The Reenactments: A Memoir Read online

  One night, a year from now, a few months after our film has come and gone from theaters, I will sit next to a poet (Kristin Prevallet) at a dinner in Rhode Island. I knew her poems, but I didn’t know that in the past few years she’d become a hypnotherapist. She’d just heard me read the first few pages of this book (before it was a book), including the passage about the movie-in-the-brain (Damasio), and it reminded her of one of her treatment strategies. She places the client into a light trance state, straddling the line between the conscious and unconscious realms. The brain is constantly rewiring itself, she explains, yet often (through a traumatic event, say) the mind gets stuck in a few well-worn grooves. Sound familiar? Put yourself in a movie theater, she tells the client—the movie you are watching is the movie of what happened. Prevallet holds her palm in front of her face: This is a movie screen, tell me about the movie. At some point, as the movie is playing, Prevallet (her name, in French, means “field in a valley”) tells the client to move into the projection booth (Sherlock, Jr.) so that he is now in control of the movie. He can edit it, slow it down, stop it, introduce new scenes. This is one very tangible, direct way to rewire your brain, Prevallet says. The amygdala tends to cluster images from a traumatic event (ocean, gun, pills), and this is a way to separate them, to allow them to once again have their own existence, outside of the story you’ve attached to them. I have my doubts. Even if you rewrite the trauma, even if the ocean is once again allowed to simply be the ocean, in the end she will still be dead, no? But you will be able to move on from it, Prevallet says softly. You can turn the film from color to black-and-white, from black-and-white to sepia. It can lose some of its vivid presence. But is that what I want, for her to be less vivid?

  WHAT if she had died before the invention of film? Would I still run the movie of her death over and over in my mind, would my mind even be able to imagine it could? Or would it be more like turning the pages of a book? What if she had died before the invention of books? Would I carry her around like a triptych, set her up wherever I found myself? In the first take we don’t see what she pulls from the closet. I hear Paul murmur, The gun, a little more. This time, when she gets the gun from the top shelf, she lets us see it—we glimpse it in her hand, in the light. I’m home for a few days from school, as I’m leaving I kiss her goodbye, but the kiss is a little wrong, a little openmouthed—she’s in bed, maybe already dead, maybe just full up with pills, maybe it’s a migraine, I don’t know. Here comes the rain. I will know later that she had already written the first few pages of her note, that she wrote them after she read my notebook, maybe that very day. She will finish writing it a couple weeks later, while I’m back up at school. We all have a number tattooed on us somewhere—hers has come around again. I always knew she only had so much time here, I know we all do. Julianne yawns between takes, I yawn with her. I was going to take a picture of her waiting at the top of the stairs, but it is lit from below—I can’t stand in her light, I can’t be her shadow.

  TWENTY-TWO

  NOW we completely fill the dead school (St. Patrick’s)—we fill every dead classroom, every unerased blackboard. A year ago each room had a child inside it, seated at a little desk, learning of God, of America—that was their passion play, this is ours. That was the Son, here is the father, going down on one knee, then lower. Then he begins acting out (funny phrase, “acting out”), then the son begins to stutter, then the father gets bigger, then the son gets smaller—the father puts him in his ear, the son thinks he’s gone, thinks he’s invisible, thinks he is a thought in his father’s head. I wear a headset, everyone is wired, I hear everything. I can hear what Dano is thinking about my hair—stringy, greasy, it falls into my face, then the sound cuts out, and I am looking into silence.

  ACTION.

  On the tiny screen I see myself reading about my father, going down. Jonathan’s a little out of control tonight, Olivia says. In the next room, through those doors, De Niro’s wrapped in a sheet, ranting. Dano reads the log, then he closes it, walks through those doors, toward De Niro. But he won’t come through the other side of those doors for a couple days, we need to build the lobby first.

  THE film has always been an experiment, where the man (me) with the missing arm (mom) is put into a mirrored box, so that what his mind sees is his body, complete again, before the disaster. The mind refuses to believe the arm is gone, all these years it’s bothered him—the itch, the ache, constant—the other hand reaches for it, the fingers close on nothing.

