with film? This was how the hours flew by like panicked zebras on the African savanna, how craigslist sucked you in. Then again, these ads were unbelievable. “Tap-Dancing Vagina Needed for Vaudeville Comedy Show”? Shouldn’t someone in Craig’s vast empire be screening these things, weeding out the total nut jobs? Jesus, Brie would love this. And wouldn’t it be funny if she just started texting Brandon these subject lines without any explanation? Anna got up and nuked some frozen spanakopita triangles, which she spent some time arranging on a plate around a crescent of sour cream. She poured herself a glass of Tropicana, and suddenly, as she was putting the carton back in the refrigerator, it struck her that she was doing it again.

OK, when I sit back down, Anna told herself, I will stay on topic. I will only click on entries that relate to film. I will start a separate Word file. I will contact at least five people today. She thought about actually writing these instructions down for herself on a Post-it note. Better yet, she could form an Intention Statement. But even with the helpful list of “continuous action verbs” that Leslie had e-mailed her, Anna somehow balked at forming an Intention Statement without Leslie there.

Once she redoubled her efforts, the obvious problem confronting her was that most of these ads requested that people have very specific skills. People who could “disseminate encoding protocols,” had a “basic understanding of UNIX,” and knew their way around an “MPEG-2 Transport Stream.” What Anna had to offer was a bit more vague. Not many people, admittedly, were looking for an unemployed woman with an AVCCAM in a box who happened to be conversant in the nuances of real estate tax law. But then Anna stumbled on an ad for a “producing partner” that required no professional experience, only a “passion for cinema.” She wrote that one down. And when she extended her search back a few weeks, she found some other possibilities. “Indie Filmmaker Seeks Non-Union Crew.” “Assistant for Film Distribution Company.” “Film Intern—Production/Postproduction.” (Who knows, maybe Brie had the right idea about internships?) She had promised herself five contacts, true, but come to think of it, four was good enough. Anna actually felt kind of invigorated. Not quite ready to tackle the AVCCAM box, perhaps, but ready to at least start unpacking the microphones. She was just about to close the craigslist tab when she saw it:

ARE YOU A REAL PERSON?

Anna had to admit, that was a good one. And hadn’t she admirably resisted clicking on that other funny ad, the one with the subject line “Do you eat chalk?” She deserved a freebie, so she clicked.

As you live life, you film it. Your mind’s eye is a camera. Your life experience is your demo reel. You are full of patience and open to everything. You are any sex or several. You are any ethnicity. You are 19 or 99. Above all else, YOU ARE NOT AFRAID.

You are a creative partner whom I can trust and build a lasting professional relationship with.

I know Craig’s List is an unlikely place to seek communion. You don’t belong here and neither do I.

(Unfortunately, due to the nature of this operation, there is no pay. With that in mind, please only serious inquiries.)

There was no phone number or website listed, just an automatically generated e-mail address: Reply To: job-xrtrtp-13588541609@craigslist.org.

OK, Anna thought as she opened up Gmail, this will be funny.

Dear 13588etcetera, she typed. This is Anna Krestler writing to you. And I am a real person.




6


The phone rang while Anna was eating breakfast in front of the computer, but it was only Leslie.

“Where do you go for a bikini wax?” she asked as soon as Anna picked up.

“Lucky Nails on Fifth Ave. at Fifty-Eighth. Out in Sunset Park.”

“Ugh. Don’t you know any place in the city?”

“Nope.”

“Last time I went to my place? They tore my skin off.”

“Ew,” Anna said, opening another tab for Salon.com. She clicked back to Facebook and left a comment on a friend of a friend’s wall, because yes, last night’s episode of Real Housewives of Dallas was total bullshit. That lady’s boobs were for sure fake. Cassandra was right:) Anna typed as she spoke. “Well, Lucky Nails uses this special hard wax. I think it’s from France? Plus they really get in there with the tweezers.”

“At my place, they skip the tweezer part,” said Leslie.

