Last Days of the Projector

 1

Where others have none, the cactus has a plan, has long had plans, for to be a cactus is not to be the lovers, who have each other, who can turn away from the future to face and caress each other with the feeling and daring and conviction of come what may, however utterly stupid or impractical or even doomed that turns out to be; nor is it to be the senator in his wheelchair since the fateful accident to which no one with a thought for his own welfare refers, for not only has the senator some undeniable degree of mobility despite what dark ways he may view it, but he has the power of capital and the altogether filial respect of the punchers and rustlers not to mention the veterans who served with him, and even his prejudices and stubbornness so sure to be his undoing do not prevent envy from sprouting in the most dispassionate beholder; nor is to be the carpet, trod upon by generations but commanding respect, laden with symbols but more to the point itself a symbol, a symbol of many more values and conflicts than even the absent-minded maid; yet come to that, too, to be a cactus, to be this cactus is not to be the maid, Fetchie, whistle-voiced and black and slow, comic for her meandering iterations and in turn pitiful for being comic in this way, as though her depiction was so openly dishonest as to make the injustice of it all right, and her own fate of little gravity, but still, yes, so much weightier than that of the cactus; for, after all, come the hurricane or the raging brush fire or the Comanches, concern falls to the lovers, even if they do not look for it, and the senator, whose frailty must at last succeed his ferocity, and the carpet and Fetchie and the dogs and the framed photograph of mother and the sheet music of Beautiful Dreamer left untouched on the piano since she passed and the curtains blowing gently and the other dogs and the pinto and the pendant torn off in passion and hurled into the swimming hole and so on and indeed so on, the concern falling here and there like rain but not on the one thought undeserving or needless of rain, just as the cactus is without anyone to caress or command or be subjugated by, the cactus merits no concern. The cactus knows this and has given it a lot of thought. While Sid is trying to break in the new stallion and scrambling not to get trampled, the cactus, far from this foreground, is thinking and planning, and the cactus is planning when the army messenger arrives with the yellow moustache and the distressing news, when the sky breaks into an unnatural red and a myth of a chief’s dying son is somewhat ironically invoked by a penitent observer, when the bloody straw settles at last after a long night’s foaling.

 

2

It was autumn and my marriage was as gradually denuding itself of meaning as the trees their bright leaves. I had gone to catch a matinee for the sole purpose of getting out of the apartment. We had reached the point, my wife and I, where we no longer completed each other’s sentences and thoughts not because we weren’t aware of what they were, but because we were too aware, too wearily aware, and attempts at surprise or deviation from a set course either simply failed, the pull of routine too strong, or failed to provoke more than irritation or sometimes pity for all concerned. We had no genuine differences of opinion but quibbled about menial things about which no opinion was seriously conceivable. When I tried listening to her, I heard all the more clearly how she was not listening to me, and I am certain that when she looked at me she found me unable or unwilling, perhaps one because of the other, to see her. I, who had little temper, would find myself shouting, and the recognition that this behaviour was not, as I wanted to believe, characteristic, yet was fast becoming chronic, only helped to raise the volume and intensity of that shouting, while she oscillated between cold glares and fits of sobbing in locked rooms. On this particular occasion, the door may or may not have been locked; I did not check; I went out, out anywhere, out to the streets, and sooner or later into the movies.  

3

“It was totally unreal,” a man reported to a radio call-in show about the flood that had taken his hundred-year-old house apart the day before. He repeated this statement defiantly, argumentatively.  

4

Difficult though it is to track down a copy, an old back issue of a now-defunct magazine for cinephiles includes an interview with the director, held many years after he had stopped making movies. The interview makes for disjointed reading, and the director, fairly old and at least a shade irascible at this point, seems reluctant to answer directly the questions put to him. Again and again he digresses, never to the point of incoherency, though never with a recapitulation or clear return to the ostensible subject at hand.

INTERVIEWER

Initial reviews of the film aren’t much disposed to like it, but I noticed that nobody panned it outright. In fact, despite the various criticisms and complaints that they make, every one of them contains a kind of hesitation, as though there’s something in the film nagging at them that prevents them from rejecting it, but none of them absolutely identifies what that something is. Did you notice that?

