Innocents and Others (25 page)

* * *

After three years of this penitent life, Meadow decided to take a job teaching film at a college in Albany. It was a BFA program, and she was a professor of practice. She didn't care to teach filmmaking, but they let her teach film studies. Film studies classes for filmmakers, not academics.

Meadow taught whatever films she wanted to study. It was like being twenty all over again. Her first semester she taught a class devoted to film noir in its weirdest permutations. Of course she taught nonfiction film. Then she taught the European New Wave, with a focus on the lesser-known films. But her favorite thing to teach was the Orson Welles section of her Innovators class. Welles was considered obvious and overrated by her students. She liked to show them exactly why he was her favorite. When it worked, when they understood that, and when she got them excited, she knew this also was a good thing.

PART FOUR

JELLY AND JACK

Jack called her number one night and left a message on her voice mail.

He was so goddamned sick of the well-wishers and the care-­givers. He just wanted to sit with his hound dog Sandy and look at the beach. He didn't want to hear any more about options and palliatives and comfort.

Sandy was a perfect comfort: she was the same as she had always been. Sandy expected him to walk and feed her. She lay sleepily on the couch next to him, her chin resting on his leg. Everyone else was either talking about the illness or not talking about the illness but still thinking about it. His daughter winced when he lit a cigarette or made a drink, even though his diagnosis had nothing to do with these vices. What for, all this concern, when it was a fait accompli?

On a whim, he realized he wanted to talk to someone who didn't know his prognosis, just knew him, and then he realized he would like to talk to Nicole.

After their disastrous meeting, and the film's release, he thought he was finally over her. She had left two voice-mail messages for him, apologetic messages, one right after the film was shot and one a few months after that, but he never called her back.

He felt different now, less wounded. Leave it to a fatal disease
to make you feel healed. She called him back, and they talked like old times. He didn't tell her he was dying. But he did tell her some stories, and he played some music for her. She told him what she thought, and she was as kind and brilliant as ever. They were back to talking on the phone every day now. They discussed the movies they had watched, just as they had before, and sometimes she even told him about her life, her real life.

CARRIE GOES TO THE MOVIES

Rehearsal is going super long. I'm really, really sorry, but can you go without me?

Her son, Dash, texted her in complete sentences with punctuation. It was condescending, mom-texting, the equivalent of speaking really slowly to an old person. She wanted to text back:

but we ALWAYS go 2 a movie on Dec 26!!

They were going to see
Manformers
, a big action blockbuster, which was also part of the tradition, seeing a big cheeseball of a movie. Instead she texted:

no worries! c u later

She actually didn't want to see
Manformers
, not at all. She did feel like seeing a movie, though. The Film Forum was showing a restored print of Vera Chytilová's
Daisies
, a film she had heard about but never seen. Meadow had emailed her about it earlier in the week. Just a link and a sentence that said, “One day only to see this on the big screen. Want to go?” Carrie was amused that Meadow still used “on
the big screen” as an incentive. Nobody gave a crap about big screens anymore. Besides, Carrie owned the Blu-Ray Criterion Collection
Daisies
DVD and could watch it on a pretty big screen in the comfort of her home anytime she wanted to, although she hadn't gotten around to it yet. She had written back that she would love to go, but it was her movie tradition to go to a blockbuster with her son on the day after Christmas. She also said she hoped to see Meadow soon for dinner or lunch. It was the first time Carrie had heard from her since she put her essay online. She had no idea if Meadow had read it—but of course she must have.

Carrie took a cab to Sixth Avenue. It was already getting dark at 5:00. She paid for her ticket and headed into the theater. She saw the place was half full, and she snuck curious looks at her fellow New York City cineastes. The world was out shopping, and here the hard-core cinema lovers were waiting to be transported to the world of the Czech New Wave. And then she heard Meadow.

“Carrie!” Meadow was sitting toward the center back, all by herself. She waved Carrie over, and Carrie smiled and walked toward her.

“I thought you couldn't come?” Meadow said as they performed an awkward hug standing in front of the narrow seats.

“He blew me off!” Carrie said, shrugging. They sat, and Carrie filled the space between them with updates about Dash and his band. Then the lights started to go down, and Meadow leaned over to her.

“I read the essay you wrote. It was very generous,” she said.

Carrie whispered, “I was worried you would be mad.” Meadow scrunched her eyes and shook her head no.

As the previews played, Carrie felt the giddy wave of excitement that she got from being in a dark theater watching a big screen. No pausing, no looking things up on her phone. It was indeed different than sitting at home, on her couch, falling asleep. Sitting in
a theater with other people giving their full attention to the film. It was devotional, and sometimes she forgot how much she loved that.