“No way!”

“Way. I think I’m just going to shave. I have to go to one of Josh’s things tonight.”

“Don’t,” Anna said, scrolling through her twitfeed. “It’ll only grow back thicker.”

Waxing, Anna had to admit, was something that had crossed her mind careerwise. Not the inhaling-crotch-musk-all-day part, not the really-getting-in-there-with-the-tweezers part, but the personal part. Anna always ended up telling Wendi, the Chinese lady who groomed her crotch, everything. And without even meaning to, Anna began to wonder how Leslie styled. Wendi once told her that crotch-styling preferences said a lot about a person. So what was it, a Brazilian? A perfect little St. Moritz landing strip? She wouldn’t even put it past Leslie to try vajazzling. And this line of thinking served only to remind Anna that she was getting a little overgrown herself down there. She should give Wendi a call—her pubes were probably hanging down around her knees.

Leslie was still talking about something. Her fertility treatments? But cars were honking in the background and for half a minute a loud siren drowned her out. Anna noticed Gawker had an article about candy cigarettes being banned by a smoking-prevention law.

“—zen person’s pants?”

“Huh?” Anna said, clicking on something.

“—ess than a ten percent chance. That’s what the doctor said. After that it’s pointless. I told Josh we should switch clinics, but can’t decide between Columbia or Cornell.”

“Isn’t Cornell in Ithaca?” Anna said. She forgot what came next after IUI. IVF? Or was IVF first? All the Is confused her. So many Is engaged to create yet another I.

“They have a center in the city, too, but the thing is—I’m sorry this is so loud—”

“Yeah, I can barely hear you,” Anna said, even though she could hear her fine now.

“I’ll call you later,” Leslie shouted.

“Call me later,” Anna shouted, and hung up.

She went to the bathroom, plugged in the flat iron, and turned it to high. Then she got out a tube of SPF 15 Sweet Tea tinted moisturizer and began to put on her face. Today she would call Brandon, Anna decided. She had assumed she would open the AVCCAM box together with Brie after she got back from kickball practice last night, bust out a box of microwave popcorn, and make it a roommate thing. But Brie never showed, so the box remained where it was, by the front door. She’d even sent Brie a text, Yoo-hoo? around 10:30, but never heard back. So now she would have to call Brandon. It’s probably for the best, she thought. Brandon’s better at that sort of thing.

Then again, maybe it would be better to get out of the house first, run a few errands? She hadn’t left the apartment at all yesterday, not even to go downstairs for the mail.

She was halfway down the block when the phone rang again.

“Anna? Taj,” came an unfamiliar man’s voice. “You answered my ad yesterday.”

“Hi,” Anna said, feeling her pulse quicken.

“That was pretty funny.”

“Funny?”

“Mr. 135 blah blah?”

“Oh yeah,” Anna said, nervous. “Ha ha.”

“Is now a good time to talk? I’m scheduling interviews this week, but first I just need to ask you a few questions.”

“OK,” Anna said. She walked by a sports bar with a huge banner outside reading CATCH ALL THE WORLD CUP ACTION HERE! Then she passed another small bar on the corner, with a handwritten sign taped up that said, ABSOLUTELY *NO* WORLD CUP COVERAGE EVER HERE (PHEW!). When she tuned back in, Taj was saying, “Sofia or Francis?”

“Um, Sofia?” Anna said.

“Dogme 95 or French New Wave?”

“Both?” Anna said, not knowing much about either.

“Black and white or color?”

“That depends—”

“Dolly or handheld?”

“Handheld.”

“Pinhole or digital?”

“Are you being serious?”

“Semiserious.”

She actually knew what a pinhole was because Brie had brought home one of those Build-Your-Own-Pinhole-Camera kits from Urban Outfitters one day.

“I guess, pinhole?” This is supposed to be art, she thought. In which case, the weirder the better, right?

“Bolex or Pixelvision?”

“What?”

“Bolex camera or Pixelvision?”

