The Lights

by Brian McGreevy

  “You really, really would love a credible opportunity to shoot another human being,” I said.

  He fired several more shots into the target’s head, and ululated in a Middle Eastern way. Then he reloaded the gun and gave it to me. I actually had been observing him and tried to emulate his calm concentration. I closed one eye.

  “Keep both eyes open,” he said.

  “That doesn’t feel right,” I said.

  “Well it is. You have to make your eyes sort of Chinese-y.”

  I squinted and my vision doubled, but I maintained focus on the front site between the doppelganger of my hands and inhaled slowly, and between the inhalation and exhalation pulled the trigger. I was still off by a mile, anticipating the noise of the recoil and jerking, but realized that the feeling of the gun in my hand as a loved and powerful part of myself and not an ugly man’s toy was as good as I had felt lately.

  “I’m having unbearable penis envy,” I said, turning to Harry.

  He cringed, taking my arms and steering them so the barrel pointed down range and not at his face.

  “Finger off the trigger,” he said. “Finger off the trigger.”

  Later, we took out our earplugs and collected the spent casings and dropped them in a plastic bucket.

  “You’re not the bad guy here,” he said.

  I looked at him, but he continued picking up casings.

  “When my sadistic whore ex-wife completely emasculated me, she wanted nothing more than to have a baby,” he said. “She didn’t want her career to keep her from having a family and the agency was willing to let me go down to part time. But I was too selfish for that, and I knew it. What we do is the most selfish thing in the world. And I had years on my side, but she didn’t, so she did what she had to. Could she have done it better? Yeah. So could I. So could everyone. People are a mess. People do shit to each other. Most of it is pretty understandable in their shoes and forgivable if it doesn’t become a habit. So do me a favor and take it easy on the man cub. I have a lot of fondness for him, you know. But he is soft in a way that you and me aren’t. It’s not his worst quality.”

  I was surprised he was willing to admit the likeness between us. I didn’t think he could say it about a woman.

  His eyes lit then.

  “Look at that,” he said, and gestured down-range, but I couldn’t see whatever I was meant to.

  He walked onto the range a few yards out and pointed to a caterpillar in the grass, though it was unlike any caterpillar I had seen. It was green and totally smooth and very large like something out of the rainforest, at its plumpest nearly the circumference of my thumb. I would never have spotted it from the distance like he had, and realized that to do so required a degree of attunement to the natural world, which I secretly feared my lack of trivialized me as an artist.

  His eyes lit again and he took a stick from the ground, which he used to pick up the caterpillar and run it to the dirt bank at the far end of the range, then jogged back, beckoning me.

  “Oh, come on,” I said.

  But I followed and stuck my fingers in my ears as he sited carefully with a rifle and fired once. We walked again to the end of the range. What remained of the caterpillar was a spatter of incandescent green against the furrow of dirt like gemstones. I seized Harry’s arm, unable to believe how pretty it was.

  oh, the places you’ll go

  In the fall of the next year, his last at Hogwarts, Jason started working with a Hollywood manager. His script had placed decently in a screenwriting competition and this manager contacted him requesting a copy. Days later he called Jason in excitement, saying that the script had “X factor.” Malloy was the manager’s name; I don’t recall his given name as Jason only ever referred to him as Malloy, or later “that Irish fuck.” Malloy told him his script was “ninety percent there.” Of course Jason and I were thrilled, as this could only mean he was going to be a millionaire next week. I came up with a logical argument to help Jason prepare for this windfall: it is said money does not buy happiness; thus, it can be assumed people are spending their money on things that don’t make them happy; ergo, figure out the thing that makes you more happy than anything else and spend your money on that.

  “I think that probably what makes me happier than anything else is…room service,” I said.

  “So really what we’re doing is figuring out how to make you happy?” he said.

  “Baby, let’s be honest that your happiness pretty much depends on my happiness.”

  He didn’t argue.

