“Not ’zactly.”
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
“Well, I do make up stories but they’re just for me. They keep me company. I get lonely. Always have. I have my television set and my TV Guide, but sometimes I make up stories just for me. Too bad Brainio don’t exist yet. I’ll be dead ’fore there’s Brainio. You know how Brainio works?”
“Um, no. I just heard of it for the first time a few minutes ago,” I say.
“Brainio goes into a person brain through invisible rays and the like.”
“Like radio waves?”
“That sounds right, though I’m no science-tist. And these invisible rays they tell you a story that you get to see in your brain. But it’s not like the television set where you have one story and evy’body watches. Brainio mixes up with your own ideas, and then the story you watch is like you and Brainio making it up together.”
“Like a custom-made story.”
“What’s that?”
“Making it up together.”
“That’s what I said. And you’re in it, too. Did I say that part? You can be in the story. If that’s what you want.”
“That sounds like a fascinating invention. And not a little terrifying,” I say.
“Yeah. I wish I could be alive for Brainio.”
“Would you be in your Brainio stories?”
“No. I don’t much like looking at myself.”
“Even in Brainio?”
“Even there, I expect.”
“But you could make yourself look like anything you want in Brainio.”
“Yeah. But then it’s not me.”
“That makes sense.”
“I do wish I would be alive when Brainio comes about. It would be so much faster and easier.”
“Faster and easier than what?”
“Than the story I’m making up now. Brainio makes stories fast. That’s one of the things everyone is saying in the future about Brainio,” Ingo says.
“Can you tell me the story you’re making up?”
He grows silent and stares off as he had yesterday. I wait. Is he considering telling me? I feel he might be. He licks his lips as if about to talk, but he remains staring off.
“I can’t tell it to you.”
I am crestfallen.
“Maybe I can show it to you,” he says.
“Are you a painter, then? You’ll show me pictures?”
“I do some painting. And building. And other arts and crafts and such. Sewing. And many such arts and crafts as is necessary.”
“Fascinating! I’d love to see this work! Is it on display in a gallery or—”
“In my apartment. I have to project it for you.”
“It’s a film?”
“Yes, I’m making a motion picture.”
This is too good to be true: ancient, reclusive, eccentric, likely psychotic African American filmmaker. Outsider art, undoubtedly. I have stumbled upon something magnificent. Visions of Darger dance in my head. Now for the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question:
“Have many people seen your film?”
“What’s that now?”
“Have you shown your film to a lot of people?”
Please say no.
“It’s not for other people. It just for me. Nobody else ever seen it,” he says.
How could I have stumbled upon this? No matter how crude, how amateurish, no matter how painful to watch, I can spin this into anthropological gold. I can dine out on this for the rest of my life. Finally I can pry open the prudish legs of Cahiers du Cinéma.
BACK HOME, I help Ingo into his apartment (just a sprain, thank God!). His place, the mirror image of mine, is dark and stuffy and crammed to the ceiling with cardboard boxes. He’s a hoarder! Too perfect! The boxes are dated and seem to stretch back many decades, with labels such as Buildings and Old Men and Storm Clouds and The Unseen. It’s spectacular! Who is Ingo Cutbirth? What upon have here I stumbled?
“A lot of boxes,” I say, hoping he’ll be encouraged to explain.
He isn’t. I take a different tack.
“So, anyway, what’s in the boxes?”
He won’t budge. I try again.
“Is it OK if I look in the boxes?”
“Take the ark of the LORD and place it on the cart; and put the articles of gold which you return to Him as a guilt offering in a box by its side. Then send it away that it may go. Watch, if it goes up by the way of its own territory to Beth-shemesh, then He has done us this great evil. But if not, then we will know that it was not His hand that struck us; it happened to us by chance. Then the men did so, and took two milch cows, hitched them to the cart, and shut up their calves at home. They put the ark of the LORD on the cart, and the box with the golden mice and the likenesses of their tumors. And the cows took the straight way in the direction of Beth-shemesh; they went along the highway, lowing as they went, and did not turn aside to the right or to the left. And the lords of the Philistines followed them to the border of Beth-shemesh. Now the people of Beth-shemesh were reaping their wheat harvest in the valley, and they raised their eyes and saw the ark and were glad to see it. The cart came into the field of Joshua the Beth-shemite and stood there where there was a large stone; and they split the wood of the cart and offered the cows as a burnt offering to the LORD. The Levites took down the ark of the LORD and the box that was with it, in which were the articles of gold, and put them on the large stone; and the men of Beth-shemesh offered burnt offerings and sacrificed sacrifices that day to the LORD. 1 Samuel 6:8–15,” he says.
“Is that a yes?”
He stares at me through bloodshot ancient eyes.
“OK. Maybe later then. Because I’m curious is all. You’re an enigma, Ingo Cuthbert. You’re an enigma.”
“Cutbirth.”
“What’d I say?”
“Cuthbert.”
“And what is it?”
“Cutbirth.”
“Got it. Like cut plus birth. Got it.”
As I head to the door to let myself out, I catch sight of something in an adjacent room. It’s an exquisitely crafted miniature scene: a heavily populated city street with perfect little puppets. What’s more, I recognize it as my neighborhood. It is West 44th and 10th. There’s Dunkin’ Donuts. There’s H&R Block. It’s extraordinary. I can’t breathe. Ingo limps to the bedroom door and shuts it.
“May I look in there?” I ask.
He stares at me anciently through rheumy old bloodshot eyes.
“Maybe later then,” I say, and I leave.
IN MY APARTMENT, I check Poems and Curios. No comments. Then, for the purpose of convincing him, I try to google biblical passages about a black man letting a white man see a miniature city. There’s not that much. I do find a thing in Luke saying you should give to anyone who asks, but it’s not specific enough (not to mention