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  In the winter months, he saw his movie a hundred times. Seated at the desk in his apartment, at the window overlooking the parking lot, he watched it scroll across the frosted panes and thought it was beautiful and perfect. Who We Are was going to give shape to something that had been nipping at him and his friends for their entire lives. It was the story of the generational burden they carried, their shared realization that nothing made sense until it was too late to be changed, that they were never given anything like a real chance.

  His first movie, The Unhappy Future of Mankind, filmed on a VHS camcorder when he was twelve, had starred his Nukies, those bright red plastic children of the radiological apocalypse born with flippers for hands and melted faces like stretched bubble gum. The film was shot entirely in his bedroom, where Sam directed the Nukies on a doomed stop-motion wagon train from the door to the dresser. The quicksand rug swallowed some. A Stonehenge-like monument of textbooks quaked and fell, crushing half a dozen mutants. During one extended sequence, empty sneakers gave eerie pursuit after a few terrified stragglers and finally ground them out. But the remaining refugees strove on, though they never seemed to get farther than the open space in the middle of the bedroom floor where everything was staged. Sam could still feel the deep ache from the hard rubber eyepiece of the camcorder digging into the bones of his eye socket as he reached around to shift a figure forward a quarter of an inch so he could press the red button, capture the twitch of movement, press pause, and repeat.

  It struck Sam that Who We Are was essentially the same story, except with people instead of nuclear deformities.

  Each time Who We Are played over the window, rolling from black to black, he loved it more. When it was finished and he came to himself, a groove cut across his elbows from where he’d leaned against his desk. He yawned.

  The window was streaked with melt. Outside, the grass was greening and buds were popping on the dogwoods. The boys were back at the pothole, dropping pebbles into the darkness. Someone was on the phone. Rick’s deposit, said the voice at the other end. They hadn’t received it.

  “Oh,” said Sam. “That’s strange. I’ll check with my bank right away.”

  6.

  On a morning in May, Sam arrived at Rick Savini’s home in Westchester County with his tools and supplies. They were scheduled for a script meeting that afternoon, and he was several hours early.

  The house was part of an upscale development, tucked away behind a stand of elm and pine. The main road described a lengthy oval linking all of the ten or so homes of the development, and exited onto a bustling suburban route. While studying the actor’s home on Google Earth a few days earlier, Sam had determined that Rick Savini’s driveway had no fewer than a dozen potholes. He planned to fill them all—and following that, to take a look at Rick Savini’s roof. In the Google Earth photos, Sam thought he discerned some discoloration at the eaves, a telltale sign of weathering.

  Once he had unloaded the necessaries—bags of hot patch, bucket, shovel—Sam removed his shirt and set to work. First he used the shovel to round off the potholes, made them nice and clean. When that was done, he mixed his patch in the bucket and went from hole to hole, pouring up to the brim.

  By ten o’clock, the sun was high and hot, and the work was done. Although the job had not been difficult, Sam was out of the habit of manual labor. He took a seat on Rick Savini’s steps to rest.

  A sort of minified English manor, the house was planted in the center of an acre or so of greensward. The structure sat on a base of checkered brickwork, and the main body of the building was painted white with gray counterpoints. From one corner of the gabled roof poked a stubby turret. On his first pass through the development, Sam hadn’t been sure which house belonged to the actor. The other houses were similar, pulled from the same broad-shouldered mold. Only the accents varied—nickel plate on the front door instead of brass, trim in light blue or beige instead of white, a bell roof on the turret rather than a conical top, or sans turret completely.

  While he leaned on his elbows, Sam observed a yellow butterfly as it drew a jagged line graph in the shadows of the front door overhang. When the butterfly passed into the light, it disappeared, swallowed by glare.

  The scene dissatisfied him: the great, glossy house and same-y neighborhood, hacked out of a forest and screened from the hoi polloi driving past on the main road, the middlebrow affluence it broadcast. Compared to Tom’s ever growing LEGO castle, say, it was painfully bourgeois. He had expected better from Rick Savini. What made someone want to be like everyone else? He supposed there was a comfort in similarity, but wasn’t that like deciding that you didn’t want to be anyone anymore? It was like deciding to be less alive. He couldn’t figure that.

  Wesley Latsch, Sam’s best friend, didn’t seek anonymity, but he did greatly prefer to connect via e-mail as opposed to face-to-face. Wesley estimated that at least 75 percent of the time the person you were talking to was simultaneously thinking about pleasuring him/herself. “E-mail is an antiseptic mode of communication, and that’s a good thing.”

  (“Are you thinking about pleasuring yourself right now?” Sam asked, and Wesley said, “Oh, sure.”)

  A thrush gargled. Marigolds bunched from a pair of trough-like flower boxes on either side of the porch. Flies circled and settled and crawled in the creases between petals. Drops of sweat slid down Sam’s spine like small, light fingers.

  Or maybe the house was a kind of disguise; a McMansion was the last place you’d expect to find an independent film star. Sam imagined his actor—and even as he thought of him as his, he could feel Polly lifting a satisfied eyebrow, pleased to see him conforming to her fantasy of him as a young DeMille, dressed in those dorky lion tamer’s pants and terrorizing a crew of dozens with a bullhorn—sitting on this very step, communing with the part that he had written. Savini would let the serenity of the morning lure him out of himself while the character came in, like a possessing spirit. Sam smiled to himself. Somewhere in the surrounding woods, a stream was flowing, hushing its way over rocks.

