“I’m gonna tell Mom you told me to walk to my lesson—” the girl’s voice called back.
“Get outta here, Kay. I’m busy doing something.”
“—and she won’t let you have the car on weekends anymore.” The door opened and a girl who looked maybe eight or nine walked in. She had lank brown hair and was wearing a long black robe, plastic glasses, and a maroon tie over a flowered tank top. A Harry Potter costume, Anna realized. The girl held a wand in one hand; the other hand stayed on the doorknob.
“Shit, Kay. I told you, don’t come in here.” The man began frantically pushing the magazines off the bed and into the crack between the wall and the radiator. Kay’s eyes went wide.
“Why are you wearing that thing?” she asked, stepping into the room.
“It’s just a game, Kay. Get out.”
“Who is that man?”
There was the metallic clung sound of magazine spines hitting the radiator on their way to the floor. Kay turned and pointed her wand at the camera. “Are you the one who called last night and hung up?”
“Leave him alone, Kay.”
“I could hear you breathing, you know,” she said to the camera, moving the wand in slow circles. “I command you—answer me!”
Having finished with the magazines, the man now stood and walked over to Kay.
“Answer me.” Her voice edged up, high and shrill. “What are you doing? You’re in my house. What are you doing in my house?”
“Hey, movie over, man. Movie’s over. Cut!” The bag was crooked on the man’s head, slanted to one side so that only one eye lined up with its hole.
“Silencio!” Kay screamed, whirling around to face the man with the bag on his head. She was crying now.
“Hey, turn that thing off, man,” the man said to the camera. “C’mon, Kay.” He got up and went over to the girl. “It’s just a friend.”
“W-what’s the bag on y-your head for?” Kay was really sobbing now. The man kneeled down. He put a hand on Kay’s shoulder, then twisted around to face the camera again.
“I said turn it the fuck off, man. Now. Can’t you see it’s fucking scaring her? C’mere, Kay,” the man said. He pulled Kay stiffly into his arms and the camera zoomed in on Kay’s face, tears leaking from her eyes, which were squeezed shut. It zoomed in on her mouth as she licked the tears and snot from her upper lip.
“Why wond ee s-say s-someting?” Kay sobbed. But her face was invisible as the camera jerked over to the man’s fingers on Kay’s shoulder. You could see the hair on his knuckles and the back of his hand. He squeezed her shoulder. And then the camera moved to Kay’s flowered top. To a single purple flower with a yellow dot inside. Closer and closer, until its pixilated center filled the screen. Until the whole screen was just one raw, hideous, quivering pixel sun.
“It’s just a friend,” came the man’s voice from somewhere, a little hoarse. “It’s just a friend.”
Then the screen went dark and the word FIN appeared. As if from a great distance, the sad strains of an acoustic guitar struggling to stay in tune could be heard. A Will Oldham song. Anna realized that she was crying. She read the credits, which were short and consisted mainly of Gilman. Later she would try many times to explain this Road-to-Damascus moment to herself, but would always come up short. All she knew was it felt as though she’d slipped a hand between the sofa cushions to find a new world among the lost coins and the unsightly crumbs. An underworld you could traverse unencumbered by the opinions of anyone else, where you could just be yourself. The opposite of pop culture. Unpopular culture. A place she might just belong.
It felt like a significant discovery, even though she didn’t really know what it meant. And she was suddenly very tired. The lights were already off. The cars going by on the street below sounded like rain, like waves, like the soundtrack to some Gilman movie about the impossibility of sleep. She pushed the computer out of kicking distance, off to one side, then turned around and shut her eyes.
The laptop battery would die overnight, but she didn’t even care.
4
Anna emerged from the subway to find that a new public art exhibit had been installed in City Hall Park. A tourist stopped in front of the same sculpture that stopped Anna. He was wearing flip-flops and holding a bag from the 9/11 memorial gift shop.
“What kind of fucking shit is this?” the man said, more to himself than anyone else, as he held up his iPhone and took a picture. It was an inadvertently accurate question—the sculpture honestly did look like shit. Anna found a plaque over by the water fountain that explained the installation, which was called Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu, and Shitsuke. The artist was a Japanese sculptor by the name of Mitsuri Yagihashi.
“I have always been fascinated by rituals of hygiene,” Yagihashi was quoted as saying, “and the relationship between purity and paranoia. In Japan, one’s cleanliness is considered a reflection of one’s inner state. These five shrines were cast from the dung of macaque monkeys indigenous to Japan, then covered in gold leaf. I consider them ‘taboo’ structures.” Yagihashi’s quote was followed by a lengthy paragraph by Joseph Fierhoff, the director of the New Museum and chairman of the city’s Arts in the Parks Fund, who described Yagihashi’s work as “drawing on his country’s rich folk art traditions” and “a response to Japan’s famous ‘toilet culture.’”
On the whole, Anna had to admit, the sculptures didn’t seem to really transcend the raw materials they came from. They didn’t look much like shrines to her. They looked like enormous gold-colored turd balls grouped in random clusters. Which wasn’t to say that the park didn’t seem kind of cheerful, improbably strewn with golden turd-ball clusters. But what was most impressive here, Anna couldn’t help thinking, was the fact that they had been installed in City Hall Park at all. The sculptures sucked, true, but Joseph Fierhoff found the shitty shrines or whatever impressive and so did the Arts in the Parks commission and a number of other top-tier cultural institutions. They almost became, in a sense, monuments to artistic ambition. Monuments to themselves. This was Gilman and Yagihashi’s great trick, Anna realized. They had figured out how to make a job out of simply being themselves, turned their perverse, narcissistic, possibly enlightened selves into marketable commodities. Maybe this was all art really was—being yourself. Seen in this new light, the turd balls lifted Anna’s spirits considerably as she cut through the park toward J&R, dispelling any final misgivings she still had about buying the camera.
Brandon, had told her it didn’t matter what camera Gilman used, that nowadays it didn’t make sense to invest in anything but HD.
“Why hamstring yourself with technology?” he’d asked. “You think your Gilman guy doesn’t convert all his crap footage to HD before he screens it at Cannes or whatever? Everyone does. That’s why I’m right, right? Look, if you want to go analog, then go all the way. Real film. Super 8. But for fuck’s sake, don’t half-ass it.”
Anna didn’t want to half-ass it. And she trusted Brandon, who had studied film for a year at USC before transferring to Hunter. So she got back online right away after talking to him. The cheapest HD camera she could find on CNET reviews was a Panasonic HDC-TM700 for $794.29, but when she sent the link to Brandon, he’d immediately shot that option down as well.
“A big NO on the HDC-TM700!” Brandon replied in an e-mail. “It does have some nice features. But mostly it’s just a cheap piece of junk. It lacks external audio inputs and all you really need (are you paying attention?) is GOOD AUDIO. It’s amazing what a professional soundtrack can do even for shit footage like Gilman’s. In your case, I would actually recommend a camera with two mic inputs: one for a boom and one for