  Now Captain (Wes Studi) is bringing Jonathan up for barring. The shelter workers sit in a circle of chairs as one reads the log out loud, an entry about Jonathan not getting any better, in fact he’s getting worse. It’s time to encourage him to find help elsewhere. All in favor of barring? On the screen the hands go up one by one, the hands go up all around me. Peter denied Jesus three times, washed his hands three times. Weren’t you the one with the prophet yesterday? he is asked. He has nothing to do with me, I say—he’s just a con man and a drunk. I watch the hands go up. All opposed? I’m hollowed out, I’m insulated, I’m behind the cotton wool, and on the other side is the vote, on the other side is my father, put out in the cold. Dano asks Paul something about the shot. I dig it, Paul says, when I watch your face I’m thinking of how synapses fire. Jesus comes back to the upper room: Peter, do you love me? (You know I do.) Then feed my sheep. Then be the rock.

  THIS is the day De Niro comes into the shelter for the first time, looking for a room, or at least a bed. Dano is working the Cage, handing out bed tickets, seeming to enjoy the work. I enjoyed the work. Then the moment of recognition—De Niro stands before him, the cage between them—there must have been a moment. We film twenty takes. First the camera is on Dano’s face, he makes each take different—shock to a twisted smile to rage to something ineffable. I like them all. Then we turn it around—the same scene, but now the camera is on De Niro. De Niro asks for a room twenty more times, each take different. If it were my film I’d use every take, I’d make a whole movie out of this one moment, out of De Niro asking, Do you have a room for the evening? Out of Dano saying, You want a bed? I’d repeat it over and over, one take bleeding into the next. You want to know how I felt? Here, here is how I felt.

  CUT.

  NOW we are in the cafeteria, dinnertime at the shelter, the scene of a hundred extras, the Cecil B. DeMille day. Startling how easy it is to find extras who look homeless—we don’t even have to dress them. It’s De Niro’s first meal at the shelter, Dano comes in and sees him eating. It took awhile to get everyone eating. One guy stands behind Dano, leaning against the wall away from the others—I suggested to Paul that he stand there, someone always holds himself apart. Maybe he’s a psych guest, maybe he can’t sit with the others, maybe he has to hold himself apart, maybe that’s what will save him.

  DE Niro is wrapped in a sheet, barefoot in a pool of his own piss, ranting in a blackout. He stands in the middle of the now-empty cafeteria, the tables folded up and pushed to the sides for the night. Get this into your head at once, he rants—I’m a great artist. A few men sprawl out on mats on the floor—my father is now among those who cannot make it upstairs. Now he is losing even this—the chance to line up, the chance to be woken at five—maybe this, somehow, is what will save him. It was only by being kicked out of the shelter that he survived, by tasting how desperate one can become, though he just as easily could have died out there. This moment he is, unwittingly, sacrificing himself for me, by going there first: This is where you will end up, this is how it will look, unless you change your life. Dano has to simply walk through the doors, to look at De Niro, to will himself to linger, listen. In real life I saw my father hold his cock, wild in his hand, and piss on the floor of the Brown Lobby. De Niro will not take out his cock, the piss is just water, colored yellow, carried in a plastic jug. De Niro points to Dano: You, without faith you are lost, without faith you are nothing. You. Are. Nothing. Nothing. Dano takes it in, walks away, he doesn’t break down, he doesn’
t pick up a chair and break it over De Niro’s head. He brings it inside, where it can transform him. But it will take years.

  WE’RE between shots. Jerry, who does De Niro’s hair, asks me if I know someone named Peter __________________ . It turns out that Jerry lived in Boston when I did, that he used to stop by Pine Street from time to time to drop off donations, to look around. His uncle Peter wandered off in the early sixties, ended up living on the streets, he thought he might find him there. That scene we shot last week, Jerry tells me, with the homeless guy getting beaten to death—that was how Peter died. I ask if he has a photo—he does but it is from the fifties. He was tall, Jerry says—something happened. An extra (Carl), as he lies in his shelter bed, calls me over—he doesn’t have a speaking part, he’s “background.” How did I look in that shot? Carl asks. Did you see how I was moving my neck as if I was hurt? We’ve talked off and on throughout the shoot, he’s told me that the days he doesn’t get called in he eats at food pantries—not for research, but because he’s broke. It’s why I want to be here, Carl tells me—I know this, I know what this movie’s about. Another extra tells me she needs to work two more days this year to keep her SAG health benefits, asks if I can put in a good word. Radioman has been waiting outside for the past two days, hoping for a part—his nickname comes from the boombox he wears like a necklace. Radioman claims Robin Williams based his character for The Fisher King on him—to look at him, it could be true.