  Behind him, the door—a prodigious oak piece cut to fit a Tudor arch—banged wide.

  Sam lurched up, spun around, slipped on the gravel footpath, and fell on his back.

  “Who are you?” Rick Savini crouched forward, holding a long knife with his wrist turned out to present the blade at a deadly, tilted angle. He wore a Brooklyn Dodgers home jersey and a pair of cutoff jean shorts. Sunlight spun along the knife’s edge. “And what the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m Sam.” A hundred tiny shards of rock pressed themselves into the bare flesh of his back. “The director.” He scuttled backward on his palms. “We’re meeting today?”

  “Sam. What have you done to my driveway?” Savini stopped at the foot of the porch but didn’t lower the blade.

  “I patched it.” Sam got to his feet. “You had a bunch of holes.”

  “Kid. Man.” Savini straightened. He gazed up at the overhang and took a deep breath. Without looking down, he sheathed his weapon in a belt loop. “I’m sure your heart was in the right place, it’s a sweet gesture and everything, but those holes. That was how I remembered which house was mine.”

  In person, the actor appeared even more harassed than he did on the screen. His eyes were not so much sunken as withdrawn, dug deep into the sockets for protection, like soldiers in trenches. He looked as if he had spent the night crammed inside a glove compartment.

  What a face!

  Even as the blood was finding its way back to the tips of his fingers and toes, Sam found himself reflecting on how perfect Savini was going to be in the movie. And they had something in common: Sam used a pothole to remember where he lived, too!

  “I’m really sorry about the potholes. I completely understand. Do you want me to dig one out?”

  “Yeah, maybe. If it’s not too much trouble.” The actor thumped down on the step where Sam had been sitting before. “Ah, Jesus, it’s bright.” Puddles of reflected light oozed on the
surface of the driveway, and Savini raised a hand to shield his eyes. “Fuck you, sun.”

  “Not a summer person?” asked Sam.

  “Not so much. You may have noticed, I have a delicate complexion. And allergies. I get headaches. Some of my ancestors were sewer rats. I don’t like how damn long the days get. It’s stressful.”

  “Stressful?”

  “The push and pull of it. You know, it can go either way: ‘Is this day gonna hang on for me a little longer?’ or ‘Is this day ever gonna fucking end?’ People go nuts in the summer. Serial killers? Most active in the summer. Look it up.”

  Sam couldn’t help offering that he didn’t see the difference from the rest of the year. “There are always days that go on too long and days that you don’t want to be over.”

  “Yeah, but the brightness of the summer makes the feeling more acute. And you’re young. I don’t expect you to understand. I’m pale and old. Summer and I have history.” Savini squinted from under his hand. “I thought you weren’t coming until the afternoon.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to—but Rick, listen. You’re going to have to do the movie for scale.” Sam was standing in the direct light, the sun burning his already inflamed shoulders.

  The squint tightened. “Pardon?”

  “Scale. I can only pay you scale.”

  “So, what, you thought you could, like, work off the difference in trade?”

  “Sort of. I was also going to take a look at your roof. It’s pretty beat up.”

  “You couldn’t just ask me?” Rick Savini flung out his hand as if to knock back Sam. He flopped on the porch and landed with a thump, arms thrown out. “What the fuck. Sam. Look, I liked your script okay. I thought it would be funny to play a part entirely in a bathroom stall. But this is just very fucking unprofessional.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Sam.

  “No, you’re not,” said Rick Savini. “It’s not even ten, is it?”

  “Rick, I don’t want to be a prick about this, but you have to be in the movie.”

  “No, I don’t. And you are being a prick.” The actor raised his head slightly, dropped it against the porch. He did it again and then a third time. It made the sound of melons being dropped on a counter.

  “Please.” Sam realized in that instant how wobbly the ground had become. He took a deep shaking breath. The tears in his throat were, to his own astonishment, real.

  But they weren’t enough. What Sam was feeling was want. What the part called for was need.

  So he did what he had to. He thought of the worst, saddest, most horribly mundane moment of his entire life and broke his own heart all over again.

  ■ ■ ■

  Playing on the single screen of the Memory Theater was If You See a Vegetable, Kill It and Eat It. It was a short film, set at a bus stop, costarring Sam as himself and, in her final performance, Allie as his mother.

  “I am such an old lady,” she says, and yawns, tucking a loose tendril of gray hair behind her ear. “Pooped at one in the afternoon.”

  He hops out, grabs his duffel from the pickup bed, and goes around to her window. Allie starts to roll the window down, but he tells her not to. “If we kiss, you might get your old on me,” he says.

  She laughs, tells him he’s a little shit, to call when he’s there, to wear a coat. “And if you see a vegetable, kill it and eat it, okay? Now I’m going home to take a nap and dream old-lady stuff.”

  “Okay, cool. I’ll have my people call your people.” He gives the window a knock and turns. The bus is already at the station.

  “Please, please, please—” Sam sobbed.

  “Don’t do that!” said Rick Savini. “Do not fucking do that! You’re taking advantage. You’re overstepping your bounds. You woke me up scraping your damn shovel. It’s not right.” The actor pointed a finger at him. “You know, I didn’t say anything about it when I agreed to the deal, but I knew your . . . Ah, shit. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, kid. But this is not right. You were raised better than this, I’m sure of that.”

  Sam broke the gaze. He wept. His flaming shoulders shook.

