Tim Horvath - Understories

8. Missing his bidet, he nonetheless learns to crap with gusto and hitch up his trousers with native dexterity and aplomb.

9. Nightly he falls skin to skin with one or another non-Mette, some as young as Aline, though the numbers aren’t spoken. It is the layers of heat, also without number, from outer to innermost that he most wants to capture in paint, and where he feels acutest failure. Other failures, those as husband and father, are only temporary, he reminds himself; one day he will reunite with them.

10. Darkness gradually usurps all. He works in the hut but dreams an igloo of Sistine proportions, alighting on a ladder like Michelangelo to fresco the underbelly of snow. Disoriented when he awakens, he staggers outside. The moon and stars collude in faint illumination; his blancs have ceded to various shades of dim. He should’ve brought gris but it will take half a year to arrive now from across the ocean. To think months ago he shunned light, hid from it! The pictures of Mette and children that he’s propped up around the room along with his own paintings: often he cannot make them out.

11. Still he paints. And paints and paints. And carves and carves. Canvases rim the room: The Little Dreamer, The Man with the Ax, the sprawling Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going ? He surveys this last from right to left: an infant in a furtufted amauti ; at center canvas the tree of life, its trunk an upthrust seal, with an Eve who reaches for an apple bitten as yet only by frost, and across the left he has captured three afterlives: Agneriartarfik lush with berries and caribou, Noqumiut for the lazy hunters, sentenced to a diet of butterflies, and lastly Agelermiut, where the seasons barter their features back and forth. It is, he knows, a masterpiece.

12. He decides carvings will not be his legacy. To heat he burns some, burns others to work by.

13. Blowing warm, clear crystals to lithen his brushes, he knows with certainty he’s stumbled on paradise.

14. Puking blood, he fancies himself Viking warrior rather than syphilitic artist.

15. Over a century later, museumed, his works make spectators unpleasantly cold. Some say, “We should go someplace warm.” “Starbucks?” “Tahiti!”

16. Into his Creeping Glacier series, fronds of South Pacific green keep slipping like shards from a neighboring universe. These, plus the nipples and pubes he barely conceals under walrus hide, yield countless hours of talk for critics and prudes.

The City in the Light of Moths

The projectionist’s heart broke as the spool of the film he was screening snapped, sending a thousand frames rocketing through the room. But no, we are skipping over crucial moments: the groping for scissors; the hands, known for steadiness, atremble; and a last look through the thick glass before the lunge. The first cut missed but the second connected, and then he’d watched the life exit slowly, like some enemy combatant dying in his arms, so close he could taste its breath, watch last prayers sputter on its lips.

He’d imagined innumerable iterations of this, foiling terrorists and rescuing his block — no, the whole city. In his imaginings, they charged in in ski masks and released the radioactive xenon that glowed inside his projector, or forced him at gunpoint to put on their radical film, or one where the screen would go blindingly bright at some point, scorching every retina in the room as if they were all standing at White Sands, unprotected, followed by a sonic boom that would shred their tympana. His fantasies expanded and contracted but inevitably wound up with him as the guest of honor at some gala, Inez’s thin fingers entwined with his own under the table, “ Wesssss . .” engulfed in applause.

Now he gazed down into the theater that stretched out below, “the canyon,” they called it, as if it had been shaped by wind and water and time, the backs of heads anthropomorphic rocks. The rocks were looking back up at him. Instead of irate cries, an eerie silence welled up, a thin veneer over a thousand sighs. He could win them back, he thought. Some down there knew him, some loved him, maybe not in the way he loved Inez, but still, the word suited. It would take, though, a move as boldly restorative as this was destructive, and as he glanced down he could see the film was even now tumbling into the room like floodwater.

Wes was required by law and by the powers vested in him as a projectionist to get another film flung up there as soon as possible. An audience in the lurch, in cinemus interruptus, would grow restless quickly. Uncountable other films commanded the sides of buildings for twenty miles. If he was lucky they’d pick themselves up and march out, grumbling and shaking their heads, some to return never, none happy. His wall might get its first mark, and Hatcher would rail at him: “Wes, what were you thinking! This ain’t the boondocks. The Historic District. Diplomats, power players. At a debut, no less.”

But darker possibilities loomed. The rowdy, the addicts — all it took was one or two, plus swirl in a couple of drinks — who might come right to the door, and let’s say they began pounding and yelling about tearing him apart limb from limb? He gripped the scissors tight. It wouldn’t be the first time a projectionist had been treated to vigilante justice. Technically outlawed, such violence was, but judges tended to look the other way, as if they themselves were watching a film on the wall opposite. Case in point: that dude over in District 4.1.5.E who’d twisted the lens so that the film was flipped on its side, but still, these things happen, except that out of spite or obstinacy or simple boneheadedness, he’d refused to fix it, sinking deeper into his lip’s curl when the boos and hisses reached fever pitch, and then when they’d yanked the bench slats out of the pavement and torn off the iron rests for battering, he’d still refused to right the film or even admit any wrongdoing. When they’d finished with him he’d been rearranged so that it was said that from that point on he would look at the world ever sideways.

Wes had always blamed the projectionist, but now he felt a shudder of empathy. Things happened fast. He thought of the opening of The Wild Bunch —lazy western town, women and children parading and singing down the dusty street. You knew it was about to be bad, but not how sudden and thick the blood would spurt. He reviewed his options. Under normal conditions he could change a flat in under a minute. Its seal broken, the emergency reel would hold him till he could get to the archives, and he had another film to change down the block, but he still had thirty-eight minutes to get to that.

But he stood paralyzed, stunned, not even sure whether he’d just seen what he thought he’d seen. Maybe he’d conjured the whole thing? Had that even been Inez up there?

Inez came home exhausted every evening these days, eyes bloated and hair mussed as she slipped past him into the tight apartment and made for the couch. Her stockinged feet pointed at where some ottoman ought to sit as she swigged her cognac and Coke down to the ice in the imitation snifter, while he sipped coffee and geared up for his own shift. No, she didn’t really want to talk about her day. No, nothing was different, nothing she could pinpoint. They were putting her on more projects, true. She was competent, had proved herself, and now they had her editing like three or four things at a time. She had to work through lunch and mind her crumbs at the console. She stayed late. This was how things happened, how you got shunted up the ladder. It was happening. At once she was editing a documentary about people obsessed with hats, a murder mystery about a surgeon whose twin brother has slain him and taken over his office, and a comedy with indie leanings about anarchists in love.