Life Goes to the Movies (30 page)

By the time we reached the clearing the fog had lifted. Patches of blue broke through the cloud cover. The hole that I’d dug days before in the
stiff earth was still there, a shovel sticking out of the mound of dirt piled beside it. We put down the trunk and sat on it, facing in opposite
directions, catching our breaths. After a few minutes, responding wordlessly to some silent prompt, we stood up again, picked the trunk up, and lowered
it slowly down into the hole.

You said a prayer:

Oh God, whose blessed son was laid in a sepulcher in the garden: Bless, we pray, this grave, and grant that he whose trunk is to be buried here may
dwell with Christ in paradise, and may come to thy heavenly kingdom, through thy son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I draped Dwaine’s pea coat over the trunk and sprinkled in a handful of dirt. As it fell the dirt made a chuckling sound, like the muffled
laughter of children. We shoveled the rest of the dirt in and tamped it down.

I dug a small hole at the head of the grave and buried the Oscar, our bent tarnished grail, to its hilt. You remarked that it was a shame, that the
golden statuette was sure to be stolen, eventually. I said it didn’t matter, that in fact it was fitting, that the Oscar was already stolen.

8

Noon.
Tires crunching on gravel, my father’s Morris Minor rolls up the monastery driveway. Through my star-shaped window I see him step out. He wears
his tattered Inverness cape. Loose threads dangle from its hem. Seeing me watching him he waves up at me.

From the Morris trunk he pulls out a folding campstool, an easel, a box of oil tubes, and the half-finished painting of the monastery salvaged from the
fire. He sets up the easel, lays out his palette, and goes to work.

“Theah,” he says an hour or so later, showing me the finished painting. “A fwoo stwokes, thas allut needud.”

He folds the campstool, closes his paint box lid.

We’ve all just about said our goodbyes when my father remembers something. “Oh, zith came fuh yhew, ma bwah.” He takes an envelope
from his pocket and hands it to me. Inside are two other envelopes, both forwarded to my parents’ address. The first holds a telegram from
Northern Ireland. It’s so like Dwaine to send telegrams when no one else does anymore.

SOLD SCREENPLAY TERRIBLE BEAUTY STOP

ADVANCE 35G STOP SHOOTING BEGINS NEXT

YEAR BELFAST STOP ERIN GO BRAGH

The second envelope contains a photocopy of a check made out to Dwaine S. Fitzgibbon in the amount of $25,750 ($35,000 minus fifteen percent) drawn
from the account of Mr. William “Bull” Duncan, Literary & Film Agent.

“Bad news?” you ask.

I hand you the telegram.

The wind sighs through trees as you read it and smile.

“He is risen,” you say, handing it back.

Summer,
2007

Twenty years later.

I
’m back in New York, where I make a living as an illustrator and teacher. During those twenty years I have heard from Dwaine sporadically,
mainly by way of dispatches sent from disaster zones, from the West Bank, from Somalia, from Belgrade, from Gujarat, from
Afghanistan … His second-to-last letter included an attached diagram of his Harlem flat, showing the exact locations of all his
stored notebooks, screenplays, synopses, novels-in-progress, etc. The one after that, the last one, arrived by email on June 25, 2004, from Bagdad,
Iraq:

Babe, I’m short-circuited enough to not remember if I told you that I’m headed home. I am. Iraq is a slaughterhouse. So is Harlem. So
is every other place I’ve lived in. That is my solidarity. I HATE the slaughterers and would kill every one of them if I could, right now.
But I’m not sure which is worse, the slaughterhouse or the INDIFFERENCE—especially the brand that’s purposeful. I see it all
around me among the tsk-tskers too paralyzed—CHOKED—by fear and guilt and just fat and HAPPY enough to stay inside the system
that’s killing them, too, an inch at a time. But enough about THEM …

I’m not sure if I ever told you this, but just before coming here I was tossed in the hoosegow for spray-painting 500 SUVs with blood-colored
paint, after which King George II’s mignons [sic] raided my Harlem digs, confiscated a dozen notebooks, and tapped my phone. For seven nights
running, about an hour after I went to bed, the phone would ring and a male voice would shout, “Four More Years! Four More Years!”
Every night for three hours it kept ringing, and every time the same voice shouted, “Four More Years!” before hanging up.

Such are the hallucinations generated by reality.

Early this a.m., just after dawn, I filmed my final sequence here, in the killing pen behind an abattoir in Fallujah—the Muslim ritual
slaughter of the sheep, whose blood splashed all over my lens (and face and pants and shoes), who took way too long, for my money, to go to heaven,
whose tongue lolled, whose legs twitched, whose executioner giggled, whose imam shouted, right on cue as the blade fell,
“Allahu akbar!”—which, in case you didn’t know, means “Four more years!”

I don’t know about THAT, but I do know the only thing left for me to film now is the ritualistic slaughter of certain heads of state(s).

Talk about activist cinema verité!

So—what’s it gonna be, babe? There’s always an extra bucket of vermillion [sic] paint around, and a THOUSAND more SUVs.

I’ll see you in HELL!

D. F.

I haven’t heard from him since.

The author gratefully acknowledges the following publications wherein portions of this novel first appeared in earlier form: “Greetings From
Hollywood,” The Literary Review, Winter 2007; “A Pre-Victorian Bathtub,” Indiana Review, Summer 2007; “Eagle Electric,”
The Florida Review, Spring 2007; “It’s So Good Don’t Even Try it Once,” Inkwell, Spring 2007; “Playing it Out,”
Alaska Quarterly Review, Fall 2007; “The Bubble,”Bellevue Literary Review, Fall 2003; “Blacken the Space,” The Madison Review,
Fall 2002. 

For their help, encouragement, good advice, and general laying on of artistic and friendly hands in connection with this effort, I thank Mark Borax,
Claudia Carlson, Walter Cummins and other members of Two Bridges Writing Group, Cortney Davis, Jonathan Dee, Patrick Dillon, Jennie Dunham, Michael
Nethercott, Katinka Neuhof, Donald Newlove, Roxanna Robinson, Christopher Rowland, Oliver Sacks, George Selgin, Pinuccia Selgin, Elizabeth Socolow,
Vincent Stanley, Robert Stone, Joanna Torrey, and Gerald Warfield.

To my brave publishers—Steve Gillis, Dan Wickett, and Steven Seighman—a special thanks for every possible consideration. No author could
ask for more.

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