The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (32 page)

The day after I returned from Florida, I arranged to meet my Film professor in the Media Center, where I showed her the porkpie hat, told her about my encounter with Keaton and Beckett, then showed her the home movie. While she was watching the tape, I asked her if I could screen
Film
because I wanted to see if I could figure out where in the story they’d been when Mom and I collided with Keaton.

I set up the projector, checked out the movie, threaded everything into place, and watched it.

Nowhere in the movie is there an extra wearing a camera-head costume. I knew from class that nothing had been cut from
Film
—the director, Alan Schneider (who came from the Theatre, specializing in Absurdist plays), was working in film for the first time, and had planned out every shot in almost fanatical detail so that everything would be used (his arguably humorless approach leading to numerous on-set disagreements with Keaton).

I watched
Film
, all the time thinking:
What the hell was that guy doing hanging around with that thing on his head?

I answered the question almost at once:
Easy; he was a street crazy, or maybe someone who’d hoped to get into the movie by standing out
.

Only he hadn’t stood out. As I remembered it, he seemed to be trying to stay in the background the whole time, trying to hide as much as “O” was trying to run away.

I decided to write it off as one of those passing oddities that sometimes make interesting conversational tidbits.

My Film professor was suitably impressed, as were my classmates, and for one day I was a Hot Topic; then the videotape and Keaton’s hat went back into storage boxes, I graduated college, flipping burgers for only three months before I landed a job as a Feature writer at
The Cedar Hill Ally
, eventually meeting a young doctor named Dianne who lost her mind and agreed to marry me and a year later gave birth to our son.

Every so often I would hear a faint
shnick!
somewhere nearby, but never thought much about it (working at a newspaper, you get used to hearing the sound of a shutter-click); every once in a while the sound would be accompanied by a glint of gold or silver in my peripheral vision, but I never gave it much thought: Camera-Head was only a dim, distant, dusty memory, emerging every few years just long enough for me to decide it was too silly to bother with before retreating into the shadows where we keep all those things that no longer belong in our lives.

Then came the afternoon that Brian attended a matinee at the Auditorium Theatre with one of his friends and his friend’s parents, and came home to tell me all about the “. . . funny old man who did magic tricks when no one else was around.”

“What do you mean, honey?” Dianne asked him, giving me a quick but seriously concerned look.

“Well,” said Brian, “Jimmy had to go pee, so his dad took him, and Jimmy’s mom, she asked me if I wanted some more popcorn—Jimmy and me ate all of it before the movie even started, and they got
real good
popcorn there—and I said yeah, that would be great, so she told me to stay right there in my seat and I
did
, I was good, I never moved, and then when I was all alone, this old man behind me reached around and pulled something from my ear.” Brian reached into his pocket and removed a shiny silver dollar.

I took it from him and looked at the date: 1964.

“Did he tell you his name?”

“Nope.”

“So it wasn’t any of Daddy’s friends that you’ve already met?”

“Nope.”

“Brian, buddy,” I said, “what exactly
did
this old guy say to you?”

My son became as bright and animated as I’d ever seen him. “He told me about the card tricks he knew, and then he told a couple of jokes, and then he pulled two more silver dollars out from my ears. He had
real weird
breath. It wasn’t stinky. It kinda smelled like that cough medicine Mom makes me take when I’m sick. Oh, yeah—he told me to tell you that he needed his hat back, please.”

The silver dollar slipped from my fingers and clattered to the floor.

“Did Jimmy’s mom and dad see him?” asked Dianne.

“Nope. He was all gone before they got back.”

Dianne saw something in my expression. “What is it? What’s going on?”

I shook my head, telling her it was nothing, then—after telling Brian it was not a good idea to talk to strangers (something we re-emphasized from time to time, Brian being a particularly open, trusting, and friendly child)—went upstairs to my office and pulled Mom’s hatbox from its place in the back of the closet. Unwrapping Keaton’s hat, I heard the echo of his voice saying,
You take good care of that this, this’s one of my magic ones, and I might need it back some day.

Silently, I added:
And you promised
.

I realized there was probably a rational explanation for it, that one of my friends who knew the story had spotted Brian at the movies and decided to play a joke on me, but as soon as I’d seen the date on the silver dollar, I knew something wasn’t quite right: my friends
might
have gone to those lengths to play a joke on me, but I doubted it; and none of them would have approached Brian without first telling him who they were, especially if they’d not met him before.

I slipped the hat into my briefcase, told Dianne there was some background material for an article I’d forgotten at
The Ally
, and drove downtown.

Parking on the square, I walked past the soon-to-be renovated Midland Theatre and crossed the street to the soon-to-be-closed Auditorium Theatre. Paying no attention to what movie was showing, I bought a ticket for the showing that was already twenty minutes in and headed for the balcony (Brian and Jimmy always sit in the balcony).

The only other person up there was a small, roundish man sitting in the middle of the third row of the loge. Even from behind, I recognized him.

Making my way down toward him, I opened the briefcase and removed the hat.

“I thought for sure you’d have lost that thing years ago,” he said in the same croaky voice I’d always remembered.

“I keep my promises,” I said.

And took my seat next to Buster Keaton—not the fit, trim, athletic Keaton of his triumphant silent film days, but the pot-bellied, slightly droopy, cancer-ridden Keaton of
Film, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
, and
War, Italian Style
.

“What’s going on?” I asked, handing over the porkpie.