  However, it soon became apparent that Malloy was not actually of woman born but had emerged from some dark, malign recess solely to be the bane of Jason’s existence. Because their relationship existed exclusively by telephone, there were times I wondered if there was actually someone on the other end. In a place like Hogwarts where the apotheosis of success would have been to get a modest print run from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and appear on Terry Gross, Malloy was the archetype of profanity. Next week rolled into next month as “ninety percent there” became an endless series of notes and revisions. As an example, Malloy did not approve of abstractions, like when Jason explained a character’s irrational bravado as stemming from a deep-seated fear of his own cowardice.

  MALLOY: Slow down, college boy. Leo isn’t afraid of being some kind of pussy. Leo eats pussies. What if…he tried to pull his wife out of a train wreck but the train exploded?

  JASON: I’m not sure that’s how steam engines work.

  MALLOY: Then he could have a limp! No, a cripple is one step removed from being a pussy. He’s addicted to painkillers!

  JASON: Laudanum.

  MALLOY: Huh?

  JASON: If he was addicted to something it would probably be laudanum.

  MALLOY (irritatedly indifferent): Details.

  JASON: Details matter.

  MALLOY (irritatedly indifferent): So he’s addicted to la de dah. Then he’s a cripple, but on the inside.

  JASON: Doesn’t that bring us back to the cowardice issue?

  MALLOY: Yeah… (thinks) What if he had a kid who was there for the train wreck incident and went autistic?

  JASON: I’m not sure that’s how autism works.

  MALLOY: But, I mean, adoptably autistic.

  This process began the actual education, which Jason believed he’d been receiving in the academy, mainly in three lessons, hard earned. The first was the utter lack of irony with which the film industry regards itself; it is the perennial story that commerce feels zero onus to present itself as anything but self-parody to the artist. (“We have two modes, college boy: hustle and sleep. Are you sleeping right now?”) The second was to fear more than anything the words “what if.” That winter he spent hours and hours on phone conferences with Malloy, often sitting on the stairs outside my apartment, and I could tell when he heard those words because of the tremor that would run though his hunched shoulders like a beaten child. But this was where the rubber met the road. (“This is where the rubber meets the road,” Malloy told Jason, as though sensing his verging tears of frustration.) It had always been Jason’s ambition to be a Hollywood writer, but this was one thing relative to Hogwarts and another to Malloy; what Jason considered his own commercial instincts—honed as they were at the altar of Hitchcock and the Hollywood New Wave—were in fact too elitist and esoteric for twenty-first century Hollywood. When challenged by Malloy for a movie he had liked recently Jason named a French gangster movie; nothing too pretentious, just a stylish little thriller that happened to be in the French language. Malloy scoffed. “I watch movies before I go to bed, I don’t want to read.” The disdain with which he stressed the last syllable contained the third lesson, and possibly the most important for Jason in the last of his Hogwarts days: success in Hollywood meant writing for an audience that did not like to read. Once this clicked, Jason had it: where Malloy was resisting him was wh
en he was using his intellect as a crutch.

  “That Irish fuck isn’t wrong,” he said. “Part of me is still trying to win a philosophical argument. Fuck philosophy, what am I, a playwright? It’s my job to find the good version of what he wants the moronic version of.”

  Thus the third rail was found between Jason’s problematic literacy and Malloy’s philistinism. If an element wasn’t landing it was because Jason hadn’t worked hard enough to find the solution his taste could countenance that still succeeded on the level of id. In the next draft Jason took all his pet philosophical ideas and refracted them into a more primal lexicon of kiss kiss bang bang, culminating in a third act consisting of an extended white-knuckle chase sequence that exhausted his thesaurus of synonyms for the word “run” (barrel, bolt, bound, careen, carom, charge, dart, dash, etc.)—which was by a mile the most impressive technical achievement he had produced yet, and, in a medium defined by kinesis, objectively improved the script.

  “I will cut off my fingers before I ever write another character pondering his existential situation,” said Jason.

  “I think we have something really special on our hands,” said Malloy.

