In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  Looking out, I see Vaughn carrying the American flag. He is jumping several feet into the air with each step, and the light from the Earth is reflecting off his glass helmet.

  We are on the moon.

  Kubrick

  I met Stanley Kubrick in the summer of 2001, right around the time I realized my writing career was over. It had taken me seven years to realize it, but the truth was that my career had ended before it had ever begun.

  I should have never left the New School with just a Master’s degree. If I’d stuck with the program, I could’ve been tenure track in some third- tier school somewhere in the Midwest. My friends did just that. Nicole Baker teaches creative writing and composition to depressive undergraduate girls and alcoholic, obese boys at the University of Texas, and Larry Moore is teaching at the University of Alberta, of all places, but I’d been overconfident. I’d convinced myself that I could make good as a commercial writer. After all, my first published story was selected for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Best American Short Stories of 1995, and after that I figured an ordinary life as a college professor was beneath me. I stayed in New York, took a job at a used bookstore to make ends meet, and stayed up nights to write my first novel. Seven years later, I was still looking for a publisher and could no longer convince myself that the job behind the cash register at Church Street Books was temporary.

  The moment before Kubrick strolled in to look at coffee table books and then offer me a job, I’d been in the back alley on a break. I’d finally caught up to my agent and was practicing my outdoor voice with her, holding the earpiece side of my cell phone in my fist and shouting into the microphone end.

  “I’m still young,” I’d shouted. “My ovaries still work, you Pepsodent zombie. You think it’s over for me? It’s not over.”

  The alley ran between the bookstore and the kitchen of an Indian restaurant with tiny windows painted purple and gold, and I could still smell fermenting curry when I stepped back behind the register.

  Stanly Kubrick looked like any other celebrity, in so much as he drew the eye. His outfit, a tailored blue suit covered by a clean blue overcoat, was subtly color-coordinated without being cute, and while he wasn’t handsome, there was something about the way he looked at me over the tops of his glasses, the way he stroked his scraggly grey beard and ran his palm over his balding head, that was charismatic. Attention flowed in his direction.

  He stood in the second aisle, took a heavy hardback copy of “The Aviators of World War Two” off the shelf, and then put the tome back.

  I approached him as casually as I could, said his name while his back was to me. He thumbed through chess books.

  “Mr. Kubrick?”

  He turned around and smiled at me. “Paula Austin?” he asked.

  I froze at the sound of my name, at the way my name sounded when spoken by the director.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “I’m a big fan of your work,” he said.

  We were each of us speaking the others’ lines. I took a breath and tried again, but the wrong words kept coming out of Stanley’s mouth.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “A very big fan of your writing.”

  “Ah . . . Thank you.”

  He’d read the story in the Best of 1995, the story entitled “A Broken Assemblage,” and was much impressed.

  “You were?”

  “Very much impressed, yes. May I buy you lunch?”

  “I’m not off work until seven.”

  “I want to hire you to write for me.”

  The Twin Towers

  I looked up at the phallic monsters on the superblock, and at the expansive empty space between the towers. Kubrick paused for a moment by the glass and concrete arches and pointed at the bronze sphere in the fountain.

  “Why is it that every public sculpture is supposed to represent world peace?” Kubrick asked.

  “Does it?”

  “Smooth and featureless, right?” Kubrick asked.

  I crossed my arms and bit my lip. It was windy between the buildings and water from the fountain was caught by periodic gusts. Water droplets soaked through my thin blouse, and I wished I’d worn a sweater.

  “It’s a ball,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Not a symbol for capitalism.”

  “You’re saying that capitalism isn’t a ball?”

  Kubrick had keys for everything. He opened the huge double doors to the South Tower, pressed a button for the elevator, and then used another key inside the box. He turned the key and pressed the button for the basement, and took me down to the lunar surface.

