by Alina Simone
In response she heard a distant laugh, then Taj’s voice.
“Look forward,” he called out, “into the future!”
13
Step one to getting her shit together, Anna decided, was to take Brie’s advice and order those prescription diet pills online. Brie had mentioned the site back when she first moved in. How else did she manage to get Ambien without paying a shrink two hundred bucks per session? Besides, the whole thing was a racket, Brie said. Anyone who got to the point of making an appointment with a shrink had already done the necessary Google searching and knew what they needed. Brie believed in cutting out the middleman.
It’s not that Anna had hang-ups about being full-figured, per se, but being on camera last night, even for a moment, even just for the sake of “blocking the scene,” had opened up new pastures of insecurity. And being around Lauren all day, whose clothes sloughed so elegantly from her coat-hanger frame, didn’t help. They didn’t even make clothes like that in Anna’s size. The experience had planted notions in Anna’s head, a new hope for thinness. Why shouldn’t that be part of her transformation, shedding the physical as well as the metaphorical weight?
Anna had the site bookmarked. But when she clicked over to CanadianPharmaPharm.com it rerouted her to another site, dominated by a glossy, half-naked woman, that called itself Masculus. At first glance, the site seemed to offer only Viagra Pro, Max Viagra, Cialis Pro, and, for the fence-sitters, a multipack of all three. Only when she scrolled to the bottom of the page did she notice the tiny link for “other medications.” Just as Brie said, she was easily able to order a one-month supply of phentermine.
That done, Anna could move on to the main business of the day. Taj had given her a list of filmmakers who had influenced him and she had dutifully Netflixed all of them. Everyone is so weird, Anna thought, as she watched a video starring a talking pony head on a stick by the filmmaker Ben Coonley. Where did they get these ideas? Taj, Gilman, everyone made it look so easy to just ignite with some random passion, and yet Anna still had no clue what it was she wanted to make movies about. Sometimes she wished she could just go to Earthy Basket and pick up a microwavable pouch of artistic inspiration, a six-pack of ideas. A few short weeks ago, considering Yagihashi’s shit sculpture, she couldn’t help suspect that inspiration wasn’t actually an innate mystery of human nature, that the whole thing was a lot more calculated than that. Seen with a cynical eye, it was easy to imagine Yagihashi simply exploiting a gap in the art world by carving out an esoteric, scatological niche for himself. The idea that maybe art was just a lifestyle choice flashed through her mind; Yagihashi didn’t give a shit about shit, but did enjoy swanning around art galleries, dating girls like Lauren, and having the heads of various pompous institutions kiss his sweet Japanese ass.
But now that this strange fever had taken hold of Anna as well, she finally understood. She understood Gilman’s bizarre predilections and Yagihashi’s and her own. Why Gilman filmed men finger-painting with their balls was the same reason Anna spent seven hours wallpapering a basement with tinfoil and squeaking around in a tight red suit: because losing yourself in an idea—any idea—made life worth living. And didn’t fetish websites prove that it was possible to turn anything into an object worthy of love, obsession, scholarship? An amputee? A pointy shoe? Macaque dung? And here a new thought struck her; sitting here all night with her Netflix and her e-books, wasn’t that an awfully consumer approach to art-making? There was something to be said for book learning, but she had the sense that the Duplass brothers, Andrew Bujalski, Lynn Shelton, Ramin Bahrani, this guy Coonley, and, of course, Gilman, had learned their craft on the job. The kind of emotion-drenched, impulsive, jagged-edged filmmaking Taj exalted required the thrill of discovery. Didn’t it?
Anna closed her laptop with a satisfying click. She went out into the hall and tapped on Brie’s door. Brie had finally come home last night, but had been locked inside all morning.
“What?” came Brie’s muffled voice.
“Hey. Do you want to come open this box with me?”
“Can’t. Don’t feel well.”
“Oh no. Can I get you anything?”
“No.”
“OK, feel better,” Anna said, with a false sympathy she hoped masked the suspicion Brie was simply blowing her off. There was no way that she could get Brandon over here in the middle of the afternoon—he was still clinging to his job at Pinter, Chinski and Harms. It was just her and the AVCCAM box.
