I look up and Ingo seems distracted. He is counting out his medications. (His pill holder is the size of a wall calendar and also is a wall calendar. It hangs on the wall.) Was he even listening? I am reminded of my ungrateful students at Zookeeper’s High School. Not that they count out their medications during my lectures (for they are young and virile), but they do text and read gossip on their computers and often leave and also often don’t show up. I am not a disciplinarian. Far from it. It is my belief that when the student is not texting, the teacher will appear when they look up to the front of the room. I am not Sidney Poitier as To Sir, with Love. Nor am I Sandy Dennis as Up the Down Staircase. I am not the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Nor am I Mr. Chip or any of the seven Robin Williams films in which he plays inspiring teachers (Help Me, Teach!, Teacher of the Year II, The Teacher Who Cared Very Much, Professor Salvador Sapperstein and the Sad Students of Salisbury High, Help Me Again, Teach!, I Am Your Teacher and I Love You, and Dead Poets Society). I am a font of wisdom, if you will. I am a resource. I am here if you want. Until then, I will teach as if no one is listening. I will write as if no one is reading. I will love as if everyone in the world is dead.
Ingo has finished sorting his pills. He looks up.
“Oh, hi. So anyway, would you like to see the rest of the film?”
“Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Well, seven times yes, technically. Only seven. Because of the aforementioned technique and also the film’s apparent great length.”
“So here’s how it’s gonna go,” he says. “The film runs for three months including predetermined bathroom, food, and sleep breaks. My idea is the relentlessness of the movie will cause it to enter your psyche and thus infect your dream life. It is a filmic experiment of sorts that posits an equal relationship between artist and viewer, in that the viewer will not, after viewing it in its entirety, be certain where the film has left off and his own dreams have taken over. Or hers.”
“Or thon.”
“Granted, there is some intent on my part to nudge your dreams in a certain direction, but in the end, what you add to the film will largely be determined by your own psyche.”
“Sort of like Brainio.”
“What?”
“Sort of like Brainio,” I say again.
“First bathroom break in five hours,” he says, ignoring me. “You’ll have to use your own bathroom. My bathroom is off-limits, except to me, who can use it and will.”
“You’re sounding very much like me again.”
“That won’t get you into my bathroom, mister.”
“Fair enough. But you do. Or Ocky. It’s spooky.”
“I don’t know what Ocky means. Are you prepared to begin?”
“Let me prepare to begin,” I say.
“OK. Prepare then.”
“OK, I’m trying.”
“OK.”
I activate the Nameless Apenessness of my soul—which I can do almost instantaneously after years of study and practice of some or another Eastern-style religion—through a quick intake of air.
“Go,” I grunt apily.
The following seventeen days pass in a blurred yet brilliant fever dream of unimaginable cinematic luster, ramen, missed phone calls to my African American girlfriend, Neelon’s Genuine Tuna Fish, troubled dreams, bathroom breaks, and brief enigmatic conversations with Ingo about mucilage. I weep. I laugh. I whine. I sigh. I sweat. I punch the air in triumph. I am transported to a country of alien emotions, a country I have perhaps spent my entire life avoiding. It is everything.
On the seventeenth day, somewhere between 3:05 and 3:08 P.M., Ingo dies. I check behind me when the reel is not seamlessly changed to find him slumped on his crutches, still standing. I perform CPR, which I don’t know but I know there is pounding and I believe it is on the chest. It doesn’t work. I stare into his unseeing, glassy African American eyes and weep.
IN MY GRIEF, a night conversation of several days ago with Ingo, occurring as he tucked me in, replays like a ghost in my head:
“There are multitudes of Unseen,” he said.
“Unseen?”
“The ones not seen.”
“I see,” I said.
“In the movie.”
“They’re in the movie?”
“They’re unseen in the movie.”
“So then they’re not in the movie?”
“They’re in it. But the camera is facing away from them. As it is for most of us.”
“So it’s more or less a conceptual notion.”
“No. The puppets have been built. With as much care as the seen puppets. They have been posed movement by movement, just as have the seen puppets. They have lived their lives. But have not been witnessed by the camera. Only by me.”
“You animated them but didn’t film it.”
“It sextupled my workload. Had I not, I could have made the film in fifteen years. It was a necessary sacrifice.”
“But why?”
“Because the Unseen live, too. Because if I don’t see them live, who will?”
“But why not film them and allow them to be seen by the world?”
“Because they aren’t seen. And were one to see the Unseen, they would no longer be the Unseen.”
“Did you record on paper at least? Their names? Their loves? Their families?”
“Only in my head. And over the years, I have forgotten many of the details, many of the names. They blur together into a mass, into a notion, into the moth-eaten coat of memory. When I die, what remains of them dies with me.”
“That seems wrong and horribly sad,” I said.
“Such is the world.”
“Would you show these puppets to me?”
“No.”
“Will you tell me about them?”
“Only by way of census. They are only known as numbers. There are 1,573 black adult males over the age of twenty.”
“You built 1,573 black male puppets over the age of twenty.”
“And animated them.”
“That’s an extraordinary amount of labor.”
“Not enough. Not nearly enough. Never enough. But it is all I was capable of. My time is finite. There are 1,612 black females over the age of twenty.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“There are 1,309 black males under the age of twenty; 1,387 black females under the age of twenty. Among them the eight Adventure Girls.”
“Adventure Girls?”
“I took a special interest in them,” Ingo said.
“Who?”
“The