00:04:53:01
…BUT, LEON CONSIDERS, picture this: two angels walking through the light of that aging Italian afternoon. The ruins. The dusty olive trees. Olive or fig. Or, better: through your what. Lush garden. At dawn. Yes. That’s it. The beekeeper asleep somewhere above you. The day a motionless ocean you will cross. Again. Rowing through the minutes, one home to another. Morning fog suffused by peach sunshine. Coffee and apples. These are your angels walking arm-in-arm, faces white light splashed on broken columns. Picture this, but picture it taking place in another dimension. An antispace thought. I have spent my life asserting the possibility they are there. Here. Here, of course, and not here. Call it the dynamics of metaphor. The way they. Sweet berries. Als ob. The German form of hope. How, I want to ask, can you prove they’re not? That’s the interesting. Believing, we all feel far from the grave, and if you look and don’t see them, I tell you they’re invisible. If you listen and don’t hear them, I tell you they walk on air. They don’t breathe. Take a photograph. Go on. This is your garden before you, your time behind you, yet all you will discover is saffron incandescence. Floppy green pancake leaves. Bright red flowers, fist-sized hearts pulsing on stems. We live by the bluest reason, devoid of angels, you say. They had how many? Six limbs. Like insects. Rapture bugs. Produce a recording. Make it the highest quality. You hear birds chirping in the underbrush. A distant airplane hanging over a patchwork of houses. Perhaps even your own embarrassed cough in the background, proving only your own one-eyed existence. That’s it. That’s all. The ways we miss our lives are life. But that’s enough. Enough and not enough. How do you know the photograph hasn’t been retouched? The recording altered? When did angels become, like all words, somehow less than themselves? Let us say they have gone home. Let us say that. How do you know they haven’t? God Himself left the planet in alarm. Without even bothering to say goodbye. Packed virtue in His valise and vamoosed. The hotel instead of the hymns. Leaving those who write to forget for the rest of us. How do you know you didn’t miss them by a millisecond? A millennium? Take an x-ray. Go ahead. Set a trap. Hide with me behind that row of Queen Mother plums for an hour. A Mediterranean of bluely reasonable days. Like Sicily: land of pregnant men and manly women squat as Doric columns. We stayed in a pensione there whose name I forget whose brochure boasted, among other amenities, one beach umbrella for hiving unity. My beekeeper and me. What did it mean? Als ob. But quick: behind you. They’ve been standing there the whole time, celestial chameleons. You turn and they dissolve in your turning. Their soft hands of light are a motion. Maybe this time. Maybe this one. You can almost smell them, can’t you? The fresh morning. The oranges. The opportunities…
00:04:54:15
UNTIL TWO DAYS ago, Arnold Frankenheimer worked for the biggest asshole in the world. Designing the website for the guy’s start-up health-food company was a McJob like other McJobs Arnold had had: eight hours in a nondescript cubicle followed by the evening with his girlfriend, Heather, their new baby, Kayla, and maybe a little pot before bed. Arnold didn’t mind much. Then he did. After lunch Friday, he emailed his boss his resignation letter. It said, simply: Fuck you very much. I quit. Arnold then linked the website to the Face Value Productions one and walked. Now his girlfriend and daughter have to eat. Rent is due next week. Arnold is screwed. This morning he drove to the mall in his Honda Civic and found a seat at The Crepe Stand for an earnest think. Once upon a time, it struck him, sitting there, a sense of meaning derived from what you produced. If you were an arrow maker in Germany, your last name would be Fletcher. These days meaning derives from what you consume. You eat at cafes with which you want to be associated and pick your identity off a rack at The Gap. In the midst of this thought, Arnold decided to smash his car into the side of the Mall of America at forty miles an hour. Arnold doesn’t want to die. Far from it. He wants to make available to himself and his new family a certain amount of insurance capital. This is how he will do it. First he will enjoy the movie. Then he will make himself into a crash-test dummy. Use the System, Arnold has always told Heather, or the System will use you. Satisfied, he turns around to ask what he discovers may be the fattest man in the state, if not the entire Midwest, to please stop keeping beat to the music in the preview with his, the fattest man in the state’s, sneaker on the back of his, Arnold’s, seat.
00:04:55:24
WORDS TEMPORARILY flee Jeff Kotcheff. Cheeks chip-munked with hotdog pap, he glowers at the jewboy with the shocked indignity of a sumo wrestler whose bare foot a Pekingese has just waddled up to and shat on. Jeff stops chewing. He lowers the two-inch stub of processed meat and doughy roll and pushes his aviator glasses up on his ample nose. An ugly tomato-cream-sauce pink suffuses his ample face in the darkness. “Oh,” he says in a voice that strikes Arnold as disturbingly effeminate, huge white sneaker hovering. “Oh. Sorry. U m, sorry.” “No problem,” replies Arnold and, smiling politely, turns back to the screen.
00:04:57:04
EXT. MALL OF AMERICA — DAY
CRANE SHOT: swim in slowly through an insane blizzard. South entrance of the Mall of America gradually resolves into focus. Sidewalks snowslushy below the red, white, and blue sign above the doors. Two-foot drifts piled against gigantic flowerpots and brick exterior. Whirl of dark genderless figures, hunched against the mad weather, plunging into and out of the dismal day.
CELAN’S THEME — a soft, sad, fluid Philip Glassian piece — rises on the soundtrack.
Camera chooses one of the bundled pedestrians and unhurriedly swoops through the entrance over his/ her shoulder.
CUT TO:
INT. MALL OF AMERICA — DAY
The glittery clean tumult of commerce. In the Mall of America, weather turns out to be a dream.
No sound save for Celan’s theme.
SKY CAM SHOT: the camera seems to glide through the mall’s interior — over the heads of holiday shoppers; teens lapping ice-cream cones, listening to iPods; women with small kids walking and talking on cell phones as they browse the Lego Imagination Center gift shop; then up the escalators, out onto the food court balcony crammed with diners; over the edge, into space three floors above Camp Snoopy where, suspended, the camera rotates and looks back at where it came from.
FASTFORWARD: in the center of the shot, small, almost lost among the rapid sensory data, the AMC theater entrance on the fourth floor. Hold five seconds. The feeling is of a huge, shiny, Dexedrined chrome-and-glass beehive.
CUT TO:
INT. AMC THEATER NUMBER TEN — DAY
OVER-THE-SHOULDER SHOT: Celan Solen. Darkness except for the furious fuzzy white particulate light arriving from the screen like some wide rectangular stream of granulated sugar. Celan rests on his lower spine in his fastfood uniform, knees propped on the back of the seat in front of him. Patrons clustered in his vicinity. Foreground, including Celan’s ear, unshaven jaw, and part of the back of his head, in focus. Background, including the movie screen itself, out of focus. It is impossible to tell, therefore, what the nebulous colorful shapes up there are doing. One has the sense of looking at a film through frosted glass.
CELAN’S THEME is step by step replaced with the massive swish of CELAN’S RESPIRATION. Wind-tunnel breathing in THX sound.