Tim Horvath - Understories

Such gear switching was inseparable from what she loved about the job, what she loved about Palamoa. Why they stayed — born there, they’d been suckled alike on celluloid, barely blinked a blink without a film in their peripheries. (“Film,” went the song, “you long, blinking train.”) Till he was three, Wes had fallen asleep each night with Mothlight flickering against his ceiling: semitranslucent red-pink wings that burst into petals and veiny leaves and ramifying shapes that then broke apart into a red-pink snow, all of it fluttering above him gentle as a blanket. Brakhage, the incantatory name of the filmmaker he’d later learn from his mom, just as he’d learn that she always knew he was asleep when his cries faded and she could still make out the faint crackle of silent film wending its way.

Hard to picture Inez as “Julia” then, hard to picture her milking and bailing, sidestepping shit amid the grunters and lowers on her family farm in what were then Palamoa’s outskirts. She still rose early. Everything else had shifted: Now where her farm was were the cineburbs, and Inez turned heads (human, not livestock) in stunning strapless things and camisoles you had to study closely to tell if you were seeing through them, while the handsome barn, a five o’clock shadow of paint peel, had itself made an appearance in several films. As kids do, she’d plotted escapes — New York, Ganzoneer, any elsewhere — and somehow gotten sucked right into the city’s center.

Once Palamoa had drawn ships and sailors eager to reverse scurvy and celibacy, rushing headlong for the inland markets, for memories and paid oblivion. While they got off their sails got replaced: The Palamoans redid ships from top to bottom, but it was sails that built her, giant factories attiring ships in blaring new canvas. Today’s waterfront shimmered, lobster boats sharp-hued, whitecaps whispering of depth, but for the cameras, really. Wes and Inez, like many young couples, lived out by the factories, taking advantage of the laughable rents and cheap eats. As they walked past the old buildings, they could hear the outsized machinery churning out screens, and a figure of speech had it that you could still cross an ocean with a Palamoan sail.

Inez must have seen things as malleable to infinity. Why scrub plates and ruin skin, when, with a slight rearrangement, you could put their dirt-bedeviled state at the front of the reel and their squeaky virginity at the end? Something like this must have been her thinking. How else could she justify such blatant neglect, like she couldn’t see the piles she was leaving, the clogs she caused?

Wes cleaned up after her in those early days, not begrudgingly — since it was her. And it was a novelty to him — he’d always prided himself on his disheveledness, his clothes creases that blurred into rumples, scornful of those who cared about such things. He was gawky and had to duck under lowhanging doorways; his glasses were scratchy, and he projected for parties and knew where to score if he didn’t already have the substances you wanted. He was a hipster. His tattoo was unique. It ran up his right arm, like something in Sharpie, a hunter done in a few strokes, sneaking up on a bright red bison. When he showed it to Inez, she traced it as if she might feel the pigments.

“Is it static?”

Wes had smiled. It looked static, all right. The renderer, a friend from the art school Wes had dropped out of, had done it seamlessly; even Wes couldn’t tell where skin became screen. He twitched and she gave a little gasp as it activated, and the hunter pursued the bison, who snorted comically twice and then ran into a cave. The skin blacked out until, with a blast from the hunter’s torch, light returned. The punch line was the bison posed against the wall of the cave, holding preternaturally still, blending in perfectly with the paintings of animals already there. It was gorgeous, actually, this last scene, worthy of the Lascaux artist him or herself.

“Wow,” she said. “Play it again, Wes.”

After he did, she pulled up her own shirt to reveal hers, not animation but black and white on the center of her back, her family’s farm somewhere off in the country done as a home movie, retrochromed to look older than it was, her grandfather holding up a fish, languorous cattle in a field. It was tasteful, and the bump of her spine, jutting in the middle and stretching the screen in odd places, only added to the charm. It made his feel like an amateur sketch. Everyone had heard the stories about tattoos jarred into motion in the act of lovemaking, the lover helpless to turn them off, and he wanted this, now, to be the case for them, and, reaching out to caress the bump, he could see her tattoo refract onto his fingers, felt himself connect to her then, something that could still happen, then.

And now he took deep breaths and strategized as to how to buy himself some time. Stress he was used to. . they’d cut back — the economy, everyone hurting, probably inevitable if you could play reality backward as he did sometimes just messing around in the booth, but regardless, positions had been cut, and now Wes often did the work of, by his calculations, his gripe-boasts to Inez, two or three men — he says men even fully cognizant that there are fantastic women projectionists, Daniella Riordan, need he say more, though it wasn’t all that common, convention no doubt instead of anything deep down in the helices. Say “projectionist” and, as with “doctor,” the synapses summon up a male.

He’s no doctor, of course, neither the prestige nor the pay nor, indeed, the malpractice, though they treated him and the M.D.’s and the shrinks as equals at the mandated trainings on cinaddiction. He still wasn’t sure where he stood on the controversy. Nervous systems so enmeshed with films that they were needed ? Ask him before that party and you might’ve gotten a different answer. Some artsy guy whose name he can no longer call up goes to a film-free party and gets stuck in the bathroom — don’t ask how — and in there he just goes haywire, hyperventilating and rolling on the floor. When they pry open the door, his eyes are husks of glass, face flaring red, and his fists — these he’ll never forget — clenched so that his nails leave indentations in his palms. Random frat boy makes the mistake of suggesting he just have a drink and chill out. It takes six to pull the addict off him, face bloodied, and to drag him out to the quad, where something is showing. In minutes, he’s calmer than a monk. Before that Wes’d been 100 percent sure it was all mind, but the single incident brought matter neck and neck. It was a weird thing culturally. You could still joke about it, but a growing number got classified and wore the wrist chains and took offense if you made light. Still, that’s what the emergency reel was for. By law and as a precaution, he needed to get something up there, and so, for the first time in his career, he reached for the bright red wheel.

Wes and Inez stayed in spite of what the world had to say about them, how it typecast them, the Palamoans — gluttonous image ingesters, perpetual dupes, back floaters in a lotus sea. Get a few drinks in her and Inez fired back, a side of her that drew him originally. He loved to sit back and listen: Yeah, navel gazers and deadheads, like you’re not going to find those everywhere? Come on, could we possibly be any more disillusioned? We gaze at more navels — see more, experience more. Innies? Outies ? (She’d lift up her own shirt at this point to reveal her own adorable outie.) Tonight if I want to I can see a film about gay Indians or the sex lives of Mongolian sheepherders. I mean, everywhere people eat, shit, fuck, and live their little lives, but we. . we live across history. We know elsewheres. He dug that she really did want to learn about all of those things, then, at least.