  “Goddammit. Do what you want.” The actor lurched to his feet and went inside. The door slammed.

  ■ ■ ■

  Sometime after noon, Sam happened to glance down from the roof and see Savini walking around. The actor, wearing a wide-brimmed straw sun hat, inspected the series of fills in the driveway, which were seamless except for the darker color. A minute or two later, he went back inside. A little while after that, he hollered for Sam to get his ass down if he wanted lunch.

  More weary than nervous, Sam descended. He had told himself that he was absolved of shame, but this time, the verdict hadn’t stuck. He felt wrung out; he felt like he’d walked into something face-first.

  They ate at a dinette in the kitchen, which had steel appointments and the hypersterility of an operating room. Central air snored faintly from the bowels of the house and made Sam’s damp shirt turn icy.

  Rick Savini planted a cold whole chicken on a tinfoil server in the middle of the table, flipped Sam a paper plate and a packet of plastic utensils.

  “I’m going to play the part straight. I’m in and out in a day.” Savini, standing at a counter, dismembered the bird as he talked, using his long silver knife to hack off the drumsticks and separate the body. “And you’re cutting out the part where Merlin takes a dump.”

  “Why?” asked Sam. He could concede that it was obvious, but it was a funny part.

  “Why?” The other man paused. “One, because it’s his office. Who drops a deuce in their office? And two, there’s a few things I don’t want to do on film, and pretending to shit is at the top of the list.”

  “Okay,” said Sam, The logic of the former point was hard to refute; as to the latter, he guessed he could see where the actor was coming from.

  “Super.” Savini stabbed three hunks of chicken and, with a finger, shoved them off onto Sam’s plate. “Leave the potholes filled. I’ll find a different way to remember my house.”

  “Okay.” Sam picked at his cold wet shirt.

  Savini knifed himself a piece of chicken and sat down. They ate for a while without talking. The meat was salty and gluey. Sam considered requesting pepper, but didn’t dare. Instead, he said, “I like your knife.”

  “It’s a Lord of the Rings replica.” Savini sawed off another piece of chicken. “It’s Bilbo’s sword, Sting. I got it from Flight Emporium.”

  “The airplane catalog?”

  “Yeah. They have some tempting shit in those things.”

  “Are you into those—swords?”

  “No. I’m just a sucker for airplane catalogs. I fly so much for work. The stuff they sell, you don’t exactly want it, but you want to know if it works or what it looks like up close, you know? So I got this. And it is a real sword. I actually use it around the house quite a bit. The edge glows in the dark, so it doubles as a half-assed flashlight.” The actor cupped his hands around the tip of the blade to show Sam the flare of fuzzy blue light at the tip where some kind of glow-in-the-dark finish had been applied.

  “So are those, like, elvish runes on the handle?”

  Savini grimaced at the hilt. “I don’t know. Probably.”

  Sam nodded. His teeth were nearly chattering, but his stomach had loosened. It was working out. Savini’s loquaciousness had encouraged him; the actor couldn’t hold a grudge. What Sam had done, it had been worth it, and the actor understood.

  “You know, seriously, this isn’t how you’re supposed to behave.” Rick Savini took a deep, huffing breath. “Kid. I know you’re a kid, but—it isn’t.”

  The half-eaten bird lay between them on the table, grisly flaps of skin peeled back, white meat hanging in ribbons. The unmarked steel surfaces gleamed, but only dully. They hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights.

  “I know,” said Sam, and maybe he did, but not as well as he would learn.

  ■ ■ ■

  Who We Are fi
lmed from mid-July to mid-August on the Russell campus.

  7.

