The Reenactments: A Memoir Read online

  TWENTY-THREE

  I ask Kristin Prevallet, the same night we meet, if she can hypnotize me. I want to enter the theater. I want to change (or at least try to change) the movie. Later that night she gives me a brief session. Following her instructions I open and close my eyes while looking at a white wall, extend my peripheral vision, relax my body. It feels like meditation. Do you see a movie theater? Yes, I see it. Are you in it? Yes. Is a movie playing? The theater is enormous, baroque, the screen is white. It is empty except for me. Is it supposed to be empty? I ask. That’s up to you, she says. I’m alone in a dark theater. The screen stays white. Let’s try something else, she says. You are in a boat, a plumb line is tied to the boat—lower your body into the water with the line tied to you. I see the boat, I see the line tied to my waist, I drop into the water. Sink deeper, you are safe, you are still connected to the boat. In seconds I am at the edge of an even deeper drop-off—my body freezes. The line is no longer taut, it’s coiling behind me, bunching up. I can go no further into this blackness, this Thanatos, the place my mother went to—pure death, self-destroying—I cannot follow, not with my body. Can you look into it, can you describe it? Prevallet is simply a voice now, perhaps her voice has become the line I can follow back to the boat, if I need to. I am now sinking into the blackness, now up to my knees in it. My body twitches. Is it mud, or space, or darkness? the voice asks. Space, I answer—no, mud. No, it’s all three. Even as I name it I am in it, yet not in my body. I am now simply breath, my body gone. I am sorry I’ve left you, I say, I don’t know how to bring you through this. My breath then, imperceptibly at first, begins to make a tunnel through the darkness, dissolving the utter black into gray. Just before the voice asks if there are any colors I glimpse violet, tingeing everything. And as I think the word violet I know I have a mind, and as I see violet I know I have eyes, so my body must be somewhere. Her voice moves me through the gray now, now I’m floating above a canyon—yellow walls, sandstone. Her voice asks, What is below the yellow? Green, I see green. Go to it, she says, and I go. On the green is my body, waiting. I want to rest here, but her voice asks, What is below this? And the green gives way to blue, and below this the blue gives way to white—cold, cold white. I do not want to go into this white—this is the place my father got to, sleeping outside all those years, waking up covered in snow. I don’t know if I will survive, I barely survived seeing his body covered in snow—then I am in it, her voice places me in it, inside it my body trembles, a pain shoots through my foot. The voice asks, How can you get out of it, do you see a way out? As I hear these words I am moving through a tunnel, the walls white, cold, yes, still, yet like folds of flesh, and then I’m outside of it. You can open your eyes whenever you want to, Prevallet says.

  MY instinct when I visit the Glass Flowers now is to keep reminding myself that they are glass, even though it is impossible to forget this. Please do not lean on the cases. All the models are made of glass. The petals of the tulips, the hairs on the stems of the peach branch, the blossoms which seem only a god (or an ant) could have opened. On some of the plants there are even imperfections—fungus, rot, insects eating away at the leaves—just as it is in the fields. Rudolf, the son, added in the rot, perhaps as a way to acknowledge what his father, in his perfection, left out. Yet even the rot is contained, it has to be, frozen in that moment—none of these flowers will rot further, they will not return to earth, not as long as the Agassiz stands.

  WHAT is this desire to capture the world, to hold on to it forever? The glass flowers are erotic (open, wet), yet encased in glass, like little televisions. Like pornography. You cannot smell them, you cannot touch them. I’ve spent part of the last three years convincing my child not to rip every flower she sees from its stem, not to crush their petals between her fingers. What is this impulse? I’m far from immune from it, I sometimes join her in the destruction—absentmindedly I’ll pluck a flower and tear it apart, barely clocking what I’m doing. With her, I try to point out when the flowers are not ours, in a public planter, say, or a stranger’s garden—more a part of the universe.

  OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio’s genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth. Rudolf (the son) put decay and fungus back onto the leaves, thereby elevating the Glass Flowers above kitsch. His father had to die for him to see that the perfect peony in bloom is less interesting, less real, than the ant-covered peony bud. We wake up in trying to understand the ants, they force us to pay closer attention. The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. The peony is no longer merely pretty, it now contains struggle, and we can finally understand that all these flowers would be gone, if not captured. Yet is it enough? The workbench is compelling because it juxtaposes a jar of glass eyes with a blue petal, the petal revealing its armature. Our eyes look at those eyes as those eyes look at us. Would it help to have a vase of dead flowers as you enter, or a bowl of rotting fruit, so you could smell the decomposing, so that you couldn’t forget this is a trick? Would it help to know that the flowers themselves, the very glass they are made of, is also decaying? See the white powdery stuff on the leaves? This is glass corrosion.

