It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  She slides open the heavy pocket-door to the living room and shoves the wheelchair over the high threshold into the darkened room. The Fifes’ apartment was originally occupied by the monsignor who supervised the seminary. It’s a wood-paneled, three-bedroom flat with a formal dining room, parlor, reception hall, office, and library that Fife uses as an editing room. He bought the apartment in the late 1980s when the bottom fell out of Westmount real estate. Leonard Fife and Emma Gold are childless, bilingual, socially attractive, artistic semi-celebrities, and over the years they have adapted the rooms to suit the mingled needs of their professional and personal lives.

  Nothing in the room is the way he remembers it. Instead of entering a large, high-ceilinged, brightly lit room with four tall, old-fashioned casement windows, a warm, inviting, yet intellectually and artistically serious room, the low, mid-twentieth-century sofas, chairs, and tables deliberately arranged so that three or four or even more complicated, earnest discussions can take place simultaneously, Fife has entered a black box of unknown dimensions. He knows that he and Renée are not alone—he can feel the presence of several other people in the box, perhaps as many as four. Their silence is sudden, as if caused by his entry, as if they don’t want him to know they have been talking about him. About his illness.

  He can hear their breathing.

  Over here, Leo! It’s Malcolm, speaking in English. He says, Vincent, give us some light, will you?

  Vincent is the cameraman—though he prefers to be called director of photography. DP. Vincent asks Malcolm if he wants the houselights on. So Leo can get his bearings, he adds. Good morning, Leo. Thanks for letting us do this, man. Really appreciate it. Among friends Fife is known as Leo.

  Malcolm, too, says good morning and thanks him. Let’s hold off on the lights for now, Vincent. It took us a fucking hour to get it totally dark, he says, and all the lamps and light fixtures are moved.

  Vincent hits a switch, and a small, sharply cut circle of light appears on the bare wooden floor. It’s where Fife will be interrogated. He remembers that section of the floor being covered by the Karastan carpet he and Emma brought back from Iran in ’88. Fife would prefer to keep the room in total darkness, just let him be a voice emitted from the dark, but he knows what kind of film Malcolm has planned. Malcolm needs that single pin spot. Fife hopes he won’t have to hear Malcolm and his crew tell him again how great he looks. He got more than enough of that last month when they visited him at the Segal Cancer Centre and someone had the bright idea to shoot this interview.

  Actually, he thinks it was his idea, not Malcolm’s or anyone else’s. And it wasn’t because he thought he looked good enough to be on camera. It was because he knew he was dying.

  A woman’s voice trills out of the darkness, thanking him. Fife recognizes the voice as Diana’s, Malcolm’s producer and longtime home companion. They are all grateful to him, she says. Her high-pitched thin voice sounds to Fife like a repressed shriek. Anytime you want to take a break, she says, or rest or whatever, just do it. Don’t push yourself.

  Malcolm and his crew are based in Toronto, and everyone is speaking English now. To Renée, Diana says, Bring the wheelchair over here into the spotlight, will you, dear? We’re not going to show the chair, just Leo’s face, sometimes straight on, sometimes in profile or even from behind. Everything else will be blacked out. She says it with the condescending authority of a British grade-school teacher. Renée couldn’t care less how they intend to shoot Fife, but she understands Diana well enough to place his wheelchair directly under the pin spot.

  It’s the style you invented, man, says Malcolm. Backlight the off-camera side of the subject’s face, nothing else. He steps up to the wheelchair and lays a hand on Fife’s shoulder. Seemed only appropriate. Hope you don’t object.

  No, I don’t object.

  Consider it a protégé’s homage.

  A protégé’s homage. Fair enough, I guess. Who else is here? In the room, I mean.

  Sloan’s over there in the corner. She’ll mic you and run the sound. You met her a couple times in Toronto.

  I remember, Fife says, cutting him off. He believes that Malcolm is having an affair with the girl. She’s a pretty redheaded kid with freckles and can’t be more than twenty-four or twenty-five. Malcolm is close to fifty now. How is that possible? Fife has ex-students, protégés, who are old enough to have inappropriate affairs with interns and famous enough to be able to hook and land the financing and distribution for a filmed final interview with Leonard Fife, himself a documentarian, too old and sick now for inappropriate affairs and famous only in certain, unfashionably leftist quarters, a man who couldn’t raise the money for a project like this on his own.

  Malcolm Shoumatoff films the history of Canada, soft-focus liberal takes on early settlement, les coureurs de bois, the Native Peoples, Loyalist immigrants from the American War of Independence, American slaves who followed the North Star on the Underground Railroad, hockey, Cajun music. He’s the Ken Burns of the North, and now he’s documenting his old professor’s final confession. Malcolm thinks he’s about to film his mentor’s last interview and has written out twenty-five questions designed to seduce Fife into making the kind of provocative and often profound remarks and observations that he is famous for, at least among those who know him personally or studied with him at Concordia back in the 1980s and ’90s.

  Fife tells Renée to park him where they want him and then please bring Madame Fife here, he has something important that he must tell her.

