The Lights

by Brian McGreevy

  We talked about movies. This was a relief to me; by now I had exhausted myself trying to prove I had sophisticated things to say about literature. I was also intrigued by his baldly commercial ambition. Within a petri dish like Hogwarts there is a perceived honor to obscurity, and if you did have an attraction to a suspiciously accessible medium such as film it was typically with the aim of reducing its intrinsic populism, small coming-of-age dramas about sexual identity with endings too ambivalent to be considered unhappy, that sort of thing. Not so with Jason: he was like a cross-pollination between Pauline Kael and a twelve-year-old male.

  “I want to tell heroic stories,” he said. “I want to tell stories about heroic badasses slaying their enemies and banging awesome broads.”

  I gave him a dubious look, but could not actually disapprove of the ingenuousness of this admission. I also noted his use of the qualifier “awesome.”

  “So what’s your movie about?” I said.

  “It’s sort of a combination of Sergio Leone and Star Wars.”

  “You just said so many things I don’t care about in one sentence,” I said.

  I went to the bathroom and when I came back he resumed the conversation about his script as though there had been no interruption of his thought process.

  “Are you, like, autistic?” I said.

  “What the hell kind of thing is that to ask?” he said.

  “You’re really socially weird and bad at eye contact.”

  “What an asshole thing to say.”

  “I mean you’re clearly on the spectrum.”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  I had another round and this turned into more than I intended, doing the thing where after one sip my elbow never extended more than forty-five degrees. I was feeling intrigued and sociable and in the mood for spirits. This mood also materialized when I felt the opposite. It was really only when drinking alone that my glass ever touched the tabletop, or with Mark.

  Drunkenness suffused and Jason talked at length about the movie we were about to see, its context in the director’s filmography, its antecedents and decedents. He was prone to Rain Mansplaining: an endless stream of words somersaulting over themselves. This got past my defenses because a person who talks too much is giving you stuff that they don’t know can be used, because it doesn’t occur to them that it can. I was having fun. Though I am a match for J. Edgar Hoover in my listening skills, it does not mean I enjoy it. Mostly I make my face hurt with forced smiles and, in my heart, grieve the God-shaped hole in what people think they care about. Jason was honest, rudely and entertainingly so, and when he talked about movies it was with a joy that lit his whole face.

  “Underneath this whole act you’re really just a big nerd,” I said. “You probably quote The Simpsons on dates. I know for a fact you do.”

  “And underneath the Dorothy Parker thing you’re an unmarried thirty-year-old from Pittsburgh your family probably thinks is a lesbian,” he said.

  I dipped my fingers in my drink and flicked them at him.

  “I’m twenty-six. But I know all grown-ups just look old to you.”

  “Thank you for not throwing your drink at me,” he said.

  “I never threw my drink at you, I poured what was left of my drink on you. Which you should be grateful for because I really love throwing drinks at people when they have it coming, which you totally did.”

  “I recall what made you pour your drink on me and am still at a loss.”

  “You made an assumption. You assumed that I want to make small art.”

  “Well, what do you want to make?”

  “Well, Terry, I want to write blood. The blood that rises in your cheeks when someone slaps you in the face while you’re being fucked, that’s what I want to write.”

  He thought about this. “Cool,” he said.

  “I actually don’t know why I said that, Terry. I’ve been a serial monogamist since I was fourteen, and I’ve certainly never been slapped in the face while being fucked.”

  (I said it to settle definitively that I was not a LITTLE GIRL.)

  “I guess half the shit we say is just to figure out whether or not it’s true,” he said.

  We fell quiet and I regarded him, the unquestionable handsomeness of his face but the asexual quality it took on because of his youth and weirdness. Finding a new friend is a form of intoxication fundamentally unchanged since childhood, the giddy queasiness of it. New friends are the worst.

  “I’m sure I will throw a drink at you one day, you’re really annoying,” I said.

  We walked over to the theater together and sat together, and for the first half hour or so I couldn’t concentrate. I was drunk and distracted by the feeling that all the things I wanted were within reach. The contrast of this feeling with my life just the previous spring would have been irreconcilable if reflecting on it seemed to have any relevance at all. Something about Jason inspired this feeling of wanton possibility; the bigness of his optimism and ambition made you feel that the ceiling of the universe was higher. I remember feeling this, though not what it actually feels like, in the same way it’s impossible to remember the actual experience of pain. It’s a small mercy. As I write this the Monongahela is black with blotches of white ice like a corpse victim to some frontier disease and the mercy of the day is its brevity, the early sunset bringing the relief of darkness, and everything I felt in that place seems as distant and impossible to return to as the place itself. Thinking of the early days in Texas can make me cry hard enough for my father to brave a soft knock on the door to make sure I don’t do something that scares him even more than checking in on me.

  By the end of the movie I was sober and sensible and we parted ways with the stilted formality of strangers who had over-shared, though we had spoken only of work.

  “He feels bad, by the way,” Jason said.

