by Hadley Hury
“Or spirit, or whatever the case may be. I believed I was doing the right thing, but now I think I lived too long in my marriage after it had already died. I became too adept at compartmentalizing my thoughts and feelings.”
“I know.” He paused and smiled at her. “But I don’t think we should beat ourselves up about it too much. Sometimes we have to do that to survive.”
“I would think you’ve had to.”
“Oh, yes.”
“But you’re going to survive.”
“So it would seem. I mean yes.”
They sat and sipped their wine and listened for awhile to the faint, comforting sounds of Stephane Grapelli’s jazz violin.
“Does this make you angry?” she asked. “I mean—beyond Charlie—does this make you angry somehow about your own life?”
“How would you know that?”
“Because I am. I find that I’m suddenly very angry not only about Charlie but about being distracted by this nightmare from my own life. It reminds me too much of the old days. And feeling angry makes me feel selfish.”
“About what?”
“About not letting my life fragment again. About being afraid that life is something that’s going on somewhere else, over there, not…”
“Not here?”
“Yes.”
She paused and smiled wearily at him. “Sorry. It’s the exhaustion talking. I think we’re just so saturated right now with a lack of trust that I’m afraid even to trust myself.”
“I think you should trust yourself. You like truth even when it’s not easy. If what you mean is that you feel you don’t have time for sorrow and for death, then, yes, you’re absolutely right. I’m angry, too. I don’t want to be forced to realize, to consider on a recurring basis, that I’m fragile, vulnerable, hanging by a thread. I want to be able to believe that I’m not really a dead man trying to fool himself and other people.”
He paused. “Yeah, I’m angry, too. I want to do my work and enjoy my friends. And if part of what you meant is that we seem to have begun a new friendship and now all this has gotten in the way…”
They both leaned forward and reached out their hands to one another. It felt awkward to him at first, but because they had all been holding Charlie’s hands so much among themselves these past few days, not as awkward as it might have.
“We’ll just have to keep a place…clear.”
After a minute or so, they let go, and settled back in their respective chairs.
But the air felt somewhat lighter.
***
They could hardly hold their eyes open but, like children on a parents’ night out, were determined to savor for as long as they could their sense of space, their impromptu moment of independence. The small oasis of music and wine and affection they had created.
Hudson had worked away at a crossword puzzle and Camilla had leafed through a Gourmet at a leisurely pace. When she put it aside, she asked, “Would you mind letting me read one of your reviews?”
“No. Not if you’d like.”
“I would like.”
He went to the desk and flipped through some hard copies, his brow furrowed, trying to decide what to offer.
She could see what he was doing. “You mean they aren’t all perfect?”
He laughed. “Of course they are, but some are more perfect than others.”
“And this is an example of your releasing yourself from rigidity, of relaxing fully into the here and now?”
“Oh, all right. Here. Just take one.” He went over to her with a review in each hand.
She closed her eyes. “Caution to the winds,” she said, and pointed to one.
She looked more relaxed than he seen her in a week. Hudson looked down, and a shadow of hesitancy crossed his face.
“In a way, you’ve already heard some of this one earlier today….”
Us vs. Them American History X tries to reveal the enemy within
Tony Kaye’s feature film debut earns a large A for Effort. American History X seeks to give a human face to a momentous issue, the renascence of white supremacist hatred, by approaching its subject not on an abstract socio-political level, but as psychological drama. Like the startling black swastika tattooed on his chest, the character of young Derek Vinyard (played beautifully by Edward Norton) is an emblematic embodiment of the causes and effects of neo-Nazism. The film follows the arc of his attraction to the movement and the consequences for his family, particularly his younger brother Danny (Edward Furlong).
American History X is Kaye’s and screenwriter David McKenna’s attempt, a much-needed and honorable one, to bring large audiences face to face with what they may perceive on a daily basis as marginal, unconnected news stories. In the end, American History X is somewhat oversimplified and superficial, but not to the degree that it should be avoided; it is thoughtful, provocative, and moving, and Norton’s performance is further indication of a considerable screen talent in the making.
Kaye, most famously a director of commercials, is also cinematographer, and the film’s opening sequence is one of the most evocative of the year thus far, a gray, monochromatic vista of ragged clouds and surf along a deserted beach. The tone of the film is immediately, almost viscerally established; the seductive, haunting beauty is pervaded with a sinister foreboding (and the troubled strings of Anne Dudley’s score). At the end of the sequence, Kaye’s deep-focus longshots zoom in toward a few structures perched uneasily under the lowering sky at the far end of the shore, and the sense that we may have just looked from the window of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” where “ignorant armies clash by night,” suddenly gives way, and we find ourselves in southern California. It is a southern California not of the sun and oranges, of surfboards and movie star enclaves like Malibu, but of Venice Beach, an ethnically mixed community of Los Angeles; other than the boardwalk, it could be an urban neighborhood of almost any American city. An adolescent boy, in voiceover, observes: “It used to be really cool, a great place to live. Then the Hispanics and the black gangs started moving in from South Central, and everything went to hell…”
Kaye employs an interesting narrative frame for the story. Danny’s principal (Avery Brooks), alarmed by Danny’s evolving ideology, has forced him to write a paper tracing the impacts of his older brother Derek’s attitudes and activities on his life. With the use of flashbacks that eventually come abreast of the story’s present tense, Danny relates the salient points of the family history, its decline from the middle-middle to lower-middle class, of Derek’s adoption of skinhead values and his emergent leadership, and of the night when Derek kills two black men outside the Vinyard home. Derek goes to prison for three years. Danny becomes fully involved in the skinhead scene. As he begins his paper, his brother is released. Danny is deeply conflicted when Derek tells him that he is leaving “all that hate bullshit” behind, that he disavows his previous beliefs, and that he wants Danny out, too. The cautionary denouement of American History X is tragic and chilling.