  On the first day of production, they did a table reading of the script with Sam subbing for Rick Savini—that was it for rehearsals. Rehearsals had never worked well in his career as a student director. Rehearsals seemed to solidify performances, to turn everything into dance steps, and to sap the tension. Worse, rehearsals gave the actors openings to suggest script changes. Sam supposed that he might have needed to be more negotiable if the actors were experienced, but luckily, that was not the case here. He liked to walk through the blocking as briskly as possible, make sure the actor knew his marks, and get right into it. For the first couple of days of shooting, though, the performances were just so-so. There was too much tension, an atmosphere of fearful competition. Everyone seemed to be clenched, piling on the business, barking their lines, becoming weepy-eyed during brief, ironically intentioned exchanges about things like whether or not Captain Morgan was a real guy, or if vampires could contract herpes, and if vampires could contract herpes, were they totally up the creek, because how do you medicate a dead person, etc. Sam pulled an actor aside. “A little less,” he told her, and when that didn’t work, he said very softly, “Pretend you don’t give a shit.” Though this did seem to help somewhat, the actress cried off and on for the rest of the day. Then, in the scene where Brunson smokes meth for the first time, the actor who played the role, a hulking drama major named Wyatt Smithson, improvised a line; exhaling, he added in a stoned drawl, “Bite my bag, Republican America.” Without yelling “cut,” Sam shoved past the tech holding the boom, strode into the middle of the shot, and swatted the actor across the back of the ear with the rolled-up cone of pages that constituted that day’s shooting script. The impact produced a rubbery snap. The thirteen-odd people on-set went silent. (The composition of this group was typical for the shoot as a whole: three actors, nine crew members, and one stranger; there was Sam, the director; Brooks, the assistant director; the director of photography, Anthony Delucci; Professor Stuart in his official capacity as the script supervisor and his unofficial capacity as the jack-of-all-trades; Wyatt; Linc, the obstreperous and annoying actor who played Hugh; George, whom Sam was somewhat defensive about casting as Roger, Sam’s alter ego, because he was the handsomest of the actors, with a jaw that could have deflected bazooka shells; Quinn, universally known as “the Eskimo,” today in charge of a flag that was actually a sheet of black poster board; Elia, nicknamed “Toughie,” too petite (i.e., too anorexic) to lift anything or assist in the moving of anything weightier than a ream of paper, leaving her to handle the clapper and carry Sam’s Production Office, a three-ring binder of notes, receipts, and contracts, which she lugged by holding it tight against her chest with both arms and groaning a lot; Big Alex (also sometimes referred to as “Straight Alex”), who on most days performed as the gaffer; and Regular Alex (also sometimes referred to as “Bisexual Alex” or “Al-experiment”), who usually handled the boom; the middle-aged makeup artist, Monica Noble; and a white-bearded maintenance man from the college who had wandered by and taken a seat on his toolbox to observe the proceedings.) Perched on the edge of a dorm room bed, clutching the smoking pipe, Wyatt stared at Sam. The director held his breath. The attack had been entirely instinctual; he had reacted not out of anger but out of alarm, as if Wyatt had touched a live electrical current and needed to be knocked loose. Sam was appalled by what he had done. He assumed that everyone would leave now, quit. But no one moved or spoke. Wyatt tentatively reached up to rub his red ear. Sam tucked the cone of pages into his back pocket. “Well, do you want to do it again?” The actor nodded his assent, and the director clapped his hands, said keep rolling, and hurried back behind the camera. Everything was better from then on; the actors’ fear seemed to be focused not on each other but on him. The performances became more restrained. They hit their marks and did what he wanted them to do with a minimum of fucking around. Sam didn’t care if the crew thought he was an asshole. The director was responsible. And if he was going to be responsible, then he needed to be responsible, no one else. It was an undeniable fact that no person alone could create a movie. Only the actors could perform what had been written; Monica had to make sure they looked right; the DP had to film it; the gaffer had to light it; and everybody else had to do everything else. As small a production as Who We Are was, there were dozens of moving parts. For the movie to come together, each individual needed to fulfill his or her special role. Sam couldn’t be everywhere, and he couldn’t do everything. Which was why he needed to convince them that he would hurt them badly if he caught them doing anything except what they were supposed to be doing. He made a mental note to assault someone on the first day of his next film, to prevent any time from being squandered. One morning they were setting up for a close-up of Linc, and Brooks suggested Sam apply a catch light, a soft light that was situated to catch a glimmer in the eyes of an actor. It was an effect that a seasoned ham hock such as Booth Dolan liked for the suggestion of vigor it produced. Sam considered it cheesy. Maybe it made sense for movies about Santa Claus or talking animals, but not Who We Are. “Because Hugh is really in his element, right? He’s got that shine, right, and he’s feeling it? That catch light, okay, it emphasizes that,” Brooks said, scratching his head, nodding and grinning and leaning from foot to foot. His proximity made Sam itch. “Brooks: No. No catch light,” said Sam. “No?” said Brooks. “No,” said Sam. “Please?” said Brooks. Sam shook his head. “I’m sorry, Brooks, but I can’t. It would be corny and bad. Have you shopped?” First among Brooks’s daily chores was the shipping of the previous day’s reels to the film processor in the city; second was the purchasing and arranging of the crew’s daily repast. To this end, the AD was strictly mandated to buy only discounted sandwiches, discounted cookies, powdered lemonade, and those snack items that could be purchased in bulk, such as plastic kegs of stale cheddar puffs and infant-sized chip bags. Brooks said that he had done the shopping. “Good,” said Sam. “Now you need to go far away from me. Come back when you can be not irritating.” The AD scratched his nose and bit his