Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  “Right,” said the goatee proudly. “And this is what I’m saying. Ivanova ultimately foils the escape attempt, right?” He was gesticulating dramatically with his palms and his fingers and his fists. The short one deftly rescued a wine glass.

  “But she realizes in that moment that he has come dangerously close to leaving and that she was almost marooned on this planet. She dropped her guard and almost paid with her life. So the epilogue could be her coming back to check on him – because she’s worried now – and she discovers that he’s gone. Gone! Incredibly, we learn through her eyes – through Ivanova’s eyes, as the credits role, that Miller has escaped his punishment and has vanished. Impossible but true. And that is what sets up the premise for the sequel. Where is Lieutenant Miller? The search for Lieutenant Miller. That’s your sequel. And,” he smiled slyly again at his partner who drank nervously from an empty glass, “we’ve already started Scene One of the next movie. You are gonna love this.”

  Blair and I exchanged silent glances at this revelation. His eyes told me, from beneath their ragged yellow-blonde brows, that he had had enough.

  I knew this not just because Blair had confided in me his misgivings about the scriptwriters – a topic we had often discussed late at night on his sweat-dampened sheets – but because there is a certain synchronization of thought that is a hallmark of intimacy. There is something in sharing bodies, in appropriating another’s skin and fluids, in manipulating and being manipulated at a circulatory level – something in consenting to your own violation – which in time, tunes one’s perception to a private frequency.

  I looked across at Angus to gauge his reaction at the prospect of a sequel to the movie adaptation of his story. I was mildly astonished to find that he was already looking at me. He had been watching me look at Blair, and at Blair looking back at me, in our silent understanding about the scriptwriters and about what must be done. In the instant our eyes met, I realized that Angus’ perpetual expression of disdain had sharpened into something more personal; more immediate. An expression just short of disgust, but far beyond disappointment, with all the finality of a confirmed expectation.

  A lesser study of human nature might have misunderstood the expression; might have assumed it simply a reaction to the very idea that his characters – his children – might be condemned to another cinematic mauling. But I knew differently. I knew then that he was absorbing an understanding about me and Blair. An understanding about me. I know this not from any intimacy with Angus, for there was none; but rather because I had seen, felt, that look of confirmed disappointment so many times before. I felt the warm blush of shame on my cheeks as though the sun had suddenly focused itself.

  It was then, for the first time, I felt a powerful attraction for Angus Mann.

  “You’re already working on the next one?” It was Casey, incredulous and stupidly delighted at the same time.

  “We have. And it’s killer, Casey. It opens at a UNIX command post; a launch site in Africa. Ivanova is fighting with her superiors over how Miller could have escaped Rhuton-Baker. All hell is breaking loose. The UNIX brass is talking about a Court Martial while Ivanova is demanding authority to hunt him down.”

  “What is UNIX anyway? I’ve never really known, you know… what that is.”

  The features of the scriptwriter, froze in their lively animation then slackened as he considered the question.

  “It’s like the military arm of the space exploration program. Earth is on its last legs and we have begun looking for other planets to colonize. Rhuton-Baker is only the most recent attempt to sustain life elsewhere in the galaxy. All the others have failed.”

  “Well, yeah,” said Casey, “I know that, but whose space exploration program is it? I mean is this an American venture or…”

  “Well, I think…” the gesticulating goatee let his words trail off.

  “It’s a joint effort,” the other one offered casually. His fingers were pudgy and red, as though an assemblage of blood sausages were growing around the edges of his palms. “It’s a coalition of countries, mostly western. The United States is the primary player but it’s too much for any one country. The Europeans are definitely involved. Canada. China. And Russia, of course. I mean Ivanova…duh.”

  It was as though the three of them had utterly forgotten that Angus Mann, the author of the original work, was sitting across the table. Although Angus was nominally a consultant on the film, he had never deigned to work cooperatively with anyone. He was unwilling to assist in the ransacking of his tiny but grand palace of words, smashing them and melting them down and reshaping them into candy-colored trinkets with which to decorate the stage of what Angus must have seen as a high school play. To have actually collaborated with the scriptwriters, would have been an act of complicity in a desecration he could barely stomach even from a distance. So Angus had limited his contribution to offering Blair his unvarnished opinion of the film as it unfolded. Perhaps one measure of a writer is the number of different words he can find to express his displeasure at the world. If so, then few could have doubted Angus’ genius.

  Blair’s uncharacteristic solicitude for these criticisms meant that the scriptwriters were always rewriting entire scenes and reshaping dialogue; scenes and dialogue, which their vaunted experience in cinematic meat grinding told them were already perfect. So the scriptwriters very quickly hated the oxygen that Angus Mann pulled into his lungs. They assiduously avoided him whenever possible, which was certainly fine with Angus.

  It may well have been that the scriptwriters deliberately chose to exclude Angus from the discussion about the origins of UNIX. Or perhaps it was because Angus had been so broodingly quiet for the entire lunch, obviously taking everything in, and no doubt forming scathing opinions of everything being said, but never venturing to participate. Blair and I had learned early in the filming that it was best to let Angus be, to let him regulate his own involvement and not to attempt to draw him in. No questions or observational small talk. When he had something to say, he would say it.

