The Reenactments: A Memoir Read online

  EIGHT

  IN Magnolia, Julianne Moore enters a drugstore to fill a prescription, ostensibly for her husband, who is dying of cancer, but the pharmacist thinks she is trying to scam him for drugs. He thinks she’s an addict, or maybe her character just thinks he thinks this, it’s unclear. It seems like she might be scamming, or at least taking a swig of the liquid morphine now and then, or perhaps she is simply distraught, to be so close to death; either way, she goes off on him, in a way that is chilling and complicated, because no one seems to know at that moment what is real. If Julianne, looking for her motivation, asked her director, Am I trying to scam the drugs or am I distraught? perhaps the director simply shrugged—all possible scenarios are sometimes true.

  THE real appearing unreal, the unreal appearing real—this is the definition of the uncanny. Jimmy Stewart, in Vertigo, enters deeply into this realm—he loses his mind after witnessing what he believes to be the suicide of his newly beloved Madeleine (Kim Novak). After he is released from the psych hospital he sees a woman—Judy—who reminds him of Madeleine. What he doesn’t know is that Judy is Madeline—she was hired to play the role of Madeleine, by the husband who threw the real Madeleine’s body from the tower. In the most chilling scene in the film (for me), Stewart gets Judy to dress like Madeleine, to change the color of her hair, to wear it the same way: It can’t matter to you, he barks, lost in the depths of his obsession. This obsession feels both real and utterly hopeless, this desire to recreate what has been lost.

  (2011) I’m on the phone with Julianne, a month before we start filming, we’re on speakerphone with Paul. They are, well, I don’t know where they are—I imagine a hotel room, maybe a restaurant—just voices without bodies, asking questions about my mother. I say hi to Julianne, say how happy I am she is involved, that I look forward to meeting her. Paul says, Do you have time to talk? I’m outside a bike shop, about to buy a bike (mine was recently stolen)—I have time. So your mother shot herself? he asks. I didn’t just make that up, did I? No, you didn’t make that up. Where’d she get the gun? he asks. We had lots of guns around my house, I tell him. Some antique ones hung on the wall, a working shotgun in a zippered bag in the closet, the shells in my mother’s top drawer. I’d sometimes put them into the gun when she wasn’t around, but I don’t tell Paul this, nor do I tell Julianne. I don’t know why I don’t tell them—maybe because my mother didn’t know (at least I thought she didn’t know), so Julianne doesn’t need to know (or maybe she knows already). I tell them she had her own pistol, a .38, which she got a permit for in 1972. I would go target shooting with her, and then later I’d shoot a rifle with my stepfather, the Vietnam vet, and then some other guns with my friends, who were into guns—guns, motorcycles, and beer (and Mink DeVille). I liked the motorcycles and the beer (and Mink DeVille), though I wasn’t that into the guns. I tell them that after she died the cops came and took all the guns away, confiscated them. That I never went to retrieve them.

  WHAT exactly are we, am I, getting into? What I mean is—is this film, will it be, more glass flower, or stuffed ape? That is, am I hoping to take something that was (my mother, her death) and present it as I’d hoped it would be? Or am I taking something that was, and making something out of it that will last forever? Am I reenacting a—her—death, or am I hoping to bring her back? Will Julianne embody my mother, or will my mother embody Julianne? Am I here to try to line up the physics of the world, to recreate what happened, as accurately as possible, in the hope of releasing some hidden energy, in the hope of finding a hinge that will open a door to some truth as yet uncovered? Edgar Morin writes: There are two ways to conceive of the cinema of the Real: the first is to pretend that you can present reality to be seen; the second is to pose the problem of reality. The problem of reality? I always thought the problem was, simply, within me.

