“Where’d you get such a nickname?” I ask, forced casual-like.
He hesitates for a moment, then tells me that when he was a little boy, he’d always grab an extra cookie from the cookie jar. I do not believe that explanation for a minute, but I am not staying at the bus station until next Thursday or Friday.
It’s not too bad, in truth. Levy has a soft, warm, comfortable lap and keeps his hands mostly to himself. We engage in a brief, awkward conversation in which we try to find common ground:
“You watch sports?” he asks.
“No. You read?”
“No. You like cars?”
“Not much. You like movies?”
“DC, not Marvel. Marvel is shit.”
“How about travel?”
“Branson. Hunting?”
“Antique hunting!”
“Like, shooting old animals, you mean?”
After a perfectly timed pause, I say, “Yes, that’s what I mean.”
With this, we settle into our own worlds—Levy playing a videogame on a device he calls his Sega Pocket Gear, arms wrapped around me and watching the small colorful screen from over my shoulder while I try to read Molloy. It is slow going. Concentration is difficult these days under the most ideal circumstances. Levy possibly has an erection. I read the sentence “I don’t know how I got there” again and again. I can’t seem to understand it. On the surface, it seems like the simplest of sentences, but what does it mean? I suspect there are some gaps in my comprehension. Were the gaps always there? I can’t recall. That’s the thing about gaps. Will I ever be back to normal, if this is not normal? The doctors couldn’t (or wouldn’t) say. It is terrifying to lose things. I have lost time. I have lost most of my memory of Ingo’s movie.
“Shit, I lost,” says Levy.
He pauses to look contemplatively out the window for exactly three seconds, then starts a new game.
One needs to learn to let go, to pick up the pieces, to start again. My lap buddy is modeling an important life lesson. There will be other Ingos. I will discover many more never-before-seen masterpieces in my lifetime, maybe thousands. If I only keep my eyes open. And keep them open I shall!
I nod off briefly.
Look, if there is some level of memory loss or brain damage, I will exercise what is left of my mind. Just as a great athlete who loses his legs can—with grit and determination and one other thing … gumption?—become a great athlete again by utilizing those hoppy leg-things, so can I regain my edge, get my groove back as Sheila did … Was it Sheila?
“Is it When Sheila Got Her Groove Back?” I ask Levy.
“How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” he says, eyes never off his toy.
“Oh.”
“Pretty good flick,” he says.
“I was asking about the book,” I say. “I don’t see those kinds of movies.”
“I don’t know what the book was called.”
“I think it was When Sheila Got Her Groove Back,” I say. “They often change things for the movie.”
“Oh,” he says.
“Three Days of the Condor was originally Six Days of the Condor,” I remind him. “So—”
“Uh-huh,” says Levy.
We drift back into our separate worlds, he to a small green Martian (?) attempting to navigate a series of crisscrossing Martian canals (?), while I watch the passing dusky landscape. The North Carolina highway is littered with shanties. Barefoot children watch our bus, jaws agape. Have they never seen a bus? Surely this is the bus route. Are their jaws slack from malnutrition? How have we as a country failed these mouth-breathing cherubs? I feel the sudden urge to scoop them all up in my arms. Maybe that is something I could do now that the life Ingo’s movie would have afforded me is gone. Maybe I could come down here and be a teacher. Even with whatever degree of brain damage I have likely suffered, I could still be helpful in a godforsaken place like this. What sort of handicap is recalling only half of the Iliad in the instruction of children who can’t even close their mouths? I imagine myself in a one-room schoolhouse, calling attendance, bandaging boo-boos, battling the school board to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. In short, making a world of difference. Maybe all that came before in my life has led to this moment. I suppose I would have to get some sort of teaching license. But how difficult could that be? Certainly elementary in a place like this. I chuckle at my unintended pum. Is it pum or pun? No matter. Pum, I decide.
“Can you read books and such, Mr. Rosenberg?”
“Yes.”
“Can you plus and take away, Mr. Rosenberg?”
“Certainly.”
“You got yerself a teachin’ license! An’ that comes with a fishin’ license, too! Yee-haw!”
“Thank you, my good man.”
Soon Levy is dozing, and I spend the remainder of the long trip home imagining my new and simpler life. I can even envision a biopic someday. It truly feels as if I’ve finally found my calling.
By the time we reach New York, I am over it. I’ve given it a great deal of thought and decide that I can’t let the bastards win. I can’t roll over and die. I can’t give up on my dreams. I will find another unknown masterpiece (there must be millions!), which I will protect properly this time. I will immediately digitize it. I will make copies. I will get a safe-deposit box (or is it safety-deposit box?). I will hire a lawyer and send a copy to him (her, thon). I have learned a valuable lesson.
I fight my way through the central casting crowd of prostitutes, dope fiends, and sad-sack commuters at Port Authority. Someone should do a movie about New York someday. I mean, a real one. Nobody has ever come close. I know how to do it and would in a heartbeat. I know this city. I know its terrible pain and its meager triumphs. I could do it. I should do it. I will do it. Even though my single foray into filmmaking was met with an almost violent indifference, which, to be honest, verged on a conspiracy to silence me. But I feel ready to once again assume the mantle. My wounds have been sufficiently licked, and not just by Levy. I have withheld my affection from the intelligentsia long enough. I have fought back through the Mount Olympian criticism. I see a large-canvassed piece encompassing all of Manhattan, from Marble Hill to Battery Park, and across generations, from the early Dutch settlers to the Chinese and Saudi billionaires of today to the future Czech mindlords. And they’re all living there together, centuries of people jammed into twenty-three miles. Actually, a new thought: This would include the native Lenape people who lived here as well. We’re all there, packed so tightly we can’t move. And within this skewed reality, we focus on a love affair. Between two women, who, by the luck of the draw, happen to be packed in next to each other. So in this sense, the movie is about fate, but also about the melting pot, but more to the point, the salad bowl, because one of these women is African American from the 1920s and the other is a Palestinian American from the present. This is the movie I would make. And there are ways to cut costs. Mostly it would be close in on these two women, and they could both be short (not necessarily little people, but possibly, which would give the whole enterprise an added dimension of caring and diversity), so the camera, which would be at their eye level, can’t see beyond them to the massive crowd. The beginning and end sequences, which would need to show the expanse of people, could be done with CGI, which stands for Computer Generated Something. My girlfriend will play the African American woman. She is not short, but, again, CGI would shrink her up quite nicely, using computers and such.
AS I MAKE my way to 10th, I play the Ingo film’s destruction over in my head. I think about what is gone. My life’s work. My thoughts. My three months. Ingo’s life. Is it retrievable?