“See you,” she said.
And then she drove away. She pulled out of her spot, swung into the main part of the black street, and I watched, first her, then the car, getting smaller and smaller until eventually she must have turned, because I lost her in the confusion of all the anonymous cars in the distance.
There was a lightbulb in my room at the hotel, and under the bulb I’d been reading Brecht’s Life of Galileo, and I’d also been reading a book about Cary Grant. I was especially interested in the period dealing with the late 1950s, during what was called the “Cold War,” when his acting career had already peaked, his marriages hadn’t worked out, and although his happy-go-lucky persona was famous, it wasn’t completely authentic. He said as much when he started taking LSD. That was about 1959, around the time he made North by Northwest, when the person who called himself Cary Grant was still the apotheosis of charm.
“Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” he used to quip. “Even I want to be Cary Grant,” and what he meant, I think, is that the person who called himself Cary Grant was just an actor, a Brechtian actor in the sense that, although he became whatever character he was playing, he knew he was a fiction, knew his elegance and self-possession were make-believe. He knew he was only playing a part, and he knew the audience knew, and because he didn’t pretend otherwise, he played the part to perfection. That was his charm.
But charming people can also be deceitful people, and because Cary Grant was really Archibald Leach you could say he was deceitful. Certainly he had a dual nature, but because we all have that dual nature, we trusted him. We trusted him because he didn’t completely trust himself, and that lack of trust is why he started visiting a doctor, a psychiatrist, and why the doctor began giving him the then-legal hallucinogenic drug. The devil-may-care persona of Cary Grant had become a rut, and first of all, he didn’t like ruts, and secondly, although he’d left Archibald Leach in his past, the fact was, Archibald Leach was still a part of him. He felt it beneath the mask of Cary Grant, and because he was tired of wearing that mask, because he wanted to let his various disguises fall away, he took a glass of water, put the small round pill on his tongue, and swallowed.
It’s not hard to imagine him in the specially prepared room at the clinic. It was made to seem like a real room, with real furniture and a real rug. He was sitting in a comfortable chair with the psychiatrist sitting in another chair, and he was feeling the effect of the drug, noticing that both his body and his world were changing. He’d walked into the room with one reality and gradually that reality faded away. And the tendency anyone has, when reality is gone, is to retrieve it and restore it, and I give credit to Cary Grant, or to the doctors supervising him. He stayed in this untethered state, bouncing around inside his own head as the chemical, like a kind of poison, began to work. And as it began to work he noticed the color of the wall and the marks the roller left when it painted the wall, the almost topographical texture, like looking down at a landscape from an airplane. He was looking at the paint, not wondering what color it was, or what color he’d prefer to paint it; he was just looking, at the wall, and the rug underneath his feet, and the socks on his feet, and his hand. The shape of his fingers reminded him of an animal.
It’s hard not to think thoughts when someone plants them in your head, and when the psychiatrist began asking him questions about his childhood in England, the thoughts that grew in Cary Grant’s mind were images of his mother, specifically an image of her when he was a child. She’s lying on her sofa, with doilies and antimacassars, and he’s smelled the aroma a thousand times, and he can hear her telling him, “I want you to love me and mean it,” and Cary Grant didn’t know if he was telling the psychiatrist this, or just thinking it.
In my mind he’s sitting there, eyes closed, thinking about what the psychiatrist is saying, and when he opens his eyes, there’s the doctor with the hornrimmed glasses, and he recognizes the doctor, but he doesn’t recognize himself. He can feel himself inside his body, and he can feel himself expanding inside the skin of that body, stretching the skin until it finally cracks like a dry shell, and who he is, underneath his skin, stands up. This is me, he thinks, and although he’s actually still sitting in the chair, he sees himself standing up. He watches himself take a few steps away from the chair. The person in the chair is Cary Grant, and he doesn’t want to do that anymore. The doctor is talking to the chair, or the person in the chair, and he can see himself walking away from the chair, and away from Cary Grant, leaving behind the personality he used to have. He walks behind the chair to a window. It has a venetian blind, and he pulls the cord that pulls up the blind. There’s a section of grass outside and a section of street and he unlocks the window and raises it. He can see cars passing outside the window, and he can smell the air, cool and warm, and it seems to him like paradise. He looks back into the room, then he looks out the window, at the possible freedom out there, and he knows he’s not Archibald Leach anymore, and he decides he’s not going to be Cary Grant.
And most of us profess a love of freedom. In theory, freedom is admirable and desirable, but how do you make it happen? How do you live, moment to moment, responding honestly to the unknown moment unfolding? Freedom is partly about facing the unknown, and the problem is, losing the known, losing the thing we’ve spent so much time acquiring, is difficult. The doctor is still talking to the person in the chair, and the doctor’s a doctor and he’s the patient, and he can feel a part of himself wanting to tell the doctor, I’m not Cary Grant. Like someone wanting to protest, Cary Grant wants to turn and climb out the window. And he would, except for one thing. Cary Grant is sitting in the chair, and although he wants to stop being Cary Grant, he enjoys being Cary Grant, and he feels himself pulled back to the chair. He walks to the chair but he doesn’t sit. He wants to tell the doctor, “I don’t want to sit,” but like a child who can’t yet speak, he can’t yet speak, and all he does is stand there. He stands there until after a while he gets tired of standing, and then he sits. He watches himself sit down on the dark upholstery. He could feel the old mask forming around him, around his face and his body, and although he fit into the form of what he used to be, he didn’t feel like what he used to be.
A few nights later I had a dream. In the dream I was holding Jane in my arms, looking down at her, and she was naked and I was naked and the dream was precipitated, I think, by events that actually happened. Bonnie had found me another role. I would be starring — that was her word — in a video, and she didn’t say it was a video game, but that didn’t matter. It was being filmed in a warehouse downtown, and I arrived in the morning. I parked near a flower store specializing in funeral flowers, found the entrance door where people were bringing in lights and monitors, and where Maria, the assistant director, told me what I would be doing. The part I was to play was the part of the monster. The video game had a story, and in the story a monster would be wreaking havoc on the citizens of an imaginary town, and the object of the game was to stop the monster by killing it.
I found my dressing room — a barely converted bathroom — and found my red costume hanging on a hanger on the shower rod. I thought it was going to be a monster costume, a gorilla or space creature, but it was just a body suit, made of stretchy lycra. Except for the headgear it was a one-piece outfit, with small photosensitive wafers sewn into the material. I sat on the chair in the bathroom, and as instructed, took off all my clothes, pulled the costume up my legs and over my arms, and when I emerged from my changing room Maria zipped me up. I was completely covered, everything except my face and my feet. Because the floor was cold they allowed me to wear my socks.