  But as I looked at Angus across from me, I could see that he was choking on rage. He was staring directly into my eyes, his features locked as though cast in steel and changing only in color as the skin above his well-trimmed beard steadily bruised in deepening anger. I remember it as a look reflecting some unpardonable perfidy. As though somehow I was the one who had given offense; as though I was to him the entire industry of movie-making and had wooed from him a piece of his soul. As though I had seduced him off the page and into the tawdriness of living where he could no longer barricade himself with words and take comfort in disdain.

  I did not recognize it as love. Love never even occurred to me.

  “Angus,” I said carefully, “what…”

  “Did you ever even read the goddamned story?!” He slammed the table with his fist upsetting his glass. The wine billowed outward in thin sanguineous clouds through the tablecloth. There was a molecular change in the air over the courtyard, in the other patrons, in the birds, like in the empty moment that introduces a strike of lightening or the split second that follows a gunshot, before the panic and the grief.

  His question had been directed at the scriptwriters and, to a lesser extent, Casey Travern, who had started the whole thing. But his eyes remained focused on mine. I confess that I drank in that rage and that harsh, condemnatory tone like a woman dying of thirst. I stared back at him unflinching, my heart wide in my chest.

  Misunderstanding, Blair discretely placed his hand on my knee beneath the table, to steady me I thought; a gesture of comfort and caring in the event I was shaken. But the concern felt cloying, and the gesture like an act of defilement. I suddenly wanted nothing to do with the great Blair Gaines.

  Angus slowly closed his eyes. “Did you?!” he roared. “Did any of you?!” He rotated his head in the direction of the scriptwriters who had, apparently, been secretly busy penning a sequel to The Lion Tree. “UNIX stands for UN Nine! United Nations Nine! There are no
nations. There is no United States or Europe or Canada or China. There is no Russia. This is a goddamned world government! Do you understand?”

  He waited. There was no response.

  “Do you understand that humanity has reinvented and refined an organization of nation states over hundreds of years until there are no more nation states? One single authority on planet Earth? Do you get that?! Did you read the story? Do you understand that humanity is soon to be trapped on a lifeless world just as Lieutenant Miller is soon to be abandoned on Rhuton-Baker? Did that ever occur to you?! Do you even care?! Do you understand that in this little story I have written – this little story that I so foolishly sold in my poverty and that you so failingly try to adapt into a cartoon – the world of nations has been consolidated, reduced to the essence of mankind? Have you ever even inquired into that essence? Do you know what it is?”

  He waited, looking from one face to another. I might have spoken up. I might have said something to give the others a clue. For I knew the story like a dark nursery rhyme. Blair, too, might have said something since I knew that he understood the story even as he betrayed it for the sake of mass appeal. But neither of us ventured out into the silence falling like a heavy snow around the table. One of our servers stood in the sun-dappled periphery, watching and waiting for a better opportunity to refresh the drinks. Angus’ nostrils flared and he stood and pointed angrily.

  “No? Well let me tell you. That essence is this: consumption. That is all we do as a species. We consume. Politics. Boundaries. Languages. Irrelevant! They mean nothing. The essence of all people is to consume. To consume! It is all we are good for. It is our purpose. We are a voracious fungus. A pestilence. We use and we discard. We eat and we excrete. We gnaw the moss from the rock. We take what we want and then we abandon it in the search for more. We fight to the death for what remains and when we have so denuded the Earth that she can no longer support our ways, then we forsake her. We leave her cold and bleeding in a ditch along the Milky Way. We look to the heavens and try to escape what we have done. But there is no escape and when she dies we, by our own hand, are the forsaken. We are the abandoned! Do you get it?! Of course you don’t get it. You want action! You want fireworks! You want a pandering cock-tease! You don’t understand a thing about this story, do you?”

  “Angus,” said the tall one wearily through the hole in his goatee, “we are experienced in this business. You are not. As we have shown many times, we know how to write a successful screenplay. You, with all due respect to your literary abilities, do not. If we want anyone to show up at the theater, this movie cannot be about how mankind has consumed mother earth. This is not an environmental picture.”

  “An environ…Mankind has deliberately wrought its own abandonment!”

  “Whatever. No one cares about that. Not for ten bucks a ticket.”

  Angus now seemed as genuinely baffled as he did angry. For others to not understand his literary premise was, I imagine, perfectly predictable given his rather low expectations of others. But to comprehend the premise and simply not care – to not even acknowledge the significance of its implications for humanity or for an individual – was alien to him. Each time, again and again, it was freshly alien.

  He looked painfully earnest, like a child who was hurt and angry at not understanding; as though he were learning about betrayal for the first time. He looked at me accusingly, his contempt for what I must have represented playing in those eyes of his, which he pinched ferociously into an unyielding concern.

  I held his look as long as I could, trying to catch him, trying to commiserate. But I knew of nothing to say and, to be truthful, back then I was as shallow and as corrupted by the coin of the realm as the rest of Hollywood. No one cares about that. Not for ten bucks a ticket. It all came down to that. I had no explanation for what must to Angus have seemed an ugly barbarism toward literature; towards meaning and truth. I smiled politely, hoping for something I still did not understand.