  By now it was April, and though the path here had been frustrating, as long as he became a millionaire before graduating he would be happy. Malloy told him he had an agent in mind who would be a good fit and indeed had given it “a rave,” but it was nearly a month before Jason could get on the phone with her. This did a number on him. He tried to find meaning in why she kept rescheduling, but could accept none except the fraudulence of her interest, and fuel for his growing fear of having worked for six months with a man he had never met. I told him that based on my magazine experience sometimes months would go by before editors responded to a story that had been filed and he should try not to read into it. He didn’t listen to me. He was incapable of listening to me, he was incapable of letting me help. It was no more in his power to climb out of Fort Jason than it was in mine to climb in. It did not improve things that Harry could.

  “He says none of this is aboveboard,” said Jason. “It’s weird that I’ve been doing all this free work for this guy with no contract or transparency.”

  I now knew there was nothing I could do to alleviate Jason’s paranoia. He had no personal experience of the business world so all Harry had to do was use grown-up words like TRANSPARENCY to exert ultimate authority over him. This precipitated a fight between us because this was all the confirmation I needed of the subtle and insidious chess game Harry was playing against me.

  This pertained to another development that year, which was that the university had instituted a new student literary prize, which, in inimitable Texas fashion, was for nearly $100,000. The impact on Hogwarts was seismic, the knee-jerk reaction being snobbish disdain—what a gauche spectacle, a literary minstrel show—but this masked a grimmer truth. Because while the university had over fifty thousand students, it was obvious that this was a de facto Hogwarts competition, giving lie to the program’s democratic auspices. The fact was, we were in a position of staggeringly undemocratic prestige relative to the mother institution, and in this womb we had become sharks. (Sharks are intra-uterine cannibals.) Nature is not a democracy. When this prize was announced I doubt Harry’s erection went down for a week. His cult of social Darwinism had established a temple, finally there was something quantifiable to win.

  Amplifying the offensiveness of this prize was its single mandate, to reward the work that best encapsulated AMERICA IN MICROCOSM. Sturm und Drang. Could there have been a clearer message to emulate the Dead White Males whose palate-friendly dominion was so antithetical to why many of us were here in the first place? Could our ineffectual protests have hidden less how much all of us wanted that goddamn prize?

  “That neck-less piece of shit is trying to get into my head,” I said. “I mean, ‘neck-less’ as a physical attribute, not like jewelry.”

  “I’m following,” said Jason. “But the math here is giving me trouble.”

  “He’s trying to wind you up because he knows it will psych me out.”

  “Okay. I guess I don’t see him as trying to wind me up, he’s just trying to give me data points.”

  “Did you know that I hate that word? Data points. Because I really do. It’s not that I hate it like intrinsically, like, ontologically it is fine, if a little crass. But I hate that word the way the two of you use it in your he-man woman-haters club sort of way.”

  “It’s actually two words,” said Jason.

  “That happens in close romantic relationships, you know. Vocal mimicry. If an impartial third party were to hear recordings of the three of us talking, I wonder which two they would conclude were fucking.”

  “Are we honestly having a vocabulary fight?”

  “This isn’t a fight! Who said this was a fight! I’m just saying it would be an interesting experiment.”

  “Okay. I guess I don’t see the sinister master plan in my friend giving me an unbiased perspective on a professional question.”

  “Unbiased,” I said with a laugh that I did not want to believe was a sound coming out of me.

  “He just wants to help me. In the same way that, if the roles were reversed, I’d want to help him. It’s a pretty astoundingly uncomplicated human impulse.”

  “If you ever helped Harry he would bite your hand off.”

  “Supposing the utter redundancy at this point of trying to poison that well, can we explore the radical paranoia of believing he’s only doing it to get to you?”

  “Exactly!” I punched him in the arm for strengthening my case. “That is exactly what his plan would be, because then if I call him out on it you just call me a crazy bitch and it’s still a success.”

  “Jesus Christ, no one called you a crazy bitch. You called yourself that.”

  “You did. You called me a crazy bitch! But it’s fine. It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine. I know you’ve got a lot on your mind right now, so I wouldn’t want my writing to be an inconvenience.”

