Dana Spiotta - Innocents and Others

Carrie took a cab to Sixth Avenue. It was already getting dark at 5:00. She paid for her ticket and headed into the theater. She saw the place was half full, and she snuck curious looks at her fellow New York City cineastes. The world was out shopping, and here the hard-core cinema lovers were waiting to be transported to the world of the Czech New Wave. And then she heard Meadow.

“Carrie!” Meadow was sitting toward the center back, all by herself. She waved Carrie over, and Carrie smiled and walked toward her.

“I thought you couldn’t come?” Meadow said as they performed an awkward hug standing in front of the narrow seats.

“He blew me off!” Carrie said, shrugging. They sat, and Carrie filled the space between them with updates about Dash and his band. Then the lights started to go down, and Meadow leaned over to her.

“I read the essay you wrote. It was very generous,” she said.

Carrie whispered, “I was worried you would be mad.” Meadow scrunched her eyes and shook her head no.

As the previews played, Carrie felt the giddy wave of excitement that she got from being in a dark theater watching a big screen. No pausing, no looking things up on her phone. It was indeed different than sitting at home, on her couch, falling asleep. Sitting in a theater with other people giving their full attention to the film. It was devotional, and sometimes she forgot how much she loved that.

The film is about two young women in a fantastical tableaux of shifting, rhythmic Pop-colored filters. In interludes throughout the film, the girls are seen in bikinis as a clock’s ticks on the soundtrack drive the jump cuts. Sometimes faster than life and sometimes slower than life — both delineated and dismantled time. The “plot” concerns the two girls running amok. They go out to dinner with middle-aged rich men. Then they eat hilariously large portions of food, horrifying and sometimes splattering the older men with various kinds of food spray. “I love to eat,” one girl exclaims, and Carrie could not help but laugh. After the girls eat, drink, and smoke to disgusting excess, they ditch their dates at the train station. In between dates, they burn things, steal, trip people, wear bikinis, crank-call people (“Hello? Die, die, die.”) and lounge around in cutesy-girl outfits. All of this was very funny, but it was the end of the film that floored Carrie. The final prank shows the two women demolishing an overladen banquette table by shoving food into their mouths in an orgy of slurps and food-crushing noises and images. Next the film abruptly cuts to the girls atop the table, stomping across the plates and glasses and carcasses in high heels, smashing it all. It was absurd and dizzying in a very specific Eastern European way. But the final scene was like nothing Carrie had seen before. The girls return in bondage suits made from newspaper, and in a frenzy of fast motion they reset the table with the broken glasses and dishes, chanting in unison whispers, “We are good and hardworking. We shall be happy and everything will be wonderful.” Carrie yelped with delight, and then she turned her face to her right and glanced at Meadow, who stared at the screen, smiling. Carrie looked back at the movie, where the girls molded the smashed, spilled cakes and meats into disgusting mounds on the platters as they continued to whisper-chant, “We’ll do everything and we’ll be good and happy and beautiful. And happy again.” Carrie felt Meadow’s hand on hers. Meadow squeezed her hand, just that, and Carrie squeezed back.

And Meadow?

She taught her classes. She watched the films, watched her students’ faces. One day she showed them Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. She remembered when she’d first seen its black-and-white images, and how she thought that this was what films made in the fifteenth century looked like. And she remembered Hosney saying that Tarkovsky wanted to use images to make us feel the infinite, find a form to express the infinite. That’s all! She thought it worked like this. His films made you regard a person in a landscape, the beauty of the composition drawing you in until you lost your impatience, your preoccupation with temporality, with the next thing, drawing you in until you stayed there with him, and the material world and the mystical world became one. He used conjure and artifice to show what was true.

* * *

What else?

