The Almanac Branch (33 page)

There was a barrier reef and the cast swam out to it after the day's shoot. There was a lot of horsing around, because everybody was exhausted, and the film was working out. Berg walked out into the waves with them until the water reached his chest and heaved over his shoulders in sizzling foam, but he wouldn't swim the hundred yards out to where it got shallow again. He drifted, standing up buoyant in the sea, spitting out silver water, and watching the others diminish in size as they flailed into the breakers to make the reef. He felt contented; he felt possessive of them all. The sputter and crash of kelp-clogged wash on the sand was punctuated by pure laughter. They were a family, and loved one another
…

When Berg woke up from this dream, to find himself on the floor of the library with the sun streaming down through the window, he rose to his knees, and felt nauseated at the prospect of facing another day of agonizing over his film. He needn't have bothered to worry about it, however, as he soon would find out.

Upstairs, he took a shower. Cold water on the back of his neck to slow the blood to his brain. After he dried off, andput on his robe, he looked in the mirror. Why had he gotten himself into this mess?

Now that he had used the equipment, he couldn't hope to return it for any amount approaching what he had paid. He had wasted hours of film—thank god he'd decided to use the sixteen-millimeter stock. The lab bills were exorbitant because he had required overnight development, a messenger into the city at the end of the day, messenger back in the morning, in order to stay on a schedule that would get his crew out of Scrub Farm before his father returned. The recasting and rescripting he had thought would have gone easily of course hadn't. He kept having to reject Analise's suggestions (as gently as he could, though because of the pressure he was under he knew that he'd failed at this, too); she simply didn't have the same needs as he—to her the
Almanac
was a work of imagination, to him it was—well, what? Some lousy exorcism? A bit of satirical revenge on his family? As an act of truth, replicating emotional events that he had suffered through, in order to try better to understand himself, and as an act of self-definition, the film was proving to be a radical defeat as well.

He put one bare foot in front of the other, and found himself downstairs. The air of disorganization and discontent seemed to fill the house; he knew he could tell everyone that they could go home, that he had to rethink the thing, and they would go, knowing he had made a fool of himself—but there was the problem of the money. It hadn't been his to lose, not like this. For a fleeting instant the thought of going out to find that beached vessel somewhere to shoot a promotional picture for Gulf Stream seemed a good alternative to confessing grievous failure. He was astute enough, though, to recognize that this, too, would only be a waste of time, that he'd been kidding himself. He had never felt quite so cornered. Even if he produced some short to offer his father as an excuse, the truth of the matter was that Faw wouldn't go for it; why would an operationthat depended on the most silent anonymity go out and bother producing a silly promo film? If they were questioned, a hundred hours of film could not serve as sufficient evidence to refute the charges that might be brought against them. He had been doing nothing these last months, indeed these last years, but conciliating himself with pipe dreams.

It was then that it hit him. The house was too quiet. He looked up. A new fear came over him. Where was everyone?

“Analise,” he said; and he shouted, “Analise?” Of course. His fears were confirmed. The realization was pressed upon him with the alacrity, the snap of a wasp sting. Everyone had left. He had been abandoned. What a stinking lark. Even the opportunity to make a fool of himself by sending his cast and crew away was denied him.

For a moment he panicked about the equipment, but when he checked the library and mudroom he discovered that nothing was missing. He went for the freezer and the bottle of vodka that was in it. Meade, and the others, he could understand. He had been increasingly difficult—no, he had to admit, he'd become impossible. He hadn't slept longer than three hours a night for the past three weeks, he'd drunk well beyond his fair share of vodka and homemade espresso, he had been open with the cast and crew about the problems he was experiencing holding the thing together. Deplorable, he thought. Never complain, never explain—Andrew Carnegie and his father were right in that. Piteous whining, who needs it, especially when it comes from the mouth of a supposed superior.