  IN 1990, the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami released Close-Up, his half-documentary, half-staged recreation of the real-life trial of a man (Hossein Sabzian) who impersonated a famous Iranian filmmaker (Mohsen Makhmalbaf). In the film, as in life, Sabzian convinces a (rich) family that they will star in his next film (which they will also finance)—eventually they end up having him arrested. Kiarostami reenacts the meeting of Sabzian and the wife on a bus, using the real people. In this initial meeting Sabzian comes off as somewhat innocent—a man from a lower class with artistic aspirations who is mistaken for a famous director. The woman approaches him, mistakes him for Makhmalbaf. All Sabzian does is agree to go to the woman’s home for lunch, to meet her family—her son, she tells him, is studying film. All he has to do is say yes. Isn’t this what anyone who calls himself an artist has to do, for years before one actually makes anything worthwhile? One has to pretend to be a poet years before one actually is a poet. My father calls himself the greatest writer America has yet produced, we will hear De Niro comparing himself to Salinger and Twain in the opening shot of the film. My first book wasn’t published until I was forty, I spent years calling myself a poet with nothing to show for it. If someone had mistaken me for a real poet in those years, can I say I would have contradicted her? Kiarostami reenacts Sabzian’s initial discussions with the family, over lunch, in the actual family home. Did he simply set up his camera, bring Sabzian back in, ask them to do what they had done? The son, it turns out, has little interest, at least in this reenactment, in being a filmmaker. Now he wants to be a baker. Some days or weeks pass, the film is beginning to take shape, and then the police come and take Sabzian away. I am unsure, but it seems as if Kiarostami used actual footage from the trial, though perhaps this is recreated as well. At the end of Close-Up, Sabzian is released from prison after some months, and Kiarostami films him meeting the real Makhmalbaf. It’s devastating—Sabzian breaks down, utters the following, to both apologize for, and to justify, his actions: Everyone loved me when I was Makhmalbaf.

  ON the phone Julianne asks, though it is hard for me to hear, about pills: Which pills did your mother take? I tell her about the Darvon, which I don’t even know if they still make, but I believe it was a barbiturate—a knockout pill, a down—she took them for her migraines. Julianne says, O, my mother had migraines too, and I say, O. How old was your mother when she had you? Julianne asks, and I say she was twenty, twenty-one, and Julianne says, My mother was twenty when she had me, and I say, O, yes, so you know, but even as I say the words I don’t know what they mean. She asks about her depression and I say, It was mostly just when she had migraines that she’d go inside, that she’d spend a day in bed, that other than that she was vivacious, young, alive. She made it to work every day, and then she went to her other job at night. She didn’t miss work, until maybe near the end, when she started doing cocaine and things got a little sloppy. Everyone was doing cocaine then, I add, and Julianne laughs. She got a little off the rails but not so far off. I am leaning over a wrought-iron railing, looking into a restaurant—a Chinese man comes to the window, looks up at me.

  SIMONE Weil offers this:

  To lose someone: we suffer because the departed, the absent, has become imaginary and unreal. But our desire for him is not imaginary. We have to go down into ourselves to the abode of desire which is not imaginary. Hunger: we imagine kinds of food, but the hunger itself is real: we have to fasten on to the hunger. The presence of the dead person is imaginary, but his absence is very real: henceforward it is his way of appearing.

  Paul plans Julianne’s scenes—which are all flashback—to be filmed in such a way that they appear washed out, faded, yellowed. Your mother is the specter hanging over every scene, Paul tells me—her presence, her death, is what animates the living.

  Does that sound right? he asks.

  WHAT I don’t tell Julianne is this: I remember a lot of orange pill bottles around our house, my mother would save them, perhaps to get them refilled, perhaps to keep track, her top drawer rattled with them. Behind the pill bottles was her gun, alongside a copy of Henry Miller, Sexus, The Rosy Crucifixion—this was the drawer where the act
ion was. At some point, when I was around Liam’s age, I began taking the pill bottles, stuffing them with firecrackers. I’d cut a little hole into the white childproof caps with an x-acto knife, run the braided fuses through it, to make my little bombs. I’d aim the gun out the window at passing cars, bang, I’d make the noise with my mouth. I’d thumb through the Miller and jerk off. Later still I’d simply take the pills themselves, to see how far they could take me.