  The moon was underneath the World Trade Center. A man in a white oxford-cloth shirt, khaki pants, and a navy blue tie had a large compass in his right hand and a photograph of the moon in his left. He measured the surface of the giant globe, the model of the moon that filled the high-ceilinged room, and then compared the measurement with what was in the photo. I watched this from inside the elevator, stupefied by the dim spectacle of empty space and the giant globe, and then stepped forward onto the set.

  Kubrick was gone. He’d been right beside me in the elevator, but when doors closed behind me, I looked around to find that the director had disappeared and, instead of Kubrick waiting for me by the moon, there were movie stars.

  Nicolas Cage was wearing a white coat, holding a pocket calculator, and talking to the man who was measuring the moon. The actor had his sly smile going, the smile that always made me wonder how anyone so creepy looking could have ever made a career in Hollywood, while the girl with him was doing her best to come across as something more substantial than a seventeen-year-old with a media coach and a personal stylist. The three of them didn’t really fit together, but it wasn’t up to me to understand. I was just the writer.

  “Nicolas Cage?” I asked.

  “That’s right. And who do I have the pleasure of meeting?”

  “Paula Austin.”

  “Oh. Yes,” Cage said. “The writer.”

  The man with the compass and photographs explained that a dust storm would be nearly impossible to replicate at the scale Kubrick was asking for.

  “We could do it in camera,” the scientist said. “Or, if Stanley will let me, I could produce the effect digitally.”

  “I don’t think Mr. Kubrick is going to allow CGI effects to pollute the project,” Nicolas said. “Do you?” he asked the girl.

  “No. He wouldn’t want to pollute the project with CGI.”

  “You’re going to star in the movie?” I asked.

  “Me?” Cage asked. “No. I’m too well known.”

  “We’re not acting in the movie. We’re acting on the set,” the girl said.

  “Oh.”

  “You don’t recognize her?” Cage asked. I shrugged. “Scarlett here was in The Horse Whisperer.”

  “Evans’s book?”

  “Redford’s movie,” Johansson said.

  “Right.”

  “And now you’re acting on Kubrick’s set, but not in his movie?”

  Scarlett smiled nervously at me and, for an instant, I thought I recognized her, but then realized that I was thinking of Molly Ringwald.

  “Stanley is very detail oriented,” Cage said. He pointed at the tracks that encircled the moon model, and then leaned in close to me and put his arm around my shoulder in a way that was a bit menacing.

  “Look in the gaps,” Cage said. He was too close, but his breath was very fresh. He smelled like organic mint and warm tea, maybe a bit like antiseptic soap. “Look,” he repeated.

  There were boxes, wooden boxes with glass fronts, in the spaces between the ties. These were Joseph Cornell’s “Assemblages,” and while at first I wasn’t sure if they were authentic or not, eventually I came to believe in them.

  The first box was entitled Solar Set and contained five tiny shot glasses, and each shot glass was held in place by tiny nails around the foot. Each glass contained a marble. There were two red marbles, two blue marbl
es, and one green. The next box contained an illustration of the moon taken from a nineteenth-century astronomy book. A yellow cork ball that ran along a wire track at the top was meant to represent the sun, and thereby the movement of time. I’d seen the box before at the Met, and I could still remember bits about the work that I’d picked up from the audio guide.

  The next box contained a photograph of Lauren Bacall, the next one a clay pipe for making soap bubbles, and the next contained a paper cut-out of a green and red feathered parrot.

  Looking at each assemblage as I moved in orbit around the moon I came to feel very strange. If these weren’t the original works, if they were not the actual dream boxes made by the American Dadaist Joseph Cornell, then they were forgeries that made the distinction between copy and original irrelevant. What mattered was encountering life as something that could be preserved behind glass. Stuffed birds, blue and red glass marbles, feathers and clothespins, all were made into something more than what they were on their own, into something somehow more than real.

  I moved to the dark side of the moon, where there was only a green light from the emergency exit sign. I struggled to discern what the assemblages on the dark side contained. I stared and stared, opening my eyes wide in the dark, until finally I picked up the box with shot glasses and marbles again. I stood up straight and looked around and realized that Scarlett Johansson and Nicolas Cage were gone. The movie stars had left and the entirety of the moon was dark.

