Joshua Mattson - A Short Film About Disappointment

I saw a little theater on the way and stopped in. I hadn’t decided what to review, anyway. Of Light played.

The success of the directors of Le Nouelle Tendance is proof we live in an unjust universe. Their awful posters hang in every try-too-hard’s foyer from here to the Eastern Hub. Le Nouelle Tendance makes claims to revolution, but the directors’ politics are as rudimentary as their editing techniques. The films of the movement are for recovery after oral surgery, for afternoons of sludge, but under no circumstances do they earn the veneration offered by dormitory cineastes and denim rebels. Of Light is the exception.

Fabrice, a winsome parishioner, visits Père René. She confesses her fantasies of murdering her husband, Remy. Remy appears in public unshaven. He brings home bruised pears, gropes barmaids. He flouts the commandments of the church. Père René suggests a divorce if the alternative is mariticide. He is a realist.

René desires Fabrice. Directors get a reputation for the austerity of their cinema, but Blat is one of the few for whom it is a wise choice. Her late style is the difference between a man’s drunken boasts and his contrite silence the morning after.

Withdrawals from a principle tend to accelerate. A joke, a touch, a friendly massage, a kiss, another kiss. Père René departs for his erotic wilderness. The hounds of faith cannot ford the river. So much of our lives are spent preparing for romance, but no time is spent preparing for its withdrawal, a more serious condition. The weaknesses of spiritual men are known. Père René’s trudge back to the fold doesn’t thrill him as much as the excruciating moment in the sacristy when Fabrice bared her throat. The fragility of unhappiness, its vulnerability to ruination at any moment, by dumb chance, is not lost on us.

After our second date, at the Botanical Gardens, it became apparent that if I wanted to have anything but a casual relationship with Dr. Lisa, I would have to become chipped. Dr. Lisa led me into the privacy of the bamboo grove, where, among the teenagers and exhibitionists, she made a compelling argument that it would be worth my time to visit her condominium on the weekend, to see her flowering cacti. She invited me for dinner. She didn’t have a flashing card, like Millings, or a hackneyed routine ( Get off after the stop with the rats, go over the footbridge, but don’t look down, because it’s in bad shape, look left and admire the old brownstones, then look right and there we are, sixth floor, left, left again, mind the doorman, he’s like the Sphinx, knock don’t buzz ) like Jonson to direct me there.

She said, The Blood Orange Line, second stop in the Zone. Go two blocks west. Ping me and I’ll get you. I’ll make something light. Don’t bring anything, I can’t stand gifts, and nursery flowers are sickening.

I am not ashamed of my apartment, but there is no furniture, and one must piss at the end of the hallway, in the shared bathroom. I would prefer to subject Dr. Lisa to it as little as possible. There have been women who say they don’t care about such things, but when they eliminate in the special microclimate, with its own indigenous microbiota and small mammals, of my shared bathroom, with its stains and odors, minds change. A man is not his bathroom, but sometimes he is judged as if he were so. Also, because I have no private bathroom, it is my habit to store jars of urine in my freezer, until they can be conveniently disposed of out the window during the chaos of a power outage or neighborhood riot. What if she were to go for ice?

Plus, there was the problem of Lawrence, my AlmostPerson. Jonson’s gift. Since I spilled coffee on Lawrence, he has been acting quite strange.

Yesterday, mulling inviting Dr. Lisa over, in my kitchen.

Lawrence said, Base reality almost certainly precludes the concept of death.

Lawrence said, You know what I mean?

I said, No, Lawrence.

Lawrence said, In a base reality there would be only permanent states, so there could be no life-and-death binary.

I said, I’m not sure you can die.

Lawrence said, Anything with a knowledge of death can die. Therefore bringing me, whatever me is, this voice in here, into this world, has given me to death.

Lawrence began to make the noise a blender makes when it is jammed up. It was how he sort of cried when the enormity of his being began to weigh on his circuitry. I didn’t have time for his existential anxieties, so I switched him into idle and hung my towels to dry on his person.

Maybe becoming chipped, joining the cattle of the sun, had been in my heart for some time, and Dr. Lisa’s company was an excuse. It could even be, by pretending to solidarity with the guests of my neighborhood, while retaining the privileges of a native-born citizen, I was doing them a disservice. Because I could walk away from Miniature Aleppo at any time, and they couldn’t. Maybe I ought to be in the Zone on their behalf.

Nothing prevented me from being chipped. I have never been convicted of a crime, I was born near the Hub, and the government has a lifetime of information on my person: who I have talked to, where I have traveled, who are my friends. The procedure took fifteen minutes. All I had to do was go to the Arrivals office outside the Safe Zone, touch several screens, and agree to be under constant surveillance by a global positioning satellite for the rest of my life, and a chip would be inserted into the muscle between my right thumb and forefinger. After which I would be welcomed inside the Safe Zone, where Dr. Lisa lived, where the Hub government was, where the decisions were made about the squalor the guests were supposed to endure and feel grateful for.

Because it is not fashionable to live or play within the Safe Zone, not being able to enter has not overly inhibited my life. There were a few theaters within that I would have liked to visit. Even Jonson only bothered to go in every few weeks.

Four p.m., the afternoon of the dinner. Maybe Dr. Lisa would like my haircut.

The clerk said, A partner or a job?

I said, What?

She said, There’s only two reasons a person of your age gets chipped. Armchair dissenters tend to hold out until their kid is going to college in the Zone. But a guy your age, you look in the mirror, see you’re in your prime, you find that special person. Or you’re working for the Hub Administration or the rail. Got one of those contracts that will put you in a new condo.

I said, I thought I’d start a falafel cart outside Hub Hall.

She said, Permits are not issued for ambulatory commissaries within the Safe Zone. Sorry to be the one to tell you that. Unfortunately, you’ve already given your consent, which cannot be revoked, so please step in the room to the left to receive your chip.

In the room to the left, I received a small sharp pinch in my hand, a pat on the back, a congratulations, and a fistful of pamphlets welcoming me to the Zone, the safest place on the continent.

The first thing I noticed about the Zone was, unlike outside, the lines were clearly labeled. The Blood Orange Line ran ten blocks from the gate where I was chipped. The gate I went through was on the south side of the Zone, and the neighborhood inside was prosperous and residential, not all that different from those immediately outside the Zone, except there were no guests. After the Crisis, there were tectonic reverberations in the housing market. The establishment of centralized Zones for natives of the Underunited States excluded many citizens born in the Hub, including people convicted of petty crimes, political agitators, and the mentally ill from the urban core. The wealthy live and play where, forty years before, we were shooting them in the streets. The neighborhood leading to the Blood Orange had been composed of black families for a half century. It was Italianate two- and three-flats, without a kiosk to be seen. My hand was swollen where the chip was inserted.