lip and frowned, grinned, nodded, and dug some more at his scalp. He swung around on his heel and went weaving away, into the nearby woods, and disappeared into the shadows. A bill for $587.34 appeared in Sam’s apartment’s mailbox. A man named John Jacob Bregman, a special effects artist located in La Honda, California, had discovered his address on the Internet and insisted that Sam make reparations on behalf of his father. It seemed that Booth had contracted Bregman to make a high-quality latex nose for him—a very puffy nose with a hairy mole on the left nostril—but, following delivery of the organ, had failed to make payment. Sam’s father’s cell phone had been cut off, and Bregman’s attempts to contact Booth through regular mail had been returned to sender. “Do you know what painstaking work it is, Sam, to make a nose with a realistic mole?” wrote the artist. “I am sorry, my friend, but when the father does not pay, his debts must fall to the son. This is the oldest of civilization’s codes.” The accusation had the ring of truth: Booth was among acting’s foremost enthusiasts of prosthetic noses and rarely performed without one, and he was also among mankind’s least reliable beings. Nonetheless, Sam thought John Jacob Bregman was being a tad medieval with the father’s-debt-falling-upon-the-son stuff, not to mention presumptuous. He threw the letter away. When they were setting up the next morning, Brooks emerged from the woods. Sam did not ask if the AD had spent the night alone in the animal kingdom; it seemed better not to know. As they filmed the scene in which Rachel quietly slips away from Roger, passed out on a blanket in the field behind the festival grounds, a family of squirrels trooped into the frame. They moved in a line, one by one, splitting a trail in the long grass. Sam whispered in the ear of his DP, Anthony Delucci, “Stay on the squirrels.” Anthony raised his head to frown at the director. It was not a pleasant sight, Anthony’s frown. The DP, though only twenty, was stout and balding, and had, likely due to the innumerable hours already spent
behind a camera in his two decades, a bulging right eye that gave him the mien of a mad scientist’s halfwit assistant. Sam had toyed with the idea of performing as his own DP, but since he was already acting as his own producer and editor, he had decided to give the job to the very competent sophomore from Vinalhaven, Maine. The basics—the line of force and so on—were second nature to Anthony, and he was brisk in his business. In fact, he was probably better than Sam needed him to be. (For Intro to Film, the DP had made a short film from the perspective of a lobster gazing out at the restaurant doors across from its tank, seeing the people going in and out. Anthony had used plastic bags to create his own gels, dimming and coloring the lighting to a murky green tint; in order to give the lobster’s eye a subtle, irregular drift, he mounted the camera on a water bed. The camera’s weight caused it to sink and rise on the mattress. Though the short was totally static, it had been unnerving, to float there in the gloom and witness your killers passing by.) If there was a problem between them, it was primarily a matter of language. Anthony’s Maine accent was a babyish drawl. What he called a “two-shat” was actually a “two-shot.” When he asked “Befoh or aftah?” he meant “Before or after?” Sam was with him that far. What Anthony was saying when he referred to Brooks as “That cun-ed,” Sam felt in his heart couldn’t be complimentary but truly had no clue. However, the DP was, at least as far as Sam could understand, amenable to the director’s aesthetic strictures: that they use only a short range of medium lenses (28 mm, 35 mm, and 50 mm), and that as much as possible, everything be shot handheld—employing a tripod only in a couple of particular instances, and definitely no steadicams or dollies at any point. (Although his reasons for these limits were partly financial, Sam harbored a powerful distrust for lenses that explicitly warped spatial relationships, and he viewed wide-angle lenses as being especially wicked. Welles had used wide-angle lenses to revolutionary effect, but always for a specific purpose—in Citizen Kane, for instance, wide-angle lenses had added depth to the images, which continually gestured at the depth of the mystery of Kane. Several directors had shot dramatic close-ups of Booth with wide-angle lenses for no appreciable reason except that it was striking, and on a big screen, this resulted in bringing him so close that you could count his nostril hairs. Besides being unpleasant, it was so jarringly unrealistic, it reminded a viewer in bold: YOU ARE WATCHING A MOVIE. That was why Sam was dedicated to shooting handheld and midrange, a position that Brooks fecklessly tried to argue him out of. Why, the AD wanted to know, was a movie somehow more plausible when the camerawork was shakier, because wasn’t the audience therefore more mindful of the actual filming than they were when a movie was made in a “movie-movie” style? “Like, it doesn’t make sense, right? If you don’t want to make it seem not like a movie, shouldn’t the camera be, like, not so present?” Sam explained that he was forgetting something crucial. “What was that?” Brooks asked. “I am the director,” said Sam.) “Moh?” asked Anthony as the squirrels moved along. “Yes!” hissed Sam. Anthony shrugged and dropped his head back to the eyepiece. The DP tracked the squirrels until they came to the base of an elm tree and set to work raiding a discarded bag of Cracker Jacks. When they played it back, this all seemed intentional, an echo of how Rachel’s attention is shifting from Roger. Better yet, on second viewing, it was apparent that they weren’t squirrels at all—they were gigantic fucking rats! These monster black rats had up and decided to take a broad-daylight foraging expedition. They were marvelous, these rats! Inquiries, requests, and pleas inundated the director. Sam didn’t have all the answers. He had most of them, though, and was good at faking the rest: “Yes, when she hits her mark”; “No, not yet”; “I think you already answered it yourself, don’t you?”; “That should work”; “If it means you’ll go away, Brooks, okay, you have my permission.” They were right on schedule. Julian Stuart, his vandyke so curled with pride that it threatened to double back on itself, had taken to wandering around crying, “It is happening! By God, it is happening!” at random moments of the day. Sam himself was so excited about what they were getting that he couldn’t sleep. On the first day of the second week of the shoot, he received