She opened everything at once, ripping into the boxes like she was satisfying a long-suppressed cardboard fetish. The date for returning the AVCCAM had passed and shredding the packaging to the point of no return felt like a christening of sorts. To her great surprise, the camera turned out to be easy to assemble. There were only three parts and they easily snapped together. It was shocking how remarkably clear and bright everything was when viewed from the other side of the lens. The AVCCAM seemed to have magical, gloom-lifting properties. Even the gross, fuzzy crack between the radiator and the wall transformed into a mystical, Mordor-like landscape when viewed at full zoom. Anna wandered over to the refrigerator, camera glued to one eye. Inspired by some moldering fruit, she arranged three half-melted bananas in a bowl around a dead tomato. It was so incredibly beautiful. More beautiful than any still life by Morandi, or Zurbarán, or Steenwijck.
When the phone rang, Anna answered it automatically, somehow sure that it was Taj calling, so she could tell him about the AVCCAM and the beautifully rotting fruit. But it was only Leslie.
“Just calling to say I’ll be ten minutes late. The N’s stuck on the bridge again.”
Shit, Anna thought. She’d forgotten Leslie had changed their session to Saturday this week. Now she would have to take a cab.
“Ditto,” Anna said. “Take your time.”
She hung up and with great reluctance laid the camera back in its foam cradle like a reliquary.
* * *
The seating situation at Gorilla Coffee was even worse than at Café Gowanus. Laptop people crowded every seat of the four long tables jutting from the back wall. They contemplated leaving, but where to go? The pita place? The juice bar? Ambience was important, and the pita place had been occupied, Palestine-like, by an aggressive cult of lactivists who aimed their loaded breasts at childless passersby. The juice bar was irradiated with guilt. Anna always felt like she should order something with wheatgrass, but ended up asking for a coconut mango shake with crushed almonds instead. Besides, it was hard to linger over a glass of juice. So Anna filled Leslie in about her apprenticeship with Taj as they loitered by the milk station at Gorilla until two seats opened up.
“OK, so it sounds like you know what you want to do, you just have to find a way to make money doing it,” Leslie said, settling down.
“Exactly,” Anna replied, even though she hadn’t given the question of money a second thought.
“I mean, is there a job down the line here?”
“I think some of his crew gets paid…”
“What are we talking?” Leslie said, no-nonsense. “Beer money? Rent money? Health benefits? 401(k)?”
“No. I don’t know. Probably not that much,” Anna admitted.
“Well, this sounds like a great résumé builder, but we have to consider the exit strategy.”
“Les, I just officially joined the crew.”
“I’m just encouraging you to think long-term. Making a career for yourself in the arts—any art—is a major campaign. We can always map it out both ways: filmmaking as career and filmmaking as hobby.” Leslie was already pulling out a pen, searching around for a napkin.
“No way it’s a hobby,” Anna said, annoyed at Leslie for not just letting her talk.
“OK, OK. Last week it was criminology, remember?” Leslie said, putting up her hands in mock surrender. “I’m only trying to keep up with you.”
As Leslie eyed the line for the bathroom, Anna gave herself free rein to think treasonous thoughts. After all, what the
fuck did Leslie know? Hadn’t Leslie simply followed the predictable route from college to B-school to McKinsey? Leslie, easily six dress sizes smaller than Anna, would never squeeze herself into a red rubber unisuit to gyrate on a tinfoil stage for the sake of an unpaid art project. No, it no longer made sense to seek out Leslie’s advice. She lacked an artist’s perspective. And suddenly it hit her: There was no map. There could be no map. Everything she wanted to accomplish, everything worth accomplishing, was off the grid, in the weeds, underwater. The kinds of places Leslie didn’t want her to end up. The place she was trying to drag Anna out of right now.