Could he splice together what he had into something that might be viable, make back the money so that no one involved with the Trust would find out what had happened? He still had some days left before he had to get everything out of here (What was today, anyway? he wondered as he brought his mouth down to the bottle and lifted back). No, not really.

The vodka got Berg going. He knew he could turn this thing around. He had to depend on himself. He had to depend on what he had done thus far that was useful, to get him through whatever he had done to thwart himself, which meant (for one) to stop reviewing these scenes, stop trying to interpret them, make of them what they were. Give it up, man, like Christ on the rood when he was talking to his father who had put him in the position of becoming ritual carnage in the first place said, It is done. Well, it was done here, too. Some things aren't meant to fly. Could he tell Analise that? Without having to grovel? Of course he couldn't because there he was, already not depending on himself. And anyway, Analise—what was she but a deserter?

This was the same predicament he had found himself in as a seventeen-year-old—exiled then, exiled now. The film was wrong, the whole idea was wrong. Who was he to try to make a portrait of these people he had never understood? Max being Berg, who was Max? Berg, being Berg, could ask, Who is Berg? and know that he would never get it together enough to know. Berg couldn't hope to claim self-comprehension, so why create an image meant to represent an idea of himself that could never, ever be so much as passingly accurate? For instance, Max was no virgin, he knew better. Max might have been a very confused soul, but he understood that those cretins under the tent on the beach represented not shelter, but exposure. So why all the pretense? Why all the playing God—indeed, if there was a God, and Berg was pretty sure there wasn't, he could have it, man. Whatever perks and prerogatives might come with the office surely were overshadowed by these the messiest of questions.

Which brought up another interesting question. When are you exposing yourself and when sheltering? The vodka was not as cold as before, but it still tasted of freedom (tasted of freedom, yes, because alcohol never tasted good,but did smack of release)—and he was able to come to the thought that all these words were tangled up in the most intriguing way, just as he was. You expose film to show things, but you come to an island named Shelter and what right do you have to show what you believe you know? In the skin trade, Berg had learned that those who went in front of the camera were those who seemed—to those who stood behind in the semidark—the ones who were most protected.

When the telephone rang he considered whether or not it was prudent to answer, given the state he was in. It kept ringing. Someone on the other end clearly knew he was here, and intended to let it ring until he picked up. He answered, as much to stop the harsh jangle as anything else. He didn't say hello, just listened.

“Berg? It's me,” said Analise.

His heart was beating too fast, and he lifted the bottle again. He knew what she was going to say; he wasn't so confused as to hope that she was about to save him.

“Berg, did you read the contract you and I signed when we started this project?”

He wasn't going to give her the satisfaction.

“I tried to talk you out of doing this, all right, in the first place, you have to remember that now. I never wanted you to let yourself in for it, I knew it could happen, and it did. You wanted to go ahead, nothing I could have—”

“Analise?”

“Yes,” she answered, encouraged perhaps by how even was the tone of his voice. She always liked Berg. This debacle was a shame, in fact. Why did he have to be so ambitious and secretive about this film? He was getting in his own way.

“Piss off,” said Berg.

And, unprepared for that but not one to be outmaneuvered, she said something to the same effect before putting the receiver down hard into its cradle.

“There are no leaps in nature: everything in it is graduated, shaded. If there were an empty space between any two beings, what reason would there be for proceeding from the one to the other? There is thus no being above and below which there are not other beings that are united to it by some characters and separated from it by others.” So Charles Bonnet says in his
Contemplation de la nature
, as quoted by Michel Foucault in his book
The Order of Things
, which I still carry around with me sometimes, though I had loathed him when I read him those years ago in school. I am not French, I am not a philosopher, I am not a scholar, nor was I even a good student; it isn't intended as a pretense on my part to parade this bit of thinking before you, but even though Foucault's recipe for headaches, which I have tried, that business of mixing walnuts and wine, only made me sick—I've always been sort of fond of this quotation of his from Bonnet. Bonnet had this idea about an absolute encyclopedia, in which knowledge, action, language, and everything conceivable would be interwoven. Truths of every kind would be contained in it, and I suppose every sort of falsehood would have to be there too. All words, all acts, things that could never be accomplished. Everything linked, all branches interwoven into a principal beauty. Arbitrariness would stand proudly holding hands with order. Chaos and the sublime would form its grammar. Faith, charity, evil—you wouldn't know your ass from a hole in the ground, as it were, and yet in a way you would, since there would be a steady progress in which all systems would be both partial and universal. A divine mishmash, and all at once so crystalline.

