Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  MATTER OF FACT, I AM STILL ON THE PHONE! I WILL BE OFF IN A MINUTE! Sorry, David. Anyway, look, I can talk to you tonight when you get home. We’re having a party for Tilly this Saturday so mark your calendar. Just a few friends. The usual suspects. We’ll get Tilly to call in and put her on the speakerphone. You don’t need to do anything. I’ve got it all covered. Oh, but tell Mae that she should make some sort of pasta dish. Your sister’s a star, David. A STAR! Bye!

  “MESSAGE FIVE... FOUR THIRTY... ONE... P.M. David. This is Tilly. Jesus Christ. Will you go over to the house and rip the fucking telephone out of the wall. She’s killing me. Please, David. Please. I beg you. Seriously. Lock her in a closet or something. And take Ben to a movie. Get him outta there. Bye.

  “END OF MESSAGES.”

  I watch them swimming and eating. And pooping. In streams that waft behind them in disgusting diaphanous trails that catch the neon light streaming out of the plastic chest of pirate booty. Swimming, eating and pooping. Swimming, eating and pooping. God, if you are up there, please, please, please... turn me into a fish.

  CHAPTER 4 – Angus

  The Lion Tree, by Angus Mann

  He did not like the pleading in his own voice. “Elle?”

  That betrayal of undertone. The sound of a small, wounded eyas careening limply into tall grasses. A muffled thud and a quavered warble of pain.

  “Elle, what are you . . .?”

  “You will address me now as Colonel Ivanova.”

  “Elena . . .”

  “Lieutenant. You will address me now as Colonel Ivanova. Is that understood?”

  The sky was uniformly oppressive. A melancholic dome of dingy gray cotton. They might have been two pills alone at the bottom of a medicine bottle.

  “Yes. Okay. Whatever. Just . . .”

  Light, as always, came from everywhere and nowhere, white-washing like a bleaching vapor. The air itself could luminesce and scour. Behind her, the barracks squatted at attention in decorous rows of scrubbed mushroom brown. They could have been any-where, and yet . . .

  “Things are very different now,” she said.

  “Different how?” he asked with more force.

  “Different in every way, Lieutenant Miller. Let’s go.”

  She spun on the heels of her boots and began to walk. Her glare lingered for a moment behind the taught rotation of her shoulders. Her eyes had not changed. Her hair was also the same, the way it softened her bones and clung shyly behind her ears.

  And yet, she was suddenly an entirely different person – hair, bones and eyes – different than she had ever been. Different than yesterday. Different than this morning. At least to him. Different. Her head snapped forward, back in line.

  She left small gouges wherever she stepped. The soil sprayed in front of her in spongy, orangish-pink plumes like little fleshy explosions.

  “This is hurting me,” he said at the back of her head, his words much too earnest. She pretended not to hear him and stepped rigidly through the field towards the barracks. Her uniform puckered and creased over her body as her arms swayed to balance her weight over the rows of useless young corn.

  “I said . . .” he stopped himself. “Colonel Ivanova!”

  She stopped sharply, her metronomic hips frozen in mid stride. She did not turn. He approached her slowly and then said it again in the wounded voice he hated.

  “I said, this is hurting me.”

  She turned on him coldly, holding his eyes in hers but conceding nothing.

  She spun him around by the shoulders and adjusted the hand restraints so that they were not cutting into the flesh of his wrists. Twice he felt her skin touch his; incidental and entirely mistaken. Surely regretted. Once her thumb to his palm. Once her palm to his thumb. Both exquisite, even now. And it relieved the pain a little.

  But that was not where he was wounded.

  CHAPTER 5 – Tilly

  I first met Angus Mann in Africa when I was twenty-nine years old. When I think back to our beginning, when I open up all of the little boxes in my head and examine those memories, I re-experience Angus more than simply remember him.

  My career was on its way up. His, almost an afterthought.

  Although, to be fair, the decision of Bright Leaf Films to option The Lion Tree was an unexpected shot in the arm. The Lion Tree, as a motion picture, gave Angus more public recognition in the eleventh hour of his career than did all of his preceding works combined; just as I told him it would. This was a victory I lorded over him mercilessly, until the very end.

  Angus would undoubtedly object to the term “career” as a characterization of his life’s work, connoting as it does a prolonged exchange of effort and personal sacrifice for financial return. And, of course, he would be right about that.

  Angus never wrote for money, and for most of his life he never had much of it. He wrote words in exchange for oxygen. He wrote to live. He wrote because emotionally, constitutionally, he had little choice. Angus Mann wrote in his own blood. To call it a “career” misses the point.

  But back then, I was all about “career” – the prolonged exchange of personal sacrifice for financial return. I was then a comely sprig of single-minded ambition tempered by emotional immaturity, disgustingly poor judgment, low standards, delusions of grandeur and a tragic blind spot for irony. In short, perfect for Hollywood.

  And while I had little grasp of just why I was perfect for Hollywood, I knew in the pink of my marrow that I was perfect. I either sensed that I had all of the runaway narcissism and other tragic self-delusions required of the Hollywood perfection standard, or I believed that I had no self-delusions at all and that Hollywood would reward me for my unique artistic talent as an actress; which, of course, is seriously delusional and narcissistic. So, either way, I was perfect for Hollywood.

