Report from the Interior (13 page)

But there is Carey down in the cellar, still alive, bruised and shaken but very much alive, sitting up in the wooden box and trying to figure out what to do next. He is certain that Louise will eventually come downstairs to rescue him, and because he believes there is still hope, he resolves to do everything in his power to survive, even as he continues to grow smaller. From this point on, the film becomes a different film, a deeper film, the story of a man stripped bare, thrown back on himself, a man alone battling the obstacles that surround him, a minute Odysseus or Robinson Crusoe living by the force of his wit, his courage, his resourcefulness, making do with whatever objects and nourishment are at hand in that dank suburban basement, which has now become his entire universe. That is what grips you so: the very ordinariness of his surroundings and how each ordinary thing, whether an empty shoe polish can or a spool of thread, whether a sewing needle or a wooden match, whether a lump of cheese stuck in a mousetrap or a drop of water falling from a defective water heater, takes on the dimensions of the extraordinary, the impossible, for each thing has been reinvented, transformed into something else because of its enormous size in relation to Carey’s body, and the smaller Carey grows, the less sorry he feels for himself, the more insightful his comments become, and even as he endures one physical trial after another, it is as if he is undergoing a spiritual purification, elevating himself to a new level of consciousness.

Scaling walls with one-inch nails bent into grappling hooks, sleeping in an empty box of wooden matches, striking a match as long as he is in order to cut off a slender filament of sewing thread that for him is just as thick and tough as a line of hemp, nearly drowning in a flood as water pours out of the defective water heater—saved from slipping down the drain by clinging to an immense floating pencil—scavenging for crumbs of hardened bread, and then, the quest for the most important prize of all, a stale, half-eaten wedge of sponge cake, which has been captured by Carey’s new enemy, his sole fellow creature in that lonely underground world, a spider, a monstrously large and repugnant spider, three or four times larger than Carey, and the combat between them that ensues, with all its delirious shifts in advantage between the one and the other, is even more compelling to you than a similar scene you witnessed in another movie theater a year or two earlier, Odysseus thrusting his sword into the eye of the Cyclops, which was played out in Technicolor in the film
Ulysses
(with the former Issur Danielovitch in the title role), for the shrinking man does not have the confidence or the strength of the Greek hero, he is the smallest man on the face of the earth, and his only weapons are a pin he has extracted from a pincushion and the brain in his head. From your earliest childhood, you have been a keen observer of ants and bugs and flies, and you have often speculated on how large the world must look to those tiny beings, so different from the way you perceive the world yourself, and now, in the final minutes of
The Incredible Shrinking Man,
you are able to see your musings acted out on-screen, for by the time Carey manages to kill the spider, he is indeed no bigger than an ant.

Transfixed as you are by these deftly orchestrated sequences, these enthralling visual tropes and inventions, which turn real space into imagined space and yet somehow contrive to make the imagined real, or at least plausible, convincing, true to the geometries of lived experience—in spite of how dazzled you are by the action on-screen, it is Carey’s voice that holds it together for you, his words give the action its meaning, and in the end those words have an even greater and more lasting effect on you than the black-and-white images flickering before your eyes. By some miracle, he is still talking, still telling his story to the audience, and even though this makes no sense to you—where is his voice coming from? how can he be talking about his present condition when his lips are not moving?—you nevertheless accept it on faith, acceding to the givens of the film by reinterpreting the role of the narration, telling yourself that he is not really talking but thinking, that all along the words you have been hearing are in fact the thoughts in his head.

Louise has already come and gone. Carey has watched her walk down the stairs to the cellar, he has called out to her in a frantic attempt to attract her attention, but his voice was too small to be heard, his body was too small to be seen, and she has gone upstairs again and left the house for good. Now, in a final burst of will, summoning every bit of strength that remains in his depleted, still-shrinking body, acting with unparalleled stubbornness and ingenuity, he has captured the one source of food in the cellar, he has killed the spider, and just when you think he has triumphed again, has achieved what is perhaps his greatest victory, his thoughts push him forward to the next stage of understanding, and the victory turns out to be nothing, of no importance whatsoever.

But even as I touched the dry, flaking crumbs of nourishment, it was as if my body had ceased to exist. There was no hunger—no longer the terrible fear of shrinking …

So begins Carey’s concluding monologue, a quasi-mystical interrogation of the interplay between the divine and the human that both stirs you and confounds you, and yet even if you do not fully grasp what he is saying, his words seem to touch on everything that matters most—who are we? what are we? how do we fit into a cosmos that is beyond our understanding?—which makes you feel that you are being led toward a place where you can glimpse some new truth about the world, and as you transcribe those words now, recognizing how awkward they are, how scumbled their philosophical propositions, you must travel back into your ten-year-old’s mind in order to re-experience the power they had for you then, for wobbly as those words might seem to you today, fifty-five years ago they struck you with all the force of a blow to the head.

I was continuing to shrink. To become what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future?

If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world?

So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite, but suddenly I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.

I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number. God’s silver tapestry spread across the night, and in that moment I knew the answer, the riddle of the infinite.

I had thought in terms of man’s own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends is man’s conception, not nature’s.

And I felt my body dwindling into nothing, becoming nothing. My fears melted away, and in their place came acceptance.

All this vast majesty of creation. It had to mean something. And then I meant something too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too.

To God there is no zero.

I still exist!