The film is about two young women in a fantastical tableaux of shifting, rhythmic Pop-colored filters. In interludes throughout the film, the girls are seen in bikinis as a clock's ticks on the soundtrack drive the jump cuts. Sometimes faster than life and sometimes slower than life—both delineated and dismantled time. The “plot” concerns the two girls running amok. They go out to dinner with middle-aged rich men. Then they eat hilariously large portions of food, horrifying and sometimes splattering the older men with various kinds of food spray. “I love to eat,” one girl exclaims, and Carrie could not help but laugh. After the girls eat, drink, and smoke to disgusting excess, they ditch their dates at the train station. In between dates, they burn things, steal, trip people, wear bikinis, crank-call people (“Hello? Die, die, die.”) and lounge around in cutesy-girl outfits. All of this was very funny, but it was the end of the film that floored Carrie. The final prank shows the two women demolishing an overladen banquette table by shoving food into their mouths in an orgy of slurps and food-crushing noises and images. Next the film abruptly cuts to the girls atop the table, stomping across the plates and glasses and carcasses in high heels, smashing it all. It was absurd and dizzying in a very specific Eastern European way. But the final scene was like nothing Carrie had seen before. The girls return in bondage suits made from newspaper, and in a frenzy of fast motion they reset the table with the broken glasses and dishes, chanting in unison whispers, “We are good and hardworking. We shall be happy and everything will be wonderful.” Carrie yelped with delight, and then she turned her face to her right and glanced at Meadow, who stared at the screen,
smiling. Carrie looked back at the movie, where the girls molded the smashed, spilled cakes and meats into disgusting mounds on the platters as they continued to whisper-chant, “We'll do everything and we'll be good and happy and beautiful. And happy again.” Carrie felt Meadow's hand on hers. Meadow squeezed her hand, just that, and Carrie squeezed back.

KINO-GLAZ

And Meadow?

She taught her classes. She watched the films, watched her students' faces. One day she showed them Tarkovsky's
Andrei Rublev.
She remembered when she'd first seen its black-and-white images, and how she thought that this was what films made in the fifteenth century looked like. And she remembered Hosney saying that Tarkovsky wanted to use images to make us feel the infinite, find a form to express the infinite. That's all! She thought it worked like this. His films made you regard a person in a landscape, the beauty of the composition drawing you in until you lost your impatience, your preoccupation with temporality, with the next thing, drawing you in until you stayed there with him, and the material world and the mystical world became one. He used conjure and artifice to show what was true.

* * *

What else?

One day after class she sat at a table and ate her lunch. It was cold, but the sun was bright. She could smell the coming spring in the air. She closed her eyes to the sun and saw the red light through her eyelids. Then she opened her eyes and stared at the blue sky.
Several streaks of cloud matched the line of the horizon, and bright rays back-lit the clouds in light-lined rows like a Tintoretto painting. More filmic than real, she thought. She watched the sky and the light, and then Meadow closed her eyes again and imagined a kaleidoscope of images: waterfalls, towering trees creaking in the wind, the arc of a looping bird toward a river and back, electric-skinned amphibians in a glistening jungle, a muted pink glow as snow fills the dusk sky, the sharp glint of the moon on ice-crusted snow. Then she heard a steady sound, the rhythmic sound of a heartbeat, or a computer hum, or even the sound of a machine, the clack of a train? She tried to listen to it by sitting with her eyes closed on the bench, and she felt small but also connected. She thought of her images again but with slow motion, almost stop action, with distorted sound, with a crane shot moving her up, the view levitating, and then the camera flying forward over all of it. She thought of wide angles and deep focus, a posthuman or prehuman landscape, a film like a long lyric mist. But not only that. She imagined that a person shown in the right way could meet this, this glimpse of the sublime. Can an image convey something unnameable, impossible, invisible? What is an image if not inflected by a consciousness, a noticing? Something quieter and simpler: a person with an open face—any person, any face—sitting alone. How plain could an image be, how humble? Something to make her refutation or resistance give way. She imagined making this film, but also knew and hoped that everything would change in the doing. Change her vision, and change her, again.

THE PRISONER

In the early morning, Sarah Mills kneeled in her prison cell. Sarah was not religious, but she was spiritual. What else could you be when the actual world offered so little? She prayed, but not to God. She prayed to her daughter, Crystalynn.

She did this every morning as soon as she woke. She kneeled, closed her eyes, and pressed her palms into her closed eyes to block out all the light. She waited and then began to compose her senses. The sister told her about composition of the senses, and about Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a Jesuit priest, who created the practice. To pray on something, you used each of your senses to create a direct experience of it. Jesuits used composition of the senses to experience the life of Christ. Sarah had her own version.

