A Short Film About Disappointment Read online

  She took the chair next to mine.

  She said, Why are you here?

  I said, My face does not work, sometimes.

  She said, When did this occur for the first time?

  I said, I was daydreaming of digging a pit along the route of Osvald’s commute. This predated his flight to another city with my wife. I diagrammed how this might be possible, how to finance it, manage the rental of equipment, the forging of permits.

  She said, Who’s Osvald?

  I said, He’s my best friend. I have not seen him in several years, because he stole my wife and moved to the Eastern Hub.

  She said, He kidnapped your wife?

  I said, Well, it was a mutual decision, between the two of them. I wasn’t given the opportunity to weigh in.

  She said, You were thinking of murdering this man and you experienced bilateral facial paralysis?

  I said, It would be more in line with the spirit of my intentions to say I was thinking about the morality of putting him in a position to be murdered at a later date, if I deemed it just and convenient.

  She said, Tell me more.

  I said, When sketching an idea I had for a trebuchet that could be concealed outside his office, which would be fired when he stepped into the bucket, a tautness spread across half my face. My apartment lacks a mirror. I ran to the latrine of the charging station on the corner. I shoved past the people charging their Pingers and appliance batteries.

  I said, In the toilet, I examined my face. My muscles were stuck on the right side. Blinking was not possible with my right eye. When I smiled, only the left half of my face lifted. The overall effect was ghastly. That word must have been invented for cases like my face. A corpse’s face, exhumed for a sinister reason.

  Dr. Lisa chewing but nodding to indicate the focus of her attention was on my problem.

  I said, I shed a few tears in the locked toilet. Within an hour my facial muscles returned to my control. In the charging station I bought two Picnic Size Nougat Grenades, which I ate at the curb. After the condition recurred, my PocketMD insisted on a human doctor.

  Dr. Lisa said, Explain when it happens.

  I said, The symptoms begin when I ideate Osvald’s elimination. The generic fantasy of Osvald dying allows me to retain control of my face. For instance, if I thought of him getting hit by a car, my face would remain under my control. When a specific detail vivifies the thought, say, the title of the pornographic film playing when the meteorite strikes, the sad history of the tutued circus bear devouring his leg, the exact geographical location of the quicksand he sank in, leaving behind, on the surface, one of those pith helmets I associate with missing orchid hunters, my face solidifies into the expression I had at the time. Midexpression, this is grotesque and frightening to those in the vicinity.

  Dr. Lisa took this in.

  I said, I think he has possessed me. Do you get a lot of possession cases?

  She said, Possession is not a treatable medical condition. Why don’t we try to find something within the area of my expertise?

  Dr. Lisa ordered needles, medicine, machines, electromagnetism, physiotherapy. A technician explored my bowels. Electrodes, sessions in the nanobox. I was emphatic that there was to be no psychiatry. I filled out questionnaires on the frequency of my erections, the color of my sputum, the contents of my dreams.

  At our next appointment, she diagnosed me. She is incorrect, but I prefer her wrongness to the rightness of others.

  Dr. Lisa said, You have a conversion disorder.

  She said, A disease of thought.

  Tapping her temple, a dirty cuticle, a dimple.

  She said, A disease of control.

  Osvald first manifested with his ongoing attempt to pollute my lexicon. The miscegenation of our languages can be marked by the eruption of his adjectives. My column has become cluttered with his Latinate vocabulary, marred by his commas, undermined by the distraction of his erotic preoccupations, disturbed by the thuds of his clauses, lessened with his tone-deaf declarations, bungled articles, snubbed participles. My clean and curt sentences have thickened with the flab of his qualifiers.

  But I got him back, oh, yes.

  6.

  THE TRIALS OF COUNT COZMA

  DIR. GHEORGE NICOLESCU

  89 MINUTES

  Playing yesterday, today, and tomorrow at Cinema Acceptable, midnight, discounts for the costumed.

  A highborn vampire can’t feed. Serfs will not serve as fare for a gourmand. Cozma tries to lure diplomats, heldentenors, confectioners, and essayists to his estate. Each sends polite regrets. Cozmylvania is an idyll. Bees bumble over fields of smetterhoch, the air is fragrant with hare’s blood.