“Um …”

“That’s OK,” said Taj. “I was thinking of changing that one anyway. Bolex or Flip?”

“Flip.” At least she knew what a Flip was. There was a longish pause. “Hello?” Anna said, pressing the phone closer to her ear.

“I’ve heard nothing but wrong answers,” said Taj.

Well, that’s that, Anna thought, automatically binding the familiar wound with a tourniquet of indifference. She was standing right outside the pharmacy now. She had something to do. After getting off the phone, she would fill her prescription. And then? Then she would go to Earthy Basket and get one of those fancy, superhealthy deli salads and have lunch, maybe grab a few things to go, for later. When she got home, she would call Brandon and they’d make a date to open the AVCCAM box. In the meantime, she could get back on craigslist, send some follow-up messages. Keep busy. Why hadn’t she heard from anyone else yet?

“So, BING! You win,” Taj continued. There was a smile in his voice. “I’m intrigued. Where do you want to meet?”

She felt her heart contract.

“Have you ever been to Café Gowanus?” There was another long pause and Anna thought maybe the line had gone dead, just now, at the crucial moment. “Hello?”

“They may as well call that place Café Schadenfreude,” Taj said. “Let’s keep it real. We’ll meet at Halal Wireless Café on Thirty-Third and Fourth in Brooklyn. Can you do tomorrow at three-thirty?”

“Yes,” Anna said.

“I’ll text you the address so you’ll have it.”

“OK.”

“Bring a sweater. It gets cold in there with the air-conditioning,” Taj said, and he hung up.

Anna walked into Health Aid, a little dazed. She needed time to think, so she walked around the aisles, looking at different things. Vitamins making sketchy claims. Shark cartilage pills. She would wear her blue dress tomorrow. The soy-based cotton one that she’d gotten on Etsy last spring. And instead of calling Brandon to open the box, she would watch a bunch of movies on Hulu tonight to prepare. Anna inspected the toothpastes, forgetting whether they were running low. It was only eleven o’clock. What should she do? Go to Earthy Basket for lunch and then home to watch movies? Or she could check the listings for Film Forum and IFC, see what was playing. She hadn’t gone out to see a movie in forever. She pulled out her cell—an iPhone rip-off that came free with her shitty Verizon plan—to see whether there was anything good at Film Forum tonight. Before she knew it, a half hour had passed, she was still standing in the aisle, and the clerk was coughing softly into her fist.

Anna went up to the counter and handed over her thyroid prescription. Then, feeling in a celebratory mood, threw down a box of the shark cartilage tablets as well. That’s what she’d do, go to the movies. Maybe Brie would want to come. Or Brandon. She would skip the popcorn this time, hide some wheat thins in her purse instead. It felt like a plan.




7


It was a neighborhood of fix-a-flats and squat storefronts begging to install neon lights underneath your truck or wrap your large vehicle in four-color advertising. Everything else—the kebab shops, the mosques, the all-girls Muslim school—came off as mere footnotes in the larger story of down-market goods and depressed real estate. Anna barely noticed them. She had taken a southbound R train to Thirty-Sixth Street, emerged onto Fourth Avenue, then walked three blocks, breathing in the halitosis of open-air garages and the burning sugar tar of the candy-nut vendors. Halal Wireless Café was an unassuming cinder-block square painted queasy yellow. It sat between a shuttered Off-Track Betting place and a bakery whose window was a tableau vivant of artificial food coloring. If she hadn’t been looking for it, she would have walked right by.

Inside, the ceiling fan moved the air in slack circles and a television blared from a wall mount. Of the four people in the room, three sat together, crowded around a laptop. The man who was sitting at a table by himself near the window was brown-skinned. He was some indeterminate age between thirty and forty and wore dark slacks, a beige-collared shirt, and chunky black eyeglasses. There was a Moleskine open on the table next to a plate of half-eaten food, a basket of pita, and a coffee mug. With one hand, he waved Anna over. With the other, he pressed a cell phone to his ear.