  I have a friend, a writer (Kelle Groom) who, when she first heard me read from this book, could not understand the concept of the mirrored box. Afterward, try as I might, I could not explain the process to her, how it worked, how it tricked the brain into healing. All she could imagine was a mirror, reflecting back the face of the sufferer. When she heard the word mirror she saw her own face, and as I tried to describe it she saw a hall of mirrors, where the whole body, along with the missing arm, was reflected back, endlessly. Talking with her I realized that a mirrored box could just as easily reflect a body with both arms gone, that the movie could go either way.

  For over thirty years now my brother has had, apparently, no desire to meet our father—the years our father was living on the streets and in shelters he had no desire to engage with him at all (not that I had an overwhelming desire—he simply showed up at my work and didn’t leave). Over the seven weeks of the shoot my brother comes to set a handful of times (just because he has no desire to meet our father does not mean he has no desire to meet Robert De Niro), where he is given his own chair before the monitors, his own set of headphones. Now he gets to see what it was like for our father to sleep outside, now he gets to encounter our father sleeping out. But he does not come on our days with Julianne.

  Last night Maeve woke me up, crying. I went to her bed, to comfort her. Where are we? she asked. We’re in your room, I told her, everything’s all right. Why is the movie so dark? she asked, staring up at the ceiling. Why is it so scary? The room did seem especially dark—maybe there was no moon. I laid my head beside hers, looked at the ceiling with her. What’s the movie, I asked, what do you see? A snake is biting my leg, she said, her voice rising again. Make it stop. I looked at the ceiling. Is it just one snake? I asked. Lots of snakes but only one of them is biting me. Make it stop, she repeated. Can you change the movie, I asked, can you tell the snake to stop? Can you make the snakes go back into their holes? Can you make the sun come up? Can you see any flowers? She was quiet for a moment, wide-eyed. It’s a little lighter, she said. Any flowers? A few red flowers, she said. Any snakes? Snakes are all asleep now, she said softly. Maybe we can go back to sleep ourselves? I offered.

  Why did you give me these eyes? she asked, as she drifted off.

  IN the original Greek the sense of the word catharsis was as a daily practice—we woke up each day with who we were, with our particular sorrows and struggles, and each day we had to find a way to carry through. This contrasts with our more contemporary idea of catharsis as a onetime event, a revelation—a light coming on in an empty room. In this version, once we find th
e switch to turn that light on, we then get to see clearly what it was in our past (hi, Mom) that causes us to act the way we do—we are then, ideally, able to integrate it (her) into our lives, and we are healed. Or, if it were a daytime television show, we’d watch as others act out their scripted feelings: On today’s show we have a man who slept with two sisters and neither one knew. And we have both sisters with us. When the sisters come out the audience cheers (is there an applause sign that lights up?). When the man comes out the audience hisses (maybe we are past that point now?). The women are allowed one, maybe two, emotions—betrayal? anger? love? The man can either be contrite or resolute. Then we take a commercial break. What have we learned? Do you now know what to feel when you find out your lover has been fucking your sister? Think of coming home one day, to blood on your kitchen floor. Now kneel down and clean it up with a sponge, watch as it whirlpools down the drain. How does that feel? It depends on whether you think apple or fast car when you see red, or whether you (my bull) see red when you see red—either way, it will never transform this blood into an apple.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  SOMEONE yells, ROLLING, and everything stops. All one hundred workers stop—teamsters and carpenters and grips and extras—stand as if frozen, eyes straight ahead. Not talking, simply being. Cars flagged down on the corner, pedestrians asked to pause. Julianne stands alone in the middle of our living room. Outside, the world has stopped, really stopped—like the film Paris Qui Dort, where a scientist invents a raygun that freezes the entire city—until Paul yells, CUT. What if this were the way it was—hair and makeup, twenty takes, someone to wrap a towel around her shoulders when she comes in soaking wet, someone to hand her a coffee, someone to read over her note with her, to help her write it? Later, Paul will hire a songwriter (Damon Gough) to write the soundtrack to it all, but no song was playing, no song would play for years after, none I could hear. All I could hear were cars backfiring in parking lots, all I could hear were hammers in the woods. If she could hear a song, then it won’t happen. If she could read her own handwriting, it won’t happen. If she could look at the pills as they spill out onto the counter, it won’t happen. This is the worst day of the shoot, I tell anyone who asks, but no one asks. That’s not true—Paul asks, Caroline (the line producer) asks, but then she touches my thigh and it feels like an electric shock. After this, seeing De Niro play my father will be easy, after this everything will be easy, and it was, when I think about it. After she died everything was easy.

