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I rose above his arrogance. I would not play his game. He told me he was a filmmaker of sorts. It is all I could do to not laugh in his unformed face. I do not mean to brag but I can detect an artist on sight. It is my version of gaydar (which I also have). Artdar. This is not based on physical appearance. Both a Sam Shepard and a Charles Bukowski are equally conspicuous to me. It is in the eyes, or, in those rare instances where they have no eyes, it is in their fingertips. This is the case with blind filmmaker Kertes Onegin, who astonishingly acts as his own cinematographer (he does employ a focus puller, but she is also blind). His technique of “feeling the scene” as the actors perform (his films are all in extreme close-up and include his hand in every shot) creates an intimacy unlike any I have ever before seen in any film, and it has made him a target of the #MeToo movement (blind edition). Onegin’s movie снова нашел (Found Again), which explores a rekindled romance between two pensioners separated for forty years, is arguably the most erotic film ever made. That the bodies making love are old and that there is a fifth hand delicately describing the contours of these bodies adds in exponential measure to the experience of the filmgoer. I conducted extensive interviews with Onegin for my monograph Onegin’s Feelies. During our conversations, he required we sit within touching distance and would caress my face throughout, sometimes sticking his fingers in my mouth “to see how wet.” I remember thinking, this is the most true conversation I’ve ever had and also the least true and also again the most true. I will admit there was even an erotic component to it, and although I am not a homosexual by inclination, I did submit to this eyeless genius, this typhlotic Rembrandt late one evening after too much retsina. I do not regret this, for how can one regret true communion? Ingo had none of this to offer. Not in his soft, soggy eyes, like old grapes, not in his pruny, sausage-shaped fingers, like old plums. You are no Onegin! I screamed in my head. You are not my dear, dear Kertes! as I waited for that inevitable question:
amazing
THE BUS HAS been double-booked. Greyhound offers four dollars off any domestic bus trip for passengers willing to take the following bus, which is at 5:30 P.M. next Thursday or Friday; they’re not certain. No takers, so they implement their “Emergency Lap Plan.” All passengers are weighed and assigned a lap buddy. Since I have lost 47 pounds in the hospital and weigh in at 94 pounds soaking wet (they don’t explain why they needed to hose us down), I am paired with a tracksuited man named Levy who is 336 pounds. He shakes my hand and tells me to call him Grabby, that everyone calls him Grabby.
“Where’d you get such a nickname?” I ask, forced casual-like.
He hesitates for a moment, then tells me that when he was a little boy, he’d always grab an extra cookie from the cookie jar. I do not believe that explanation for a minute, but I am not staying at the bus station until next Thursday or Friday.
It’s not too bad, in truth. Levy has a soft, warm, comfortable lap and keeps his hands mostly to himself. We engage in a brief, awkward conversation in which we try to find common ground:
[...] And the truth is my heart is no longer in this type of education. For the new me, it is either barefooted hayseed children from the South or the whole world as my students. This is why I spend my off times scouring junk stores, yard sale bins, and garbage cans, searching for the films of the next Ingo Cutbirth. It’s not a scientific process, but mine is not a scientific field. One would not expect Joyce to write utilizing the statistical method.
[...] 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.