I don't know why this came to mind, when I stood there again at the window of Djuna Cobbetts's bedroom, not knowing precisely why none of the lights in the house up the hill were on as they had been the night before. Still Isensed there was someone moving around in the rooms. I hadn't noticed that the cars in the drive were gone, and I didn't know at what stage in the film Berg and his crew stood. There was movement in the house, I couldn't see it, but there was, and whoever was walking around inside either didn't care about running into furniture, dusty chairs and the like, or else, like a ghost, knew the place well. Then I got it. Berg was alone. Of course, he had been left to his own devices. It felt like a leap of knowing, but, as I say, I think Bonnet had a point—it was a graduated thing, this understanding of my brother's abandonment.

Berg was in trouble. He deserved to be in trouble. But still I wondered hard whether he had made a mistake that would deserve the kind of punishment he might have set himself up for. Barely knowing what he had done, or was in the process of doing, I sensed that he had made no real mistake. He was lost, is all. I had figured out that the girl in the orchard was supposed to be me, that Desmond was the naked boy sent in to make love to me, that the stranger at the edge, watching, was both the voyeur audience and the character Berg.

Sex was a fiction in the fact of life that I felt I'd made my peace with—I could take it or leave it, all it ever had done for me was either get me into trouble emotionally, or shatter a relationship that I felt was better off before sex entered into it. I had no quarrel with Berg's casting me as some kind of incestuous nymphomaniac—I knew that I was and wasn't. Nothing he could invent would ever match what had happened in my life. Nothing anyone could invent could ever match what happens to any of us. I didn't care that much about the artistic integrity of his endeavor. Other than the money, which again I didn't care about except insofar as it might cripple Faw, none of what he was doing affected me, did it? I had to admit to myself that though I only glimpsed his contorted portrait of me, I understood that it wouldn't finally make much difference to me one way or another what he thought of our past, andhow he described it to others, who would never perfectly understand it either, no matter how they tried, no matter what form the presentation took. What had Berg ever given as a brother to me, beyond this funhouse-mirror movie portrait he was proposing to complete?

I could hear my blood beating in my ears, and my breath coming in and leaving me. The distance between the carriage house and the farm seemed long. Tonight there were clouds that hazed out the stars and moon overhead, and it had been quite a lot chillier when I rode across the open causeways. There was a damp over the island that smelled of rain. Dressed in my blacks, I had walked across the field to Mrs. Cobbetts's this time with considerably more courage than the night before. The key had gone into her back door lock with far greater ease, the staircase though shrouded in dark I found and ascended without the same trepidation I had experienced on Tuesday. But now it seemed that all my confidence had flowed out of me. I could have gone back downstairs, and across the dying grass to the house, walked in, and discovered precisely what was going on over there, and been well within my rights. Instead, I dialed the house.

Berg answered, “What,” in a guilelessly nettled voice.

“Berg? It's me, Grace.”

He hesitated; I sensed he was working through whether this boded well for him or not, whether I could be of some use or not, and as I heard that silence, and divined his process of thinking about me, I realized that I myself had reached a moment of profound change toward him, toward the whole family, such as it was. I didn't have the energy to wait for him to decide how best to use me—was it energy, or immaturity that empowered such behavior in people? a question with an obvious answer, it seems to me now. And so I burst in on his silence, “Berg, I know more or less what you are doing. I know that you're in trouble.”