  He has a dysfunctional relationship with his assistant, Mihaela. When Mihaela suggests he listen to visitors instead of interrupting to brag of his collection of Sufi manuscripts before exsanguinating them, the count sulks, locks himself in his coffin. Mihaela finds a psychotherapist, Zigfried Yunt, who is willing to help. Cranky from low blood sugar, Count Cozma drains Dr. Yunt. Cheers in the theater.

  Yunt was treating society wives with tincture of coca. Improvements were noticed. Color was returning to cheeks. A bit of aristocratic sport is okay, but Yunt was liked and respected. Rumors circulate, Cozma is not a count. Cozma flaps to the capital to bleed the gossips. Though Cozma cannot enter the homes of his victims without an invitation, the lords and ladies invite him in, because to decline would be bad manners.

  Silas the Staker, the celebrated vampire hunter, is dispatched to dispatch Cozma.

  For strategic reasons, his visit falls on the summer solstice, the day Mihaela has her annual bath. Her charms lull Silas the Staker. She wants to show him her dungeon. Why not, he has hours until sunset. Falling asleep on her pallet, he awakens in the dark.

  Enter Cozma, preening. Silas the Staker is subjected to a monologue on the difficulty of keeping orchids at the forty-fifth parallel. Cozma expects his work will earn him the Iogu Science Prize.

  Silas the Staker says, Monsters are not the obvious choice for prestigious awards.

  The count, pausing to fix a stray hair and check the knot on his cravat, assures Silas the leap forward for horticulture will occlude his shortcomings in the eyes of the committee. Silas is reaching for his ankle-holstered crucifix when Cozma breakfasts.

  Mihaela is cross. Drinking Silas the Staker’s blood, when Mihaela had insisted the count abstain, shows insensitivity to her needs for communication, understanding, and friendship.

  He says, Nuts.

  Tired of giving ultimatums, Mihaela packs and leaves for the Forest of the Weeping Virgin, to work for the Gory Handmaiden.

  The Trials of Count Cozma received attention upon release last year because nothing in the film is replicated from a matter printer. Not a single object was fished from the enormous database of proprietary objects that, once chosen from that familiar, frustrating menu and squirted into the additive manufacturing kiosk, constitutes nearly every object we use every day. Everything on the screen, bar the actors, is a prop from a dusty studio basement or a legitimate historical object. When working under such constraints, compromises in costuming have to be made. For example, Silas the Staker’s cowboy hat and chaps are not traditional for the genre. For example, Count Cozma’s cape is the same worn by the Bureaucrat in Heroes Follow the Rules. One works with what one can find.

  7.

  LOOSE LIPS

  DIR. ROBERT Z. MICHAEL

  74 MINUTES

  In my friend Osvald’s A Replicate, there is a scene where his uppity sculptor, Billy Vang, stands on the smoldering car in the guest neighborhood to invite the refugees, who have fled Modest Britain, to demand the right to enter the Zone.

  Billy’s militancy is a compensation for existential anxieties. All life is copied and recombined genetic information. Given that, how can he banish the thoug
ht that consciousness, too, is a copy? That he is not the only Billy? It appeared that there were other Billys in the bodies of Baileys and Biancas.

  In that film, were it to be made, Billy would unravel his sculpture in the plaza, as directed by Mayor Alison, but it would not be a paean to responsibility. Billy’s sculpture was to be a giant self-replicating web of folded carbons meant to demonstrate the freedom of the old Internet. The iridescent strands, spun by nanoprinters, would smother the entire Eastern Hub, radiating from York to the Boston Prosperity Complex and Sub-Philadelphia. Although Osvald didn’t think of it that way, his Billy was something of a terrorist.

  While I was thinking of Billy’s web, my face froze.

  Paging Dr. Lisa. She fed me a peach pill. I took a shot of vitamins in the ass.

  She said, Rest and be happy.

  Discharged into midday from the hospital. Past the market, into the green gash of the park.

  Summer’s litter. Ravaged picnics and shucked wraps. Dogs ran after Frisbees. Couples who quit having sex buy dogs to subject us to monologues about the dogs’ charm and intelligence. It might be nice to trip a jogger.