  AFTER lunch we will move to just behind the cafeteria walls. De Niro now wears his final coat, the tore-up blue down jacket with the feathers slipping out. Time has passed, he’s about to find out he’s been barred (father murderer). I’m sitting just on the other side of the wall, watching the monitor, as De Niro tries to come inside. Snow follows him inside. Two shelter workers, Carlos (Eddie Rouse) and Gabriel (Victor Rasuk), block his way, ask him to leave. Jonathan, you’re barred, you can’t come in. De Niro will not leave easily, I’d warned Victor and Eddie—he will fight you. Does my son know about this? De Niro asks, barely taking the workers in. He knows, cabrone, you got to go. De Niro improvises the lines, adds my name—Nicholas, where are you? Nicholas Flynn, FATHER MURDERER, come out and face me. I don’t need the headphones to hear him call my name—he is just behind this wall.

  HERE’S the day that never happened, here’s the day I invite my father inside my apartment and we have a talk about my mother (I never invited my father inside). In the business this is what is known as an obligatory scene (a scene the viewer waits for and excitedly looks forward to). Today is my mother’s birthday, she’d be seventy today. If her last attempt had failed, if she didn’t get to that place again, if she made it out (I have made a terrible mistake). Today is the day of the burning palm, today I get to bring my father inside, after I find him under a bush, asleep. This is what the whole movie is about, this moment—the father sleeping outside, the river flowing beside him, beside us—the river, of course, is my mother, and what she did, and how we keep trying to leave it. By taking my father inside, I am able to tell the story of the notebook, the one my mother read. The incomplete story I wrote, the story without an end. I left off the end, then it ended. My mother read it and then she ended. I take a picture of a chandelier, how it hangs over us, watching us talk about self-hatred. We will get it right by sundown. Julianne will return on Monday, as a ghost.

  AFTER five takes Dano murmurs to me, I can’t figure out why he’d invite his father inside—I know it’s not because he’s a good guy. I smile, ask why it always takes him five takes to get it right. When I did it I nailed it on the first take, every time. This is the scene where Dano admits to De Niro that he thinks he has a drinking problem, and De Niro says, A drinking problem? That’s problematic. This, I realize, is a hinge—one of many—that opens a door. Now Dano has nothing to lose, he is now free tells the story that has yet to be told, the story of night the mother died. A second hinge is when De Niro says, The question is not why she died when she did, the question is why she stuck around as long as she did. This is why Dano brings De Niro inside, why Paul wrote it as he did, to release this energy. I didn’t see it when I read the script, only when I heard them speak the words. In life it took twenty years to release this energy—I spent each day, for twenty years, trying to unlock this door, but each morning I’d find it, once again, locked.

  ONE more day with Liam, the actor who plays me as an eleven-year-old (my inner child). A month has passed since we first met. Liam is writing now, a book about the apocalypse. All the food is gone, and people have gone crazy, except for one man, a Native American, but Liam can’t figure out his weapon. I suggest a bow and arrow. Liam is thinking blowpipe. His mother (Stacy) tells me that their family is not unfamiliar with my father’s story. She tells her story as a call-and-response with Liam. Your cousin was where? In prison, Liam answers. Why? He stole a computer from a friend he worked with, Liam answers. He stole from everyone, Stacy says, even me. The story involves drugs and penny stocks and prostitution, or something like prostitution, but by now Stacy is talking in code, yet I’m sure Liam knows exactly what is being said, since he is who I was.