  I pretended not to know what he was talking about.

  “He told me you guys got into it. He knows he crossed the line and he feels bad about it.”

  “Is something keeping him from telling me that himself?” I said.

  He had actually sent me an apology email the next day1 but I hadn’t informed anyone; there is an innate Galvan tendency towards martyrdom which includes unconsciously leveraging sympathy at every opportunity.

  He shrugged. “I guess it’s none of my business.”

  I was annoyed then at the inherent stupidity of innocence, this attempt at peacemaking introducing sourness to an otherwise enjoyable encounter. We stood awkwardly, both searching for the right note to end on. Then, on a whim, I grabbed the script from under his arm, and walked a couple of blocks down and around the corner to the less convenient bus stop so we wouldn’t end up going in the same direction.

  

  I read Jason’s screenplay that night and it was a thing of beauty. The movie it made in my head was more vivid than the one I had just seen. The plot? Who cares. It was an archetype of old school Hollywood storytelling, operatic and suspenseful and romantic, even the smallest gestures a hundred times bigger than life, and everything as fraudulent and joyfully truthful as life ought to be. One line made me laugh out loud reading in bed. Mark did not ask me what, so I said “ha” to reiterate.

  “I thought you thought this guy was a dick,” said Mark.

  “Yeah, but he’s kind of a really good dick.”

  I had him read a few pages.

  “Clever,” he said. He was seventy pages into a screenplay he meant to shoot himself. A coming-of-age drama with an ambivalent ending. He’d been seventy pages into it for two years. I told myself I wasn’t being cruel. I told myself it would help him to see people finish things.

  * * *

  1Dearest Sappho,

  Sorry for being a jerk. It happens sometimes. You’re alright for a big Sappho. SORRY! *hearts* —HVC

  the myth
ic dimension

  That week I didn’t run into Jason again, but the subsequent Saturday there was another film in the series and I went to the same bar beforehand. He was there. We both pretended this was a funny coincidence. He didn’t ask me if I’d read it. I didn’t tell him he was right: he would be seeing his name in lights. I was excited for him, the way it is always exciting to meet a person with a destiny. We talked about the Bechdel test. Jason was of the mind that this was the worst kind of condescending East Coast elitism.

  “It’s a free market,” he said. “Basically the argument is that women in fly-over states should want more enlightened things.”

  I pointed out that we had a culture to enjoy as a result of East Coast elitism.

  “This is the Republic of Texas,” he said. “Kindly hang your colonialist horse shit at the door.”

  I pointed out that he and Harry were two of the most elitist people I ever met; they were constantly self-referring as “the boss” or “the king” or equivalent inflating parlance that could only be interpreted as performance art except neither of them were kidding.

  “Real people don’t go around calling themselves ‘the king,’” I said.

  “You have this weird obsession with what real people do,” he said. “Put it this way. My favorite book as a kid was The Macmillan Book of Greek Gods and Heroes.”

  I scoffed at the obviousness of this and respected him for ignoring it.

  “My mom got it for me for Christmas in the first grade. It put me on the path. What I learned was the distinction between fiction and myth, and the distinction is that fiction is fiction. There are different planes of reality. The one we see is tedious and mundane and it’s where most people spend every day half awake, with an underlying terror over their own insignificance. But there is another mythic plane that overlaps with the sort of lame one where life is both a personal experience and a symbolic act and you are the completely unfuck-with-able hero whose every step and setback and victory has cosmic implications—and the only difference between these two realities is which story you tell yourself.”

  “So do you buy you-flavored Kool-Aid in bulk?” I asked.

  “And the most important thing you can do in this moment is admit you’re afraid you agree with every word I just said.”

  It was unusual for him to make direct eye contact and more than a little disconcerting. By temperament, and because his ego didn’t need the help, I was compelled to take an adversarial stance against much of what came out of his mouth, while failing to bear in mind that even a person who talks too much can still be observant, that the way you withhold can be just as revealing as what they offer. I was surprised at how uncomfortable his look made me. The way he looked at you made you feel like you were the only thing in the world. I averted my eyes to my thumb worrying the sweat of my drink.

  “I come from a place where being an inch taller than everyone else means they’ll be waiting outside your door to cut you down to size,” I said.

  “Well you’re in Texas now,” he said.

  “Possibly,” I said.

  

  The next week we were in our now-customary spot immersed in our now-customary mode of conversation: impassioned, urgent, caroming from drink to drink and idea to idea, my elbow at that perpetual forty-five degrees. We were talking about our greatest fears. I was opening up to him. It’s possible I didn’t entirely mind being looked at like the only thing in the world.