“You graduated oh-eight?” Anna heard him say into the phone. He paused to write something down. “Tisch? Is there any chance you knew Chi-Wei? Production and Critical Studies? Ha! So Crick is still teaching that …?”

Isn’t it kind of rude, Anna thought, to conduct another interview, knowing I’d arrive any minute? She set her bag down on the chair opposite Taj and went over to the counter, where pretzel dogs were rotating sadly under a heat lamp. The menu was a bizarre mash-up of Middle Eastern and American food, casting doubt on the authenticity of either. Anna ordered a poached egg and coffee from a lady in a hairnet, then lingered by the toilet door, pretending to watch Wolf Blitzer on CNN until Taj was off the phone.

“Hey, Anna,” Taj said, reading her name from a list in his Moleskine. “Did you find this place OK?” His face, Anna noticed, was lopsided, but in kind of a sexy way. His eyes were a dark liquid brown that reminded her of West Elm furniture. “I know it’s kind of out of the way.”

Anna nodded and took a sip of her coffee, which tasted like someone had done their laundry in it. She actually looked down into the cup to see if there might be a cigarette butt floating there, if some sort of mistake had been made.

“All right. So where were we?” Taj flipped open the Moleskine on the table. “I have in my notes that you’re a big Lars von Trier fan.”

Having never heard this name, Anna could only assume he’d confused her with somebody else.

“Actually, lately I’ve been getting really into Romanian New Wave,” Anna chirped. “Lately” being since last night, when she had gone up to Lincoln Center to see a Cristian Mungiu double feature with Brandon.

“Oh, come on …,” Taj said, a half-bemused smile playing on his lips.

“What?”

“What what? Is that what you think I want to hear?”

“No!”

“You didn’t think the first half hour of 12:08 East of Bucharest could have been about half an hour shorter?”

“It maybe could’ve used some editing—” Anna began.

“And The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, how long was that movie? Maybe five hours? Weren’t you like, �Please die already, Lazarescu, I could use a fucking bathroom break’?”

Anna wasn’t sure where to go with this whole line of inquiry, but felt like now she had to follow through. Go on the defensive.

“It won Cannes,” she said with less certainty.

“Yeah, where they have a special jury prize for slowest film.” He stirred his coffee boldly with one finger. “Seriously, don’t you feel a little like the whole Romanian thing, it’s almost like rewarding low expectations?”

“You’re being reductive,” Anna said and immediately regretted it. This happened sometimes; a bit of logorrhea left over from grad school would shoot out of her mouth before she could stop it. But Taj only smiled.

“Those movies, it’s like they’re almost designed to win Cannes,” he said. “I think they have a secret Cannes-winning lab in Romania.”

Anna giggled despite herself. “That lab should be in Transylvania.”

“Doesn’t it feel almost opportunistic?” He said this in a conspiratorial whisper, leaning in toward her.

“Like an infection?” She giggled again.

“Like an infection.”

Taj held up a finger and wrote something down in his Moleskine. While he wrote, Anna studied his face: a very good nose, and his skin was more olive than brown up close. One eye, she noticed, was a little higher up than the other. Maybe that’s where the sexiness came from? It made sense. She’d always had a weird thing for guys with amblyopia.

Realizing that Taj actually enjoyed sparring with her, Anna let herself relax a little. She stabbed her egg, letting the yolk spill across the plate. Taj generously pushed his pita basket toward her. She couldn’t believe how well things were going.

“I was afraid you’d be like the other guy who was just here,” Taj said. “He brought me his semiotics thesis. Check this out.” Taj picked up the first page from the stack of paper on the table. “�Process Identification and The Shawshank Redemption—A Microanalysis,’” he read. “Who even knows what that means? I’m like, don’t give me the words man, give me the feelings, you know?”

“I know what you mean.” Anna smiled. “I’m all about the feelings.” In fact, maybe now was as good a time as any to come clean. “Actually, that’s sort of the reason I answered your ad. Have you heard of Paul Gilman?”