  Kubrick still wasn’t anywhere to be seen, and the scientists in khaki pants and white dress shirts were gone. And I called out into the darkness a few times. I called out for help until I came to accept that I was alone.

  I decided to find the elevator again. I crawled in the dark, heading in as straight a line as I could manage as I fumbled over wooden tracks and thick electrical cords.

  I held onto what I thought was carpet until I saw the soft glow of the button for the elevator. There was only one button with an arrow that pointed up, and when I was inside it the only light came from the buttons for the floors. I reached out for a light switch and accidentally pressed the button for floor 76.

  The elevator ascended and the overhead light slowly turned on. Dim at first, but then brighter and brighter as I made my way up.

  Digital Transitions

  My boyfriend Donnie told me that I ought to include a dog in the story. If Americans were going to go back into space, if there was going to be a return to the idealism of the ’50s and ’60s, a return to the stars, then I had to bring Fido along for the ride. Any idealistic public project that was going to take hold of the public’s imagination in this new millennium would have to be cute.

  “People want to believe in innocence, and that means animals. Puppy dogs, guinea pigs, maybe a talking insect? You need their unreserved sympathy,” Donnie said. There was no reason to worry about the implications. It was a job, and that was all. He took a gulp of beer from a green bottle and then set the bottle down on the remote control accidentally.

  On the television set, Jim Carrey made a face at the audience. His body seemed to be made out of rubber and he took his left leg and raised it over his head so that he appeared to be carrying himself on his own shoulder.

  Donnie worked in animation as a freelance digital editor. He’d worked for Fox Animation, Warner Bros, Dream Works, and with Lucasfilm on a project called “Monkey Island” although he didn’t like to talk about that one. Actually he rarely talked about any of his films. Once we watched Shrek together and he couldn’t point out anything he’d done. He’d try to tell me, but his work went by too quickly or subtly. I could never see it.

  “I edit so they don’t notice cuts and jumps,” he said. “If you really want to miss out on my best work, then look at Anastasia. That film has perfect transitions,” Donnie told me. “Whatever problems there are in that film have nothing to do with what I did. What I did was invisible. The movie is seamless.”

  We were drunk in our studio apartment. Actually, Donnie was drunk, and I was working on catching up. I poured vodka and lemonade into an oversized red plastic cup and thought about all the smooth cuts, the little invisible spaces, in Anastasia.

  Maybe Donnie was right. I needed a dog in the story, and not just any dog, but that dog the Russians had sent into space to die. I needed the Sputnik dog, and by Googling I found her name was Laika.

  We would have never landed on the moon if it hadn’t been for Laika. Without the Russians beating us, without the threat of communism, we would have never have gone. After all, there were no material reasons to go up. It wasn’t as though we were expecting to find oil up on the moon, or diamonds or anything. There was nothing up there worth having, but still we had to get there first.

  So yes, I needed a dog like Laika. After all, people would want to see an American version of Laika on the moon. I needed something tangible to motivate the audience and the characters.

  “Richard Nixon,” Donnie said.

  “What?”

  “Richard Nixon was president when they went to the moon,” he said.

  I went to get ice from our stainless steel refrigerator. Donnie didn’t make consistent money; I was the one who paid the rent for our tiny little apartment, but when Donnie did make money, he’d usually make a substantial pile of it. We had a European refrigerator with a transparent Plexiglass front panel and a cold, clean, stainless steel freezer door. We had to keep the inside of the refrigerator clean because everything inside was always on display, but I enjoyed the discipline of that. I’d arrange the apples in a glass bowl and place them on a lower shelf. When I shopped I purchased items based on the color of the packaging, and ended up with a lot of greens and oranges. Perrier bottles and liters of orange soda are very pretty, I think.

