Eric Puchner - Model Home

She wanted a cigarette. Something about the Pop-Tarts. She hadn’t smoked one for years — but suddenly she wanted to feel the dark, feathery warmth in her lungs.

The feeling persisted at work. There was something about the PV County public schools office — the bare walls, maybe, yolk-yellow and studded here and there with thumbtacks — that made the craving more pronounced. She found Mikolaj, her cameraman, sitting by himself in the recording studio, blond hair hanging in a ponytail down his back. She hoped it was damp from the shower and not greasy. Mikolaj had been a filmmaker in communist Poland; Camille didn’t understand the details, except that he’d been involved in the Solidarity movement somehow and had fled the country when a warrant went out for his arrest. His dream was to make an allegorical zombie film about Polish history. Instead, to support himself, he was making videos about family planning and the PVCPS payroll system. Camille would have liked to find him an inspirational figure.

“Hello, Camille,” he said. His right eye was bloodshot, a nebula of red spreading from one corner. He had the weedy arms and bedtime squint that Camille associated with hitchhikers. She always felt nervous around him, shy and staticky, as though she were tuned between stations. “Today’s the big day for presentation.”

“I’m sure everything will be fine.”

“I don’t know,” he said bitterly. “These parents are worse than communist. They want to make law against sex.”

“It’s understandable. McMartin Preschool and everything, and now Mandy Rogers.”

“Mandy Rogers?”

“The girl who was abducted.”

“Oh, yes. Very sad. Boo-hoo.” She smelled something on his breath, a whiff of mouthwash. “On every news show, this one girl.”

“Did you go over the new script?” she asked, to change the subject.

“This is your important news. A girl with no brains, the whole world should pray for her!” Mikolaj leaned forward in his seat. “I can ask you a question, Camille? About my film?”

“Well, honestly, I don’t have much time right now.”

“Do you think this is good title?” he said. “ Hunt the Mists Slowly ?”

Camille glanced at his untucked shirt, one tail of which was stained with a ring of coffee. She wondered if he’d used it for a coaster. “I think maybe just one ‘mist’ is better. Hunt the Mist. ”

He looked at her for a moment. “Yes, of course,” he said gratefully. “They hunt for one mist only, the mist of freedom. The big mist that is never in touching distance.”

Camille walked back to her office. Perhaps he wasn’t drunk, as she suspected, but demented with homesickness. Or — the most likely explanation — he was both. Last week, searching for a slide, Camille had rummaged through a box under the light table and come across a suspicious-looking bottle, empty except for a heeltap of liquid. There was a square of downy white on the bottle where the label had been peeled off. And two mornings ago she’d found a strange note in the top drawer of her desk: YOU ARE BEAUTYFUL, it read, followed by a string of words she couldn’t decipher. She’d hired Mikolaj out of charity and felt betrayed by these developments.

In her office, one last time, Camille went over the script to Earth to My Body: What’s Happening? skimming carefully through each scene, which she’d storyboarded in colored pencil next to an accompanying narrative. She slowed down for the section titled “Conception, or What a Long Strange Trip.” This was the part the committee had objected to the first time around. She’d planned on using actual stock footage of sperm invading an egg, filmed under a microscope, but several PTA members and Father Gladstone from the Roman Catholic archdiocese had protested. They were concerned about the footage having been taken in a lab. “This is the miracle of life,” Father Gladstone said. “We don’t want these kids thinking they can duplicate it in their basement.”

Camille’s brilliant idea was this: she’d get actual children to participate, dressing them in T-shirts that said SPERM and EGG on them. She’d videotape them on the old soccer field behind the art department. The sperm — ten of them — would run across the field and “invade” the egg, which would consist of five girls holding hands in a circle. Only one of them, the Chosen Sperm, would be let in. It would be fun, and the kids would be able to relate to it.

When she explained all this later, however, standing behind the podium and addressing the “concerned citizens” of the advisory committee — including several representatives from different faiths — she was met with a disconcerting hush. The auditorium was large and windowless, which only amplified the silence. Camille’s eyes drifted to Rabbi Silverberg, who was staring at her rather than the Xeroxed script in his lap. He liked to sit in the fourth row and scowl at her ominously through his beard. In front of him sat Wendy Felsher, a community educator from Planned Parenthood. Camille tried to imagine Rabbi Silverberg in his underwear, as someone had once advised her to do, but picturing the religious dignitary in his briefs made her feel indecent.

“Which kids do you plan on using?” This came from one of the teachers, Narmada Khan, normally an outspoken defender of Camille’s work. The committee was supposed to be a perfect cross section of the public but in fact had been more or less randomly appointed by the school board.

“I thought we’d use the ACCESS kids,” Camille said, adjusting the microphone. “I talked to Sue Kaufman already, who’s running the summer program. We’ll need permissions, of course.”

“Isn’t that the gifted program?”

One of the other teachers snorted. “Hoo, boy. Good luck.”

“I’m worried about exposing these kids on videotape,” Carl Boufis said. He was the only father in the PTA and most people believed he was gay. “Who’s going to be doing the filming?”

“Mikolaj Czarnecki,” Camille mumbled. “My cameraman.”

Mikolaj stood up from the front row and did a Shakespearean bow, rolling his hand in a long flourish of gestures, as though he were shaking out a sprain. He seemed a bit lost afterward and sat down in a different seat than before. Camille smiled at the audience.

“What’s going to happen to this so-called egg?” Father Gladstone said, squinting at the Xerox in his lap.

“Nothing,” Camille said. “I mean, it’s just a demonstration.”

“Could we follow up with a birth scenario somehow? Just, um, thinking out loud here, tell me if I’m overstepping, but could the girls in the egg hold up a banner maybe? One that says BABY?”

“Good idea,” Wendy Felsher, the Planned Parenthooder, said. “Let’s thoroughly confuse the viewers.”

Father Gladstone ignored her. “It’s the sense of continuity I’m worried about. We don’t want to give a false impression, like this egg’s going out with the trash.”

Wendy Felsher scowled. “I don’t think we need to politicize this, Father.”

His face hardened. “As long as it feels like a permanent choice, that’s all I’m asking. We’re not playing God here.”

“And what if this is a rape?”

“This is not a rape,” Camille said. “It’s an educational video.”

“Father Gladstone’s just trying to be accurate,” Carl Boufis said.

“In that case,” Wendy Felsher said, “why don’t we have someone come in with a coat hanger T-shirt?”

“Ha ha ha ha!” Mikolaj said from the front row, slapping his knees. “This is much more interesting!”

Camille’s cigarette craving deepened. She looked up at the back row and found Lexie Cross, an eighth-grade teacher and the only member of the committee besides Father Gladstone who was wearing black. She’d moved here six months ago from London, which seemed — at this moment — like the epitome of sophistication.