  This was stooping. When I review the transcripts of some of the things I said to manipulate the given argument in my favor, there is plenty I’m not proud of; however, accusing him of wanting to fuck other girls or loving me less than the guy I left him for or loving his misogynistic neck-less piece of shit best friend more than me all fell into the category of fair play, by Galvan rules. But some things are sacred, and whatever we did to each other as a boy and a girl was separate from the simple goodness we did for each other as artists. We supported each other with a religious lack of question or condition. Even the oblique incrimination that he was treating me like a GARDENER went to the quick, and, seeing that woundedness in his eyes from this low tactic, I wanted nothing more than to hold and comfort this sweet boy who after all this time still did not understand why I would hurt him like that, as I looked at him with the savage smugness of a Galvan holding the whip.

  “Can you please explain to me what the point of psyching you out would be when the stories are already in the process of being judged?” said Jason.

  “Irrelevant. You know how competitive he is. You know that Art of War shit he’s into. He’s so afraid of losing to me that he would try to get into my head just so that’s what I was putting into the universe.”

  Jason considered this. “You are being a crazy bitch,” he said.

  “You’ll see. When you learn what a mistake it was to be loyal to him over me I want you to remember something. I forgive you. Okay? Remember that I forgive you for what you’re bringing on yourself.”

  “I guess I’m done with this conversation,” said Jason, deflated in a way that meant I wasn’t even going to get mean sex out of this.

  “I forgive you, baby,” I said.

  Of course he was also getting the same from the other side.

  “She’s undermining you,” Harry told him (in my mind—though I was hardly ima
gining things). “You think she wants you to be successful, but that’s the last thing she wants. And if she thinks there is the danger of you becoming the player that we all know you’re meant to become, she is going to drop a nuclear warhead on it. Because rich, young Hollywood ballers don’t marry their alcoholic train wreck grad school girlfriend.”

  But tensions diffused when Jason finally got this agent on the phone. It was a ruby slippers moment: the entire point of the call was to determine whether or not Jason was interested in working with her. She and Malloy agreed that the ideal strategy would be to take the script out the first week of May.

  “Apparently, it’s when the studios are just starting to get their beaks wet with summer money. They’re primed,” said Jason at a celebration group outing that night. The pleasure he took in speaking knowledgeably about industry workings was like a child in his father’s lap pretending to drive the car.

  I was surprised by how happy I was. Of course I knew I would be happy for him, Harry was offensively wrong on that score, but the pride I felt for him was alarming, narcotic, possessive, queasy; he was lucent, a comet in reverse—no wake, but trajectory searing. He had a destiny. There is no feeling to match the ferocious pride you feel for someone whose genitals have been in your mouth.

  “I guess all the rescheduling was just because she was busy,” said Harry. “In the future we should remember that the stakes for us are completely different than the stakes for them, and it’s impossible to read into anything.”

  “Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” I said, not observing that this was the exact point I had been making when Harry had been driving Jason out onto the ledge. Though I was over the idea that doing so was part of Harry’s strategic campaign against me—if I had even believed this accusation myself as much as needed Jason’s concession he was capable of it.

  It is winter. I go to bed with running clothes on so when I wake up I can be moving instantly, propelled outside, teeth hurting in the cold, face florid red, the only color in the landscape. I do this as an insurance policy that I will get out of bed. It should be tranquil, the streetlamps go out and the violet of dawn becomes the blue of day, black snarl-tooth pilings emerging from the water, the only souls out this hour the gainfully employed and the elderly, evidence that civilization is on the rails. But for it to be tranquil would require it to be quiet, and that would require a different person’s brain, one that didn’t have the thoughts that are in mine, ninety-nine out of a hundred being resentments or regrets, flipping over each other like fish for crumbs. I try to focus on the one that is not pitying or destructive, the one that is curious without judgment about the variables that led to my present circumstances, that all the same would prefer not to repeat them, not to go through life as Diane II, martyr after all to her inability to identify how responsible she is for feeling how she feels. When these thoughts turn, as they often do, to Texas the most overridingly reasonable of them is bafflement over the things Jason and I fought over.