Joshua Mattson - A Short Film About Disappointment

I left his gift, Haupt’s Record of a Bad Time , on his desk. The book, Haupt’s diary detailing the production of Mind Under Matter , includes notes Haupt took while spying on the actors, in his attempt to make them paranoid on-screen.

During the party, the woman with the piercings wandered into his room, handled his things, stretched on his bed for a minute. Her joints popping. I invited her to leave birthday wishes inside the cover of the Record . She smelled like cold water and her attention span was not sentimental enough to linger anywhere too long. I let her take a nugget of talc from his desk. Osvald collected minerals.

The next morning, he mopped. Hangovers moved through us like glaciers. I taunted him with my impression of Csonka, captain of the starship Inquisitor .

I said, Theese ess a leetle bochs. In theese bochs, the secrets of our generasion. The possebeeleties off our future weethin.

We had met in a film class at Bast, on the first day of college. The Holy Eye: On the Religious in Science Fiction, 21 Yarl Hall, Tuesday five to ten p.m. Soon we began to make films in conjunction with or adjacent to one another, as our ideas and time demanded. We thought we would be filmmakers, as if this were a permanent condition.

How we know our friends when we meet them. A capacity for secrets. Above everything, the ability to suspend judgment of us. Each of us can be good to a few people. If you have had the good fortune to encounter only those you can be kind to, then it is no achievement on your part.

An eerie starship, traveling for hundreds of years, its mission unclear. A disturbed, blessed captain. Csonka has steered Inquisitor too long.

Osvald said, Csonka is a vessel for holiness and not necessarily a person per se.

I said, My chob ees to pretek theese bochs. Ef ew don undeerstand, the whole feuture ees contained een theese bochs.

The adjunct asked the class what meaning we assigned to the Starboard Exhaust Manifold, where a device told the future of crew members, provided they met criteria the film does not clarify. The rituals of the ship were perpetuated by the AI to ensure long-term stability. The demands for sacrifice, taboos, and the elevation of fools to the priesthood caused political instability, so Captain Csonka maintained control. Osvald thought Inquisitor was a spoof of belief. I saw it as the expression of an ethnographic impulse.

Whoever espouses the idiotic theory that Inquisitor populates Earth with its savage, superstitious, devolved crew is my enemy. A woman who sat near us, Miriam, introduced our class to this idea, based on the names of the two janitors, Ad’em and If. There is no proof. Osvald caught me squeezing a tube of epoxy in her bike lock.

He said, Who does she think she is, trying to turn Verne Gyula’s profound film into an episode of Outer Space Chronicles ?

I said, It’s a shame to wreck a good lock like this.

He said, Yes, it’s too bad.

Then we were friends. Friendship requires conservation of resources. Something must be withheld. A lease was signed, lost. On Sunday mornings, we watched Inquisitor while convalescing from Saturday’s bitter revels.

Osvald sent the ailing director pings about the film, if a meaning could be established, if meaning was compatible with experience. Inquisitor was made to be screened in prisons. Gyula did not respond. Osvald who took my marriage.

A matinee double feature at Original Cin, playing for the next three days.

Rachel Wilcher, a dissolute podiatrist, proved that the radio bands that allowed for wireless broadband Internet were responsible for the epidemic of credulity observed in the industrialized world twenty years ago.

Her findings ignored, and her severe stutter mocked, she was eventually institutionalized. Rachel was the node drunk, perhaps because of her difficulties getting taken seriously. Before being put away, she could be found of an evening in the town square, tooling around on a bicycle in the raw.

In the theater with me, a buffet of casualties. An elderly woman hooted at each factoid and spit on the floor when the government was mentioned. A couple emptied a bucket of fried lima nuggets. Authoritarian children chanted freely. I saw two Transit Authority spies, identifiable by their posture, taking notes on who was laughing and who wasn’t.

In The Final Secret , Rogier posits that the government of the United States discredited Wilcher. He suggests the powers that be, fearing the chaos that the worldwide cessation of broadband data would engender, fed Wilcher a diet of boutique psychedelics to keep her unhinged.

At intermission, patrons posed with a cardboard cutout of Rogier. Pictures were six dollars a pop. It seemed that an extra two feet were added to Rogier’s height. I slung my arm around his waist, like we were on a date.

In They’re Coming for Us! , Rogier claimed that the refugees of the Confidence Crisis engineered the collapse of their countries to force the Underunited States to allow them refuge.

After the end of the film, I was first in the lobby. Finding the cutout unguarded, I absconded with Rogier.

He’s in my kitchen now, with Lawrence, my AlmostPerson.

Lawrence said, Who is this gentleman?

I said, He’s your new friend Rogier. He’s the prince of muckrakers.

Lawrence said, He seems rather flat.

I said, Spend some time with him, Lawrence. You’ll find he’s deeper than you might guess.

I was in Windsor, Son, Uncle & Daughters Books looking through Zaccardi’s Selected Images , a large, lush volume, a thousand color pages, composed of stills from his films. The high-quality stock captured the saturation of his images, the specificity of his light. No words. For weeks it had been my habit to come to the shop and flip through their copy. The clerk tired of taking it out of storage and placing it on a lectern. It is some forty pounds. He left it in a reading nook for me, on a table, underneath dictionaries. As far as I could tell, nobody had touched it since my last visit.

Best is the section from Flowers Which Eat Men . Zaccardi’s lovers, the performance artists Cereality, scored that film, ruining it with screeching, flushing, the breathing of a long-distance runner. Could you adore a beautiful person with a high-pitched grating voice? After their split, Zaccardi decided to redo the sound for the film but never got around to it.

Who was this over my shoulder, looking with me? To get them to leave, I flipped to a still from The Harvests of Old Age , of a nude elderly man.

Millings said, That motorcycle you wrecked at Jonson’s was my mother’s.

I said, She must have been a dumb woman to give it to you.

Millings said, You’re going to get your ass kicked.

He picked up a copy of The Art and Science of Spreading Blame .

I said, In front of all the cameras? Where will you find a place without a camera?

He said, I can make the cameras go away.

I said, No, you can’t. If you had that much juice, you would have hit me already, or you would have sent people around to my apartment.

He said, Your place in Miniature Aleppo. I know where it is.

I said, So?

He said, Expect a visit.

Flipping through the book, Millings got a paper cut on his thumb. Sucking at the blood, he looked more infant than tycoon. It was hard to feel threatened.