I’d heard nothing about Troeltsch apparently switching room-assignments with Trevor Axford. A gigantic wedge of snow slid down a steep part of the roof over our window and fell past the window and hit the ground below with a huge whump. For some reason the fact that something as major as a midterm room-switch could have taken place without my knowing anything about it filled me with dread. There were a few glitters of a possible incipient panic-attack again.
Mario’s bedside table had a tube of salve for his pelvis’s burn, unevenly squeezed. Mario was looking at my face. ‘Is it you’re sad about not getting to play if the Quebec players are canceled?’
‘And then to crown off the whole night he ends up with his face glued to a window,’ Coyle said disgustedly.
‘Frozen,’ I corrected him.
‘Except but now listen to Stice’s explanation.’
‘Let me guess,’ I said.
‘For the bed hovering.’
Mario looked at Coyle. ‘You said bolted.’
‘I said presumably bolted is what I said. I said the only rationale that’s possible is bolts.’
‘Let me guess,’ I said.
‘Let him guess,’ Mario told Coyle.
‘The Darkness thinks ghosts.’ Coyle stood and came toward us. His two eyes were not set quite level in his face. ‘Slice’s explanation that he swore me to discretion but that was before the bed on the ceiling was he thinks he’s been somehow selected or chosen to get haunted or possessed by some kind of beneficiary or guardian ghost that resides in and/or manifests in ordinary physical objects, that wants to teach The Darkness how to not underestimate ordinary objects and raise his game to like a supernatural level, to help his game.’ One eye was subtly lower than the other, and set at a different angle.
‘Or hurt somebody else’s,’ I said.
‘Stice is mentally buckling,’ Coyle said, still moving in. I was careful to stay just out of morning-breath range. ‘He keeps staring at things with his temple-veins flexing, trying to exert will on them. He bet me 20 beans he could stand on his desk chair and lift it up at the same time, and then he wouldn’t let me cancel the bet when I got embarrassed for him after half an hour, standing up there flexing his temples.’
I was also keeping a careful eye on the oral appliance. ‘Did you guys hear sausage-analog and fresh-squeezed for breakfast?’
Mario asked again if I were sad.
Coyle said ‘I was down there. Stice’s map was taking the edge off appetites all over the room. Then deLint started in yelling at him.’ He was looking at me oddly. ‘I don’t see what’s so funny about it, man.’
Mario fell backward onto his bed and wriggled into his backpack’s straps with practiced ease.
Coyle said ‘I don’t know if I should go to Schtitt, or Rusk, or what. Or Lateral Alice. What if they haul him off somewhere, and it’s my fault?’
‘There’s no denying The Dark’s raised his game this fall though.’
‘There are machine messages on the machine, Hal, too,’ Mario said as I held his hands carefully and pulled him upright.
‘What if it’s the mental buckling that’s raised his game?’ Coyle said. ‘Does it still count as buckling?’
Cosgrove Watt had been one of the very few professional actors Himself ever used. Himself often liked to use rank amateurs; he wanted them simply to read their lines with an amateur’s wooden self-consciousness off cue cards Mario or Disney Leith would hold up well to the side of wherever the character was supposed to be looking. Up until the last phase of his career, Himself had apparently thought the stilted, wooden quality of nonprofes-sionals helped to strip away the pernicious illusion of realism and to remind the audience that they were in reality watching actors acting and not people behaving. Like the Parisian-French Bresson he so admired, Himself had no interest in suckering the audience with illusory realism, he said. The apparent irony of the fact that it required nonactors to achieve this stilted artificial I’m-only-acting-here quality was one of very few things about Himself’s early projects that truly interested academic critics. But the real truth was that the early Himself hadn’t wanted skilled or believable acting to get in the way of the abstract ideas and technical innovations in the cartridges, and this had always seemed to me more like Brecht than like Bresson. Conceptual and technical ingenuity didn’t much interest entertainment-film audiences, though, and one way of looking at Himself’s abandonment of anticonfluentialism is that in his last several projects he’d been so desperate to make something that ordinary U.S. audiences might find entertaining and diverting and conducive to self-forgetting[378] that he had had professionals and amateurs alike emoting wildly all over the place. Getting emotion out of either actors or audiences had never struck me as one of Himself’s strengths, though I could remember arguments during which Mario had claimed I didn’t see a lot of what was right there.
Cosgrove Watt was a pro, but he wasn’t very good, and before Himself discovered him, Watt’s career consisted mostly of regional-market commercials on broadcast television. His widest commercial exposure was as the Dancing Gland in a series of spots for a chain of East Coast endocrinology clinics. He’d worn a bulbous white costume, white toupee, and either a ball-and-chain or white tap-shoes, depending on whether he was portraying the Before-Gland or the After-Gland. Himself during one of these commercials had shouted Eureka at our HD Sony and travelled personally all the way to Glen Riddle, Pennsylvania, where Watt lived with his mother and her cats, to recruit him. He used Cosgrove Watt in almost every project for eighteen months. Watt for a time was to Himself as DeNiro was to Scorsese, McLachlin to Lynch, Allen to Allen. And up until Watt’s temporal-lobe problem made his social presence unbearable, Himself had actually put Watt, mother, and cats up in a contiguous suite of what later became prorectors’ rooms off the main E.T.A. tunnel, the Moms acquiescing in this but instructing Orin, Mario, and me never ever to remain in a room alone with Watt.
Accomplice! was one of Watt’s later roles. It is a sad and simple cartridge, and so short that the TP retracked to the film’s beginning in almost no time. Himself’s film opens as a beautifully sad young bus-station male prostitute, fragile and epicene and so blond even his eyebrows and lashes are blond, is approached in the Greyhound coffee shop by a flabby, dissipated-looking old specimen with gray teeth and circumflex eyebrows and obvious temporal-lobe difficulties. Cosgrove Watt plays the depraved older man, who takes the boy home to his lush but somehow scuzzy co-op apartment, in fact the place Himself had rented for O. and the P.G.O.A.T. and had decorated in various gradations of scuz for the interiors of almost all his late projects.
The sad and beautiful Aryan-looking boy agrees to seduction by the dissipated old specimen, but only on the condition that the man wear protection. The boy, who is inarticulate, nevertheless makes this stipulation extremely clear. Safe Sex or No Sex, he stipulates, holding up a familiar foil packet. The hideous old specimen — now in a smoking jacket and ascot of apricot-colored silk, and smoking through a long white FDR-style filter — is offended, thinks the young male prostitute has sized him up as such a depraved and dissipated old specimen that he might well have It, the Human Immuno Virus, he thinks. His thoughts are rendered via animated thought-bubbles, which Himself at that late-middle stage hoped the audience would find at once self-consciously nonillusory and wildly entertaining. Watt’s old specimen is grinning grayly in what he thinks is a pleasant way as he obligingly takes the foil packet and removes his ascot with what he believes to be a sensual flourish … but inside his thought-bubble he’s having temporal-lobe spasms of sadistic rage at the sad blond boy for appearing to size him up as a health risk. The obvious health risk here is referred to, both orally and in the thought-bubble, merely as It. For example: ‘Little bastard thinks I’m so dissipated-looking that I’ve been at this sort of thing so long that I’m likely to have It, does he,’ the old specimen thinks, his thought-bubble going all jagged with rage.