Tim Horvath - Understories

In soberer states, she’d extemporize about how Palamoans knew exactly where the cogs of illusion meshed and where the seams flickered by undetected, how life could be adjusted with the efficiency a tailor takes to a suit: a few seconds trimmed here, an inversion or two, a telling juxtaposition, voilá. Other cities may have known the wrath of monsoon and hurricane, but in Palamoa it was film, film coming down in torrents and pouring onto cutting-room floors, and it could unleash as much havoc as a force of nature, could sweep you away if you weren’t careful, leave you stunned and shell-shocked on your porch, wondering what had hit you. If anything, the Palamoans were consummate realists: none of that romantic crap for them, no waiting for rescue, no delusions of being on some grand hero’s journey. Their only deity was the mise-enscène, the frame — the smudgy/hyperlucid/eclipsed/doub/led/ fickle frame — that ushered in and closed out, made for happening and nonhappening. The line between abject cowardice and awe-inspiring courage might have everything to do with the frame and nothing at all with your heart. But, Gunther might have posed, what if you were outside the frame? Did you even exist then?

Inez could talk a streak, but for a while she shared her innermost thoughts only with Mervich, Henry H., who’d attained some celebrity with Reintegration Therapy, taking the splintered, shattered heap that contemporary life foisted on you and making you whole, gluing you back together. Guy’s all the king’s horses, Wes had thought. The treatments, from what he could gather, involved cooking and consuming a steady supply of veggie burgers sold by Mervich himself (they looked like Martian rocks) and taking long, hot baths. Mervich was a millionaire and was seeing Inez thanks to one of her work connections. But she swore by him. That went on for several months, and then one day his fees shot up inexplicably. From that day forward, Mervich’s name was non grata around the apartment, and Wes wondered but didn’t pry, sure she would share when she was ready, but that was never to make it into the frame.

“Into the frame”—yes, metaphors froth in his consciousness up there in the booth. Things can get slow; once he’s seen the feature for the fifth time, even at a remove — muffled audio, twice reflected in the double-paned glass — his mind does some odd turns. So, for instance, the give-out reel and the take-up reel move at the same time, but never at the same speed or in the same direction. When the film is starting out, the front wheel spins rapidly backward, and the lower one advances slowly forward. As the film progresses, they switch roles, so that by the end the lower reel is zipping along and the top one has slowed down. But there’s that moment — an instant, technically — the absolute midpoint, when the reels, spooling in opposite directions, must be, laws of physics, rotating at the exact same speed. As that instant is perceived it is already gone. The screen betrays nothing; only the one in the booth could know.

And isn’t this he and Inez? In mind and body, they occupy almost separate realities. When she is working, he is sleeping in or running his errands, and when she gets home, he’s headed out the door to project. Hours later he’ll stagger in, hopped up on cola and movie candy, or maybe his late-night perambulations have brought him to a peaceful place and he can simply steal under their sheets and listen to her breathe. Only at extremely rare moments are they precisely synchronized. And even then, opposites in so many ways.

Who, he wonders on occasion, is the one in the booth?

The projectionist’s nightmare: He is not in the booth. Well then, the booth — who’s manning it? The film running, the booth empty. Where is he? Mired in vague dream coordinates. And the film is hurtling toward its end, which he senses, viscerally as you might intuit the imminent death of a loved one many miles distant. Shit, shit. Running and running, he can’t get there, anywhere. The booth stays empty.

In a snap, he was no longer in the booth, the emergency reel up and doing its job. He’d already lost part of his audience, but a sizable number were sticking it out. He’d always wondered what the red reel held, secretly hoping it would be Mothlight. It wasn’t — it appeared to be a history of film and the city: scene from Cinema Paradiso where old Alfredo rotates the projector’s beam out into the square. Voice-over: “. . which some would call Palamoa’s moment of conception .” Cut to: workers hammering sail on a mast. Scratchy jazz, herky-jerky motion. The stilted quality of a flip book, its charm. Talk flanked by quaint quotation marks. Pleats, dames.

“Thanks for your patience!” he called out, stepping onto the floor. “A first time for everything! Please enjoy the show while we work out the technical difficulties upstairs!” Should’ve been wittier, he thought, should’ve been Wesser, called the backup reel “the reserve grapes,” thrown in some innuendo about the busted sex scene. He was still way out of sorts, though. Anyhow, he could already see them sinking back into their benches, settling into a story that they could never get too much of.

But instead of returning upstairs, he slipped away, crossed the street, and ducked into a hidden alleyway. He felt the liberation of a kid playing hooky. On the next block, something epic, Russian, wintry was showing, and beyond that? It was a fun house, only a fun house asked of you a single mind state, that peculiar to fun houses, whereas Palamoa demanded a continuous pivot, a peering into the pockets of life as they turned themselves inside out one by one. The films were free, of course. It had been written into the city charter at the Dimming. They’d never charge their citizens — what next, tax their moonlight, nickel-dime them for the evening breeze?

That breeze, faintly briny, buffeted him along now as he walked. As a teenager, he must’ve covered every block at least once. Ever revising his route, its logic. He’d do this time-travel thing, careful not to repeat any era, meandering through history decade by decade. Chaplin bumbling around inside the house teetering at the edge of a cliff in The Gold Rush → the dank, misty tunnels below L.A. in He Walked by Night → the binocular dance of voyeurism of Rear Window → The Apartment’s sadlovely rows of corporate futility → the stills at the peerless opening credits of The Wild Bunch → the purple ambush at the close of Vagabond → Pulp Fiction, any scene, really, but most of all the car, the car, the car → City of God’s featureless roof rows, sizzling tempers — he could gallivant over a century, cover the planet in a single swoop. If he timed it right he could hit most of his favorite scenes. It felt like being on a jet plane and watching a continent pass underwing — desert, mountains, lake, city, coast. Going in reverse had its own pleasures, and if you picked your route wisely you could find your way back to the Lumière brothers and Muybridge’s horse levitations, which felt akin to catching a glimpse of the big bang from the Hubble.

Usually there was no method to his travels beyond serendipity and his nose, free-floating in the zero gravity of visual possibility until something caught him and held him in thrall and denuded him of time and place. Sometimes hormones overcame him and he’d find himself down by the river amid the blocks of warehouses no one had bothered tamping up the paint job on. Xtown, where the moans and grunts, feigned and surely some genuine, of couples and threesomes and beyond, would’ve carried for miles but were mercifully drowned out by the sweeping sound tracks of less prurient walls. The streets here, darker, cloaked the pedestrian in anonymity, but once he’d spotted one of his teachers there, a Mr. Youngman. Youngman had nodded but said nothing, as if to suggest some shared understanding, some masculine code, though from that day on they averted eyes in the halls.