  THE problem of reality, the problem of the truth. I only half understand why I am part of all these conversations. I don’t know what else Paul needs to know—he has my book, everything is in the book. He’s like a tv detective just trying to get the story right—he asks and so I tell him. We spend a day in a van looking at locations, I look at buildings that could be the shelter and say, You need a big room for the dorm, a big room for the dining hall, you need doors that lead to staircases, but he already knows all this. I look at the coat (black leather) I will wear, the truck I will drive (beat-up Toyota—production refers to it as the “hero” truck), the woman I will fall in love with (punky, yet kind), I say this one, more than this one, but does this mean it will be any closer to reality, any closer to the truth?

  I never went to the police station to retrieve my mother’s guns—for all I know, they are still locked in a room somewhere. Or else one day they were auctioned off. Or else they simply vanished. Maybe someone uses one of them every year (the shotgun) to shoot a deer, to feed his family, or maybe someone used another one, the same gun my mother used (the .38), to end his (or her) life. Maybe I should have retrieved them, melted them down, I could have forged them into something—an urn, something big enough to sleep in, and the world become a bell we’d crawl inside / and the ringing all we’d eat.

  NINE

  (1986) I go to Paris for the winter, in part to get away from the shelter, in part to cross paths with Beckett, who I’d read would frequent a certain café every afternoon for a glass of red wine. I’d wander the streets, hoping to run into him, but (surprise) never did. I’d read all the plays, and at Shakespeare and Company I bought a used copy of the trilogy—Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. This is what I remember: a man dragging himself across a field with a spoon, a man ruminating on what he called a suck stone, which one should place in one’s mouth when hunger or thirst becomes unbearable. Beckett spent a page on how important it was to find the right suck stone—small but not too small, smooth but with character—how to test it in your mouth, for comfort. After that, for years I carried a stone with me wherever I went, in my pocket or in my mouth—it seemed at least as important as a map. That winter in Paris I also scraped together a few francs to see Oh Les Beaux Jours (Happy Days), a revival with the actress (Madeleine Renaud) who had originated the role in 1961. It opens with a shrieking alarm and blinding lights, to reveal a woman buried up to her waist in sand, yet seemingly unfazed by it. The second act opens with the same alarm and light, only now the woman is buried up to her neck, still unfazed. While in Paris I also tracked down a screening of the one collaboration Beckett did with Buster Keaton, a film called, simply, Film—a robed Keaton, alone in a room, sits in a chair, looks at the closed door, seemingly troubled, or perhaps it’s just his face. He hears something at the door—is he hallucinating? He gets up, opens it, a cat rushes in. Keaton throws it out, but it slips back in before he gets the door closed. Repeat. He begins to see eyes everywhere, in the patterns on the back of the chair, on his buttons, in the knots on the door. Everything is looking at him. It would be another year before my father would get himself evicted and end up at the shelter, another year before I’d cease being invisible there.

  IT turns out that Film doesn’t take place entirely in a room—it actually begins outside, under the Brooklyn Bridge (how did I forget a whole bridge?), as Keaton makes his (uncomfortable? paranoid?) way to his room. I thought he was the only actor in the film, but he passes a couple on the street, and a woman on the staircase, and has interactions (of sorts) with each of them. And the cat, I remembered it as a stray, an interloper, but the cat is his, along with a dog (a chihuahua—how could I forget a chihuahua?), a goldfish, and a caged bird. The film begins with a quote on a title card by the Irish philosopher Berkeley—esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived), though the actual quote is esse est percipi aut percipere (to be is to be perceived and to perceive). Once he makes it into his room, Keaton spends the rest of the film covering whatever it is that seems to be looking at him—that’s the part I remember.

  ESSE est percipi. To be is to be perceived. This reminds me of Schrödinger’s cat, the thought experiment, you know how it goes—you put a cat put in a box with some sort of a device that may or may not kill him. Without opening the box the question becomes whether the cat is alive or dead (or both alive and dead), whether reality is made manifest only when we observe it, whether it is our attention that makes it one thing or another. Is the cat really both alive and dead until the box is opened? Is it possible he is dead in the box, yet alive in some parallel universe? Yet (maybe? obviously?) it isn’t just us (humans) who observe the world—maybe (like in Film) everything does. If we concede that the cat can observe itself, is this enough to determine its fate? Or maybe the cat is simply dead, at least in this particular box, which is all we have. Accept it, move on.