the initial video transfers (the celluloid having been developed and burned to disc), and after they wrapped that night, he hustled to the film department’s editing suite to get started immediately. He edited until his hands started to shake. Too restless to hold back, Sam maintained this routine, shooting all day and editing all night. When he was too jittery to continue editing, if he still couldn’t sleep, he watched television in his apartment. Booth was always on two or three channels, and Sam Dopplered between them. Of a particular night: on Channel 98 his father in his toga in Devil of the Acropolis, and on Channel 186, wearing a hawkish prosthetic nose as the “famed satanologist” Dr. Graham Hawking Gould in Hellhole. He issues warnings in both: about Spartan werewolves in the former and hellholes in the latter. Back and forth Sam went, sucked into them simultaneously, not sure why, and for once not willing to examine it or to search for an excuse. “It seems damned odd, does it not, Timon, to speak of ‘ethics’ while this foul beast roams the city, staining the agora with the viscera of the innocent,” ponders Plato, playing the peacock feather at the end of his fountain pen against his cheek. “By God, it’s the devil’s hole!” exclaims Dr. Gould, shutting a leather tome so savagely it belches a cloud of dust. Civilization was beset by threats! Sam frequently found himself chuckling. When the credits began to roll—Athens saved, hellhole plugged—he felt soothed, and could drift off into a couple of hours of sleep. But Sam’s check for the cable must have bounced; toward the middle of the second week of production, he lost all his channels except for the one with the Christian puppets. He largely abandoned sleep. He edited until he couldn’t anymore, and afterward, he walked around the campus until dawn. Out walking one night, Sam recalled how Polly had asked years earlier whether it was “some sort of Oedipal-type deal” that drove him to make films. The comment had pissed Sam off so much that he abruptly stood from where they were sitting and left her calling after him. It was about three in the morning when he remembered the instance. He found an unlocked Russell College security kiosk and called Polly. “It’s kind of late, dude,” she said. Sam told her to never mind that, did she remember what she said to him that time about the Oedipal-type deal? “I honestly have no memory of that,” she said. Sam told her to just listen: “This thing happened, with these rats . . .” It had been one of those moments; people were going to yell at the screen; they were going to cry out, “Those aren’t squirrels—they’re rats! Uh-oh! This is not a good sign!” Sam was aware that he was almost raving, yet unable to restrain himself. He wanted her to know that he was finally what he had always wanted to be, doing what he had always wanted to do. “I don’t want to rehash the same stories, Polly. I could give a shit about mythology or theatrics. I want to put something on the screen that’s original the way real life is original, and surprising the way that real life is surprising.” Polly yawned and said she wasn’t sure what that meant now, “Oedipal-type deal.” She went on, “When was that, sophomore year? And you’ve been brooding on it all this time? You know, I think that means that I’m your muse, Sammy. Am I? Am I your muse? Refresh my memory about Oedipus?” He told her that Oedipus was the motherfucker. “Oh, right! Duh!” Polly laughed. Sam told her she ought to come visit the set. She could be an extra. “Hey, you know what’s hilarious? That you’ll let the rats improvise but not the actual actors,” said Polly. He conceded that was somewhat amusing. “Listen: are you seeing someone?” Polly said not to be ridiculous. She asked him what he was wearing, told him to take it off, pronto. He locked the door of the kiosk and drew the window shade. There was grumbling about the food, Brooks reported. Big Alex had found some green-tinged turkey in one of the discounted sandwiches; Wyatt had pelted Brooks with a handful of cheddar puffs, and they had stung like rocks. “Just act like they’re kidding,” advised Sam. The day before they filmed a particularly emotional scene—when Br
unson tears apart his room looking for a misplaced vial of dope only for the room to abruptly heal itself and Brunson to suddenly develop needle tracks along his arms—Wyatt asked the director how he should prepare. Sam told him to practice his lines. “Is there something I should listen to or something I should watch for inspiration?” asked Wyatt. Sam replied that the script was full of inspiration. “Practice your lines, Wyatt.” The actor wondered if he should post an ad on Craigslist, for a drug addict to hang out with and to help keep him awake all night. Wyatt pointed out that Daniel Day Lewis had learned to scalp people when he was acting in The Last of the Mohicans. Sam pointed out that was untrue. Wyatt said it was, he’d read it somewhere, Daniel Day Lewis could scalp a man as well as any Indian brave. Sam yelled for Toughie to bring him an extra-thick roll of script pages. Another $587.34 bill arrived from John Jacob Bregman. It came with a picture of Booth’s puffy nose with the hairy mole. The mole was impressive; it had a single pendulous hair on the tip and a cancerous luster. “I put my heart into this nose,” wrote Bregman. He persisted that it was Sam’s duty to right his father’s wrong. The man was so anodyne in his entreaty—earnest bordering on holy—that Sam was troubled enough to try calling Booth himself, but of course, his father’s cell phone was still disconnected for nonpayment. Rick Savini arrived for his day of filming at the end of July. “You want to put an obie on me?” The actor had spent a few minutes sitting in his stall, touching the walls, contemplating the space, sitting on the lid of the toilet in different ways, and then announced he was ready to go. An obie was what he called a catch light. Sam made a noncommittal noise. “Good,” said Savini, “me, neither. I hate that Santa Claus crap.” They were on the same page throughout. Savini hit every mark, spoke each line of drug code with the casual assurance of a veteran dealer. The entire bathroom setup was wrapped before four in the afternoon. Sam drove him to the Days Inn, and Savini spent the trip with his hand on the sun visor, tweaking it continuously to keep the glare off his face. “Sorry about the sun,” said Sam, and the actor said, “Ah, never mind my bullshit. It’s all uphill after the solstice. Soon enough it’ll be fall and I can relax.” Rick registered under the alias Steven Pink; they went upstairs together to establish that