She stared into her pressed eyelids and she conjured what the house looked like.
The living room with the black leather couch striped by cat scratches. The Christmas tree, plugged in so the lights and tinsel sparkle. I had cooked spaghetti with red sauce from a jar and scorched the sauce when I left it on the stove, so the house already smelled of something burnt. I sat on the couch and smoked, the menthol tasting like a dry, rough mint in my throat, but the cigarette smoke was so constant that it hardly smelled at all to me. I stared at the tree because the pills I had taken made the blinking bulbs linger in my eyes until I felt I was in a trance. I was
fixed to the couch. I felt very good at this point. Also sitting by the tree was you, Crystalynn. You had wispy white hair, and you didn't like to have it combed. It was sticking up, wasn't it? You were sucking your pink binky and staring at the tree. You wore blue footed pajamas with the top snap undone. There were no presents under the tree, but you loved the ornaments. I watched you in my daze. You reached your finger out and swatted a red bulb. I did nothing but stare. You giggled and swatted it again even harder, and then I said, “Look don't touch, Crystalynn!” The bulb swayed and spun, the lights moving in its shiny surface. You laughed, and I could hear it, can hear it perfectly twenty years later. Next I put you to bed, how heavy you felt when I lifted you. The weight in my arms. I carried you, and I felt wobbly on my feet. I was barefoot, and my toes gripped the carpet on the stairs. Your room was a mess. I unzipped your pajamas and checked that your diaper was dry. You squirmed as I zipped you up, and it smelled like plastic and baby powder. You cried when I put you in your crib, so I went downstairs and took a bottle of juice from the fridge. Jason came in, and I stopped as he walked over to me and put a hand on the back of my bare thigh. He moved his hand up, and I arched against him, leaned into Jason. You started to yell from upstairs. I still had the bottle in my hand, and I groaned—I did, a tired sound in the back of the throat. I went up the stairs. You stood in your crib, crying, big tears rolling down your red cheeks. I gave you the bottle. You instantly stopped crying and held the bottle with both hands as you sucked. I reached into the crib, put my hands under your arms, and picked you up. I pushed my lips to your cheek, hot and soft and a little wet from your tears. And when I pulled back, I could see you smile with the bottle's nipple in your mouth. I swung your legs back and then laid you on your back in the crib. You were so very tired, and your eyelids already started to droop. I pulled the knit blanket up. I said, “Go to sleep, baby.” And I touched your cheek, felt for a second its fullness.
I smelled apple juice, baby powder, and my own cigarettes. I turned out the light, and I closed the door to your room.

Sarah stayed on her knees, her eyes closed, her hands pressing her eyelids.

The last time I heard you, I was in the garage screaming at Jason. I heard you crying, and I wished that you would stop. I did not go to you. I was yelling, and Jason was ignoring me. I wished that everything would stop. I was sobbing, and I was in pain from my fall. My leg was red, and my thigh throbbed. I was in my panties and a t-shirt. I was shaking from cold and from the combination of drugs. My jaw was grinding in my mouth, and more than cold and sore, I felt angry. I threw a shovel at Jason's car. I threw his bike pump against his car.

The last time I saw you, I was in your room and you were asleep. The smoke was burning my throat. I could feel the heat from the floor below. I stood over your crib, and you looked asleep. You were not crying, and my eyes and nose were watering. I could not tell if you were alive or not. I did not check. And I did not pick you up and run out of the house with you. I did not. I thought of doing it, and in the second I stood over your crib, I decided no.

In the early years, when she first began this exercise, Sarah used to think this litany during this part:
I decided no. So you wouldn't be like me, like my mom, like all of us. A bust. Like I was. So you wouldn't find out about this life, that money would always be short, and without money, everything was too hard. So you wouldn't turn that perfect body into a thing to fight against. So men wouldn't hurt you. So I wouldn't hurt you. I didn't think those words, baby. I felt it in my tired body, and the only words in my head were, “Leave her be.”
But then Sarah began to strip back the reasons, the story of why she thought she did what she did. Because even if it were true, it only served the self that she wanted to discard. She must simply contemplate what she did.

The smoke was choking me, and I went to the window of your room and opened it. The air, the cold night air, made me want to breathe, so I pulled myself out the window. I left you in the smoky room, and I moved toward the air until I woke up on the grass with someone giving me oxygen and loading me in an ambulance. This is what I did, Crystalynn.

Sarah stopped there. She no longer needed to add this part either:
It was the wrong thing; it was a terrible bad thing and I am so very sorry that I did not save you.
This was not her confession. This was her life in her cell, alone.

Sarah stayed kneeling, stayed pressing her eyes closed. Every day she did this, went over her last hours with Crystalynn. Every day it would come back, and every day Sarah must remember it. This was important, Sarah made herself remember, and then she could let herself go. She was on her knees and she felt now something like forgiveness. Not by God, or Crystalynn, or anyone else in the world. She felt forgiven by her own insignificance. She saw herself from the outside, on her knees in the cell, and she was gloriously insignificant. So much so that she was just air. What she wanted, what she thought, what she knew, didn't matter.

The repetition of the days did something to you. You knew the monotony, but you couldn't fight it. You had to invent your own repetitions to meet it. A ritual. This early, barely awake kneeling was hers.

She looked deep into the black of her closed eyes. Stared into the dark. When your sense of vision has very little stimulation, it invents images. Sarah doesn't know the name for this is the Prisoner's Cinema. It is a trick of the mind, blindness turned into glorious sight. Isolation turned into hallucination. After enough time, she saw a series of lights. The false images are called phosphenes, which means “show of lights.” But all Sarah knew was that it gave her vibrant colors of great depth, and patterns like a mosaic, like a tiled church floor or sometimes like the spiral of a shell. These visions did not absolve her of her time, her duty, and her deeds. Instead these visions took her through the limits of who she was and what she had done, and for this she felt gratitude, and with this, at last, consolation.