“Gilman?” Taj repeated.

“He did Rurik, Rurik, Traffic Cop and 87 Love Street with—”

“Is this some lame attempt at irony?” Taj interrupted.

“N-no—”

“I know Paul,” Taj said.

“Oh! So you know—”

“What I don’t know, exactly, is how the fuck you people keep finding me.” His voice was soft now, almost feral. “I never name-check Paul or even Simone, but Jesus, every time it’s the same thing with you people. It’s incredible, you know?” He leaned in closer. “Just explain to me how it works, OK? Do you really, really have nothing better to do than hang out all day on the Internet? It’s like this piece of fucking shit I can’t get off my shoe.”

Anna felt her face get hot, stunned at the violence of this turnaround. “I swear, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.” She was still chewing on Taj’s pita, for God’s sake. Hardly the body of Christ, but they’d shared a moment of communion, hadn’t they? She wondered how soon she could leave, because now things were definitely superawkward, especially with the counterwoman in the hairnet wiping the table next to them. She would wait it out for five more minutes, she thought, trying to be like China.

“Yes, you do,” said Taj.

“No,” she said. “I don’t. I watched Age of Consent the other night and it made me, I don’t know, think of things a whole other way. That’s when I found your ad. After that, I mean.”

“I bet you watched it and thought, I can do that!” he said with a smirk.

Anna said nothing though it was true that those exact words had occurred to her.

“You really don’t know who I am?”

“You’re a guy who put an ad on craigslist?” Anna said, not knowing what else to say.

He searched her face for a long moment, then finally seemed to uncoil a bit.

“OK, you want to know about Paul?” He opened a creamer even though his coffee was gone.

“No, that’s really OK—”

“Of course you do,” Taj said, matter-of-factly. “So, first of all, Paul comes from money. And I know those movies �didn’t cost anything.’ But movies that don’t �cost anything’? They all cost, minimum, twenty grand. So forget about the brutal honesty of �exurban realism’ or whatever it is he calls it. It was all family money.”

Anna didn’t really see what that had to do with anything, but she let Taj talk.

“And with Paul, the thing is … it’s an aesthetic, OK, and I’ll admit he’s made it work, for himself at least, but where do you go from there? He’s got his little game, �Is it documentary or fiction, is it real or fake?’ How interesting is that? This stupid manufactured intrigue. With me, I like to think it’s really clear-cut. It’s either totally, obviously real, or really, obviously fake, you get what I mean?”

Anna nodded, understanding nothing. She had googled Taj, but oddly her search hadn’t yielded any results.

“Age of Consent, OK? It’s a trick. Paul uses all his gimmicks, his faux realism, keeping everything so very, you know, grim? And what you think you’re getting is honesty. But you know what you’re really getting? Think for a minute about what you’re getting. Do you know what it is?”

Anna shook her head mutely, feeling the way she had back at Columbia when trying to master impossible inflections, the complex morphology of Slavic declensions.

“You’re getting sex,” said Taj. “You’re getting sex packaged as art, so you can go to a theater and sit there nicely with your friends feeling smart, and afterward you can go somewhere and talk about fucking without feeling like you’re exploiting anyone, because it’s art. But guess what? All those movies, Calista and the rest of them, they’re nothing but porn. It’s all one kind of porn or another. And don’t even get me started on Simone,” Taj said, though getting starting on Simone was something he clearly relished. “If there’s one thing her story proves, it’s there’s no faster way to fame in today’s attention economy than to show someone your pink parts.”

“So what if it’s titillating?” Anna said, surprised to find herself arguing. “At least it makes you feel something. If that guy in Age of Consent was obsessed with, I don’t know, plumbing, and was reading from a bunch of plumbing magazines about pipes and things with a bag on his head, it wouldn’t be the same. People wouldn’t care. It’s because he’s sharing something private—”

“You’re right,” Taj said.

