I bang hard on Ingo’s door. When he answers, I offer to do his shopping now that it will be difficult for him to get around. He sighs and nods, and I step in. The bedroom door is still closed.
“Have you given any thought to my petition?” I ask.
Ingo doesn’t respond but simply limps to a notepad on the cluttered kitchen table and begins to write. I scan the room, hoping for elucidation. Boxes. Perhaps hundreds of them, maybe thousands, possibly millions—all marked: Automobiles, Firemen, Weather, Natives, Pastries, Trees (Palm, Spruce) …
Ingo returns with his list: Whole Milk, Whole Chicken, Whole Wheat Bread, Hole Puncher, Peach Halves (in syrup), Halvah, Half and Half, Anne Hathaway Havoc DVD, Black Thread, Black-eyed Peas, Ketchup, Mucilage, Carrots, Peanut Butter (chunkless), 150 packages of Ramen (assorted), 50 cans of Neelon’s Tuna Fish (improved texture), 80 cans of Nimby’s Chicken Noodle Soup, 10 pounds of Bolton’s Powdered Eggs, 5 pounds of Fripp’s Powdered Milk, 1 pound of Prochnow’s Powder (talcum), a thousand boxes (empty).
I nod.
“So what would you say that little New York City street scene in there is for, if you were to say? If I were to ask?” I ask.
He says nothing.
“The reason I would ask,” I say, “if I were to, is that it looked so familiar to me, which I thought you might find amusing. Ha ha. In fact, from my cursory glance before you so aggressively slammed the door, it looked much like the very block on which I myself live at this very time. Well, not at this time, because I live next door now, but where my apartment is, where I live when I don’t live here, which is usually. And that is why I ask. That is why hence my curiosity, as it were, if you must know. Coincidence or no, I might be of some value to you in checking for accuracy. Also, in addition, I might be a little curious as to the why of this particular miniature set. That is why … I ask … of you … this … at this … time.”
After a protracted period of what I can only characterize as loud nose-whistle breathing, Ingo speaks:
“Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops. Luke 12:2–3.”
Actually, that is pretty much the type of biblical passage I was searching for earlier. And it was right there all along in namby-pamby Luke. But Ingo got to it first and used it against me. Damn him to hell.
ON THE WAY to the supermarket, I amuse myself by ticking off all the possible narrative conflicts available to filmic storytellers:
Man vs. Man (Woman, Nonbinary, Child)
Man vs. Self
Man vs. Nature
Man vs. Society
Man vs. Machine
Man vs. Supernatural
Man vs. God(dess)
Man vs. Two Men (and et chetera)
Man vs. Everything
Man vs. Nothing
Man vs. A Few Things
Man vs. Disease
Man (Sick) vs. Healthy Person of Any Gender
Man vs. Idiocy
Man vs. Memory (Memory is a map of sorts, but hand drawn, incomplete, and full of errors. It can let you know a place exists, but you cannot trust it to get you there. To get you there, you need a computer. A computer is precise. A computer does not think your mother is more important than the chair, or the space that’s not your mother is more important than the space that is, or the glass of water on the table, or the sun pouring through the window, or the velvet drapes, or your mother’s love for her father, or the front stoop, or the cracks in the front stoop. This is why Man must fight it.)
Man vs. Computer
Man vs. Time
Man vs. Fate
Man vs. Marketing
Man vs. Clone
Um …
Man vs. Smell
Um …
Man vs. No Smell
Um …
Man vs. Some Smell
Um …
I’m certain there are others, but I am preoccupied. The Winn-Dixie supermarket is as big as a football field, and I mean a king-size football field, not a queen-size. While in the produce section, looking at carrots, I once again ponder the tiny re-creation of my neighborhood. I am not a person who believes in destiny. But how could my world be in that elderly African American gentleman’s apartment? I choose a bag of carrots. It seems as if I have stumbled upon something dangerous, perhaps even otherworldly. I, an avowed atheist who believes in reason and the rule of law, am not a person who accepts an unseen spirit realm, but something is amiss here. Who is Ingo Cutbirth? I find the mucilage aisle. So many choices! Should I be disturbed that Neelon’s also makes a mucilage? Is it Cutbirth or Cuthbert? Either way, he is most likely a giant elderly African American gentleman. Unless this is just more makeup. Shandy’s Eco-Mucilage looks good. Oh, the experiences he most certainly has had. It would behoove me to engage him. My privilege shelters me, and Ingo is the ax with which to hack away at the shelter that is the privilege which I have had. Halvah is hard to find. I should train my eyes to look at him with the awe I would afford one of my old white man heroes. Halvah is filed alphabetically under chalva (I had to ask a stockperson). I will imagine he is Godard, the great French filmmaker and talented anti-Semite, and then look at him as if he is the part of Godard that is a genius and not a talented anti-Semite. I think that will work. That is what I have done with Godard himself. Chunkless, it turns out, is not the same thing as smooth, it turns out.
“It’s a southern thing,” a second stockperson explains.
ON THE DRIVE back, I find myself obsessed with the following cinematic predicament: It is nearly impossible in a motion picture to effectively communicate odor to an audience. And yet a film for blind and deaf people must be all smell all the time. How to accomplish this? I must ask my friend Romeo Quinoa, who is a nasal artist.
Then this: I wonder if there is the possibility of smelling the future. Second smell, I would call it, were the government to assign me the job of naming it. My thoughts are popping like lightning. It is a sign that I am finally excited about something.
As Ingo unpacks his groceries, I attempt to get into his eyeline. His old rheumy bloodshot eyes become glassy. Is he about to cry? Perhaps he has never in his entire life been looked at as though he were an anti-anti-Semitic Godard. I would imagine not, especially as an African American. Such is the lot of African Americans in America. Was he a Pullman porter? A sharecropper? Oh, wait, he told me what he was, but I don’t recall. I think I have it on tape. In any event, the things I might learn from Ingo if only I can persuade him to open up. But he is a taciturn man. No one can know the trouble he’s seen, certainly not I, with my milk-white skin and my degree from Harvard, which I went to. Sure I have tramped, ridden the rails, lived in a hobo jungle, but that was part of a summer program at The New School, sanctioned by Union Pacific, our hobo jungles simulated, the hobos improvisational actors from Upright Citizens Brigade. Granted it gave us the flavor of the rootless life, but there was at least a hint of a safety net. When Derek Wilkinson had an allergic reaction one day during hobo luncheon (the beans had been prepared in a factory that processed nut products), there was a nurse (dressed