his room’s air-conditioning unit was functioning (it was), shook hands, and said goodbye without embracing. The next morning Rick Savini was gone. Monica Noble, the tetchy middle-aged makeup artist responsible for maintaining the film’s motif—the actors’ changing appearances—began to weep intermittently. Sam asked what was wrong. She wailed that she was only one single individual person and it was too much. Sam embraced her. “I know you’re not going to let us down, Monica,” he said. “I won’t,” she said. “I know you’re not going to fall to pieces and ruin this experience for these other people who are working so hard for no money at all, and who believe in you and trust you,” he said. “I won’t,” she said. “You can’t,” he said. “Gosh,” she said, “thanks, asshole.” Rain started falling, kept falling. The budget instantly grew precarious; the shoot was on its second-to-last weekend; their rental contract for the Ferris wheel and the carnival games had to be extended. They’d only been able to use them for a day. Everything that remained to be filmed, even the stuff that had nothing to do with the Spring Festival location, was supposed to happen outside. Sam was determined to use the rides, but he didn’t want to film everyone walking around and blinking at each other in a downpour. It would be distracting, and he hadn’t planned on it. They waited; they couldn’t do anything; they couldn’t do shit. On the third straight day of rain, Sam extended the rental contract yet again, even though it was destroying the budget; he didn’t know what else to do. Water sheeted down the transparent walls of the rented pavilion. The rotten-sweet smell of mud and soaked grass coated everything. Sam prayed for a stranger to burst in and attack him so he could kill someone in self-defense. Why had he not thought of a cover set, the director asked himself, an alternate way to shoot the remaining scenes? The answer instantly materialized: because he was a dipshit. In his willingness to pardon himself for any and all crimes committed in the name of his film, he had failed to recognize that nature was the one player who could not be cajoled, enticed, tricked, guilt-tripped, or smacked across the ear with a cone of script. Nature was an ice-cold son of a bitch. The actors huddled on folding chairs, as removed from the director as possible, and whispered. Anthony lay on his back on a table with the Black Bag—the bag used to cover the magazine when changing film—pulled over his head, as though he had been executed. Julian paced around, thumbing “The Blue Danube” on a light meter at double time. The relative quiet was broken only by the occasional sharp rip of peeling gaffer’s tape as Regular Alex added another length to the mummy-like tape sculpture that he was creating; it was about the size of a toddler, and atop its segmented silver body was a single cheddar puff. The tape sculpture’s working title was “Alien w/ Tiny Yellow Skull.” Brooks sat by himself and burned kitchen matches. “Are you getting this?” he asked the question under his breath, apparently to himself. “Hmmm? And what about this?” One after another from a box he carried in his pea coat, the AD picked out a match, struck, and stared into the flame, shivering. “What the hell is wrong with you?” Sam snatched the box of matches away. Brooks stared at the ground. “Well?” Sam demanded. “A lot, I think,” admitted Brooks, and laughed and frowned and laughed. The last laugh was wistful. “A lot.” Sam commanded him to go outside and stand in the rain. “I need you to report to me the moment it stops.” The assistant director exited between the flaps of the tent, out into the downpour. There was a round of applause from the rest of the crew. “That guy is creeping everybody out so bad,” said Olivia Das, the actress who played Florence-Diana-Aurora-Divinity-Florence. Everyone gathered around to discuss Brooks: the matches, the twitching, the staring, the invisible documentary crew that he sometimes mentioned was following him around. “I hate everyone here,” said Monica Noble, dabbing at her eyes with a napkin, “but I hate Brooks most of all. I hate Brooks even more than I hate you, Sam.” Wyatt Smithson piped up to suggest that it was Brooks who had stolen Rick Savini’s sword: “It’d be just like the freak.” Someone had stolen Rick’s Sting? Sam was dismayed, angered; that sword was how Rick Savini protected himself! “Othah day I begged for that cun-ed to get something othah than old sanditches, and he just laughed at me,” said Anthony. Through the plastic walls of the tent, Brooks could be seen out in the field, sneakers buried in a rushing brown stream, hands pocketed, blond bangs plastered over his eyes. “Listen,” said Sam, as it dawned on him that a scapegoat might be just what the production needed to pull itself out of its doldrums, “we aren’t going to let the bastard ruin our movie are we?” The crew yelled, “No!” Their united front in the face of rampant idiosyncrasy was stirring, and Sam was finally able to bring himself to grapple with the circumstances. “Okay,” he said, “let’s improvise.” The company worked through the night to create a rave inside the Russell gymnasium. Sam asked Julian if he had keys to the theater department, and although the professor didn’t, he proposed that they try the window of the first-floor women’s bathroom, which was in the back of the building, obscured by a hedge, and usually unlocked. “How do you know that?” asked Sam. Julian said he didn’t. “It was just an idea I had. Intuition. A wild guess. I mean, how could I know something like that? I don’t eavesdrop on women. I don’t listen to their secret talk about their mothers and their lovers,” said Julian. “Okay,” said Sam. “I don’t listen to their demure tinkles,” continued the professor, looking off now, talking to himself. “Stop,” said Sam. “Please stop.” The professor snapped back, his expression offended, but said no more. They boosted Toughie through the unlocked window, and she let them in the door. From the costume closet, they dressed up the extras as pirates and flappers and Bedouins and cardinals. Strobe lights were requisitioned and tapestries were draped. New shots were blocked, the dialogue rewritten, and to catch up with the schedule, Sam rode the crew through fifty-four se