  THE loneliness of the actor between scenes, chewing her nails, wondering if she found it. Found what? Something beyond the realm of understanding, the word inside the word, the emotion inside the emotion. The hinge. I want to tell her she’s perfect, but it’s not for me to say. In eight days my life will end, at least this version of it. In eight days this one story from my past will become pure light. Ryan (props) holds a crack pipe out to me, asks if it looks okay, if it looks real. I don’t want to touch it, I don’t want to take it in my hands. He’d described it to me first—a glass straw with a brillo pad in one end for a screen. That’d work, I say. Any fucken thing works—glass stem, apple, tinfoil—whatever gets that shit inside you. I don’t really even remember what mine looked like. I remember a room and a guy with a lighter, I remember passing him a twenty for each hit—or maybe it was two hits for twenty, maybe I emptied my pockets after the first hit—either way we were going through it, we were spending the night in that room, the party raging (full-on) just beyond the door. I don’t remember his face, only what he said—Don’t—just before I took the first hit. When Paul edits these scenes he will cut a scene of Liam eating ice cream between the scenes of Dano taking hit after hit of crack, and I will think, Yes, ice cream, perfect.

  RAIN today, we can see our breath, the street covered in fake snow. De Niro is in his final outfit, the same outfit we first saw him in, back in January, on the first day (my birthday). In film time it’s the morning after the night I took my father inside. De Niro has woken up, left without saying goodbye. Dano has followed him out onto the street, calls after him, Where are you going? I’m going to my suite at the Ritz, De Niro tells him. Then he turns, comes back: Out of curiosity, why haven’t you ever asked me to stay with you before? Here it is again, another hinge—something heretofore unknown or as yet unarticulated, made manifest. Why haven’t you taken me in before? It is raining still, cold. We see Dano’s breath. Did I ever see my father’s breath? Did I ever see him breathing? Dano calls De Niro a drowning man, De Niro turns, comes back, sneers, A drowning man? A drowning man? I’m not a drowning man. The hours fold into themselves, the shot keeps getting retaken, the camera moves from wide to tight. Then everything turns around and we go through it all again, looking for something ineffable. De Niro says, I’m not your poor mother, I’m not going to die out here. I’m a survivor. Dano doesn’t understand why he doesn’t punch him. I explain that he has found one of the glitches, a spot where we have messed with reality. My father said these words to me, but he was outside my locked gate when he did, and it was snowing, and he was on his way to nowhere. I didn’t have to punch him, I simply didn’t open the gate.

  DAY thirty-six—for the past three hours we have been filming Mom, Dad, and me. This is the first time we are all together since I was born. In this scene Julianne appears in the shelter, standing between De Niro an
d Dano. She turns, looks at one, then the other, smiles, then vanishes. Declan shoots her standing, and then he shoots her gone—she simply walks out of the frame when the camera pans to Dano’s face, and when it pans back she is gone. She was never really there, she is a dream, a ghost, but we both see her, everyone sees her. After the first shot Paul turns to me and says, This is the hinge, the word I’d murmured to him on Friday. I don’t know if this is the hinge, I don’t know if a hallucination can be a hinge. Then come the close-ups, tight on each actor’s face, as they take in the apparition, as the apparition takes them in.

  DAY forty—we are in my father’s apartment, the one he moves into after he gets off the streets. A bottle of vodka on the kitchen table. You got anything for me? Paul asks. I point to a bottle of whiskey holding up some books on his desk—my father’s not the kind of drunk who has an extra bottle around for bad days or to offer a friend a drink. He buys a bottle of vodka and he drinks it. Then he buys another, over and over, until the money runs out. Tom removes the bottle. Paul asks if he would have made his bed—the bed here is made. I think it looks too neat. Paul thinks he’s been institutionalized so he would make it, but I think prisons and shelters have left him more infantilized—you don’t make your own bed at Pine Street. The bed looks too good, I say, the pillows too clean, the blanket too new. Maybe even the fridge is too clean, but maybe not—this is early on in this post-homeless apartment, it hasn’t yet disintegrated, hasn’t yet dusted over, hasn’t collapsed in on itself. Tom messes up the bed a bit. ACTION. Dano knocks on the door. Paul thinks he played it too dead in the first take, but I think he is dead at that moment, seeing the father he left for dead. I think Dano nailed it, first take, which is all we really get, all we are allowed, after today. Tomorrow we fold up the tent and move on. It’s dusk inside, but the door to this stage opens to sunshine.