  Dr. Lisa’s pill rowing up my blood and drifting back down.

  A woman lay in the grass, wearing an eggplant one-piece. When I realized who I was ogling, nausea spread down my esophagus, through my stomach, into my crotch, where it became shame and fear. Jonson’s wife, Lucretia. The pain of coincidence. A skinny man with a potbelly splayed next to her.

  I walked to a bench at a safe distance. I knew who he was. The hairy man was Seel. Philip Seel, one 1, two e’s. A foxtail for my garland of secrets. Prayers for bird shit went unanswered. Maybe this was none of my business. Jonson had a right to his gentleness, no less delectable for being cultivated in artificial conditions, like a hydroponic pineapple.

  Was it so wrong? Two people in the park, sunbathing. It could have been that they came across each other. Healthy friendship between the sexes. Neither seemed the type to have friends outside of situations with an audience, dinners, fund-raisers, openings, funerals.

  Lucretia and Philip are both specialists in antiquity. A lunch meeting, maybe. Business and the pleasure of the sun. If Lucretia were going to betray Jonson, it wouldn’t be with such a withered and pompous man.

  Jonson’s pain to date included a kidney stone, six or eight aborted gardens, a dead grandmother three nodes west. He didn’t have to enter the catacombs of his marriage. Certain pains are inevitable but other pains are choices. Jonson had chosen. Had he? It seemed wrong to watch Lucretia and Seel.

  East, out of the park. The Conspicuous was showing Loose Lips. Do-gooder rats out his kids for emissions crimes, becomes family pariah. I barged past the usher. Because I’ve mentioned the theater over five hundred times in this column, I get to see films free of charge with half-off popcorn. Maybe this wasn’t my business. Jonson could maintain the great lawns, the sumptuous gardens, the statuary, of his ignorance. However, said a small, pitiless voice. The lights dimming. What are friends for if not to help you suffer?

  8.

  MOONSTONE

  DIR. HARLAN GORLAN

  91 MINUTES

  Harris V. Jonson V, my colleague, my friend, is the other film critic at the Central Hub Slaw. His position on the Slaw is for fun and appearances. Jonson does not need to work.

  He was supposed to review Moonstone. He is indisposed. The benefit for the Jonson Foundation went late last night, and it would have been rude not to join the donors in convivial toasts. Jonson offered me a belt I admired last Tuesday in exchange for writing this review. It is actual leather, which means it must be at least thirty years old. My pastime, in the molasses of the afternoon, is to have a little fun under his byline. He won’t read the review. Jonson is a busy man.

  Nobody’s going to read this, as far as I’m aware. In my four years of reviewing, no friend, loved one, acquaintance, enemy, or stranger has commented on my reviews. I won’t pester them for their opinions. I don’t want to hear theirs.

  My colleague’s prose resembles copy for cosmetic surgery. Jonson does not pan.

  He said, Why should I bring more negativity into a negative world?

  I said, You don’t think negativity can be a corrective force?

  He said, Positivity is a corrective force.

  Allow me my Jonson impression:

  Gorlan’s fifth fabulous film, Moonstone, takes as its premise the discovery of a strange stone in a university laboratory, and the conflict between Lydia, a cryptogeologist, and Roger, an extraneous minerals specialist, over its provenance. If this sounds boring, it’s not. It rocks! The tetchy professoress, Lydia, believes the rock to be the product of a terrestrial hoax. Roger thinks it comes from another dimension. They have a rocky marriage. Roger makes a beau geste, in the interest of saving his marriage, and recants his opinion. With Moonstone, The Roth Paradox, and Doctors in the Mood steaming up this awards season, I must ask: Have we reached Peak Sexy Scientist?

  My thought was, I would drop off the ghostwritten review at his penthouse, inquire after his hangover, check the fridge. In person, it would be easier to deliver the bad news, and the Jonson fridge is a miracle. I would fetch Jonson a bracing glass of whatever was on hand, sit him down, and mention that I had seen his wife in the park with Seel south of the Austerity Monument, maybe it was nothing, or perhaps Lucretia and Jonson had an agreement? I would clarify that his wife and Seel were sitting in the grass, nothing nefarious was going on, no bodily contact in the couple minutes I saw them as I walked. Jonson would say, of course we have an agreement, we’re modern, thanks for looking out for me. My second thought was, it wouldn’t go like that.

