Joshua Mattson - A Short Film About Disappointment

She said, Turned out I didn’t care about vestibular disorders. Every night, after work, he went on and on. I suppose I wasn’t any better.

She said, Never marry a professional.

He had children now. Her parents were myco-remediation workers who had succumbed to the toxins they cleaned up.

She tended hothouse plants in a small room in her condominium with glass windows on two sides and on the roof. Her husband had had it installed after she agreed to sign the papers. There she grew plants I had never seen or heard of, but she promised to show me: Devil’s Tongue, the Variegated Porcupine Violet, the Murderer’s Fig.

She said, I suppose I will discover the one which obsesses and pleases me best, like most hobbyists. For now I don’t have my hopes invested in any particular plant. One thrives, another withers. It is good practice for the conditions of existence, of simultaneously holding everything close and being divorced from or even contemptuous of certain attachments.

I said, Isn’t it courageous to care?

She said, It is courageous to care about what you care about. How much of one’s life is wasted on the extraneous? Courage is giving up what’s unnecessary.

The fidgeting conversation warping in and out of pitch. Too loud and too fast or too quiet. Outside of her authoritative space, Dr. Lisa was awkward. She would tuck her hair behind her left ear and let the hair on the right hang down, hiding her face from me, because she tended to look downward when listening. Infatuation is a horrible affliction, a cancer of the patience. In my life, I have tried to rush through this stage to whatever may come next: indifference, acceptance, friendship, disgust, romance.

I said, This is us.

She said, We have time. Let’s eat.

We stopped at a kiosk. Dr. Lisa got peanut noodles and a beer. I got a hot apple sandwich I could not eat much of, which Dr. Lisa took half of without asking, smiling. Leaning against a wall down the block from the Bombay Cinema.

She said, What did you want to be when you were young?

I said, A filmmaker. What about you?

She said, I wanted to be a surgeon, but during my residency I grew tired of cutting people open, having some of them die, telling their families. It is like a secret. You cut it out and destroy it but that’s not enough. The secret has already taken its path. I changed my specialty. Now I think I would like to be a foster parent for extinct plants. I’d have to commit to one or two. Choice is a sort of violence.

I said, The problem with choice is how does one know one has chosen? What is the sign? You can tell yourself you chose but that doesn’t mean it’s true.

She said, The action isn’t the desire or the inclination or the hidden opinion.

I said, Yes. It’s what is undertaken to relieve the cognitive dissonance.

She said, Film is a great example of what is undertaken to relieve cognitive dissonance.

I said, Maybe existence outside of human consciousness is wholly binary. Is/isn’t. We are designed to hold conflicting ideas in our heads at the same time.

She said, Within the metrics of our universe humanity is meaningless and our time excruciating in its brevity but my life is meaningful and I am supposed to feel pleasure.

I said, There is a generative force who cares for humans especially though there is no evidence of its existence.

She said, Our government is the best and most free in the world but everything we do is recorded and regulated.

I said, I want to be alone; I am lonely when I am alone.

She said, I want to be with someone; I am afraid of being with someone.

I said, Watching films is a bad use of my limited time; watching films illustrates something about my life I would be poorer without, though I can’t name it.

She said, Life is precious, we die without reason.

Dr. Lisa paid. Nothing of His Mother’s Birthday gained purchase in my imagination. The mother had a birthday, and it was significant. The son loved the mother but he was also practicing for some gaming competition. I don’t know. My attention sucked into my left peripheral. I kept the right side of my face facing away from her as much as was possible, fearful of Osvald’s reprisal. I became acutely and uncomfortably conscious of Dr. Lisa’s breathing, afraid mine was unnatural, that she could tell I was nervous. The more I struggled to control it, the more difficult it was to take deep and regular breaths. I didn’t grope her knuckles or sling an arm around her shoulder. I dislike such aggressions. There is much about another one can intuit in a dark theater.

Credits, jackets.

She said, Which way are you? I’m headed into the Zone.

I said, South. Miniature Aleppo.

In a warm violet shadow near the theater. Gangs of leaves shoved along by wind. Because she was slow leaving her seat, yawning, gathering her coat, checking each pocket to see if her Pinger was there, we were alone.

She said, Safe travel.

Her hand touched my face, where it had many times before, in her office, as she tried to understand the nature of my occupation. I leaned in to her. With a mutual politeness we kissed, which relaxed into something more animal as the stiffness of the evening, the tension of pretending, drained from our bodies. My claw in her hair. She twisted my clump of stomach fat. Later, the plums of bruises. She coughed, shoved me away, spat.

She said, Blood.

When Dr. Lisa bit my tongue, she opened the clot.

At a pharmacy kiosk, she sprayed my cut with more coagulant. Within the boundaries of her profession, her confidence returned. Her back straight, her voice brisk.

She said, If it’s bleeding tomorrow, get it restitched. A film is a bad place for a date. Next time, I’ll choose.

Re: My possession of Osvald. It enables me to dimly sense what he’s up to. Sometimes I see through his eyes. In small ways, I can influence his conduct. Now and then I trip him. I can’t make him jump in front of a bus, say, or wire me money. But I do know if he was going to go into Notino’s, our favorite deli, I could make him order a Reuben, extra soystrami, my favorite, instead of his beloved hot pickled beets on rye, yuck.

How do I know this isn’t in my head? I was in Notino’s after catching Love Under the Hub in the Marcus Station Quik Flik. The Quik Flik edits films down to forty-five minutes, for those of us on the go. We’ve all heard the urban legend about the mutants under the Hub. What Love Under the Hub wonders: What if they were all really horny?

I asked Sal Notino when he had last seen Osvald and what he had eaten on that occasion.

Sal said, Been thirty-five months to the day since I saw him. He ordered the Reuben with beets on the side, which, as you know, was not his normal order.

I nodded to myself.

Sal claims the government experimented on him as a child and now he can remember everything.

Some of Osvald’s ideas are mine.

For example, planning his film, A Replicate . Mayor Alison was to be in the pocket of the Transit Authority. The scene where Billy slaps Alison to prove his iconoclastic bona fides is nothing but a transposition of Bellono and Duke Giovanni in my Altarpiece .

Island Promises , running as a part of the Grotto Theater’s Breakfast with Feil series, Saturday mornings, seven a.m., has no aesthetic but much sentimental value for me, because it was the film we saw before I proposed to Isabel.

Carl’s Creamery pimpled the brow of the hill. Isabel and I lived in the cleft of its chin. An aspirational native neighborhood. From our kitchen on the top floor of the building, at moonrise in autumn, we’d peer out the window to see how many people waited for ice cream. It was an important estimate. Our habit was to make up after fights with cones. If we waited in line for too long, we resumed the argument, left the ice-cream shop, screamed on the patio, returned to the line, bought cones.