  The appliance seemed to match with the concrete walls in our unit. It was very clean, and it produced ribbons instead of cubes. Ice ribbons that came out of our Bosch freezer. They were curved like peppermint holiday candies. These ribbons wouldn’t fit in a glass unless you snapped them into pieces, but the uniqueness of our ice made me feel like I’d arrived at something. I’d open the stainless steel door of the freezer, take an ice ribbon out of the metal bin, and feel as though I’d proven that art and everyday life could combine.

  I returned to our bedroom and watched Jim Carrey dance with Lauren Hutton. She kept trying to bite Carrey, but he was too rubbery and agile for her. I put the ribbon of ice in my mouth so that it held my mouth open and then turned to Donnie to show him how ridiculous I looked, but Donnie’s eyes were closed.

  Maybe this Moon Mission could include the daughter of Christa McAuliffe? The story could be about how little Carly McAuliffe, now all grown up, was going to go to the moon in order to honor her mother’s memory. Instead of the big ideological space race, this Last Apollo Mission would be a kind of coming-of-age story. It would be the story of reconciliation between a beautiful young astronaut and her dead schoolteacher mom. The side plot would be the story of a young jet fighter pilot struggling with alcoholism. He’d dry out when offered the chance to go back up there and make something out of his life.

  The ice in my mouth slowly melted as I watched Jim Carrey close the lid to his own coffin. He had a stupid smile on his face and then he was trapped inside the box.

  In 1969, the men who came back from the moon had used solar wind to power their craft, and they’d used a thin strip of aluminum as a solar sail. From the moon, they’d used lasers to measure the distance from the moon to Earth to within a fraction-of-an-inch accuracy, and they’d drilled an eight-foot soil sample. What kinds of practical projects could the new astronauts accomplish? Maybe they’d put a webcam on the American flag, or maybe they could build a sauna?

  The ice in my mouth slipped from between my lips and to the orange carpet. I swallowed the rest of my vodka lemonade in one go and then climbed onto the couch next to Donnie. His eyes were closed, but when I cuddled up with him, he put his hands on my breasts and pressed against me. He put his to
ngue in my ear.

  Richard Nixon had seemed happy for the astronauts when they got back. All the photographs show Nixon laughing, but maybe George Bush would be visibly disappointed when the astronauts made it back alive? He’d resent them for their success, and then finally admit that he’d wanted to go with them. They’d tell him that, while he might be president, he was no astronaut. And they’d tell him that nobody wanted to be stuck with him in the capsule. Not even the Republican astronauts wanted George Bush to come along for a ride in a cramped space capsule. Nobody wanted George Bush on the moon.

  I took off my sweater and fetched the rust-colored knitted blanket off the back of the couch, while Donnie put his hands between my legs. He made it seem very natural so that I hardly noticed him doing it. He really was masterful with transitions.

  Stripping like Barbarella

  Donnie wants me to strip in the same way that Jane Fonda stripped during the opening credits for the film Barbarella. In the film sequence, Fonda floats weightless in her space capsule and removes her spacesuit. First she undoes the silver glove and then she removes the sleeve. She removes one leg of the suit and then the other. Her toes are pointed and her knees are bent. Her thighs appears to be perfect, her skin soft and smooth.

  Perhaps the most erotic moment occurs when the tint in the glass of her bubble helmet dissipates. It looks as though the helmet is draining; all the bad black fluid disappears, and Fonda’s oval face, her wide eyes and phony smile, are visible behind the glass.

  We’ve been trapped on the moon for weeks, and I’ve made my desire clear to him, but he needs this stripping if he’s going to perform the act. Donnie wants me to strip like Jane Fonda.

  “We’re stuck here, yeah? So we might as well live out the fantasy of it,” he says.

  “Your fantasy.”

  “Of course, yeah.”

  “What about my fantasy?”

  This strikes Donnie as a welcome diversion. If I have a moon fantasy that he can fulfill, then we’ll do mine first, he says, but afterwards I’ll still have to strip like Jane Fonda.