Shadow Is a Colour as Light Is

by Michael Langan

  Cut to Marius raising an eyebrow, and laughing at him.

  For his screen test Marius had slicked his hair back and grown a straggly beard. He still looked sexy as hell, which was kind of wrong but an important aspect of any movie protagonist, J-P conceded. And he’d tried way too hard at being ‘period’ — affecting a weird, clipped mid-Atlantic accent to indicate the past, or Europe, or culture, or all of those at once — before, to everyone’s great relief, Su Lin interrupted and instructed him to speak in his own voice.

  As Marius continued with his speech, taken from a scene in which he and Émile were arguing about why Paul felt he had to leave Paris and return to Aix-en-Provençe, it became clear that what Marius had understood, with an instinctual brilliance, was that to astonish others you must, yourself, be astonished by yourself.

  He’d tapped directly into this young man’s desires, a sense of amazement at his own potential, mixed with an actual fear of it, and he became it, transformed into a Paul Cézanne who quivered with frustration at the possibility that he, and he alone, understood the world, that he was a prophet to whom no one listened, who would be mocked and miserable forever, scared for himself while at the same time knowing this is the only way he can exist, astonished at the fact of being alive during this moment, the overwhelming present, when things are changing beyond measure, and not only is he a part of it — he is it.

  At the end of the test, after Marius-as-Paul had stormed out of the room, exasperated by his dearest friend’s expressions of love for Paris and the people in it, a love that appeared to be stronger than that for his friend, J-P, Betsy and Su Lin all sat in silence, until Su Lin eventually said, “Did we really just see that?”

  During their subsequent discussion Su Lin expressed her deep reservations, said that surely Marius was simply not the right actor for this movie, and that she struggled to imagine him pulling the whole thing off, or she worried that their ‘natural audience’ — that was her phrase — would be put off at the very idea of him playing Cézanne, though the room was still crackling with the electricity of what they’d witnessed, she said.

  J-P hung back a bit until, finally, he whispered, “But he just was Paul, wasn’t he?” and that was the clincher. He’d already shown himself as someone willing to listen to others’ ideas by agreeing to the test in the first place, that he was open to compromise and not simply some pole-up-his-ass auteur but a passionate filmmaker with real commercial sense and, as Su Lin told him later, over celebratory drinks, “We really respect you for that.”

  What she and Betsy couldn’t know was that J-P had been even more blown away than they were, because he knew that, like Paul Cézanne, Marius struggled with a level of anxiety that could easily prevent him becoming the artist he truly wanted to be.

  Like Paul’s craving the approval of the Paris Salon, while affecting to reject it, Marius wanted the praise from critics and the blessings of his parents, while doubting his desire and capacity to play the roles that would garner him this, and fearing rejection or ridicule from the world.

  Despite these issues, perhaps because of them, the moment any camera was pointed at him — even just a fan’s phone — Marius transformed into a beautiful, luminous being, emitting an invisible beam of glorious, substance-altering, universal energy.

  Tapping into these rich, unresolved contradictions, J-P knew, could elicit from his star a really great portrayal of an artist as a troubled young man, and selfishly, cravenly, he was determined to harness and exploit all of that despair. It would be, truly, astonishing.

  Jeffrey, Hong Kong — 2013

  Jeffrey clicks on the folder of found images from Leslie’s funeral. He’s gathered many over the years, from different online sources. In all of them, Hong Kong is washed out and gloomy, the sky grey and low, as it was on that day. Rows and rows of masked schoolgirls line the streets in their standard uniforms of navy blue tunic, white blouse with a red bow tied at the neck, white socks pulled up just below the knee, black patent leather shoes and little white gloves. In the preceding days many of them had come together, on the streets and in group chats, or in various online forums, to share their personal stories, as well as special, individual, love for Gor Gor, chorusing his songs, exchanging soft toys, keepsakes, memories, all for their idol’s sake.

  Jeffrey had spoken to no one, had wanted only to watch and listen, to store it all up.