  THE decisive step in the making of consciousness is not the making of images and creating the basics of the mind. The decisive step is making the images ours, making them belong to their rightful owners. . . . The decisive step. A handgun the police confiscated and never returned. A nightgown, heavy with blood, curled on the carpet. An empty orange pill bottle, searching for its white childproof cap. It has never been my problem to make these images mine—the problem is that I’m haunted by them. A five-page handwritten note that by the last page is almost impossible to decipher. A rag I wring out into a white sink, a pink swirl down the drain (it might have been the first time I wondered where the sewers led—to the sea?). A white wooden chair with its back blown out, the last piece of furniture my mother’s body would touch. I never fix the chair, I can’t, it becomes a stool, I carry it with me from apartment to apartment, for ten years. It ends up holding a jade plant my mother had given me in high school—what have I done, what have I ever done, but make these images mine?

  EACH of us, at birth or maybe at some point in our early childhoods, is given a handful of images—our job, throughout the rest of our lives, is to try to make sense of them. Robert Frost offers this: The whole great enterprise of life, of the world, the great enterprise of our race, is our penetration into matter, deeper and deeper, carrying the spirit deeper into matter. For Jung, If you possess the image you possess half the thing itself. These images, these objects, are mediums of what Freud and Breuer (in Studies on Hysteria) called besetzung (occupation), which when translated became cathexis (from the Greek to hold fast, to occupy). Cathexis is the investment of our emotional energies—our anxieties, our fears, our lust, our hopes—into objects (or persons, or ideas), in order to contain these anxieties. Cathexis functions, then, like a totem object, like a fetish. Once contained we can then pass these anxieties, these energies (literally) on to another, which may (or may not) bring about catharsis, in that other.

  After lunch we go into the bedroom, to align the body. For this we use Julianne’s stand-in. Someone had asked her, earlier, as she sat at the dining room table, if she knew what she was doing. I’m supposed to look suicidal, she answered, and the room laughed. Paul stands over her now as she lies on the bed, then asks her to get up so he can show her what he’s thinking. Facedown, he twists his arm awkwardly behind his head, crosses his legs. Then he rises, and the stand-in takes his place, arranges her body like he had done. Christo (first assistant director) comes into the room, points to a spot on the blanket beside her body. So you want blood here, pooling? he asks Paul. And here, on the back of her dress? The sun is down, Christo glances at me. Some part of me wants to say, I made it through the real day, of course I can make it through this, but everyone knows I didn’t make it through, not really.

  She shot herself in the chest, right? Christo asks Paul.

  In the heart, I want to say.

  ACCORDING to Freud, the “compulsion to repeat” the trauma—be it in art, nightmare, or waking life—is the organism’s attempt to master the surplus anxiety that the original incursion produced, yet this cycle of repetition can, of course, lead one down the same rabbit hole, over and over, with disastrous results. Or it can offer a glimmer of empathy. Sometimes (mostly) it simply leads to both. Get out of the movie, fuckhead.

  The next day I want to call Paul. It hadn’t occurred to me earlier, but the force of the blast would have blown—did blow—out her back. It left a bullet-sized hole in her chest, but the back, the exit wound, was gaping. Like a bullet through an apple. The chair she had sat herself in, its spindles all blown out.

  I hadn’t told Paul about the chair.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ONE theory states that the universe created man so that it would have someone to contemplate it—it was unable to contemplate itself so it created us. Then, after a half-century search, physicists discover a subatomic particle—the Higgs boson, or the “God Particle”—which might answer the questions, Why are we made of matter rather than simply light? Why is there something rather than nothing? The New York Times weighs in: The finding affirms a grand view of the universe described by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws—but one in which everything interesting, like ourselves, results from flaws or breaks in that symmetry. Flaws or breaks in the symmetry—hasn’t it always felt this way, haven’t we believed this all along, that these flaws, these breaks, are what made us? In the midst of tears and celebration, even the physicists know that this discovery is simply a threshold. The whole universe awaits.

  Eagleman offers this: One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala—when something threatens your life, this area kicks into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the experience, the longer the moment seems to last. The moments after my mother died (a “flashbulb moment”) seemed to last an eternity, yet the way she went away was too fast, too sudden—I might relive it constantly, yet my mind was never able to take it in, not fully. I was offered a choice—yes or no—to be on set to see it reenacted. What would you have done? And so, for the past several months, hundreds of people—the crew, the actors—have woken up every morning before the sun, built rooms that we could enter into, filled a trailer with costumes, printed up the scenes for each day on little half sheets, all this so that she would come back, if briefly, like a star, whose light we all know is dead, yet it’s still so bright, until it falls, and then is gone forever. I dragged myself to the ocean but I couldn’t throw myself in, she wrote, with this
hand. I look at my hand as I write these words. How hard was it to drag myself here today? Walking from the car to set I couldn’t feel my feet. I said to myself, I can’t feel my feet. I need to feel the sidewalk, I said—I need to feel my feet on the sidewalk. The old stuff is really hard to erase, Eagleman says.