Rudolph Wurlitzer - Slow Fade

CUT TO JIM WALKING DOWN THE STREET. . so sunk in anxiety and despair that he barely notices a street festival of chanting pilgrims, snake charmers, sword swallowers, and acrobats. He passes a wooden platform where Kathakali dancers move through the rituals of an ancient myth with slow graceful gestures. One woman, her face divided into two colors, red and blue, laughs with one side of her face and cries with the other. He moves on, through screaming children throwing bags of water and urine. They surround him, taunting him, covering him with red dye, and drenching him with the awful fluid. He stands there helpless and enraged, unable to control himself. .

LATER, HIS CLOTHES STILL DRENCHED. . he finds himself before a cigarette stall on the corner of a busy thoroughfare. A small gray-haired man with most of his teeth missing sits on a rug at the rear of the stall sorting through a pile of handmade cigarettes. Jim stares at him, unable to approach. Several times he tries and the man waits expectantly, looking up at him. Jim glances at his watch, as if he has an appointment. Across the street pilgrims perform bathing rituals in a deep green pool in front of an ancient temple where women have spread out their laundry to dry on the stone steps. Monkeys chatter in the trees. A funeral procession passes, a child’s body lying on a board covered with garlands of fresh flowers. “Time is a cruel master,” the man says, but Jim can only nod. Finally he buys a pack of American cigarettes and leaves. .

AT THIS point, Wesley, sitting at a café on the beach at Mazatlán, stopped reading the typed transcript of Walker’s tape even though there were more than a few pages remaining. It was past noon and he was on his third margarita and he felt slightly dizzy and more than a little hung over. Walking toward him on the beach were Sidney, the second unit cameraman, and Harold, a young producer from London sporting a new Panama hat and a Hawaiian shirt who had flown in the previous night and whose mission Wesley had somehow forgotten. He was not happy to see them. He needed time for his own thoughts, for this sudden permission he seemed to have granted himself toward an interior dialogue, or failing that, at least a period of refuge from the gleeful and vicious publicity he had received since his walkout and subsequent firing two weeks ago. “Neti, neti,” he said aloud, realizing he knew nothing about Walker’s mind and precious little about his own.

“You certainly chose a bucolic spot for yourself, Mr. Hardin,” Harold said, maneuvering his bulk into a chair as he and Sidney sat down at the table.

He paused, trying to feel his way through the sullen atmosphere Wesley was projecting. The fact that he was in awe of the legendary director didn’t help. Wesley sat immobile, his face half hidden underneath a peasant’s straw hat, staring at the thick line of jungle where squads of green parrots kept up a raucous chatter. Inside the café the jukebox played Hank Williams to an empty room. After a lengthy silence, Harold tried again: “Your charming wife told me to tell you that she won’t be joining us for lunch. She pleads guilty to a shopping compulsion directed toward native rugs.”

Wesley said nothing, looking at Harold with a preoccupied frown until Harold was forced to look away. Sidney, on the other hand, didn’t mind Wesley’s mood, much as it seemed to match his own, and he waited until he had ordered a drink before he tried to bring the situation into some kind of focus.

“Harold might be able to come up with money to continue shooting. I filled him in this morning about the stuff we shot in Durango and those few scenes down here and the one with Evelyn on the fishing boat.”

“Of course I have to look at the footage,” Harold said. “But I’m thrilled with the whole concept. And I think a personal straight-from-the-guts exploration of a major crisis in a famous man’s life has broad popular appeal.”

“I was thinking just the opposite,” Wesley said.

“Indeed?” Harold said. “Sidney gave me the impression you were quite excited about the way things were going.”

“I don’t want to think about results, which means I don’t want to think about money, which means I don’t want to consider turning what are essentially private notes into a feature film. I started shooting out of rage, just wanting to shove it up the studio’s ass. I’m not interested in hustling my private life and I don’t want anyone else doing it either.”

“Then what am I doing here?” Harold asked.

“I don’t know,” Wesley said quietly. “And I don’t want to know.”

“Does that mean a wrap?” Sidney asked.

“For you it does.”

Wesley watched a sailboat slowly coming about in the offshore breeze and felt himself to be in a kind of agony. He was either saying things that were too personal or not relevant at all.

“Are you considering other projects?” Harold was asking.

“I’m developing a script to be shot in India. A contemporary story about young Americans searching for themselves and finding the opposite.”

“That seems a sweaty task,” Harold said. “Sort of a producer’s nightmare.”

“I would rather read about it myself,” Wesley admitted.

“Perhaps you don’t want to work at all. Perhaps it’s time for philosophy and rumination.”

“Perhaps.” Wesley rose slowly from his seat. Swaying slightly he looked down at them, his face stern and yet somehow fragile. “My store is not open, gentlemen. Either for personal little forays into my beleaguered psyche or for broad popular entertainment. But perhaps you can develop something between yourselves.”

With that he left them, walking slowly down to the beach along the edge of the sea, his white linen pants rolled up past his ankles, his blue cotton shirt falling loosely over his waist. The air was heavy and moist and he walked in a slow shuffle through the sand. His body was no longer friendly to him. His joints ached and his breathing was shallow and he moved with no obvious purpose or direction. He could not remember a time when he wasn’t involved in some project, either going toward or leaving behind. There had always been something to fasten on to, people around to keep him going, keep him on the point, pull him through. It was true that over the past decade he had come to take it all for granted, that he had in a sense just gone through the motions as developments formed around him from the accumulated weight of his professional presence. It was a somewhat startling fact that he was still functioning at all after more than thirty films in the can, that the inevitable damage to body, mind, and soul, although severe and now seemingly terminal, had been held in check enough for him to sustain a reputation as a safe and bankable director. There had always been a raw primitive edge to his work, a kind of sentimental passion that every once in a while would bring in gold from the box office. But all of that was gone now.

He took off his white linen jacket and lay down on the warm sand. But the noon light was hard and exhausting and abruptly he moved off the beach to sit in the shade of two giant palm trees. The light was softer and more diffuse and that pleased him. An awareness of light was what cushioned him when he approached a scene, what protected him from the mechanical boredom of the medium. But fuck light, he thought. He was headed for a black hole. The journey of his son toward the disappearance of his daughter reminded him of that. He resented having to read Walker’s pages. It was a forced and unnatural arrangement, one that he shouldn’t have initiated. But unfolding the remaining pages, he began to read anyway:

INTERIOR — DAY. . Jim walks through the hotel lobby, obviously distraught, his clothes torn and matted from the festival hi-jinks. . As he picks up the key at the front desk, he is handed a slip of paper from Samendra with Clementine’s address in New Delhi. . Entering his room he reaches for a bottle of Scotch on the dresser. The curtains are drawn against the late afternoon sun and Lacey is sleeping, curled in on herself as if for protection. She opens her eyes, regards him. “Could you come into bed and just hold me for a minute?” she asks. . He takes a long pull from the bottle and steps out of his clothes before he answers: “I have to get into the shower. I’m covered with piss and slime and probably have about three months to live.” He disappears into the bathroom. . As he’s standing under the shower Lacey enters beside him and starts soaping his back, kissing him on the shoulder. “I get panicked when you get weird and aggressive.” She reaches around his waist and takes hold of his cock. “I need an adventure,” she says, squeezing him gently. . He shuts his eyes as her soapy fingers surround him. “What kind of an adventure?” He turns her around and lifts one of her legs so that he can slide into her. “Any kind as long as it’s new,” she whispers as he slowly begins to move inside her. .