  Much to his relief, Walter was away on a business trip during the whole period. It meant not having to account for his movements, his moods, his visible emotions.

  Could he have told his father that Leslie’s suicide had taken away Jeffrey’s only hope of true happiness in life? That in his dying flight, Gor Gor had become all things to Jeffrey, including the future he would never have? No, he couldn’t say this.

  What would a man like Walter — such a rough, vulgar, unfeeling man — say about what was going on inside his son? And what could Jeffrey himself say about it? He was beginning to think he might be better off alone.

  The day before the funeral, the roads surrounding the Mandarin Oriental had been closed off. Heavy rain, combined with the sultry heat, meant the sidewalk’s flowers were starting to spoil. As soon as he’d exited the subway, Jeffrey smelled the cloying, damp stench of them filling the air with a sweet miasma. But when the authorities had tried to clear them away there was nearly a riot, so febrile was the crowd, and the police retreated.

  That evening, those waiting were allowed into the Hong Kong Funeral Home to pay their respects. Jeffrey had waited in line for he couldn’t remember how many hours, while Gor Gor’s music was piped through loudspeakers. This only worked to make the crowd more hysterical and Jeffrey felt, in turn, even more distant from them.

  Once inside, the funeral parlour looked so beautiful that Jeffrey and everyone around him gasped as they entered, sucking in the protective anti-SARS masks they all still wore. The walls were decorated in white pleated silk and there were banks of wreaths and garlands, three, four deep, along all sides. The gleaming bronze coffin was covered with flowers and, above it, a widescreen TV showed pop videos, interviews, and a montage of Leslie’s best movie-scene clips on a loop. There was Gor Gor, singing, smiling, blowing kisses to all of them. They had come to pay their respects, but it was impossible to believe he was gone.

  Jeffrey scrolls through the photographs until he finds the one he wants. In this image, the coffin, crowned with a gigantic spray of white lilies, is being lifted onto the shoulders of six broad pallbearers in white tuxedos, still discernibly handsome behind their green hospital masks.

  Caught up in the throng, he’d heard the reaction to the funeral cortege before he saw it; the clapping and sobbing and wailing, people crying, shouting, “We love you Gor Gor!”, “We miss you!”, “Gor Gor why did you leave us?” And he’d been shocked when, instead of the large, black, shiny hearse he was expecting, a transit van, clad in white flowers like a parade float, and with a photo of Leslie facing out through the windshield, crawled around the corner and came to a halt.

  As the van’s rear doors opened Jeffrey was still convinced that out would jump the radiant, un-smashed Leslie they all knew and loved, waving and smiling at everyone. Instead, the heavy coffin — monumental for someone so small — was rolled out. As it appeared, a tangle of arms obscured Jeffrey’s view, all raised, not in salute, but holding cameras and cell phones to record the moment.

  Then, a row of black limousines had pulled up and Tong Tong, Gor Gor’s ‘most beloved’, emerged from the first one. In their first public statement after the suicide, Gor Gor’s stricken family had even been bold enough to describe Tong Tong as ‘Leslie’s surviving spouse’.

  As Tong Tong made his way across the street, he was shored up by Leslie’s sister on one side, and his personal assistant on the other. He looked so elegant, so brave. All three wore dark, sleek suits, their mouths covered by black silk scarves, transformed into a living tableau of grief.

  In the years since, Jeffrey has come to
realise that the funeral of the Gor Gor he’d never met, his elder brother, had been a substitute for that of his mother and of Walter Junior. His numbing grief, his silent wanderings, his search for connection with Leslie’s other devotees, were all because he hadn’t been able to attend his own mother’s funeral, nor grieve for his unremembered real brother.

  His distressing lack of recognisable feeling, his sense of distance from the crowds and what was happening around him, was the same response to growing up without a mother and brother he didn’t even remember, but whose absence hung over him and his father as a weighted presence. Soon, he’ll be the only one left and, though Leslie’s music comforts him, the fact is there’ll be no Gor Gor to help him through.