“I mean, maybe it’s less arty, or more shallow or whatever,” Anna went on, emboldened, “but I wouldn’t want to watch it either if it was about plumbing. I guess I don’t mind that Gilman uses sex to draw you in.”

“No one’s denying you your right to titillation, OK? I get it. Titillation is important, necessary even. But it can’t be everything. You have to have titillation plus something else. If you’re going to show me your nut sack, make it the Michelangelo of nut sacks. Blow me away with your craft, your insight, your something—shit—” Taj grabbed his pen and scrawled something down. “That’s kind of a great idea: Titillation Plus. What if we call it that?”

“Call what what?” Anna said.

“A new framework for art criticism,” Taj said, still writing. “Something’s either just titillating or titillating plus.”

“Or it’s just not titillating,” Anna added.

“T, NT, or TP, then?”

“I guess.”

Taj paused to spoon some ful mudammas into his mouth with a pita triangle.

“I’ll tell you a story about Paul,” Taj said, “but it’s probably not the kind of thing he wants to get around.”

“I promise,” Anna said, trying to hide her excitement. It really only hit her now: she was sitting with a guy who knows Gilman! This put things on an entirely different level, didn’t it? But then Anna realized something else. She wasn’t just excited because Taj knew Gilman; she was excited because things were about to get fucked up. Already—and without getting drunk or high—they had stumbled into the zone of inappropriate intimacy. She could tell Taj things. And Taj could tell her things. Not everything, maybe, but a lot of things. Things they might not tell anyone else, because they either knew them too well or not well enough. Why was it that she never felt this way with other women? Brandon was the closest thing. But she and Brandon had something in common. They had been cubicle serfs at Pinter, Chinski and Harms together. A “loser bond” they called it. Because theirs weren’t the kinds of jobs anyone aspired to but the kind you simply ended up at, sucked in by promises of health benefits and discounted Metrocards. You made excuses for being there until the excuses became the reasons themselves. So she and Brandon had Chinski and Harms, but what did she and Taj have?

“—had signed up for this special six-week seminar with Herzog out in LA,” Taj was saying. “It was called Ephemeral Cinema or Cinema of the Ephemeral or something, and every week everyone in the class was supposed to make a three-minute movie and bring it in for crit. Paul was starting to get a name for himself in certain circles, but hadn’t hit on the magic bullet yet. At the time he was in a Mario Giacomelli phase, shooting these supercontrasty, eight-millimeter films at night. Basically in the dark. Grain big as golf balls.” Taj was tearing open a Sweet’n Low packet as he spoke, pouring its contents onto the table. “I think I still have some of those in a box somewhere.”

Anna had no idea what Taj was talking about, but it was all interesting. She ate her egg.

“So Paul was showing his boring movies in crit every week and no one liked them. Then he comes home one day and his roommate is fucking some guy. He had found this cheap studio to sublet but it was a share, so he and this other guy basically lived in one big room together.”

“I had a roommate like that once,” Anna began. “In college we—”

“Yeah,” Taj went on, ignoring her. “I forget all the details, but I think the guy was like, some kind of Puerto Rican queen. Or Vietnamese queen?”

“An ethnic queen?” Anna supplied helpfully.

“Something. And maybe he was fucking this other guy for money? I don’t know. I remember Paul telling me there was something weird about it. Maybe they were dressed up like Pilgrims or, like, finger-painting with their balls—whatever it was, it wasn’t exactly normal. Plus, of course, they’re both totally jacked up on something. Paul had crit the next day and he hadn’t made his movie yet, so he thinks, What the hell? And grabs his Nizo. He sets the camera down on something and hits record. He shoots them for three minutes, all one take. They probably didn’t even notice, or didn’t care, if they did.”

“That’s so messed up—”

“Yeah, not exactly what you’d call a triumph of the human spirit.” Taj paused to pour the contents of another Sweet’n Low on the table and began to draw a spiral in the sugar with his finger, a sort of Spiral Jetty




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