  9.

  ORACLE

  DIR. MALLORY FLIN

  91 MINUTES

  My apartment, ten miles from the Safe Zone, has no furniture. The neighborhood, Miniature Aleppo, is almost completely guests from the dust of the region formerly known as Syria, now known as not much. After four years of indentured remediation, they were given apartments and semipermanent visas. My building is not a settler building, as they are called. It’s a vintage slum.

  Walls on my block are papered with posters, in many languages: SHOWERS AREN’T PATRIOTIC!, THE SELFISH WOMAN GOES UNLOVED, SWEATING IS HEALTHY, BE A SPORT! REPORT USAGE VIOLATIONS!

  The peace is enforced. Aside from the occasional boisterous birthday party on my street, and the midnight incursions by the riot police, it suits me. The food is good, the music piquant, and the hobbyist dronespotter will never lack for material.

  The ceilings of my apartment are high and the big windows face south. A bed, a desk. Hardy plants morose with thirst. I am not inclined to explain the provenance of the Tyndale portrait, the prickly succulent, the agates. The centerpiece: a cinerary urn depicting the marriage of a forest nymph to a boy prince. Lucretia looted it from a failing museum in a defunct country during her postdoc. When the Jonsons were visiting her mother, I borrowed it without permission. One forgets one’s obligations. Carrying it up my stairs, I spilled the ashes. If there is an afterlife, then I suppose I will have to answer to whoever was once that dust for the insult.

  A knock. I looked through the peephole. Jonson is nosy about a man’s debris. His knock was three bangs followed by three raps. The thump of his palm was apologized for with his hairy knuckles. He has the patience of a man who does not have to manage his time.

  The urn went in the freezer, for safekeeping. Jonson can be clumsy.

  Jonson entered, sat on the floor, held his hand out for a drink, was annoyed to receive a glass of water. In uncertain times it is best to keep a clear head. He couldn’t get Lucretia on her Pinger. She was in Montreal. No replies to his pings. A clear blue panic. He’d been put on hold by police, concierges, diplomats. A warmth for his pain spread under my ears, in my knuckles.

  I said, How long has it been since you heard from her, Jonson?


  He said, Twelve hours. She pinged me when her slingshot arrived.

  I said, I could never ride one of those terrible things. What’s the value of being fired into suborbital space to save a few hours? Is your time all that precious?

  He said, If your slingshot capsule explodes, then there’s no corpse for your loved ones to cry over. Much more romantic, even dashing, if you ask me.

  He said, But what if Lucretia’s died?

  Jonson pinged her again.

  I said, How many pings have you sent, Jonson?

  He said, A hundred. Hundred fifty. What if she’s with a man?

  I said, I bet she’s thinking the same thing about you.

  He said, Distract me.

  I said, You need a challenge rather than a distraction. Let’s make a film.

  Jonson said, We’re critics.

  I said, I have an idea for a feature.

  Jonson said, Shoot me first and then tell me about it.

  I said, Why are we disbursing our creative energies on the Slaw? Others should be reviewing us.

  Jonson said, Why would you give others a chance to get you back after all the nasty reviews?

  I said, This job is a muselet: when it is twisted off, the cork will pop, the champagne of cinema will flow. Don’t you want to taste it?

  Jonson said, Champagne, drunk alone, is cloying, carbonated, fermented grape juice.

  I said, It gets you intoxicated.

  He said, I have nightmares of her in bed with a man four inches taller than me. He’s poor and has a tattoo on his neck.

  I said, Pay attention to my idea.

  He said, Fine. What’s the film about?

  I squatted to get eye to eye with Jonson.

  I said, Altarpiece concerns a painter.

  Jonson said, How about a sexy lady painter?

  I said, Bellono is believed to be a great artist, maybe the best. As a youth, he was apprenticed to Master Vittororio. Bellono thinks painting is the worst job in the world. Why make a picture of something that doesn’t exist? Eating and sleeping are his chief pleasures.