  He zooms into the image and pans across the crowd to find what he’s looking for. There, just to one side of the procession and craning to get a better look, eyes only just visible above his surgical mask, is the fifteen-year-old Jeffrey Yeung. It is the last photo ever taken of him, and it makes his heart ache.

  In the Buddhist tradition, a dead person’s soul remains in limbo until the 49th day, when it finally comes to rest, freed from the world and totally at peace. Jeffrey had consoled himself with the idea of Gor Gor’s spirit still being out in the world somewhere, as if it meant the chance of him returning. Leslie’s soul at peace meant he couldn’t come back, though Jeffrey wouldn’t want him to remain in a state of unhappiness, the same state that led him to leap from that hotel window. It would be good for him to be at peace.

  On Leslie’s 49th day, May 18th, 2003, he went early to Leslie’s home to leave there a card he’d laboured over all that time, one with flowers expertly reproduced.

  A few other girls and boys were already there, huddled together and crying quietly. Some laid plates of Gor Gor’s favourite food and sweets out on the sidewalk, while others spoke softly, intimately, to pictures of him.

  Jeffrey did the same, whispering into the film still from Happy Together he’d brought with him, of Leslie in bed with Tony Leung: “It’s time for you to go, dear one.” The way he tells the story to himself now, it was at this very moment of saying that line that his decision was made.

  He’d seen a news report on the phenomenon of Hikikomori and it had made a deep impression upon him. Though described as being predominantly a Japanese concern, in China, South Korea, and other countries too, teenagers and young men were withdrawing into their rooms and refusing to come out.

  Many of the Hikikomori expressed how they couldn’t stand the unbearable social pressures to conform and that the only act of rebellion open to them was to lock themselves away, escaping into their worlds of computer games and virtual reality, chatrooms and Internet forums, where they felt more free, more able to be themselves. They did so safely in the knowledge that the potential embarrassment to their families protected them because their parents would rather go along with their wishes than become the subjects of idle gossip and terrible scandal.

  The notion of shutting himself away had not occurred to Jeffrey at the time of watching the report, though he now thinks that he’d simply repressed this desire, like he repressed all his desires.

  After the final coming to rest of Leslie’s soul, he knew it was the right thing for him to do; a way of leaving the world behind that was not as extreme as Gor Gor’s tragic act.

  And so that day became Jeffrey’s own 49th day; the last day he went outside.

  Marius, Liverpool — 2008

  He tries once more to focus, to focus in on his breathing, only. Always a challenge, his mind wandering all over the place, and one he sometimes meets, but not today. Maybe never again.

  In his middle-of-the-night, spiralling out of control, crazy episode, he’d decided to call a surprise press conference first thing this morning, before the day’s shooting had begun. In this half-imagined, half-dreamed scenario, he would tell the assembled media that he was gay and J-P would be so totally pissed at him he’d end their relationship, which would mean not having to do it himself. But, come the actual morning, of course he’d lost his nerve.

  That local news crew are still outside though. He could stroll right on over to the edge of the set, easy as anything, and give that reporter a live, straight-to-camera, world exclusive. No, he won’t. He won’t fuck up the project, but contain and channel the hurt, his anger, into the scene he’s about to play, into the agitated despair that powers Paul Cézanne as he storms past the Salon from which he’s barred.

  Taking a deep breath in, he lets the air out as a controlled ribbon coloured sky-blue and wrapping itself around him. But it soon dissolves and he knows there’s really no point in trying today. He’ll let his mind go where it will.

  So he replays last night’s scene in which he flips open J-P’s laptop to remind himself of the painting, of The Murder, because that was what’s swirling around in Cézanne’s mind at this time, and spotting, on the desktop, a folder called ‘Marius’. He probably shouldn’t have clicked on it but, well, he did.

  The stuff people say about how he looks — he gets it, he honestly gets it, but seeing the thumbnail images there, hundreds of them, on J-P’s own screen, had reanimated some of the worst experiences he’d faced as a boy; the mocking whistles, the catcalls on the street — Olá gatinha! — interspersed with suggestive or obscene gestures, and even, occasionally, mauling and manhandling.