Edward Norton is one of our more intriguing new film actors. As he showed in the 1996 thriller Primal Fear, he is as adroit at purveying eccentricity and extremity as he is the ordinariness of the guy-next-door. His relation to the camera is of the rare sort that can make a good actor a star. He can project the modest, gee-whiz, Everyman quality of a Jimmy Stewart or a Tom Hanks, and in the next moment, his face can take on the veiled, troubled intensity of Montgomery Clift, or the galvanizing intensity of the young Peter O’Toole. Though thwarted by the character’s underscripted transformation, his work here is memorable. Furlong is effective, too, evoking the adolescent Danny’s drifting, yearning search for something in which to believe; and Beverly D’Angelo has a few very powerful scenes as their mother.
The film’s reach far exceeds its grasp. The very best aspects of this psychological investigation of right-wing domestic terrorism happen also to be its very worst aspects. Expectations are raised with heady frequency only to languish unfulfilled. This fil
m wants essentially to examine the banality of evil and the effects of paranoia, but certain elements of the story are jarringly contrived, and we are never taken below the surface of the breeding grounds of hatred. As a character study of Derek as an individual, American History X doesn’t go deep enough, nor is it quite emblematic enough as an investigation of how Dereks—intelligently articulate, sensitive, murderous—are formed. (His father, a fireman, was killed in the line of duty in a drug-ridden tenement in a black neighborhood. Not all of the folks turning to anti-government militias, skinhead rallies, and Internet-nurtured hate groups are propelled there by such highly specific events.) The film’s glancing treatment is maddeningly equal opportunity: NRAers can leave the theatre thinking it was about the evils of “big government” and liberal civil libertarians will feel assured it was about the dangerous organizational and psychological links between ultra-rightist religious demagogues, politicians, media, militias, and domestic terrorists. The only message the film purports to get across is that we should get over being so chronically quick to content ourselves with the idea of the single shooter, the lone ranger, the “mad” man—which message it then spends two hours neutralizing with its own ironic demographics appeasement policy.
Of course, the rumors of “vast right-wing conspiracies” are, as any sentient and objectively informed citizen knows, truer now than ever, but for all its good intentions of shedding light, American History X, like Mark Pellington’s recent suspense effort, Arlington Road, starring Jeff Bridges, and so many others before it, simply proves instead that there’s another conspiracy also in need of exposure: that of Hollywood producers who keep insisting that Americans are incapable of watching a movie and thinking at the same time.
Films remain to be made that force us finally to confront the frighteningly demoralizing complexities of race in America and the fact that much of the Us vs. Them fear and hatred in our society—whether racial, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-intellectual—is engendered, or at least abetted for political purposes, not by the more obvious fringe dwellers, but by those in church pulpits and legislatures, and, more recently and perhaps most frighteningly, even by major news networks, who wrap themselves loud and long in the most insidious forms of demagogic religion and patriotism.
It was after midnight before Hudson made Camilla at home in his bedroom and went off to sleep in the loft.
Chapter 40
By early afternoon the job was nearly completed.
Hudson had met with Tim Faraday in his office at six to go over things again, and half an hour later they had met the carpenter, electrician, and technical consultant outside Charlie’s room. The security guys across the hall were sent home.
Camilla, still whispering to an extremely wide-eyed Fentry, sat with Charlie while Hudson, Faraday, and the workmen went into the empty bay just west of Charlie’s room.
It had been a multipurpose space for years, most recently a temporary coffee and food service room while the new wing was being built. It was soon to be reincarnated as a medical records storage office, but for now it was merely an empty room with an adjoining bath, half-fitted with terminals and crates and coiled wire.
After Faraday’s appearance with the crew that morning, none of the staff thought much about the sounds of minor construction that came from the room throughout the day or the men who came in and out of it and, occasionally, quietly, Charlie’s.
The physician in charge came in and was pleased. The heart rate had steadied and the neurology reports from the tests the day before were encouraging.
Victor traded places with Fentry at eight, and Hudson sat with Charlie while Camilla went through the story again down in the coffee shop. When they came back up, Victor still looked flustered, and Hudson could tell from the way Camilla frequently touched his arm and the soothing tone of her voice that the big man didn’t want to leave and go to work. As he held Charlie’s hand in his and looked at the two of them, Hudson could sense his free-floating bewilderment giving way to something tightly focused and coiled, as if, given a signal from Camilla, he would throw Charlie’s own team of doctors to the ground one by one. Finally, Camilla walked him down the hall as far as the elevators, reassuring him that they would be in touch. Soon.
