The last cigarette I consciously had was 9 August 1995. The day Jerry Garcia died. Smoker. Heart attack.
The other last cigarette was Christmas 1995 (December). Dean Martin’s death. Lung cancer. Dean Martin, whose astounding, mold-breaking turn in Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Kiss Me, Stupid preceded Charlie Kaufman’s “novel” idea of having an actor lampoon himself by only thirty years.
I feel myself dozing to neuronal strains of “That’s Amore.”
I’M IN MY apartment but it’s a hospital but I live there but it’s piled with clothing. It’s dark. I’m writing something. A book? I write the word unvicissitudinously in a sentence. I stare at the word. I can’t remember the meaning. I attempt to dissect it into its Latinate components to figure it out. Unvic. Issit. Udinou. Sly. These are not words. Well, sly is. But the other words are not words. I am almost positive. A doctor enters with photos pasted on foam core. They are me in profile with different noses.
“These are your options,” he says.
I study the labeled photos. Pug. Button. Roman. Greek. African American. Japanese.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Do I need a new nose? Is the African American nose different from the African African nose?”
Suddenly, I realize—within the dream—that I have been calling the actors in my girlfriend’s movie African Americans, even though they are from other countries. I am mortified. Did she hear me say this? I am a horrible racist!
“Why do I need a new nose?” I say. “Won’t that make me a lie?”
“The surgery is scheduled,” he explains. “It will be a hardship for many people if you cancel. The staff has made time. The noses have been ordered. Think of others for once.”
He is right. I need to think of others. For once.
“Which nose do you favor?” I ask.
“For you? The Fabray.”
He rifles through the cards, pulls out the photo of me with a Nanette Fabray nose.
I like it. It’s small. It’s cute. I don’t think it fits my face, though.
He tells me that this could be the first of many procedures, that over time it would make sense as I was transformed.
“Um …”
“Your face is the face you present to the world,” he says. “Make sure it’s right.”
I nod, although with uncertainty. He puts a check mark on the Fabray nose profile and hands it off to a man in surgical scrubs and a mask.
I’m walking in the woods. My face is bandaged. Completely, except for my eyes. I wonder how I’m going to eat. Or breathe. My hand is in my pocket fiddling with my keys. I realize my key chain is my old nose. I recognize it by feel. That small mole on the wing of the nostril. I think, It’s nice of them to give me a souvenir. On the path, a dog runs toward me. I panic, tense my body. It’s a German shepherd. He is followed at some distance by a jogging woman. She sees my panic, says nothing to me, does not smile apologetically or even acknowledge me. In fact, she seems angry.
“B.,” she says. “Come.” The dog’s name is the same as mine. We share a highly unusual name. She runs past me without any acknowledgment. Her dog is off leash, which I’m sure must be illegal. She is in the wrong and I could call the authorities, if I were so inclined. I have the power. She is in the wrong.
“Thank you for that,” I say, bitingly, as she passes. As sarcastically as I can. She doesn’t even turn. Does she have earphones in? I think back to seeing her from the front. No. She does not have earphones in. She heard me and ignored me.
“How about a sorry? Fucking cunt,” I say, not loud enough for her to hear probably. But so angry. I feel invisible. I hope she didn’t hear me. She does not care about me. She thinks I’m unattractive, not worth the flirt or even common courtesy. I hate her. Then I hate myself for hating her. For caring. For being angry. Why couldn’t she be decent, though? Why are people so awful? I hate people. I hope she didn’t hear me. Why am I not attractive to her? At least she should have sympathy for me because of my bandaged face. People with bandaged faces get sympathy; that’s the societal rule. She was pretty, in that female runner sort of way, that taking care of business, women are tough kind of way. That running bra, tank top way. Maybe the long gray beard sticking out from beneath the bandages made her dislike me. Should I have made the first move to be friendly? I might have said, as an icebreaker, that her dog and I share the same highly unusual name. Why is she nice to her dog and not me? I could easily be her dog. Then she would love me. Then I could stick my nose into her crotch and she would just giggle and push me away. Or let me have a little sniff. All in good fun, if one is a dog. My new nose. The Nanette Fabray. I imagine her dog with a Fabray nose as I fixate on her sweating runner’s crotch. Women sweat from their crotches more than do men; I read that. Looking back at her running along the trail, I watch her ass. I am lonely. She would never love me. I continue my walk. A woodpecker lands on the trunk of a tree near me. I stop and we look at each other. I speak to him in that baby voice reserved for babies and animals.
“Hello, woodpecker. Hi there. Hi there. How are you today? Hello. Hello.”
He hops onto the far side of the tree. Nothing. Asshole.
EVELYN, WHOM I loved once upon a time, who is gone, with whom there was a chance of something human, if such a thing was ever possible in my existence—Evelyn, who is long gone, who, even now, I think perhaps today will call, but she doesn’t, she won’t, she can’t, she doesn’t want to, she’s no longer interested, she’s dead, she’s laughing right now with somebody else, she’s old and unattractive, she’s still amazingly youthful, she doesn’t think of me at all, she went back to school and now she’s a psychologist, a lawyer, the head of acquisitions for an art museum. There’s no way to know. She has no online presence. Maybe she is dead, goes by a different name, a married name. I could hire a private detective, but to what end? Haven’t I done enough damage? Shouldn’t there come a time when I shrivel into a less egregious presence in the world? Perhaps I should consider meditation. I’ve always found myself most aligned with the Eastern religious philosophies. And as one becomes less focused on the I, one would probably become more attractive. The wrinkles won’t go away, but they will become attractive wrinkles. George Clooney billion-dollar eye crinkles.
I PULL UP TO the St. Augustine Society for the Preservation of St. Augustine Film History (SASFPSAFH) building, which is a minor monstrosity, figuratively as well as literally, designed to resemble a mash-up of the requisite Spanish architecture and the head of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, perhaps the most famous of the St. Augustine–associated cinema; in actuality, it was almost entirely shot in nearby Palatka. The building has no windows other than the Creature’s eyes, which are on the third floor, so it’s dark in the lobby when I meet the Society’s curator, Euridice Snaptem, a roly-poly little woman with a disproportionately small head and fingers.
“So you’re a man,” is the first thing she says to me. “I’ve read your work, of course, but your gender has always been a mystery to me. Truth is, I figured you for a woman.”
“Well, I take that as a compliment,” I say, to say something, and because no one respects women more than I.
“I’m not sure I meant it that way, but …” she says and performs some vague and impatient “no matter” gesture with her hands. “Anyway, this way.”
And she leads me down the hall and some stairs.
“The vault is in the chin,” she says. “We say it’s in the chin because it’s in the chin of the Creature. You may have noticed that the building is in the form of the head of the Creature from the Black Lagoon; the movie was filmed in nearby Palatka. Anyway, your materials are already set up. Nothing can