Now work on the film is done. It’s a quiet, low-key production, and probably won’t be a box-office hit. Its release will be pretty subdued, and it’s likely to go mostly unnoticed. It will probably be the kind of film that goes to video quickly, and is left in a corner of the rental shop, the colors on its box fading.
The last scene ends and the screen goes dark. Then the credits roll.
If my life were a movie, I’d want it to be memorable, in a way, no matter how modest the production was. I’d hope it would mean something to someone, somehow, that it would give them a boost and spur them on.
After the credits, life goes on. My hope is that my life would go on in someone’s memory.
The two-hour screening ends.
I step outside the theater and the quiet and the darkness envelops me.
“Do you feel sad?” she said, as we left the theater.
“I don’t know.”
“I guess it must be rough on you.”
“I don’t know. Sorry, I really don’t know how I feel right now.”
And I really didn’t know. I wasn’t sure if I was sad because I was going to die or if I was sad because something really important and meaningful was about to disappear from the world.
“You can come back and see me any time, you know, if you ever feel bad, if you’re in so much pain you can’t stand it.”
Her words reached me just as I was about to turn away.
“Thanks,” I said, and headed back up the hill.
“Wait!”
She shouted from behind me.
“One more quiz!”
“Not again…”
“This is the last question. Just one more.”
As she shouted after me I could see she’d begun to cry.
Then seeing her cry made me feel like crying.
“OK. I’ll give it one last go.”
“Whenever I watch a movie with a sad ending I always watch it one more time. Do you know why?”
This time I knew the answer. It’s the one thing I remembered well.
It’s something I was hoping for during the whole plane ride back from Buenos Aires, and even for a while after we broke up.
“Yeah, I know.”
“OK, so what’s the answer?”
“Because you’re hoping that maybe it’ll have a happy ending the next time.”
“Right! That’s it!”
She wiped her eyes roughly with her sleeve, and giving me a big wave, shouted manically, “May the Force be with you!”
To which I responded, holding back the tears, “I’ll be back!”
When I got home Aloha was waiting for me sporting a big grin. He gave me a wink (of course he can’t really wink so it’s more like kind of a squint), and with that, made movies disappear.
While Aloha was busy erasing movies, I was thinking about my mother. There was an Italian movie she liked a lot. Fellini’s La Strada.
The story goes like this: Gelsomina, a naive young woman, is bought from her impoverished mother by brutish circus strongman Zampanò, who wants her for his wife and partner. She remains loyal despite the abuse she suffers at Zampanò’s hands as they travel the Italian countryside performing together. Eventually Gelsomina grows weaker and when the abuse becomes intolerable, she begins to physically waste away. Zampanò abandons her.
A few years later the traveling circus arrives in a seaside town and Zampanò hears a young woman singing a song that Gelsomina used to sing. Zampanò finds out that Gelsomina has died, but her song lives on. Listening to the young woman singing Gelsomina’s song, Zampanò realizes that he loved her. He walks to the shore and collapses in tears on the beach. Crying won’t bring her back. In the end he realizes that although he really did love her, he was incapable of treating her as if he did, when they were together.
“You only realize what the really important things are when you’ve lost them.”
That’s what my mother would say when she watched this film.
It seemed like the same thing was happening with me now. I was genuinely sad now that I’d actually lost movies. I knew I would miss them. I know it was stupid, but it was only when I realized that the movies were really gone that it hit me how much they’d helped me emotionally, and how much they’d had to do with making me who I was. But my life was more important…
The Devil picked that moment to announce in his usual cheerful manner the next item he’d make disappear.
I couldn’t think about anything anymore, so I said yes just like that.
At that point, the thought that it could happen to Cabbage had never crossed my mind.
THURSDAY: IF CLOCKS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD
It’s funny how one strange thing is often followed by another. Like when you lose your keys and you invariably end up losing your wallet. Or in a baseball game when your team hits one home run after another. Or how a whole series of major manga artists just happened to end up living in the same cheap apartment building (the Tokiwa-So) in the early 60s.
As for me, I end up with terminal cancer, the Devil appears, phones and movies disappear from the world, and the next thing I know the cat is talking.
“Why, are you still sleeping, sir?”
I had to be dreaming.
“By George, you will get up this instant!”
It had to be a dream.
“Come now, up with you!”
But no, it wasn’t a dream. He was actually talking. And the he who was speaking was definitely Cabbage. And for some reason he sounded so refined… It was hard to know exactly what was going on.
“A bit confused, are we?”
Aloha appeared with that big grin on his face. Today he wore a sky-blue Hawaiian shirt. Again I felt like telling him to put on some real clothes. In keeping with the flamboyant style I’d come to expect from him, the brightly colored shirt featured parakeets and huge, swirly lollipops. It was so bright it made my eyes hurt. Not exactly the easiest thing to wake up to. Aloha was getting to be a pain in the ass. I snapped.
“C’mon, man, you’re always doing this to me! Now I wake up and the cat’s not meowing, it’s talking. And like a member of the landed gentry! Seriously, what’s happening here?”
“My, aren’t we witty this morning. Well, that’s just a little something extra from me, to you.”
“Something extra?”
“That’s right. After all, there are no more phones, the movies that you were so attached to are gone, so I thought you might need a little something to cheer you up. Like someone to talk to, or a new hobby or something. So, I just thought I’d try making the cat talk. I just happen to dabble in magic—you didn’t know? After all, I am the Devil…”
“But having the cat suddenly start to talk is a bit, um, disconcerting, I guess. Can you get it to stop?”
“Oh?”
Suddenly Aloha fell silent.
“Did I say something wrong?”
Aloha remained tight-lipped.
“I hope this isn’t something that you can’t fix—like you can’t put things back to normal.”
“Well, no, that’s not it. I mean, I can put things back… or should I say, it’ll all go back to normal eventually, it’s just a question of timing. You might say… I mean, God knows! But anyway, I don’t really know. I mean, I’m not God, you know? I’m just the Devil.”
How about if I just smack your head against the wall! is what I was thinking, but I swallowed my words and burrowed deeper under the covers. A world with no movies and where cats talk was not a world I wanted to wake up in.
Then Cabbage began to walk on my face. He’d always do this to wake me up (I was never a morning person). I once heard that the origin of the Japanese word for cat, “neko,” is actually “sleeping child” (same sound, different choice of kanji characters), but I think that’s a load of rubbish. Cabbage never sleeps late—he always wakes up early and starts harassing me.