  I met Angus on location filming The Lion Tree, about two weeks into the shoot. We were in Tunisia working on what would be the first of three efforts to get the safari wildlife shots right. Blair Gaines directed and co-produced the picture; a first-rate movie-maker and, not by coincidence, a first rate hot-headed prick. I vowed in the middle of that film that I would never work with Blair again. I have broken that promise twice.

  I never actually had a role in any of the safari shots, but Blair was pushed for time. He wanted to work with me on my part of the script, which was in constant evolution. Angus had written Colonel Ivanova as a multidimensional character; subdued perhaps, but multi-faceted. The screenwriters, I cannot remember their names – Frick and Frack – could not settle on just how to boil Ivanova down, to congeal all of her richness into a flat, marketable attitude that they could slap onto a poster. They kept tweaking and rewriting and my part kept changing. Ivanova the siren. Ivanova the bitch. Ivanova the victim. Ivanova the scrupulous interrogator. Blair finally lost his patience and the arguments were daily and epic.

  The rapid deterioration in that relationship is ultimately what led to all of the mid-production industry gossip about Blair firing the screenwriters and reworking the script himself. Not exactly true. What Blair actually did was hire Angus, already a consultant for the project. Frick and Frack quit in a huff to see their lawyers. The truth is that Blair always seemed to be in danger of shooting a scene that had not yet been fully scripted.

  So I spent a couple of weeks in Tunisia and Kenya working on my part. I flew out with the crew and met Blair who had flown over early with the advance team and the gaffers to scout the shoot. I spent most of my time sweating beneath a tarp the crew had draped over the tops of two of the larger trucks Blair had rented. Tough as I was in every other respect, I was still a girl from Ohio who had barely managed to acclimate to Los Angeles. I was certainly not prepared for the Kenyan climate.

  I spent my days swatting at flies, preparing for my evening sessions with Blair, and staring out into the savannah watching them try to shoot this single scene – an enactment of the allegory that Ivanova offers to Lieutenant Miller as a way of summing him up, before imposin
g his sentence – which was in many ways a centerpiece of the film.

  On each day, our window of opportunity was only about three hours. Lighting was crucial and Blair wanted the sun to be in a particular slice of the sky. He wanted these shots to have an underexposed, sepia flavor, like an old memory burned at the edges. He wanted the savannah scenes to have some visual resonance, albeit in contrast, with the scenes set under the enormous synthetic dome on Rhuton-Baker, the planet where Elena Ivanova interrogates her lover. The Rhuton-Baker scenes were deliberately washed-out and over-exposed, to suggest sterility rather than age. Truth over memory.

  Nothing cooperated. The insects got in the way. In Kenya the wind came in unpredictable gusts. We had generator problems. The lions were difficult. The wild lions were, ironically, far too diffident for the mood Blair was trying to capture. Zoom lenses brought them in close, but did nothing to agitate them into ferociousness. The captive lions, on the other hand, were so agitated at all the heightened attention, that their handlers could not give them any workable direction. The zoo shots were, without exception, disasters. We kept having to leave civilization to find these cats in their natural habitat, where they were simply too content to seem wild.

  But Blair got his shot. He always does.

  We did most of our script work at night out in hotel courtyards, first in Tozeur, then in Mombasa, after Blair had worked through the dailies and lined the cast and crew out for the next day’s shoot.

  It has been so many years, now. I have never been back to Africa and it is certainly out of the question now. But I do remember it vividly. I remember the night air was sweet and still and heavy and so hot, boiling up from the ground, it was hard to concentrate. It was as though the sun, baking the people having lunch in a park on the other side of the planet, was burning directly through miles of darkened earth to reach the soles of our feet.

  I remember that Angus was always nearby, always underfoot, with his tea and his cigarettes. He carried around a ragged copy of his story, either stuffed in a back pocket or rolled up like a paper scepter.

  He was quiet and distant much of the time, as though he were politely laboring the pain of some internal wound. Often, Angus was silent for hours on end, standing and watching or sitting and watching as people and equipment streamed around him; as though he were a rock jutting obstinately out of a river. My first impression was that he was just naturally deferential to what goes on in someone else’s home. I know better now. What I saw as deference was simply a well-mannered hopelessness; a begrudging, excruciating surrender to something he loathed.

  When Angus did contribute, it was sudden and unpredictable, in the nature of involuntary outburst. A violent squall in the desert. Out of nowhere he became a torrent of vituperative opinion and strenuous objection, with no hint of deference, as though we were in his home. As though we were deigning to instruct him on composition. He spoke like a writer. His tirades had a beginning, a middle, and an end, full of metaphor and symbolism, and always rich with understated derision. We even joked to ourselves that Angus spent his hours of pained silence mentally composing his next nuanced harangue.

