Tim Horvath - Understories

Word got around — Wesley was one to watch. He fancied himself a grand master with chessboards lined up and down, snot-nosed prodigies from all nations put in their places as he slid his retinue of warriors and church officials around the board. Or a Vassilonian chef who juggled several complex dishes at once, undaunted by the dozens of burners. His mom boasted about him to her bridge club, that he had a girlfriend and a lease, and assured him that his father would’ve been “busting his buttons.” The only ones he couldn’t seem to dazzle were the only two he wanted to, Inez and Gunther. Dissolve into—

Gunther. They are kids, still, on the tracks. They are, what, nine? Ten? In his memory it is a single long take, the day endless, tracks extending through industrial complexes and abandoned fields and farmland, the ties never letting you settle into an exact rhythm, the boys hatching schemes for derailings, robberies, and kidnappings of secretly willing ladies.

Gunther grabs his shoulder. “Stop.”

Between ties, they pause, listening. Wes hears nothing. In the distance, the blocky yellow lights of warehouses and streets, not the single white one growing closer.

They walk on, Gunther chanting some hip-hop tune of his own devising.

Wes knows even then that Gunther wants the actual train, the giant projectile of steel bearing down on them. He knows Gunther will bail from the rails but wants the blowback of air, his clothes billowing outward, his hair splaying, intimations of death and danger. Wes wants these things but does not. He wants Gunther to like and respect him and hang out with him. He wants to go to movies with Gunther, but Gunther does not like to go to movies. Gunther likes girls, real ones.

Flash forward to full-grown Gunther, an avowed, unabashed anticinemite. “Just wait,” Wes’s mother had insisted, “he’ll come around,” which he’d always believed, but lately he’d begun to concede it might never happen. Gunther was staunch.

It was something of a cliché: You’d go anticinemitic in college and then become some industry clone a year after graduation. There were, too, the older ones who predated the Dimming and still spoke nostalgically of before, right up to the citywide debates that trialed their tongues and brought forth arguments of such verve and eloquence, they were sure they’d triumph. But the darkness had gone forward. Some had had the wherewithal to leave, but for others where would they go; how would they relearn the topos of sidewalk and curb, find an edible knish, decent shoes, and so they stayed on, their grumbling a steady soundtrack even as film lashed at their laundry lines, and it was fortunate that many were hard of hearing and kept to their apartments.

Gunther was old at heart, Wes’s mom said, but Inez begged to differ, saying, rather, that he’d never grown up. Like Wes, he’d been steeped in film from the womb, his mother one of the balloon-bellied who spent hours of her pregnancy under the endlessly looping sonogram in 2.5.6. Just being there, the scientists told them, brought the unborn bliss, for they would sense always a womb that limned the world.

Gunther and Wes had played on streets that were studios and sets and theaters. How, then, to account for his demurral, his stoic resistance? Some wanted the zoning laws to be stricter, wanted to preserve some streets as oases of contemplation (as if there weren’t contemplative films. See Fog Line, see Tarkovsky passim). But Gunther wanted it gone, all of it.

Of course he and Inez butted heads. He’d stare into his plate when Wes tried to bring them together; “Dinner with the Dim,” Gunther had dubbed it. He’d held his tongue, at least, refraining from accusing her of “nocturnocidal tendencies,” part of his larger rant about how the whole city was an anthill of cinaddicts, not just those with the wrist chains.

“It was like I wasn’t even there for your asshole friend,” Inez told him that night. “Your nut case, paranoid recluse of a friend. I don’t get it. I don’t understand the basis of your friendship. You’re going in opposite directions in life. I hope.”

“It’s largely racquetball-based these days,” Wes told her, which bore some truth. Play they did, though ball whacks were interspersed with confidences and discussion of Deleuze.

She shook her head. “This boy loyalty, I don’t get it. If you were brothers, it would be one thing. Tell him to grow the fuck up.”

He had the sudden urge to see Gunther, wanted his ear, wanted to talk to someone who’d known him since they were measured in inches. Maybe Gunther could offer something, make it go away. He changed course, ducked into another alleyway, little more than a crevice. Gunther’s neighborhood was riddled with these narrow old-city vestiges, too close-quartered to squeeze films into. They were sanctuary for the Gunthers and, if you believed certain newspapers, terrorist breeding grounds. It was the most ethnically mixed part of Palamoa, neighborhoods that huddled close and went dark early. He hadn’t memorized the way but remembered a temple and a botanica, and if he could find one of these, he knew he could find Gunther’s.

Oh but the darkness was a balm. At that moment he would’ve stepped straight into another one of Gunther’s meetings. The pitchest black he’d ever been in. Literally, they’d led him underground, blindfolded, far enough down that street noise receded entirely. Somewhere in the city’s guts. It was cold, and even when his eyes adjusted, there was nothing upon which to anchor his vision. That was the idea: light purge. They sat in silence for a while. He heard his own breath, no other, and felt attuned to the slightest twitchings of his brain. An ululation arose, followed by something hornlike, and then, one by one, like surfacing orcas, the voices broke:

“. . out of a hundred. . maybe twelve to pursue further, two of whom said they might come not sure if they’re among us right now.”

“One is.”

“. . helped a seventy-two-year-old move to New York.”

“. . alongside scientists on studies of lungs and particulate matter.”

“. . book, Palamoaization and the Posthuman due out next year from. . University Press. . academic respectability. . infiltrate the higher institutions of learning. . the classrooms.”

Drawn originally by curiosity, Wes knew Gunther wanted to win him over to the whole shebang, including the orgy at the end, nakedness and exploration of touch that shrugged off gender or orientation or background or number involved. Thankfully Gunther had warned him; Wes pictured Gunther himself reaching for him, or returning to daylight not knowing, and so he had opted out of this part of the night, which was fine. Plus he’d just started dating Inez at this point and had no intention of cheating on her.

“It’s not even sexual, really,” Gunther had insisted. “It’s a bracketing out of everything that Palamoa stands for and embracing all that it rejects.”

“Sure, not sexual.” Wes wondered whether Gunther had really deluded himself so thoroughly in the name of disillusionment.

Maybe he and Inez just needed to get away more. Inez had accompanied the higher-ups to a couple of festivals as part of her job, but the only trips they’d taken together were to Colorado, where Inez’s parents had retired after the farm sold. They’d flown into Denver a year into their relationship, made a vacation of it. Altitude or psychosomatic reaction, the first couple of days for Wes were a continuous migraine, everything too sharp, vertiginous. The third evening, he strode into a moment as incontrovertible as déjà vu. They were on some street in Lodo closed to traffic, and after dinner and drinks they strode by a Cuban place where a live band out front blared a sweet old mambo, trumpets darting around a sultry crooner. A few feet ahead of Wes, a woman sashayed in a tight black dress, the correspondence between her movement and the sound track so exact, he was spellbound, and he wanted to point it out to Inez, who, to his delight when he turned, herself looked like a screen star. She’d been watching with him and declared, “You want her,” and he’d tried to convey what he’d experienced, but she wouldn’t hear of it. “You’re human,” she said. “It’s okay.” Then, suggestively: “Make it up to me later.”