tups in a single day. When the rush was finished, he had slept one hour out of seventy-two, lowering his average to under three per night since the start of production. The next morning he fell asleep in the lobby of the Days Inn; he was there to meet Wassel and Patch, come north from Astoria to visit the production for the day. (Sunk into the crinkling embrace of a plastic-covered armchair, beneath a gilt-framed picture of guests enjoying the complimentary breakfast, the director dreamed that he was screening a blank reel for a theater of human-size Nukies.) The weather cleared. Brooks left the field and came to Sam. Black mud caked the AD from shoes to hair; he looked like a swamp monster. “The rain has stopped,” said Brooks. “Thank you,” said Sam, and was about to apologize for not calling the AD in sooner—before appreciating that he might need to utilize the crew’s hatred of him again. “Begone,” he said, and the AD squished off. Wassel and Patch bought all the doughnuts at the local Dunkin’ Donuts. “We have the doughnuts, bitches,” said Wassel. “Dough-nuts!” sang Patch. Patch, who was collecting the state quarters and was, additionally, tremendously high, went around demanding that people let him sift their pocket change. “You ate the doughnuts, now it’s time to pay the piper.” Everyone cooperated. “Look at you, Patch,” said Wassel. “Just look at you, you’re a damned bloodhound for commemorative coinage!” While she was applying some touch-ups to an actor, Monica Noble appeared to Sam to be unusually resolved; she was not, for the first time in days, teary. Sam asked if she was feeling better. Monica chinned toward the producers, who had instigated an impromptu game of leapfrog nearby. “And I thought you and Brooks were hemorrhoids,” she said. They exchanged a high five. That night Sam called Polly again in hopes of a replay but got her machine. There was a call-waiting beep. Rick Savini wanted to talk about his roof. “Can I get another year out of it?” Sam wasn’t a roofer, but he thought it’d be okay for another five years. “All right. Another thing: you owe me a Sting,” said Rick. “Some reprobate lifted it, and I’m pissed.” The director assured him that it would be taken care of. Then Rick surprised him by saying, “You know, I knew your mom.” Sam was aware that Booth and Rick had crossed paths in the eighties. (This was on the time travel–themed anthology picture, A Thousand Deaths—the one in which Booth’s deranged caveman chieftain had munched the pigeon. In another segment of the film, Rick had a nonspeaking role as a spaceman.) So it wasn’t totally confounding, but it was out of nowhere. “Yeah?” replied Sam. “Yeah. I liked her,” said Rick. “She was a strong person. I hated it when she died.” Sam thanked him, and Rick said, “Look, Sam, I’m just telling you,” and that was essentially the end of the conversation. Later, strolling the lanes of the campus, Sam found himself beside the security kiosk. He tried the handle and it was locked. Through the window at the top of the door, Sam saw that the trash can into which he had ejaculated was overturned. A cluster of huge black rats was squirming over the spilled garbage, nibbling on things—probably snacking on his semen, he thought. It was awful, and yet he stood there and minutes passed while he observed the rodents’ banquet. At the apartment complex, his mailbox contained yet another $587.34 bill from John Jacob Bregman. Bregman had included a wallet photograph of his own son, a moppet in a Dodgers cap and overalls, holding out an empty bowl. “My son is begging you,” wrote Bregman. “Be the man your father refuses to be.” The nose Booth had stolen was the void in his son’s belly. Was the frown on the moppet’s face a wince of hunger or of chagrin at being forced to pose as the Tiny Tim of La Honda, California? It was so unnecessary! You bought a nose, you paid for it! What was so hard about that? It was the middle of the night. Sam folded up the letter and the photograph and tucked them into his back pocket. There was nothing to do except watch the Christian puppets until daylight. The episode’s theme was sharing. “Jesus loved to share,” explained a large flocculent yellow bulb with nine wobbly eyes and black lady legs. “He thought sharing was pretty darn cool, Jesus did.” Scenes were filmed and often filmed again, with the actors making the same movements but in slightly different costumes, as well as the changes to their hair and makeup. This provided for the splicing that would create the impression that the characters were growing older in the course of minutes and seconds. The long days became longer. They were well overbudget. Although the video he’d seen wasn’t amazing, there were enough authentically peculiar moments—not peculiar in a forced way, as if he’d cast dwarves as campus cops or something, but peculiar in a true way, like a sneeze in the middle of a screaming argument—that the director believed he could stitch together a fairly compelling whole. It wasn’t exactly what he had imagined, but it was promising. He already felt like he’d pulled it off. By then, the third week of filming, Sam was happy, saner than he’d been in months, and cold all the time. His overriding sense was one of relief, of near-escape, of leaping from a speeding cattle car into the dark, hitting the ground hard, rolling, and coming to his feet to find that, thank God, nothing was broken. No one—not even Sam—seemed to doubt that he was in control. On the eighteenth day of filming, he felt a lump on the side of his neck, roughly the size of an almond. As cold as the rest of his body was, there was a burning sensation at the back of his eyes, and his knees seemed too loose in the sockets. “You kay dare?” Anthony asked when he saw Sam shudder and hug himself even though it was hot and humid. Sam said he thought it was a virus. The next morning he couldn’t swallow. The inside of his throat felt as though it had been scoured in his sleep. He was freezing. Bonfires were crackling behind his eyeballs. He managed to dress but collapsed outside the door. When the director didn’t show up at call time, Brooks went searching and found him lying in the hall of the apartment complex. The AD called an ambulance. While a nurse drew Sam’s blood, the director clutched Brooks’s hand. He whispered that he was afraid. Brooks reassured him that because of his art, Sam would be immortal. The AD’s hands jerked from his sides, as if trying to shake off an invisible grasp. (“I worry about you, Brooks,” Sam croaked, but Brooks said not to, that he would be immortal, too. It was all being filmed for posterity.) A doctor informed Sam that he had mononucleosis. The director slept. Brooks picked up three more days of dorm rooms for the crew, gave each person a hundred-dollar per diem to keep them busy, and shut the production down. Seventy-two hours elapsed in a trembling, bleach-speckled strip, as if Sam were watching events recorded on a VHS tape that had been left to cook in the sun.