  And yet, while I call them outbursts and tirades and violent squalls and the like, the remarkable thing about such interjections was that Angus’ intensity came less from his manner than from his words and the implacable ferocity in his eyes when he spoke them. Flailing and shouting were beneath him and often, even when he chose to sacrifice all economy of verbal expression, speaking great rivers of words in service to some depth of feeling, he almost always adhered to a preternatural economy of emotional expression. One had to watch, and listen, to understand Angus. It took me a long time to realize that his many harsh opinions were merely steam vents miles away from the molten core.

  In retrospect, I have to say that Blair showed remarkable tolerance and concern for Angus’ opinions; an odd solicitude that increasingly upset the screenwriters. Knowing Blair, angering the screenwriters may have been the point.

  I remember how strangely territorial I was; how protective of the art of making movies. How I resented the incursions from this force of literature, this man, the author, who had made no bones about his disdain for the industry, my industry, at whose doorstep he laid nothing less than the downfall of all western civilization. I took my cue from the crew and the screenwriters, who, by the end of the shoot, truly hated Angus; probably because they could not tell from one moment to the next whether the burning sensation at their backs was the Tunisian sun or his scathing judgment. Blair, on the other hand, treated Angus like a father. Angus, in return, treated Blair like a way-ward son who had chosen to bring home a hooker as his bride.

  One evening in Kenya, I left Blair in the courtyard berating the screenwriters for devoting two valuable days to entirely transforming Lieutenant Miller’s motivations into something actively homicidal. They had actually concocted a frantic chase through the center of Rhuton-Baker and grafted on an explosive, dome-shattering ending, none of which has any counterpart in Angus Mann’s original short story. Angus was so angry his lips grew visibly tight and his color seemed to redden. When the writers suggested that The Lion Tree was just too dull to adapt to the screen without something to offer younger male viewers, Blair nearly had a coronary infarction, giving full voice to what Angus must have been feeling. I knew the rest of the evening was shot and so I simply pushed myself back from the table and left the four of them to fight it out.

  The moon was enormous and singed to a burnt saffron. I walked the maze of dirt pathways, flanked by high shrubbery, designed to serpentine ridiculously around the hotel grounds. They were artificially Byzantine; confusion where there needn’t have been confusion.

  I remember not expecting such artifice in a place like Africa. But then, who was I to complain of artifice?

  I stopped for a while at the elephant fountain. The brochures in the lobby had made it look much larger than its actual size, which approximated that of a large horse. I held the back of my neck under the stream arching up from the wrinkled stone trunk. The water ran over me in warm, soft gushes. It felt so good that I could not resist soaking my hair. I closed my eyes. The water filled my ears as though I had dived into the sea.

  So I didn’t hear him the first time he spoke.

  “I said, you must wonder why you ever got involved in this project.”

  Angus was looking up at the moon, blowing smoke out into the evening. Wisps of it curled back around over his hand, taking temporary refuge in his short, silvery beard. I could tell he was still agitated and surmised that he must have left the table to keep from doing physical violence. I twisted my hair into a thick rope, wringing water into the dirt.

  “I guess Blair knows what he’s doing. He’s an ass, but he’s pretty good.”

  “Slept with him yet?”

  “Hey. Fuck you.” Ivanova the bitch, speaking; cold and unruffled.

  I was young and thick-skinned and tough as nails. I sat on the edge of the fountain and combed through my hair with my fingers.

  “Just asking. Your reputation precedes you, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Mmm…” he trailed off, pretending to withhold judgment.

  I should have let it go.

  “What.”

  Angus shook his head, as if to dismiss the subject.

  “What, Angus.”

  “It may be none of my business, as you say.” He considered his cigarette. “But it would seem that you talk rather freely of your escapades to anyone who will listen. Is there someone in particular you hope is listening? Because you can always just pick up a telephone…”

  “You’re putting a lot of trust in tabloids. Most of it’s shit.”

  “If you say so.”

  “You’re not exactly my confessor.”

  “No. Just a fellow Ohioan. One who can see how far you’ve fallen.”

  “Look, I don’t need the morals lecture. You wrote a nice little story. Blair will spin
it into gold, and we can all sell ourselves out all the way to the bank.”

  “This is not my choice,” he said after a long silence. “I think it is your choice.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Then why’d you sell the rights? Was it optioned at gunpoint or something?”

  “I wrote it forty-three years ago,” he said calmly. I know now that he must have been holding back the bile rising in his throat beneath those words. “When I was younger than you are now. Back when I knew as much about publishing and intellectual property rights as you do now. Apparently.”

  “If you say so,” I responded with just enough insouciance to rub it in.

  “You have another one of those?”

  Angus lit me a cigarette and we staked out different areas of the clearing that surrounded the fountain to look at the sky and blow smoke at the moon.

  “Your family still in Ohio?” he asked eventually. “My parents and two brothers.”

  “And what do they think of your meteoric rise?” I took a long drag and thought about that one.

  “I don’t believe they’re of one mind on the subject.”

  “Ah. Not everyone is so proud of waltzing Matilda?”

  “Tilly.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Mom’s proud. She was nervous at first, but she’s busting now. Dad thinks I’m a floozy. We don’t talk much. He’s read some of your stuff though, so maybe my approval ratings will go up with him after this movie.”