  WERNER Heisenberg discovered (invented?) the idea that everything changes in the presence of something else (part of his uncertainty principle), but what is not in the presence of something else? At the very least aren’t we always in the presence of time? I’d been working at the shelter for three years before my father got himself evicted and ended up on the streets, but I still get asked if I went to work at the shelter to find him. I don’t think this is an unreasonable question. Maybe I went to the shelter to understand men who were very much like my father—marginal, alcoholic, delusional—but it is only one piece of the puzzle. Maybe my father got himself evicted so that we would have a reunion in the shelter, yet I don’t know if anyone could have planned such a reunion. My mother had killed herself a year and a half before I started working at the shelter—I felt a need to dissolve myself into something larger than myself, or, I feared, I would follow her. The shelter, it seemed, was larger.

  WHAT I mean by something larger than myself is changeable—for a while it was the ocean, so I moved onto it, and for the next ten years I lived on a boat, off and on. Before that marijuana had fulfilled the role of something larger than myself, a constant companion, it seemed to connect me to the universe, until it (marijuana? the universe?) began to shrink, until it became a little ocean, until the day came when I’d get high and never leave the boat, never make it to shore, not for days on end. Then poetry, for a while, I’d dream dreams made entirely of words, of sound. Some days it was abandon, some nights it was fucking. Bees for a while, then Abu Ghraib—both perhaps manifestations of a self-righteous anger based on something I read in the newspaper, something I heard on the radio. Thich Nhat Hanh says that the self is made of only non-self elements (it is the emptiness of the bowl that creates the bowl). Maurice Halbwachs offers this:

  Often we deem ourselves the originators of thoughts and ideas, feelings and passions, actually inspired by some group. Our agreement with those about us is so complete that we vibrate in unison, ignorant of the real source of the vibrations. How often do we present, as deeply held convictions, thoughts borrowed from a newspaper, book, or conversation? They respond so well to our way of seeing things that we are surprised to discover that their author is someone other than ourself.

  Damasio would seem to dispute, or at least to complicate, this idea of collective memory: Consciousness is an entirely private, first-person phenomenon which occurs as part of a private, first-person process we call mind. Yet Damasio goes on to say that attention—focused attention—is as necessary to consciousness as having images. When my father appeared at the shelter door he was little more than an image, two-dimensional, without flesh. I couldn’t know he wouldn’t leave, that he
wouldn’t get off the street, for five years. I’d been working at the shelter for three years at that point, I did my job well, or well enough. No one at the shelter asks where you come from—everyone is there for a reason, yet rarely does the reason manifest itself. I became, the moment my father walked through the shelter door, transparent.

  Or do I mean real?

  SCHRÖDINGER’S cat, the uncertainty principle, nonself elements—all of these ideas are in the realm of quantum physics. Reading up on it led me, uneasily, to a term I had yet to encounter: quantum suicide. I have a hard time grasping the concept of quantum suicide, yet it somehow lines up with the concept of quantum immortality, but only if certain parallel universe, many world-worlds interpretations, are true (or even possible). Hugh Everett III, the American physicist who proposed the many-worlds theory, believed that it guaranteed him immortality—he argued that consciousness is bound at each branching to follow whichever path does not lead to death. In this way the cat is both alive and dead. Or, better yet, it lives forever. But does this desire (can desire?) change the way it is?

  DISSOLVE into something larger. I never utter the word God, even when I pray (which I almost never do, being a devout nonbeliever). I believe that anything I can name, anything I can understand, cannot possibly help me, not with this. What is this? Everything. As Whitman offered: Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, if I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me. Once I said God is everything that is not me, but today I’m not so sure. Thoreau distills it all down to this: Only that day dawns to which we are awake.