  Hers: DISTRACTION. The demon of her line, which consisted of a high incidence of addled brilliance and existential turbulence. This demon had come to plague her once in the form of the magazine, but there were any number of dumb, devious masks it might wear to get close enough to insert its proboscis and drain the best of you, the stuff that was supposed to go into the work. This was the perennial question of being a participant versus an observer. Was it possible to be both, meaningfully? Maybe for some, not for her. In her bones she knew her calling was to sit somewhere quiet and watch, like Buddha under the tree, while this seductive adversary did its worst. The things that happen to you before your real life starts, that usurp it. She had made an agreement with herself that if she was unmarried and unpublished by the time she was thirty, she would throw herself under a train.

  “I have a suspicion you threaten to throw yourself under a train a lot more than the average person,” he said.

  His: the middle. He had been born middle middle class with a vertebral quirk inclining him to the firmament. A child, inevitably, of a librarian and a used-car salesman in post-Reagan suburbia, he had been raised in an environment of tract housing, diet sodas, and syndicated sitcoms. But he shared with his home state a native tendency toward bigness, attracting him to the monomyth, and its purest expression: the motion picture. Hitchcock, Scorsese, Coppola, men who wrote their dreams in light. The mass-manufactured disposability of the middle class fueled, rather than extinguished, the urgency of his mystical inquisitiveness; he spent his adolescence sharpening his wit with college students at Austin coffee houses and his bookshelf consisting of the trifecta of great twentieth-century religious synthesizers—Jung, Eliade, Campbell—as well as an unembarrassed collection of New Age self-help books—The Intuitive Warrior, The Tools, The Way of the Shaman. Like Eliade he saw the New Age movement for all the stigma surrounding it as essentially positive: faith in the power of what can’t be seen or measured, an affectionate optimism about the endless perfectibility of our species. Like Jung he not-so-secretly believed every word of it. A necessity, because the alternative was believing in suburbia.

  I thought of my mother. When I was little, her worst insult was “mediocre.” Her favorite insult was “cunt,” but there was always a hint of admiration when she used it. When she called somebody “mediocre” it was like a ray that reduced another person to absolute nothingness. One day I asked her what it meant.

  “When something is as far from being great as it is from being terrible,” she said.

  I realized I was telling him this, that I had inadvertently started talking about my mother with him. His face showed that he knew we’d entered precarious territory. His instincts, even then, directed him to be sensitive to my moods. I wanted to change the subject. Fate obliged. Abruptly he grew visibly tense: something had caught his eye and he averted his look, angling his body away from whatever he had seen.

  “What?” I said.

  “Group of suits by the piano,” he said.

  I looked over at a table of lawyer types, including one overweight young woman.

  “Is she looking this way?” said Jason.

  “What, did you bang her?” I asked, surprised. I expected a greater level of shallowness from him, and frankly would have been a little disappointed for this mystique to be dispelled.

  He crinkled his nose. “What, no. Is she giving me the evil eye?”

  “She hasn’t seen you.”

  He slouched into his stool. “Tell me if she does. No, don’t. I can’t even deal with the evil eye, it makes me so uncomfortable you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “You rogue,” I said. “What did you do?”

  “I briefly dated her friend. Her friend is much hotter, obviously. It became necessary to extricate myself from the situation, and it didn’t go over well.”

  “What, did you Houdini?”

  He shook his head in a jerky, Asp-y way. “Not clean. For one thing, it leaves the door open for when you’re feeling lonely or another girl has shot you down or whatever to drunk-text her. And for another thing, it’s unchivalrous. I told her I was engaged.”

  I looked at him skeptically.

  “In this scenario, I’m the clear villain. She’s not wondering if there’s something wrong with her or confirming the general agitas women of a certain age can feel toward dating because this was an outlier of shittiness.”

  “You know it’s way shittier to break it off with someo
ne without giving them an honest explanation.”

  He defended himself. “So in this scenario she’s working at a respectable law firm and doing pretty well, but is bored herself talking about work. One time after an all-nighter she goes into this Debbie Downer spiral thinking about how many hours of the last two days she’s spent in the same ten-by-twelve-foot box, which she then starts extrapolating over the next forty years of her life. By the end of this conversation I want to slit my wrists with a butter knife. But it’s a good income and she’s got however much in student loans and this timetable for when she wants a house and kids and blah blah blah, all of these notions she has convinced herself are more important than being free. And it would have been unchivalrous to tell her we wouldn’t be seeing each other anymore because everything she’s doing is wrong.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I said. “If you’re in a situation you can’t see the way out of, you need to rise above it.”

  (So pleased with my own success with this transcendent function, I was blithely forgetting my doubt and fatalism the previous fall, Mark physically preventing me from deleting my Hogwarts application at the last minute.)

  “Maybe you saying something about it would have given her the perspective she needed to do something,” I said. “Maybe not and it would have haunted her forever like a drip in the next room. It’s not for you to decide, and lying is never good juju, my friend.”

  It was unclear where my stance on this subject came from. I had been with the same person for seven years and the two boyfriends before that had gradually fizzled when we went to prep school and college, respectively. I’d never broken up with anyone in my life and could only attribute my sudden conviction to how pleasurable it was to disagree with Jason on anything because he was so obnoxious.