“I’ll be—you sure took good care of it.” He straightened the brim, flattened down the top a little more, and set it on his head. Had I not been so frightened, I would have been in absolute awe. “Still fits. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I replied. “What the hell is happening?”

“It’s the Onlookers,” he answered, then turned to face me. “Them camera-head fellahs you spotted way back when?”

I nodded.

“Well, turns out there was something to Sam’s malarkey, after all. That old Irish son-of-a-bitch, he hit on something with that picture he wasn’t supposed to—kind of like when Pasteur made his big discovery by accident. Only with Sam and
Film
, the process he discovered ain’t quite so helpful in the long run.”

“What process?”

Keaton pointed his index finger at me, just like Beckett had done, and touched me right between my eyes. “Perception, young fellah. How it ain’t just a two-way thing, but a
three-way
thing. You, the camera, and the audience.”

“The audience being the Onlookers?”

“No—they’re the camera. The Onlookers, they’re the ones perceiving everything
through
the camera.” He shrugged, then winked at me; I know he meant it to be reassuring, but there was something infinitely sad in the gesture.

“I don’t really know what, exactly, the Onlookers are; only that they’ve been watching us for a long, long time. See, the way I understand it, is that as long as none of us were aware they were watching, everything was okay. It was like me running from that camera in the picture; as long as I didn’t turn around to see it, I wouldn’t know the audience was watching me through the blasted thing. But once I turned around and saw the camera, well . . . that made the audience part of it, because then we were all aware. It was like a chain reaction. Do you get what I’m saying? I sure as hell’d hate to have to try explaining this a second time.”

“I think so,” I said. “By making that movie, you guys somehow . . . somehow . . . ”

“. . . somehow lifted a barrier between them and us that nobody knew was there until Old Sam hit on the idea. But that’s all it took—one guy hitting on the idea, then making others aware of it. Image, camera, audience—
wham!
The three ingredients needed to pull off that extra level of perception and let some of us start seeing the things the Onlookers
see us
with.”

“So . . . what happens now?”

Before Keaton could answer me, a rapid series of shutter-clicks—
shnicknick-nick-nick-nick-nick!
—echoed from the seats below. I rose up, peering over the edge, and saw that a full one-fourth of the audience below had square heads, golden half-sphere eyes, and silver lens-beaks.

No one else seemed to hear or see them.

One by one, the Camera-Eyes turned to look up toward the balcony. I jumped back from the railing and hunkered as far down into my seat as I could.

“Hate to be the one to say it,” said Keaton, “but I think they seen ya.”

“Is this supposed to be how ‘O’ felt?”

Keaton parted his hands in front of him. “Damned if I know.”

“What’s going to happen now?”

He gave me a long, silent look of pity. “You know how at the end of
Film
the camera freezes on my face and then it all just goes to black? Old Sam told me that the idea there was that, once ‘O’ and ‘E’ and the audience make that three-way connection, then a state of . . . what’d he call it? . . . oh, yeah,
non-being
followed.” He snapped his fingers. “Everything just stops, ceases to be. It’s like the way all colors together form black; all perceptions together create . . .” He made his hand into a fist, brought the side of the fist up to his mouth, then blew into it while opening his hand.

I didn’t need words; the meaning was clear enough.

“Isn’t there any way to stop them?” I asked.

“The Onlookers? Huh-uh. They’ve always been and always will be. Now if you’re asking me, is there any way to stop them things down there from seeing you, the only idea I got is for you to not see them.
Un
-see ’em.”

“How the hell do I
un
-see something?”

He placed the tip of his index finger between my eyes. “‘To perceive is to be perceived.’ That’s what Sam said to you . . . course he had to say it French ’cause he was kind of an intellectual snob, but he was an okay fellah, once you got to know him.” He rolled his eyes upward, saw something wrong with the angle of his hat, and adjusted the brim once more.

“Why do you need the hat back?” I asked.

“If you’re expecting a complicated Sam Beckett answer, you’re gonna be disappointed. This particular hat was my favorite . . . I just didn’t realize it until after you’d gone. Eleanor, God love her, forgot to get your names and address from your mother. Took a while to track you down.”

“Why here? Why this old movie house?”

“Because this old movie house used to be a damn nice theatre in the days of Vaudeville. My family and me played here quite a few times when I was just a kid. There’s a wall underneath that stage that all the companies used to sign as they came through. You’d shit a brick if you knew some of the names on that wall. But I ain’t gonna bore you with nostalgia; you got a family to get back to.”

He started to rise; I reached up and grabbed his arm. “How can I un-see them?”

He shook his head. “Just between us, I don’t think it can be done. I wouldn’t worry too much, I was you. How fast the process takes depends on how perceptive you really are. You’ll start noticing things, like colors changing or fading away. Not all at once, but gradually. After that, other things’ll fade, little by little. That’s just the slow road perception takes to non-being.” He pulled from my grip, then gently patted my shoulder. “But it’ll be okay, young fellah. I’ll be waiting over there to show you around, and—oh, what have we here?”

In two quick, smooth, fluid movements, he reached behind my ear and removed a shiny silver dollar. I took it from him, looked at it and smiled, and when I looked back up he was all gone.

I left the theatre and walked toward my car, hearing the endless chattering shutter-clicks of
shnick-nick-nick-nick-nick-nick!
following me. I became frightened, started running, but the Camera-Eyes were never far behind; even though I never once turned around to look for (or at) them, I knew they were there.