Whether anything happened or not.
As the day wore on, Hudson and Camilla looked and listened as the work went on. They watched the clock. They took turns by the head of Charlie’s bed, reading to him. When the men had to use their drills, Camilla put the headset over his ears and played favorite music.
He was coming to, though only for a minute or two at a time, with some regularity now. He clearly recognized them both. And though they debated whether it was wishful thinking or not, they thought they discerned just a faraway hint of the old glitter in his eye. Even when he lapsed away from them again, it seemed less an utter absence and more like sleep.
At two, Rogers and Fields arrived. At two-thirty, the men thought they had it finished. Hudson called Tim Faraday and he came up immediately.
They went next door. They came back into Charlie’s room. They tested. Re-tested. Made adjustments and readjustments.
At three-thirty it was as right as they could make it. Faraday left for a meeting. Rogers and Fields disappeared.
Libby called at four-thirty. She had gotten some decent sleep despite a constant nagging that she was out of the loop.
When they had told her first about Charlie and then the preparations, Hudson said, “You know you’re right here with us.”
“Call me.”
“We will.”
They waited.
***
At five-fifty, when Chaz and Sydney walked in, Charlie’s eyes were open again and he was steadily returning Hudson’s pressure on his hand. Chaz put down some papers and magazines and a small bag on the sofa. Sydney came straight to the bed.
Camilla and Hudson moved slightly, and when Charlie’s eyes swam weakly over to Sydney they saw something like the faint light of pleased recognition again, which seemed to delight Sydney. She reached out her hand excitedly. “Chaz!” She leaned down and kissed Charlie’s forehead. “You’re doing so well, Charlie. We’re right here.”
Chaz went around to the other side of the bed. He seemed to Hudson out of breath and a bit edgy, nearly snagging the catheter meter with his foot and then catching his watchband momentarily on the IV as he took Charlie’s other hand.
“Hey, guy. You’re looking really good.”
Charlie dozed off again and for a moment, they stood there, looking at one another, one of Charlie’s hands in Hudson’s, the other in Chaz’s.
“There’s more good news,” said Camilla, smiling evenly. “The cardiovascular surgeon was just in and said that the slight tear in the esophagus should be mended and that he wants to dissolve the shunt tomorrow morning. Charlie will be able to start taking liquids by mouth and in a day or so soft food.”
“He wanted to talk today, we’re sure.” Hudson smiled as well.
Sydney looked over Charlie’s bandaged chest at Chaz. Her widened eyes began to fill with tears, but she lifted her chin just perceptibly and smiled at him.
While Hudson and Camilla gathered up a few things, Sydney asked a number of questions. All intelligent, all earnest. Was it important now to keep talking and reading to him? To play music? What if he tried to speak? Did he need just to sleep?
Hudson thought the solicitude as genuine and normal as anyone might expect in the circumstances and as he and Camilla went down on the elevator he wondered aloud for a moment if they weren’t perhaps desperately wrong after all.
“I don’t think so,” said Camilla as they walked down the long front hall. At the doors, she stopped and turned to him, her hand gripping his upper arm for a moment. “And if we are? If we had to live this over again, knowing what we know and what we don’t know, are you saying you wouldn’t try it again?”
“No.”
***
St. Andrews is a moderate-sized hospital. Its one l
arge parking lot wraps around the front and down one side of the building, both flanks of which were visible from Charlie’s room.
As Hudson first walked Camilla to her car and then went several aisles over to the Highlander, he imagined he could feel their eyes on his back. They would be able to see him leave through the gate and drive down the street as far as the access road that would take him west to Highway 98, back to Laurel.
They wouldn’t be able to see him when he circled two long blocks over and returned to the hospital from the south, entered the small underground lot for physicians and senior staff, and parked in a taped-off slot beside the administrator’s.
Chapter 41
Sydney was worried more about Chaz than any other variable. He was like a sick cat, alternating between anxious testiness and a distanced morose sulk.
The latter had seemed preferable for awhile.
Their first five hours in the room had become almost unbearable. It was as though some time-warp synapse had fired and he had been transported back to the throes of some very bad coke rush. Manic, he stalked the small room one side to the other, over and over and over again. She sent him out to walk the halls when she couldn’t stand it anymore, telling him to slow down as much as he possibly could and to try to look encouraged, relatively happy. She knew that fatigue from anxiety was expected, a helpful cover, but she didn’t want him drawing attention by running up and down the halls half-crazed.
Neither of them looked often at Charlie, and they went to the bed even less.
Chaz got juice and coffee and water and saltine crackers and anything else he could find down the hall in the small service room. He went down to the cafeteria twice and came back. He rattled three papers and read two magazines cover to cover. He stood. He reclined tentatively on the sofa with a pillow behind his head. He sat on the sofa, he sat in the chair. He held the remote control as if it were some hold on a fleeting reality, channel-surfing wildly, repeatedly, watching perhaps one entire sitcom and probably three hours of fragmented snippets as brief as seconds and no longer than a few minutes.
