Joshua Mattson - A Short Film About Disappointment

I had seen it. A crocodile-headed god with a man’s body. Blood of tempura paint issuing, as from a sprinkler, from the arteries of his victims. A replica tomb is printed at the City Museum for Cultic Practices. Within the replica tomb, Sobek is summoned on accident with albino’s blood from a pricked thumb mixed with the crusts of a bologna sandwich. Sobek is a god of the proles. Temple slaves, quarrymen, left offerings. Exit the egyptologists by way of Sobek’s maw.

A shaved calf berthed in my peripheral.

A bit of my past stuck to Cometh Sobek . What, though? Sobek was a god. The gods of antiquity had modest demands. A roll in the hay, a goblet of wine, to eat you.

Another customer in Greye’s is not common. Complimentary pepper spray hangs by the entrance. A trio of intimidating dogs nap in Heliocentric Fiction, Minor Homosexuals, and The Protagonist Dies, respectively. The lack of coherency does not encourage repeat customers. Greye can be rude. Sections near the back, like Sadogustation and Scurrilous Biography, smell of rotting fruit, and are never browsed.

I could no longer postpone examining the leg’s owner. It brushed the tip of my nose. The customs of bookstores are ancient. From the golden calf emanated the odors of blood oranges, chain oil, dust. Lucretia Jonson.

Her face is animated by a spirit of inquiry, a malignant curiosity, a determination to master, through vigorous practice, the appearance of warmth. I do not often long for other men’s domestic arrangements but I have felt envious of Jonson.

She said, Nice to run into you.

I said, Certainly.

She said, How’s my urn?

Jonson’s wife wore a trench with ketchup stains on the lapel, an Eye of Horus bracelet, Jonson’s Blackout 660s. He had a premium sneaker phase. In her pocket bulged a hex wrench. Nobody knows I go to Greye’s. The secrecy of one’s habits ought to be sacrosanct.

I said, What brings you?

She said, I was two blocks east lunching with the chapter president of the Hyperborean Society. He holds the Hyperboreans were lost in the tidal convulsions swallowing Ys and Atlantis and wiped from the historical record. Such nonsense is a delightful break from my studies.

I said, Your studies?

She said, The president mentioned Greye owned a first edition of Manzoni’s The Betrothed . The two of them got on. I came to have a look, but could not wake him up.

I said, I know the legend of Ys from an opera recording. A sisters’ quarrel over a man destroys the city.

The strange are affiliated through networks we are ignorant of.

She said, I had no intention of donating, but I enjoy hearing his theories. He has those exquisite elderly person manners.

Our mutual ambivalence had ossified. She looked at the poster.

She said, You know that film is inaccurate.

I said, How so?

She explained how Bunce had debauched the facts. This topic was open-ended. Minutes of my life boiled off. I reviewed the tactics I could use to end our interaction. One, run away. Two, misdirection. Three, Seel.

She said, You and Jonson have been spending a lot of time together.

I said, A lot?

She said, What are you doing?

I said, Watching movies.

She said, What else?

I said, We rob banks. We plan his mayoral campaign.

She said, Aren’t you sick of being his charity case? You live in one drafty room with no furniture, like a guest, except you don’t have the dignity of struggle to attribute to your failure.

I said, When are you going to tell him about Seel?

Jonson’s wife laughed.

She said, There’s nothing to tell. We’re friends. He’s gay.

I said, How did he get that thing on his forehead again?

She said, He came to his sexuality later in life. The philandering was to compensate for feelings he was not ready to face.

I said, Please don’t take it the wrong way if I say that seems very unlikely, from what I’ve seen of him.

She said, It’s very annoying how complacent you are when you don’t see the most basic facts of what’s going on around you. For instance. Jonson has other women.

I said, I don’t believe you. He isn’t like us.

She said, He’s worse. Have you ever seen a video of a pig, those animals they used to eat? He’s the last pig. He eats and eats and if a hand comes near his trough, he eats that, and if a person falls in, he eats her. The world is his trough.

Mention of Lucretia Jonson used to put Isabel in a bad mood, a sooty quiet where she brooded over her own lack of credentials, her struggles to join the entitled creative class she was born into. They were briefly acquainted when I joined the Slaw . Jonson invited us over. Cocktails on the balcony, fish from their tank. Jonson had trouble filleting the tilapia, although he insisted he had done it hundreds of times.

Lucretia said, What is it again that you do?

Isabel said, Design.

Lucretia said, Oh, yes. That must be very interesting.

Isabel said, What do you do?

Lucretia said, I do charitable work and also have ongoing postdoc research.

Isabel said, On what?

Lucretia said, I wrote my doctoral thesis on the growing evidence that Moses was a priest of the cult of Aten, the monotheistic sun god which the pharaoh Akhenaten decreed his subjects must worship in place of the traditional Egyptian pantheon.

Isabel said, The goddesses of the pyramids.

Lucretia said, Yes. After Akhenaten died, the people returned to their old forms of worship. Revisionists within the country made him out to be a criminal and a heretic, erasing his name from the records.

Isabel said, This is the father of the famous King Tut.

Lucretia said, When he died, his priests were expelled from the country. My research seeks to find if one of his priests was Moses, the hero of the Old Testament, who led his people from bondage. These people were the Jews. The majority of the people in the world might base their faith on the ravings of a malnourished king who lived three and a half thousand years ago.

Photosensitivity is in wide release. It concerns a Cairo Town guest who, believing himself to be the reincarnation of Akhenaten, leads an invasion of the Safe Zone. One can’t help but suspect, from its hysterical tone and its production values, that it is funded by the Transit Authority.

Isabel said, But you can’t do fieldwork now.

Lucretia said, That’s the great frustration of my life. My whole career is looking at databases, trying to get closed countries to share their proprietary archaeological data, being rebuffed and insulted.

Isabel said, That’s interesting. I’m quite interested in the—

Lucretia’s Pinger chimed.

She said, Excuse me.

In the trailer I had been editing the last equipment test, a nod to Tod’s classic Offering . Xin Hi, our actress from La Malinche , wanders in the woods, like Tod’s Marion. Instead of looking haunted, as Marion did in the Hairy Forest, Xin Hi fell asleep on a bench between takes. Hadn’t combed the snarls from her hair. She wasn’t going to return but Jonson tripled her fee.

Instead of the woods, we filmed her at the conservatory. Waivers distributed. I forgot to get permission in advance. Because people were wandering through the rooms, in reverie, and did not want to be interrupted or filmed, this was a chore. Xin Hi drew the attention of the conservatory security by stealing a bag lunch from the backpack of a child on a field trip. Security ordered us to leave. We told them we were shooting a documentary about the space. We skulked to the bonsai garden, shot six feeble minutes of footage, and were ejected. In the ensuing scuffle, Jonson dropped our camera in the koi pond.