  Blair’s hand was still on my leg, moving perceptibly up my thigh. There was an increasing urgency, a certain tumescent momentum in his touch and I understood he was taking advantage of the conversational distraction. I kept my hands above the table and crossed my legs, which was as much of a rebuke as I could deliver without openly announcing to everyone that I was fucking my director. Again.

  Angus was trying mightily to collect himself. He sat down, righted his wine glass, cleared his throat and made another run at the writing team – Goatee and Sausage – charged with interpreting his story to the big screen.

  “Are you saying that the theme of this story does not interest you at all?”

  “What, that we are fucking up the planet?” said Goatee. “That’s so played out, man. We want this movie to be original. I would think you’d be pleased, Angus.”

  “It is not about fucking up the planet.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No.”

  “Then…”

  “It’s about the power of identity. It’s about our striving to be who we believe we are. Even if it kills us. It’s about destiny as the hand-maiden of self-perception.”

  The screenwriters gave each other less than subtle sideways glances and then reached for their respective glasses to mask the eye rolling.

  “My glass has been empty for fifteen minutes,” said the goatee in distracted irritation. Does anybody work here or…”

  “Did you understand what I just said?” Angus pressed firmly.

  “Angus…no, frankly, I don’t understand what you’re talking about. A minute ago you were saying the story was about being abandoned by mother Earth and now you’re saying something about…self-identity, or… I don’t know.”

  “Destiny as the hand-maiden of self-perception,” offered the Sausage.

  “Yeah, whatever. I’m sorry you don’t like the script, but…”

  Angus took a breath.

  “Look,” he said, forcing a measure of calm back into his tone. “We are abandoned because we want to be abandoned. It is what we believe we deserve. That is why we work so hard for it; why we strive for that end. Because we believe it is just.”

  Sausage laughed to himself as though unable to handle the absurdity.

  “Something funny, sir?” It was a stab more than a question.

  “No. Angus. It’s…it’s just. So, your story is about how we are abandoned by the earth and how this is a good thing because we never deserved the earth in the first place.”

  “Are you really that simple?”

  “You don’t need to insult me.”

  “I’m beginning to think I do. Let’s try this: do you understand original sin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you understand that original sin is a state of mind and that we have banished ourselves from Eden.”

  “But ultimately, Angus,” interjected the goatee taking an unfortunate professorial tone, “any motion picture needs a plot and a protagonist, and Lieutenant Miller…”

  “You imbecilic …” Angus broke off, closing his eyes. Then he started again. “Did it occur to you that we are Lieutenant Miller? That we are this man who has fled into the stars, forsaking his wife and unborn child? This man who has experienced such rejection in his life that rejection has become his identity; that he has condemned himself to rejection as an inescapable fate, and that when he has found love he has consumed it – consumed it! – recklessly and with criminal abandon, as though he were undeserving; as though love was a precious, exhaustible commodity to be either stolen or denied. You understand that he is punished not for his actions but by his own nature? That, by murder, Lieutenant Miller has orchestrated his own abandonment? Yes? You get that? You understand this is not a story about escape attempts and manhunts and tits and ass and interstellar sex, but about justice according to our true nature? That, in consuming and abandoning, we are ultimately consumed and abandoned? That we always feed ourselves to the lions of our own judgment? I mean you do get that, don’t you?”

>   There was no answer and the table was quiet. Distant dishes clattered in running water from beyond the courtyard and the smell of baked cheese and Italian spices was suddenly too heavy in the air. The people sitting at the three or four tables within my field of vision were eating – forks were lifting, glassed were tilting – but they were not talking; which meant that they were all hitching a ride on the conversation at our table.

  The scriptwriters fidgeted with the tassels on their place mats and with their soiled and twisted napkins, waiting for Angus to give up or for someone to force a change of subject. Casey Travern picked at a string of cheese on his plate, pulling it through smears of crusting red sauce with the tines of his fork. Blair had taken the hint and abandoned my thigh for an empty bottle of Meritage, which he turned contemplatively in his hands.

  And I … I was riveted on the presence that was Angus Mann; captivated as much by the integrity of his mind as the anguish that carried his words. I remember feeling such compassion in that moment that I wanted to embrace him. And I remember not knowing why I should feel that way.

  He pushed his chair back and stood again, looking down at me as he rose, his face at once accusing and disappointed and angry and brimming with judgment and confirming of such sorrow that there are no words to express it except, perhaps, as I would learn, those of his own story. He turned his back abruptly and strode off in the direction of the men’s room, a brief detour before abandoning us for the solitude of greater Los Angeles. We did not see him again for nearly a month.

  The mood at the table seemed to lighten almost immediately. The scriptwriters conferred something humorous amongst themselves before Goatee slapped his leg and, with a healthy dose of sarcasm, said: “Well, I’m sure glad we cleared that up.”

  Sausage laughed rather forcefully at this and then leaned into the table as though ready to impart something secret or sensitive. He jerked his ruddy, disgusting thumb in the direction of the men’s room.