Before it was time to wheelbarrow Dora to some activity or another, Leslie handed Anna a book called The Fatal Flaw, written by some guy in a lab coat. Anna made another visit to the counter to procure a testicular twist of dough and a fresh latte, then settled back to peruse. The lab-coat guy’s thesis, her skim revealed, was that everyone had a fatal personality flaw but that no one would tell you what it was, most especially not the shrink collecting your hush money. Lab Coat favored a rigorous, scientific approach. He posited that only an anonymous and representative survey of friends, family, lovers, coworkers, and scant acquaintances could reveal the exact nature of one’s douche-baggery. Anna flipped to the back—there was an ad for Lab Coat’s consultancy. His was a crack team, filled with the kinds of truffle hunters who keep college alumni databases updated, and for a mint, they would pan the river of your regrets, sifting the piecemeal disappointments from the chronic stuff.
She found herself thinking of various people she knew. Leslie, Brie, Taj, Brandon—what were their fatal flaws? More interestingly, she thought, taking a sip of her latte, if each of them were a coffee, what kind of coffee would they be? Leslie would undoubtedly be something expensive, one of those fancy pour-overs the new place up the street was charging six bucks for. Brie? Something sweet with foam. A Cinnamon Dolce Crème Frappuccino with a shot of hazelnut. Brandon, who always liked to get things done quickly, would no doubt be instant. Taj … now, Taj was complicated. Perhaps he would be one of those exotic free-trade coffees the barista was always expounding on, holding up the line. Grown in some Himalayan village where each bean is wrapped in muslin, carried down the mountain by virgins, and bathed in unicorn tears before being left to dry in the sun. But what kind of coffee was Anna? Something not too bitter and a little diluted. An Americano, maybe. Or a latte, she thought, contemplating her latte.
* * *
The lights were off in the apartment when Anna arrived, so she was surprised to hear Brie’s voice sounding in the dark.
“Hey.”
“Hey!” Anna said. She flipped on the light and there was Brie, sitting on the couch, wearing a slept-in pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a dancing piece of tofu. Her finger was stuck, mid-rewind, in the sprocket of a plastic cassette tape whose magnetic intestines were unspooled across the floor. The whole table was, in fact, covered with tapes. Tapes and their dusty cases, many cracked, all of them looking as though they’d been scrubbed with steel wool. Brie sat there as though she’d always been there and always would be, like a figure from a Greek myth—Cassettrodite.
“Are you OK?”
Brie shook her head no.
“What’s wrong? Is it work?”
Brie shook her head again.
“Rishi?”
“No.”
“Kickball?”
Brie began to cry. “F-fuck kickball,” she said.
Coming from Brie—a person who stopped reading a book if she thought that “things were maybe about to get sad”—tears were shocking.
“Do you want me to make you a peppermint tea?” Brie didn’t say anything and Anna decided to take this as a yes. She went over to the electric teapot, glad to escape the toxic orb of misery surrounding Brie and busy herself with something. She returned a moment later with a steaming mug.
“Too hot,” Brie sniffed.
“I know. We’ll wait.”
They waited.
“I’ll blow on it.”
“Good,” said Anna. Then, after an awkward span of silence, “I ordered some diet pills from that website you told me about.”
Brie nodded, blowing on her tea.
“They said they’d send them in a couple weeks.”
Silence.
“You were right, it was totally easy.”
Brie could only close her eyes as the tears streamed harder, gathering under her chin.
“Brie, what’s wrong?”
“I-I can’t say it.”
“OK.”
There was just the sound of Brie blowing and sniffing.
“I’ll write it down,” she said, finally.
“OK,” Anna said. She dug a pen out of her bag and handed Brie a bodega receipt.
Brie scribbled something down on the receipt with one hand and slid the note across the coffee table to Anna. She let the cassette clatter to the floor—she never did explain what the cassettes were for—and left Anna to read the note. Anna read it and then read it again, even though it contained only two words: I’m pregnant.