DIRECTOR

My mother had six fingers on each hand and though she took no special pains to conceal the fact almost nobody ever commented. Now was that because they saw and didn’t want to be rude, or was it that they saw and didn’t know what to make of it so that they couldn’t even muster comment, rude or otherwise, or was it that they didn’t see those six fingers at all? And I guess when I was young I asked her why she had six fingers and I had only five. Everybody liked to tell me that I asked that when I was young and at the time everybody in the room was holding their breath waiting for her answer. Unfortunately, I don’t remember what her answer was.

INTERVIEWER

The film’s end is nothing if not cataclysmic, and that remains a big shock for audiences and critics alike.

DIRECTOR

Well, we had two camera guys, and they were dating the same girl. Pretty much everybody on the set knew about it but neither of them had quite figured it out. So naturally there would be jokes and when Eddie was staying for the night shoot for three straight nights, because we had to get some of those shots with just the right kind of sky and the right kind of wind and lighting and everything else, and also I remember we were having a few mechanical problems then... well, if Eddie was committed to those nights of shooting everybody knew that Gene was with the girl. And Eddie knew that Gene had a girl, and vice versa, but no clue between them about what all the coincidences pointed to. It was funny, that not knowing and all that knowing thick around it, like the water they say can be found inside the heart of a cactus, not that I ever checked that story for myself but if ever I’m stranded without a drop in the desert … Gene died, as you might know, in that big hotel fire about ten years ago. It would be a dreadful thing to be burned alive, don’t you think?  

5

You telephoned. It was a bad connection and you didn’t say where you were calling from, and I was too discreet to ask (too foolish not to). You told me about a man you had watched on a train who was slowly, methodically pulling out his hair in long strands, with no sign of effort or alarm, but at a pace that was hypnotic, that effectively slowed the train, the movement of his eyes following the movements of his fingers withdrawing long strands of hair in strange, slow parallel with the movement of the passing world seen through the windows of the train. Rather than say or attempt to say how you felt, then or now, about what you were watching, you dwelt upon the details of those rhythmically conjoined movements and tried to imagine, with little enough success, what the man might have been thinking, watching himself come apart in this almost tender way, and no, I did not ask How did you feel about what you were seeing, or even (though it might have been the same question, posed another way) Why are you telling me this now, but instead asked only, What do you suppose he was thinking? You answered in a faraway voice: I can’t be sure, but I suppose … and your voice receded yet farther into an inarticulate susurration, and I asked you to repeat what you had said, and called your name more than once, before hanging up, or to be more exact, before trying to hang up, for the receiver slipped from my hands in the act of cradling it, and I picked it up and put it again to my ear without thinking, and you were still not there, and then I did successfully hang up.  

6

It’s not exactly pointless to ask such questions as how does a catastrophe take place or why should so-and-so alone survive; these questions may even be inevitable, themselves the effect of catastrophe, the very definition of it: catastrophe is that which compels one to ask these questions. To do so is not exactly pointless, not without any possible point at all, but how much clearer everything would be were it truly so, for instead it is more or less pointless, pointless to a degree that cannot be determined. What makes asking these questions so excruciating is how one cannot understand precisely to what purpose one is thus compelled to ask them.  

7

At first—it helps to treat the memory like a sequence of film—it was as though the flames were reverential, savouring the history of the place. It had been an office building for a law firm and a stationary supplier, briefly a flophouse, and now, in its last and longest incarnation, a cinema. The watching crowd’s murmured exchange of these details of history was punctuated by gasps and cries that followed the bursting of windows, the fire inhaling the sky. One person said it was a shame, another asked if there was anybody inside, and a few minutes after nobody answered that question, someone else said it was a shame. The eyes of a child in a stained shirt were wide with unmistakable delight. Even over the whirrings of all of the digital cameras, the fire could be heard eagerly chewing away. The firefighters, none of them young, concentrated on saving neighbouring structures. The colour was so bright, so aggressive, that it could not help but suggest Technicolor. Most of the crowd stayed until the end, but then found that they had run out of things to say to one another, and returned to their less-impressive, unburned homes.  

8

A cactus does not actually have a heart. That is just a way of talking.