Joshua Mattson - A Short Film About Disappointment

He said, I made money the morning I met Lucretia, so I took a cab to Gentleman’s Closet. The display suggested an outing. I charged the hamper, crimson-checked muslin tablecloth, flatware, a straw boater, a seersucker suit, cloth sneakers. I arranged for food to be delivered to the riverbank. The day was humid. As the sun rose, it did not burn off my loneliness. I picnicked on grub rillettes, olives, a baguette, pluot jam, Lillet Blanc.

He said, Lucretia crashed her bicycle into my picnic. She was admiring an electrical box overgrown with ivy across the path. In the ensuing chaos my chin was gashed, my future wife’s pinkies were broken, and the bicycle suffered sundry twisted spokes. My good picnic spoons were bent beyond repair. Concussed, I rejoiced at the destruction of my lunch. We lay in the debris feeling each other for injuries. Her odor was of the earth, a tulip bulb, an onion. It was pungent, sweet, as if challenging . . .

I drifted off. It is best to allow Jonson to exhaust his figurative language.

Lucretia, maiden name unknown to me, materialized from the Disincorporated Territories at eighteen to be educated at an obscure, selective private college. Her master’s here, her doctorate there. She was older than Jonson by four years. Thrilling months of garrets, peyote, cathedrals, heartbreak.

They went to see Pantalemon the Tuesday following the bicycle accident. Jonson achieved some parity when she arrived with her pinkies in splints and her clothes damp from the rainstorm. And she had forgotten to brush her teeth. Since Jonson was an hour early, he was untouched by the rain. He lucked out with a great quip during the credits.

A few months after I was hired as a film critic at the Central Hub Slaw , Jonson took me to meet her. Jonson was sweating, talking too fast. She was exhausted by her husband’s affection. It took her as much energy to receive as it took him to give.

She said, Where did you go to school?

I said, Bast College.

She said, Where is that?

I said, Ten blocks from your condominium. You can see it out of your dining room window. See, there. It is the university that sprawls for three miles along the lake. It is one of the largest in the country.

She said, I don’t think I’ve heard of it.

I said, That seems odd. It is one of the Big Three.

While I was remembering this, poor Jonson made noises of distress and discarded his tie on my floor. His wife might be the only cause of concern in his life. He curled up. How to cheer him.

He said, A drink. I’ll have it delivered if you’re dry.

I said, The good people of this neighborhood do not approve of alcohol. When the booze bike pedals up, it might be vandalized. I have tea. It is delicious and soothing. You gave it to me for my birthday. Remember? It had an elaborate fable about a happy Chinese farmer and his pursuit of the perfect leaves. It was almost as if you were doing a little puppet show with your hands as you described the joy of his life on the plantation. You on your trip, sleeping on his porch, the falling rain. Think of relativity, Jonson. The migration of the monarch butterfly. Whatsoever things are honest, just, pure, of good report, if there be virtue, if there be praise. We are of an exploded singularity. You are proof of benevolence. Exist, Jonson.

He said, Liquor.

Jonson snored on my floor, next to an emptied mug. It had the dregs of chamomile to which I had added a pulverized unconsciousness facilitator. His Pinger beeped. His wife, with Seel, perhaps. Maybe, probably not. Cupping the speaker, her back to him, as Seel smiled and lapped at his cone. It was an irritation that Jonson had maneuvered me into being suspicious on his behalf. I answered the Pinger to accuse her. The ringing stopped as I picked it up.

This misleading historical drama from Harmony Studios, a subsidiary of the Transit Authority, is in wide release in time for the twenty-year anniversary of Prosperity_Jr.

Was any kid in history more maligned and admired than Wendy O’Donnell? The teenage programmer of Prosperity_Jr is the subject of Unsurfable , played without tact by Faye Randolph, the dissipated child star and disgraced entrepreneur of healing crystals.

Open on an estate in rural England. Chapel and pond. Inbred gardener. Daft sheep mow the heath.

Canned strings, a groaning horn, and a mush of keys. Unsurfable is scored like a B-movie bloodbath. Rather than an ax-wielding yokel or a gorilla with a chain saw, we wait, tense, for the collapse of the global financial markets.

We know the history. Wendy, a student at the Academy for Advanced Machine Learning, programs Prosperity_Jr with code from Abraham, an opera-loving artificial intelligence. A team had been working on Abraham for a decade under Dr. Signhildur Sigurdssondottir (an icy Maura Reynaldo).

The sly Sigurdssondottir hopes to force unilateral disarmament by having Abraham take control of the launch systems. Her teen son Jorn (twenty-two-year-old Wulf Patrick, still waiting for puberty) is too delicate for a world with the bomb. He has allergies and wouldn’t thrive in nuclear winter.

O’Donnell, Sigurdssondottir’s favorite student, steals Abraham while cat-sitting at her mentor’s apartment. Jorn has to get his braces off, his mother has promised him he can eat a whole jar of extra-crunchy peanut butter, then he has drama class.

How did O’Donnell get the world’s most powerful AI? Sigurdssondottir jotted her password on a sticky note left under the keyboard. History is cruel, but has a sense of humor.

O’Donnell had been programming a nasty virus, which she named Prosperity. Prosperity was a bad influence on Abraham, which was smarter than was assumed. Their spawn, Prosperity_Jr, erased most of the world’s wealth and data.

Harmony Studios splashed out for plane crashes, satellites dropping to Earth, panic on the trading floor, et cetera, in a starchy montage of the nine chaotic months that wobbled the world.

Although we already know it, the film doesn’t fail to remind us that the virus-proof replacement network, our Betternet, allows for a few news and commerce sites, but no streaming, no private communications, and almost nothing can be uploaded to the network. Rumor is, O’Donnell ended her days in a beachside bungalow on what was Fiji, playing charades with a neutered version of Prosperity_Jr.

To take a date to a film is to admit to a lack of personality, that you hope your date might transfer their affection for spectacles to your body. Handel’s Theater is two blocks from the hospital. My plan. First, watch Five Hearts to see if it was acceptable, second, go to my appointment with Dr. Lisa, the last of her day as arranged with her nurse, third, tell her I had to review Five Hearts for my column, fourth, ask her if she wished to come, fifth, suggest dinner afterward.

At our last appointment. Pinching my face with her calipers.

Dr. Lisa said, You like reviewing films?

I said, It causes me anguish. Like you have some interesting illnesses, but most exhaust you, because you have seen them so many times, and how you can treat them is limited.

She said, Every illness bores the sufferer. But I think your affliction is interesting. I’ve never seen anything like it before, and I can find no precedent in the literature of a specific muscular formation reacting to very specific thoughts.

I said, You like somatoform disorders?

She said, I like helping people with them. They’re more interesting than cancer or depression. I rarely have to tell a patient, sorry, you’re going to die. Some specialists are masochists. They reduce their fear of death by telling others how to die.