  Small and pretty as he was, guys would genuinely mistake him for a girl, no matter how he dressed. One time — he was maybe twelve and still learning the best response was to do nothing, say nothing — a guy who realised the mistake he’d made, and in front of all his buddies too, flipped out and grabbed at him, pulling him to the ground. ‘You smile at me like that, bagulho? I’ll cut your tiny balls off.’

  He started working out at sixteen, after his growth spurt had finally happened, making him so skinny the other guys at the gym howled when he started off by lifting the bar only. It wasn’t long before he could add some weights, and he took up the kickboxing too, on a fast track to turning semi-pro. If ever anyone threatened to cut off his balls again, he’d have to be ready to face them down.

  And though he worked hard to build himself up over the subsequent years, to reinforce and steel himself, structural weaknesses remain. Paradoxically, he’s turned himself into someone looked at by countless millions, the body he created and face he was lucky enough to be born with, inescapably public, but he’s begun to hate straight-acting more than the fear that formed him.

  J-P’s predilection for the different aromas and various flavours of his body reminds him of the sexiness that permeated the gym, the boxing ring — the sight and smell of men, the grunting feel of them, could be overwhelming — and he happily played along. What confuses him about all those photos is that this is what’s absent from them.

  If people knew how he thinks about himself they’d hardly credit it. He’d run away from his femme self by taking that part of him into the most macho arena imaginable, but he has never dealt with the fucked-up-self-hating-scared-gay-boy terror he buried somewhere back home, but which still calls out to him like a ghost in the night.

  It was Leslie Cheung who told him once, “Marius, we all grow up in fear, but once you let go of that, well, it can transform your life. Do you know what’s most tragic? The thing you’re most afraid of, is you.” He misses poor Leslie; so adored, so wise with others, and so unhappy, hurling his body into the night sky like that.

  Only three months ago, he and J-P had gone to the Metropolitan Museum together. He knew those paintings meant so much to J-P and, following him up the grand staircase, treading the galleries in nervous silence, he’d thought, What if I don’t like them? What if I don’t feel anything?

  They’d entered the Cézanne room and he’d actually exhaled an Oh! in front of the still life with apples and primroses and was immediately wrapped up in the painting’s blue-green brightness, had been moved, genuinely, by the crimson and green apples and the orange ones that could almost be oranges, beside t
he pale pink flowers.

  Motivated by that green-blue background, the apples, and those primroses especially, whose leaf stalks stretched out like wide-open arms, waiting to embrace them both, he’d gone to J-P, who was sitting on the bench in the middle of the room, whispered the single word, “Astonishing,” into his ear and put a hand on his knee, but only briefly because some asshole had already snapped a picture.

  What does this all mean, now, for them? What’s happened has made any future impossible, whatever way you look at it. He could speak. He could ask J-P, Which of those portraits is the real me? Tell me who you think I am?

  They could have a conversation about how fucked up the whole situation is, help each other out. But he doesn’t know how to play that scene, what lines to speak, and neither could he improvise it. Say nothing, do nothing, he repeated, in time to his breathing.

  When he’d bounded into J-P’s trailer just now, and into his arms, he wasn’t acting but it took only a few seconds to remember what he’d gone through in his mind last night — What’s the best way to play this? — until J-P had returned from his dinner with Maria and he’d pretended to be asleep. Do nothing, say nothing.

  He suddenly pictures himself picking up J-P’s laptop and bringing it down on the table where it sits in front of him right now, smashing it and everything around them into fragments of glass. This vision has the same energy as when he’d played Paul taking up his palette knife, piling it with paint, attacking his canvas; smearing, pressing, stabbing the surface, to creating the new, horrifying surface of The Murder.

  So much frustration and rage in him, and in Paul. He’ll use it. But he wants merely to be an apple, nestled in the folds of a crumpled cloth, given shelter and protection by the outstretched leaves of a pot of primroses.