By the end, Carey is no more than a fraction of an inch tall, so puny that he is able to step through a square in a screen window and go outside into the night. The camera then tilts upward, revealing an immense sky thick with stars and the swirl of distant constellations, meaning that when Carey comes to the end of his monologue, he is no longer visible. You try to absorb what is happening. He will continue to become smaller and smaller, shrinking down to the size of a subatomic particle, devolving into a monad of pure consciousness, and yet the implication is that he will never entirely disappear, that as long as he is still alive, he cannot be reduced to nothing. Where does he go from there? What further adventures await him? He will merge with the universe, you tell yourself, and even then his mind will go on thinking, his voice will go on speaking, and as you walk out of the theater with your friend Mark, the two of you battered into mute submission by the ending of the film, you feel that the world has changed its shape within you, that the world you live in now is no longer the same world that existed two hours ago, that it will not and cannot ever be the same again.

2

1961.
You can’t remember the month, but you believe it was sometime in the fall. You were fourteen. Adolescence had struck, childhood was well behind you now, and the social whirl that had so consumed you at eleven and twelve had lost its charm. You avoided going to dances and parties, and even though you were mad for girls, ever more involved in the pursuit of your erotic education, you no longer had any desire to fit in, you made a point of going your own way, and as far as the world was concerned, whether the small world of your New Jersey town or the large world of your country, you saw yourself as a contrarian, a person at odds with things-as-they-were. You were still wrapped up in playing sports (football, basketball, and baseball—with ever-increasing skill and intensity of purpose), but games were no longer the center of your life, and rock and roll was dead. The previous year, you had spent hundreds of hours listening to folk music, records by the Weavers and Woody Guthrie, attracted by the words of protest that ran through their songs, but by now you had begun to lose interest in those simple messages, you were moving on, dwelling for a season or two in the kingdom of jazz, and then, by fourteen, fourteen and a half, immersing yourself in classical music, Bach and Beethoven, Handel and Mozart, Schubert and Haydn, drawing sustenance from those composers in ways that wouldn’t have seemed possible just a year or two before, discovering the music that has continued to sustain you through all the years that have followed. You were reading more now as well, the barrier that had once stood between you and what you considered to be first-rank literature had fallen, and off you ran into that immense country that is still your home, beginning with twentieth-century Americans such as Hemingway, Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, and Salinger, but also meeting Kafka and Orwell for the first time that year, camping out with Voltaire’s
Candide
—which made you laugh harder than any book you had ever read—and shaking hands with Emily Dickinson and William Blake, and before long you would be booking passage to Russia, France, England, Ireland, and Germany, as well as working your way back into the American past. That was also the year when you read
The Communist Manifesto
for the first time—which was the year of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the year of Eisenhower’s speech about the military-industrial complex, the year of Kennedy’s inauguration, the year of the Peace Corps and the Bay of Pigs, the year Alan Shepard became the first American to be launched into space, the year of the Berlin Wall. You were paying attention now, you had turned into a political creature with opinions and arguments and counterarguments, appalled by the nuclear arms race between America and the Soviet Union and therefore an ardent Ban the Bomb supporter, a young person avidly following every development of the civil rights movement, which all came down to a question of fairness for you, the undoing of ancient wrongs, the golden dream of living in a race-blind world. During the summer, the Freedom Riders traveling through the South on long-distance buses were beaten by mobs of white men, Hemingway committed suicide, and on a summer-camp outing in the woods of New York State, a boy in your group was struck and killed by lightning, the fourteen-year-old Ralph M., who was no more than a foot from you when the bolt shot down from the sky and electrocuted him, and although you have written about this event in some detail (
Why Write?
, story no. 3), you have never stopped thinking about what happened that day, it has continued to inform how you have looked at the world ever since, for that was your first lesson in the alchemy of chance, your introduction to the inhuman forces that can turn life into death in a single instant. Fourteen, the terrible age of fourteen, when you are still a prisoner of the circumstances you were born into and yet ready to leave them behind, when all you dream about is escape.

Among the films you saw that year were
Judgment at Nuremberg, Two Rode Together,
and
The Hustler,
all popular movies that made their way into the suburban theaters of Essex County, but for foreign films and older films one had to go to New York, which was about forty-five minutes away, and since it wasn’t until the next year, as a sophomore in high school, that you started cultivating the habit of slipping off to Manhattan whenever you could, your film education had not yet begun in earnest when you were fourteen. The only place where you could see old films was on television, a useful resource in its way, but the films broadcast on the local stations were often butchered to fit into prearranged schedules and always—maddeningly—interrupted by commercials. Still, there was one televised film series that did better than the others, a program called
Million Dollar Movie,
which aired on Channel 9 and showed one classic American film every day for an entire week, the same film three times a day, once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once at night, which meant that you could watch the same film twenty-one times in a span of 168 hours—assuming you wished to do that. It was because of
Million Dollar Movie
that you were able to see
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,
the next cinematic earthquake of your life, the next film that blasted in on you and altered the composition of your inner world, a 1932 Warner Brothers production directed by Mervyn LeRoy with Paul Muni (born Muni Weisenfreund) in the principal role, one of the darkest American films ever made, a story about injustice that shuns the Hollywood convention of hopeful or happy endings, and because you were fourteen and burning with indignation against the injustices of the world, you were ripe for this story, it came into your life at the precise moment you needed to see it, and therefore you watched it again the next day, and the day after that as well, and perhaps every single day until the week was done.
²