Oh, Ingo. Dead and gone. Erased. I insinuated myself into your trust. I was your sole audience and with that came an immense responsibility to you, to the work. I cannot bring you back. I cannot bring back your life’s work. Yet I cannot live if I do not. I try to remember. My brain aches with the effort. I think back to that first day, the hardback chair, the initial frame, the first movement, the scratches on the film, the stains, the overexposure, the underexposure, the correct exposure. These accidental artifacts are no less essential elements of the film than those conscious choices made by the artist. The world gets to have its say in the piece. The world will not be denied.
And so perhaps, I consider, the world has had its say. The film erased, swept away like the sacred sand mandalas of Buddhist monks. It returns to its disorganized form of ash. Ashes to ashes. There is solace in this for me, for I have long considered Buddhism the philosophic system closest to my heart. There is a human desperation in the process of film, a human need to control, to own, to fight against the ephemerality of the world. Even the terminology of photography is fraught with humanity’s need to control, to tame. It is said that photographers “capture” a moment. One can no more capture a moment than one can stop the flow of time. This is not how the world works, and yet we convince ourselves through our ever-advancing technology that it does. But death always comes. There may be a monument to us in the form of an artwork or a tombstone, but it does not change that fact. We are in a constant state of adjustment. We adjust. We adjust. This happened, now what next? This is our question as humans and so it goes. With this balm applied to my psychic trauma, I proceed. I will remember. And my remembering will be my collaboration with Ingo. The collaboration of an African American man whose life spanned the twentieth century and a white intellectual whose life began mid-twentieth-century and will end probably sometime in the early twenty-second. There will certainly be an outcry. Cultural appropriation, they will claim. The white man once again profits from the accomplishments of the black man. To those people I have two things to say: 1) Is not Ingo’s film an appropriation? For does it not utilize a technology invented by white men? And from what I remember about Ingo’s story, it takes place entirely in the world of white people, specifically in the world of white movie comedy. Do whites own the “gags” employed by Ingo in his work? Perhaps. But I do not begrudge him this. I am flattered by his usage of our work. And, 2) There exists no one else for this job. I am, for better or worse, his sole executor. I realize this word sounds dangerously close to executioner. This is a quirk of the English language and there is nothing to be done about it. 3) Maybe Ingo was a white Swede.
My task laid out before me, I find a bench in Port Authority (why am I back here?) and sit, a legal pad in front of me—I only write longhand. On legal pads. Call me a dinosaur, but I do not put stock in word processing machines. Writing must be a visceral experience for me. There must be smudges. There must be crossed-out passages; the violence of the slash reminds me of my passion in the moment of self-rebuke. Was I tired or sad when I wrote this or that? The slant of my handwriting tells me so. The forensics available to an analyst of handwriting are limitless. I begin.
A man roller-skates. No, a man walks in a windstorm. He travels from screen left to screen right. Some objects blow by. He loses his hat. Maybe there is a child. Maybe there is a blob falling from the sky …
It is not working. Four hours of struggle have yielded meager results. I cannot remember. My limited human wiring, designed primarily for fight or flight, for remembering which berries are edible, for vanquishing my enemies, will not allow it.
Wait. The film was lost in a tsunami, I suddenly recall. I jumped in after it, even though I don’t like to swim, and was batted about like actist Naomi Watts, until the Coast Guard rescued me and took me to Morton Downey Drowning Hospital in Doctor Phillips, Florida, where Dr. Flip Phipps induced a coma and reconstructed my nose, both of which for reasons that remain unclear. What about the fire? Wasn’t there a fire? Yes, there was a fire. How can both versions of the film’s destruction be true? I don’t know, but there I am, driving north from Doctor Phillips, the roads empty. Whole towns have been evacuated because Hurricane Button (named after signer of the Declaration of Independence Button Gwinnett?) is expected to make landfall soon. So I am speeding to try to keep ahead of it. According to Saffir-Simpson, Button is currently a tropical storm, which puts it at seventy-three miles an hour tops. I go seventy-four to keep in front of it. My radio is tuned to weather. If the storm gets upgraded, I will go faster. I should have left yesterday, but I was in a funk and could not leave the hospital.
Today is different. Today I have a fire under me. I need to be back in New York. All hope for my Ingo project dashed, I need to reimmerse myself in the life of New York City. There are movies to see, art openings to attend, inexpensive ethnic restaurants to discover. But most important, my African American girlfriend is now back. Our contact has been scant for a few months now, both of us focused on our work. The perils of the long-distance relationship! But if I drive straight through, I can be home by ten. The thought of her welcoming arms, and dare I say, vagina, keeps me focused. That and Button, which the radio tells me is now expected to make landfall south of Myrtle Beach. The tolls are slowing me down. In my rearview mirror, the sky looks bad. I play a game to pass the time, attempt to name the states in order along the coast between Florida and New York. Georgia comes next, then South Carolina, North Carolina, then South Virginia, West Virginia, North Virginia … Napierville. Delaware. Vagina. Mary. Pencil. New Jersey. New York. The game doesn’t take long enough. I’m still in Florida. I entertain myself with imaginings of my reunion with my girlfriend, the commingling of our bodies, her rich brown skin, an almost chocolate brown against my pinkish white hue, an almost Turkish delight, both glistening with perspiration. I am quite carnal by nature, which is not at all at odds with my intellectual tendencies. Popular culture would have you believe that the “nerds” and the “geeks” and the “dweebs” and the “dorks” and the “pencil necks” are hopeless when it comes to matters of the heart and body, but just as a more educated palate can better appreciate the subtle distinctions between various varietal wines, a person educated in the arts of seduction and sex can and will prove to be a superior lover. For example, since I can instruct my lover in the art of pompoir and kabazzah, I stand a better chance than one’s typical dime-store lothario of engaging in a mutually satisfying and often explosive sexual encounter. These techniques have the extra added benefit for the female of putting the male in an entirely passive position, thus giving the power to her. Of course, empowering the female is often sexually liberating for them, but also I love to be controlled by a strong woman. If that strong woman happens to be African American, well, I am in heaven.
So I imagine my girlfriend on top of me, my yoni, I mean my lingam, completely in her hands, metaphorically, because in kabazzah, my lingam is completely in her yoni, and she contracts her vaginal walls and pulls in her abdomen in slow, powerful undulations. She is a belly dancer astride my member. This imagery alone is enough to cause an erection, and I must shift my focus or I am in danger of ejaculating during a hurricane, which the National Weather Service strongly advises against.
Finally safely in New Jersey, car parked at my lot in Harrison, I PATH it home. New York smells the same and most intensely the same at Port Authority. I fight my way through the central casting crowd of prostitutes, dope fiends, and sad-sack commuters. Someone should do a movie about New York someday. I mean, a real one. Nobody has ever come close. I sit down with my legal pad and attempt to write it here and now. I cannot.
I ARRIVE AT MY building, where my African American girlfriend is waiting for me on the stoop.
How