“How were you wrong?”
“Even with all my control over their destinies, I was still an Unseen myself. An Unseen God to Unseen Girls and there was nothing I could do. And so they fought. And I loved them. But in the end, they, too, fell back into the sea of invisibility, taking on thankless jobs, losing their sparks, working at Slammy’s. Emotional labor, they call it these days. It was inevitable. I know that now.”
“Can I see them?”
“No. Only a few are still alive. They are old and sad. It is hard to look at the Unseen, even if you are Unseen yourself. It is hard to look. One doesn’t want to be reminded. It is better to look at the Seen. The Unseen are the audience for the Seen. They are here to watch, not to be watched.”
INGO CUTBIRTH HAS no known next of kin. He has, it turns out, requested burial at the St. Glinglin Cemetery just south of Twelve Mile Swamp, behind the Tastee Freez and in front of the Frosty Freez. The apartment manager hands me an envelope with four hundred dollars. Oddly, it has my name on it. It’s not at all clear to me why I’m in charge of the funeral, but the truth is, control over Ingo, his legacy, and his belongings is precisely what I want. So even though the four hundred dollars in crumpled ones does not begin to cover the costs of casket, headstone, minister, burial, and reception at Tastee Freez (note: check to see if Frosty Freez can do better), I will gladly pay the difference with a substantial loan from my sister, who married rich. I know there will in the future be countless pilgrimages to Ingo’s grave. I want to make sure the destination is satisfying to these yet-unborn acolytes, of which there will surely be thousands, maybe millions, maybe more. I need an epitaph. Something profound. Something that expresses the cultural significance of Cutbirth but also inextricably ties me to him, to the Cutbirth phenomenon. Pope’s epitaph for Newton comes immediately to mind: Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light. Love, Pope. Perhaps I could construct some similar sentiment. As Spacetime is both invisible and essential, so was Cutbirth. Love, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg. Or The Unsung has Sung. Love, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg. Or A Solitary Man Who Moved Millions. Love, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg. Or On the 32,850th Day Cutbirth Rested. Love, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg. Or The World Was Never Meant for One as African American as You. Love, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg.
I settle on the Unsung one but add And Thus the Heart of the World Is Broken. Love, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg. I hire a photographer to document the funeral. I know I’ll be alone there with the hired Baptist minister (Ingo must’ve been a Baptist!) and this will put me in good stead down the road, cementing our connection in the mind of the public. I am Brod now. I am Brod, my entire life mapped out: executor, biographer, analyst, confidant, emergency contact. Friend. I schedule the funeral for a day during which a torrential downpour is anticipated, the umbrellas and mud being highly cinematic, funereal, illustrative of profound grief, hardship, loneliness. In addition, it will not be difficult for me to appear grief-stricken on the day, not only because I will be, but tears do not always come for me, even though I have taken several acting for directors classes, two acting for critics classes, and one acting for audiences class. With the rain, my face will be wet and I don’t have to worry about verisimilitude. I rent a rain machine from a local film production supply house, just in case.
AFTER I RETURN from Ingo’s funeral and a delicious Frosty Freez frappé, I think about Ingo’s imminent journey from the Unseen to the Seen and all those Unseen he attempted to bring with him. I confirm I must defy Ingo’s wishes—just as Max Brod denied Kafka’s—and search through Ingo’s boxes to find the Unseen. They are, I believe, the negative space defining the positive space of Ingo’s film, and they must now and forever be recognized and celebrated for all they have done. Perhaps there is a second movie to be made with them. Perhaps now is their time. For we live in the future now. Perhaps this is what Ingo would have wanted. I could make that movie. Nobody, not even a puppet, deserves to live and die in obscurity, to live a life unseen. I think about the small laminated card I carry for inspiration in my wallet: Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen—George Jean Nathan. As a critic, I sit in the dark, unseen. But I exist (I exist!), and my time has come. I will bring these unfortunates with me. By studying the film ad infinitum, I will understand who these Unseen are, down to the individual. I will be the Howard Zinn of Ingo’s world, not that unseen African Americans need a Jewish historian to make them visible. But still, I will be it. Even though I am not Jewish.
On the drive back from the funeral it occurs to me that there needs to be something more exciting at Ingo’s gravesite. If the pilgrims are to feel satisfied with their choice of vacation pilgrimage, if the Yelp ratings are to draw the proper crowds, there needs to be some sort of entertainment value. This is, after all, America. Don’t kid yourself. What I envision is a giant slide, say, one hundred feet tall if it’s a day. On one side will be a sequence of stone slabs, each one carved with Ingo’s face, each with a slightly altered expression. As the acolyte slides, he (she, thon) looks sideward and, through the magic of granite cinema, Ingo’s face appears to move. Perhaps Ingo smiles. Yes, I am aware that Alfred Hitchcock’s resting place features such an attraction, but his has him winking. Now that it has been revealed he was sexually abusive, protesters are insisting it be taken down and replaced with a slide in honor of women, created by women. A tribute to women whose careers and lives were negatively impacted by that monstrous misogynist. (Perhaps Tippi Hedren winking? It’s not for me, a man, to say.) And I say it’s about time (though that’s not for me to say, either). Tear Hitchcock down. He was toxically masculine. Don’t soften his brutal legacy by having elfin delight Toby Jones play him. From here on out, Harvey Weinstein should be forced to play Hitchcock in an endless tour of one-man performances, just as James O’Neill was forced to spend his later years portraying the Count of Monte Crisco to atone for something or other to do with vegetable shortening. I make some calls, not about the Weinstein idea (although perhaps later). I call a stone carver, a water slide carver, and the zoning commissioner. I call my sister to borrow a lot more money.
I wander Ingo’s apartment, feeling oddly free here for the first time. He is not watching. No one is watching. I sift through boxes. This is wrong. It is as if I am looking through the recesses of a man’s mind, an intensely private man. And yet I am Ingo’s voice in the world now. His has been forever silenced. If I am to do the necessary work of curating, of illuminating his psyche, work that is necessary because the world needs Ingo, perhaps now more than ever, then I must in essence become Ingo. There is no other way. His boxes are filled with bodies, hundreds, probably thousands, of little bodies, possibly millions of bodies, beautifully crafted with articulated skeletal systems, with malleable faces, dressed in perfectly realized, tiny costumes, no detail too small for Ingo’s attention: policemen, bankers, surgeons, matrons, soldiers, sailors, Mudd and Molloy at various ages. They’re all here, all the characters from the film, all the background actors, individually and lovingly enshrouded in tissue paper like those Chinese white pears at Christmas (or Thonnukah). Here, too, I find the miniature streetlamps, automobiles cataloged by era, dogs and cats, tiny trompe l’oeil newspapers constructed with internal wires so they can be animated to appear to blow through the city streets on a windy day, trees with individually articulable branches and leaves, an organ-grinder, his monkey, fire hydrants, their monkeys, telephone poles, beer bottles, cutlery, boxes of shoes and handbags, city buses and cable cars, railroad tracks, pigeons, robots, a claw shovel, Richard Nixon, stained glass, the Central Park carousel, atom bombs, newsstands, thimbles the size of grains of sand, bartenders, all the white cast members of Hamilton, paratroopers, Macy’s Thanksgiving parade floats. Pretty much anything one could imagine or see in the world is to be found in these boxes. One particularly large box contains only one character: a beautiful young man, perhaps twenty-five, chiseled features, the movie star looks of a Rock Hudson or a Troy Donahue.