[...] I once had a girlfriend who dumped me for a more conventionally successful and conventionally handsome and conventionally decent fellow, and afterward, I would see her car everywhere. But, of course, it was a fairly common make and color, and all cars look the same today anyway (see: my critically acclaimed essay on this very subject, “A Single Carnation,” in The Journal of What’s Wrong With Today’s Cars), so it was most likely rarely if ever her. [...]

In my apartment, I stare through a professional jeweler’s loupe at the single remaining frame of Ingo’s film. I believe I have come upon a brilliant and feasible restoration technique. Using a method of my own devising, based on my understanding of the block universe theory and my vast knowledge of film history, I should be able to study this frame and with great precision predict the frame that follows it as well as the one that precedes it. By simply repeating this process 186,624,999 times, I should end up with a complete reconstruction of the film. It will be painstaking, of course. It will likely kill me, but it is essential.

A voice in my head dubs me a failure once again. Is it my own voice? It is too distant to tell. I put the single frame back in its envelope. I am awash with self-loathing. This failure to predict the frame on each side, the other moments, the quantized presentation of Ingo’s world, has led me to the undeniable conclusion that the only moment that exists is the moment we inhabit. The rest is rumor and gossip. The rest is a lie.

IN AN ATTEMPT to improve my state of mind, I wander the streets of New York looking forlorn, as is my way, in order to attract women who might think I’m deep or that I need to be saved, a technique that has not yet proved fruitful but I am confident will. One might think I would have given up on it by now, but it is the single technique in my arsenal. I invented it at the age of fifteen at a teen party, where I sat in the corner and wrote in a little notebook. What are you writing? asks the sad and beautiful girl of my imagination. Oh, just some thoughts, I say, matching her sadness. Do you hate these things as much as I do? she continues. I do, I say. It seemed like it should work. But it never did. I mean, not with any of the pretty, sad ones.

“I cannot remember the details of a film I have watched.”

“Oh,” he says. “That is nothing. Movies are a disposable art form.”

I hate this man.

“I am a film critic by profession, as well as by passion,” I say.

Then, as if on cue, the voices start.

Muffled and distant they talk about Slammy’s. They tell me how good it is. They implore me to go there to eat. I worry I am going crazy. I become afraid to leave my apartment. As the lightbulbs burn out one by one, rather than buy replacements, I switch the dead ones out so there’s always a working one above my bed, which is where I now spend all my time, like Proust. When the final bulb dies, I move to my tiny back porch, which butts up against the tenement next door. The light from my neighbor’s window is the only light bright enough for me to read by. The Slammy’s voice is getting louder:

Again she nods. Again he’s fishing. Everyone knows something that begins with M. I’ve suffered a loss of my memory. There’s the M I’ve lost, putz.

“Michael?” he asks.

She nods. OK, that was good. But still, everyone knows a Michael. I know seventeen Michaels, four of whom died recently, two of whom were recently lost while camping, one of whom is in hiding. If he had said Melchior and been correct, I might’ve been impressed. Might’ve. But I know six Melchiors, three of whom are fairly recently dead, so even then.

“Listen,” he continues, “I can help you. By putting you into a state of deep hypgnotic relaxation, I can help you access memories you feel certain are forever lost. You should know that in addition to working with alien abductees and past-lifers—both of which I believe in, by the way—I also work with the NYPD and several other major police departments.”

“Oh,” I say, impressed. “What is your success rate?”

“I do filing for them and I’m pretty damn accurate. The point is,” Barassini says, “that for this to work, I need you to trust me fully. Are there any concerns you have about me or the process at this point that I can try to assuage?”

“The chair is hard. I feel it pressing into my buttock bones. The room is dark, musty. I feel anxiety. I want this movie to be great. I want it to change my life, both in the watching and in the eventual heralding. If it’s terrible, I have gained nothing. I am where I was. Worse off because time has passed and I am that much closer to my grave. And I’ll have to tell Ingo that I loved it when it will be clear that I did not. I am not a good actor in that I cannot be dishonest. It is my curse that others always know exactly how I feel. I guess in a way that might make me a brilliant actor, but only if I am playing a character who is scripted to feel exactly as I feel at every moment of the filming. Maybe then I would be the best actor who has ever lived. I’m certain I would. I should audition for that role. I’ll look in Backstage later. The projector starts up. It whirs and sputters as a rectangle of light appears before me on the screen, followed by the scratchy black leader, followed by the China Girl. Wait, was that Tsai? Go back!”

So this will not be a novelization. A novelization is a lesser thing. Just as the book is always better than the movie (with the exception of Truffaut’s one decent film, Tirez sur le Pianiste [1960]), the movie is always better than the novelization. There must be a term for what I am about to do. What do you call something that is an interpretation, a critique, an embellishment, a deepening? Something that compares favorably to the experience of a moviegoer. I am, after all, a critic who will watch a movie only once and, whenever possible, in a public theater with a paying audience. I insist on paying fair-market value. That is the true moviegoing experience. A movie is not only the image on the screen, the sound from the speakers. It is the translation of all this by the brain. It is the social milieu. It is the year you see it, your age, the state of your marriage. It is what happened on the way to the theater, what you expect to happen after, it is who is next to you on each side. It is how they smell. It is who sits in front of you. Who is or isn’t kicking your seat from behind. It is your worry about the call from the doctor. It is that you got laid. Or didn’t. Or are about to. Or know you never will again. It is your envy: of the filmmaker, of the couple necking down front. It is the popcorn. The Goobers. That you have to go to the bathroom. That someone is eating a smelly tuna sandwich. Did they smuggle it in? It doesn’t seem fair, that the cheaters get the sandwiches and the rest of us get shit on. It is your suspension of disbelief. The scene that motivates an eye roll. It is your critique of the acting. It is you trying to remember where you’ve seen that actor before. It is your prediction of what’s going to happen next in the film. It is your pride when you are proven correct. It is your surprise when the filmmaker defies your expectation. It is life, which you only get to live once. You prepare for it, but it will surprise you anyway. The film is predetermined but revealed to you only through time, incrementally. This makes you think it is a living thing, a thing for which you can change the outcome. You yell at the actors onscreen. You clench your teeth as if it will help. And even though the movie is predetermined, the world is not. So the movie can change in this way, too. The projector could break down. Maybe this screening has a loud laugher. Maybe there will be a shooter. These chance elements are layered upon the chanceless film. So a text that encompasses all of this outer and inner experience is not a novelization. It is so much more. It is a witnessing, and it should be called that, bearing witness to the human experience—this plastic, this light, this clackety 1⁄24th of a second through time that the film and I are traveling together but separate, neighboring solitudes. The original meaning of the word martyr is witness and that seems about right. A viewer is a witness; a witness is one who testifies. This will be a witnessing. Or, wait, don’t I watch films seven times? By myself? In my living room? Don’t I turn the television upside down? Suddenly, I’m confused. I don’t—