14
Looking back, Anna wondered whether her relationship with Taj would ever have advanced to the next level if Brie hadn’t become pregnant. Would she have invited Taj over that night if Brie hadn’t gone to stay with her parents in Framingham and she hadn’t had the apartment to herself? There was no denying that she had felt lonely ever since Brie left. Then again, it was almost worse with Brie there. After that one discussion on the couch, Brie hadn’t brought up her pregnancy again, and this filled the apartment with a weird tension, the withheld revelations giving Anna a severe case of conversational blue balls. A week later, Anna had come home from a shoot at the Compound to find a handful of checks for Brie’s share of the bills tucked under the pepper mill and Brie gone. The text from Framingham only arrived two days later.
When Taj called, Anna was editing her fruit footage. Brandon had given her a promotional copy of Final Cut Pro he had cadged from an old friend at film school. Threatening pop-up boxes appeared whenever Anna launched the application, but she just clicked OK and, to her relief, things seemed to indeed turn out that way. She didn’t like the idea of stealing software, but a new copy of FCP cost a few hundred dollars and, since she had decided against returning the AVCCAM, money was getting tight. Besides, Brandon reassured her that no one who was serious about film actually paid for editing software and so, by paying for it, she would only be reinforcing her own poor perception of herself. It would practically be an act of self-sabotage.
“I’m upset,” Taj had said as soon as she’d picked up the phone.
“Oh, no!” said Anna, happy to find herself a recipient of this, Taj’s upsetness.
“I feel like you’re the only one who can get me unupset.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because you’re new,” Taj said. That made sense to Anna.
“Do you want to come over? I’ll make you soup.” Or rather, Anna thought, she would heat him soup. She’d picked up a quart of corn chowder and a pint of split pea at Earthy Basket that afternoon.
“You would soup me?” Taj said. He promised to be there in an hour.
But although he had sounded raw and even a little tender on the phone, by the time he arrived something had changed and he just seemed angry.
“When did you get this AVCCAM?” he said, waving at the camera on the table with a vague air of hostility.
“A while back,” Anna said, feeling oddly guilty. For some reason she hadn’t found time to mention the AVCCAM to Taj, or the thing with Final Cut Pro.
“Fucking waste of money.”
“Well, I needed something with two mic inputs—”
“You’d have been better off with a Kodak Zi8. It has a really good lens. You can always just record the sound separately on a Tascam DR-100.”
She should introduce Taj to Brandon, Anna thought, so they could have conversations that consisted solely of passing strings o
f letters and numbers back and forth. Then something else jogged her memory. Good lens. Shit. Maybe that was what the salesman at J&R had been trying to say about the Zi8.
“Do you want some soup?” Anna said, as much for Taj as to distract herself from calculating how much money she might have saved by buying the Zi8 instead.
“Scotch.”
“I might have some Absolut in the freezer.”
And she did, buried under two ancient bags of frozen edamame. Anna filled a shot glass for Taj, which he tossed back immediately.
“I got rejected,” he said.
“Oh, no. Was it the Gugg?” Anna said, feeling caught off guard. “Because you shouldn’t feel bad about that. No one ever gets those.”
“God, no. Nowhere near as good as the Gugg. Some crappy festival.”
“That’s so fucked up.”
“On many levels. But that’s not even what bugs me. They rejected me but they didn’t even tell me. I had to find out from Lauren, whose crappy short got accepted and who, by the way, has no idea I submitted, so we didn’t have this conversation.”
“Of course not,” Anna said. She went to the cabinet and got out the good chocolate she’d been hiding from Brie. She put the chocolate on the table, but Taj didn’t touch it. “What happened?”
“Lauren tells me she got in and I’ve heard nothing, so I call the festival people and they go, ‘We have no record of your application on file.’ And I’m like, ‘Really? Because I noticed the check for my application fee was cashed two months ago.’ And they’re like, ‘Oh? OK, we’ll call you back,’ in this annoyed voice like I’m this drag they have to deal with now. Like, ‘Oh no, this stupid, annoying retard is hassling us’—”
“No!”
“Yeah. Then the next day I get a call from some fucking Tisch intern or something and the guy just goes, ‘Is this Taj?’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, this is Taj’ and he goes, ‘You didn’t get in.’ That’s it. Hangs up. How un-fucking-professional is that? Who does that?”