One day after class she sat at a table and ate her lunch. It was cold, but the sun was bright. She could smell the coming spring in the air. She closed her eyes to the sun and saw the red light through her eyelids. Then she opened her eyes and stared at the blue sky. Several streaks of cloud matched the line of the horizon, and bright rays back-lit the clouds in light-lined rows like a Tintoretto painting. More filmic than real, she thought. She watched the sky and the light, and then Meadow closed her eyes again and imagined a kaleidoscope of images: waterfalls, towering trees creaking in the wind, the arc of a looping bird toward a river and back, electric-skinned amphibians in a glistening jungle, a muted pink glow as snow fills the dusk sky, the sharp glint of the moon on ice-crusted snow. Then she heard a steady sound, the rhythmic sound of a heartbeat, or a computer hum, or even the sound of a machine, the clack of a train? She tried to listen to it by sitting with her eyes closed on the bench, and she felt small but also connected. She thought of her images again but with slow motion, almost stop action, with distorted sound, with a crane shot moving her up, the view levitating, and then the camera flying forward over all of it. She thought of wide angles and deep focus, a posthuman or prehuman landscape, a film like a long lyric mist. But not only that. She imagined that a person shown in the right way could meet this, this glimpse of the sublime. Can an image convey something unnameable, impossible, invisible? What is an image if not inflected by a consciousness, a noticing? Something quieter and simpler: a person with an open face — any person, any face — sitting alone. How plain could an image be, how humble? Something to make her refutation or resistance give way. She imagined making this film, but also knew and hoped that everything would change in the doing. Change her vision, and change her, again.

In the early morning, Sarah Mills kneeled in her prison cell. Sarah was not religious, but she was spiritual. What else could you be when the actual world offered so little? She prayed, but not to God. She prayed to her daughter, Crystalynn.

She did this every morning as soon as she woke. She kneeled, closed her eyes, and pressed her palms into her closed eyes to block out all the light. She waited and then began to compose her senses. The sister told her about composition of the senses, and about Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a Jesuit priest, who created the practice. To pray on something, you used each of your senses to create a direct experience of it. Jesuits used composition of the senses to experience the life of Christ. Sarah had her own version.

She stared into her pressed eyelids and she conjured what the house looked like. The living room with the black leather couch striped by cat scratches. The Christmas tree, plugged in so the lights and tinsel sparkle. I had cooked spaghetti with red sauce from a jar and scorched the sauce when I left it on the stove, so the house already smelled of something burnt. I sat on the couch and smoked, the menthol tasting like a dry, rough mint in my throat, but the cigarette smoke was so constant that it hardly smelled at all to me. I stared at the tree because the pills I had taken made the blinking bulbs linger in my eyes until I felt I was in a trance. I was fixed to the couch. I felt very good at this point. Also sitting by the tree was you, Crystalynn. You had wispy white hair, and you didn’t like to have it combed. It was sticking up, wasn’t it? You were sucking your pink binky and staring at the tree. You wore blue footed pajamas with the top snap undone. There were no presents under the tree, but you loved the ornaments. I watched you in my daze. You reached your finger out and swatted a red bulb. I did nothing but stare. You giggled and swatted it again even harder, and then I said, “Look don’t touch, Crystalynn!” The bulb swayed and spun, the lights moving in its shiny surface. You laughed, and I could hear it, can hear it perfectly twenty years later. Next I put you to bed, how heavy you felt when I lifted you. The weight in my arms. I carried you, and I felt wobbly on my feet. I was barefoot, and my toes gripped the carpet on the stairs. Your room was a mess. I unzipped your pajamas and checked that your diaper was dry. You squirmed as I zipped you up, and it smelled like plastic and baby powder. You cried when I put you in your crib, so I went downstairs and took a bottle of juice from the fridge. Jason came in, and I stopped as he walked over to me and put a hand on the back of my bare thigh. He moved his hand up, and I arched against him, leaned into Jason. You started to yell from upstairs. I still had the bottle in my hand, and I groaned — I did, a tired sound in the back of the throat. I went up the stairs. You stood in your crib, crying, big tears rolling down your red cheeks. I gave you the bottle. You instantly stopped crying and held the bottle with both hands as you sucked. I reached into the crib, put my hands under your arms, and picked you up. I pushed my lips to your cheek, hot and soft and a little wet from your tears. And when I pulled back, I could see you smile with the bottle’s nipple in your mouth. I swung your legs back and then laid you on your back in the crib. You were so very tired, and your eyelids already started to droop. I pulled the knit blanket up. I said, “Go to sleep, baby.” And I touched your cheek, felt for a second its fullness. I smelled apple juice, baby powder, and my own cigarettes. I turned out the light, and I closed the door to your room.