  Renée moves his chair into the circle of light. She sets the brake and disappears into the darkness beyond.

  Fife wants to know where the camera is located.

  Don’t worry about it, man. All you got to do is sit there and do what you do best.

  Which is?

  Talk.

  Talk? That’s what I do best?

  You know what I mean. What you do better than anyone else. What you do best, of course, is make your films. You sure you’re feeling up to this, Leo? I don’t want to push you, bro. We don’t have to do the entire shoot today, if you’re not up to it. Maybe just thirty minutes or so, till we use up the first card. We can come back tomorrow to continue.

  Diana chimes in and confirms. We can stay in Montreal all week, if it suits you, and edit in the hotel as we go. There’s no need to shoot it all in one day and go back to Toronto for the editing.

  Fife says, I want to keep you here. Until I finish telling everything.

  What do you mean, ‘everything’? Diana asks. Malcolm and I have worked up some great questions.

  I’m sure you have.

  The girl, Sloan, has stepped out of the darkness and is miking him. She clips the tiny mic onto the collar band of the black long-sleeved mock turtleneck shirt that has been part of Fife’s uniform for decades. He likes being touched by her. He likes the mingled smell of cigarettes and sweat and minty shampoo. Young women smell different and better than middle-aged and older women. It’s as if desire has one scent and longing for desire has another. When Emma leans down in the morning to kiss his cheek before leaving for the production company office downtown, she smells of English breakfast tea and unscented soap. And longing for desire. This girl, Sloan, smells of desire itself.

  It’s not fair to notice that, he thinks.

  But it is true. And Emma’s morning smell is not unpleasant. Just one that’s empty of desire and filled with a wish for it to return. He wonders what he smells like now, especially to a young woman. To Sloan. Can she pick up the odor of his medications, the antiandrogens he was on for months and the Taxotere and prednisone he started this past week? Can she smell the bisphosphonates he’s taking to keep his bones from breaking under the weight of his body, the morphine patches, the urine dripping from his bladder into the catheter and tube emptying into the bag hooked onto his chair? The bits of dried feces clinging to his butt? To Sloan he must smell like a hospital ward for chemically castrated old men dying of cancer.

 
Tell me again why I came home from the hospital, he says to no one in particular.

  Malcolm says, I imagine you’re a hell of a lot happier here. With Emma being close by, I mean, and everything that’s familiar.

  There’s no more being happy or happier, Malcolm. He’d like to add—but doesn’t—that all there is for him now is more pain and less pain, more and less dread, more and less fear. Along with more and less shame, anger, embarrassment, anxiety, depression. And more and less confusion.

  C’mon, Leo. Don’t talk like that, Malcolm says.

  I believe I can talk any damned way I want now.

  Yeah, you can. That’s why we’re here today. Right?

  Right.

  Sloan puts her headphones on, and the darkness swallows her.

  Where the hell is my wife? Fife asks the darkness. He can still smell Sloan.

  Right behind you, Emma says in her low, smoker’s voice. Renée told me you wouldn’t do this unless I’m present. True?

  True.

  Why? This is for posterity. I’m not posterity, she says, and laughs. I’m your wife.

  It’s easier for me to know what to say and what not to say if I know who I’m talking to.

  You’re talking to Malcolm.

  No! No, I’m not. He and Vincent and Diana and Sloan, they’re only here to film and record me, so they can cut and splice my images and words together and make from those digitalized images and words a little forty-five-minute movie that they sold to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation so it can be resold to Canadian television viewers after I’ve gone and before I’m forgotten. Malcolm and Diana won’t be listening to me and watching me. They’re making a movie. Different thing.

  Emma asks Diana for some light so she can find someplace to sit.

  Sloan, Diana says, but Sloan is listening only to Fife through her headphones.

  Vincent flips on the overhead light, and Fife sees that they have pushed all the furniture against one wall, making the room seem as large and empty as a hotel ballroom. With all the furniture clustered at the far wall in front of the fireplace and surrounding built-in bookshelves, the room feels tilted onto its side, as if it’s a cruise ship, not a hotel, and the ship has struck a reef and is listing and about to go down. Fife suddenly feels nauseous. He’s afraid he’s going to vomit.

  Emma crosses to the pile of furniture, and the ship lists a few inches further in that direction. She sits on the end of a sofa, crosses her arms and legs.

  Be careful, Fife says to her.

  What? Careful of what?

  Nothing. Diana, please shut off the room lights. It’s disorienting. The spot’s okay, but I don’t want to see the room. Or be seen in it.

  Oh, Leo, you look great, Diana says. Really, you do.

  Definitely, Malcolm says. You look great. Too bad we’re only going to shoot your beautiful brooding bald head.

  The light goes out, and Fife is once again illuminated solely and from above by the pin spot. The room floats back to level, and his nausea passes.

  You know the drill, Malcolm says. Ready?

  Ready as I’ll ever be. Or ever was.

  Ready, everyone? Vincent? Sloan?

  Yes.

  Yes.

  Diana?

  Yes.

  Malcolm says Fife’s name and the date, April 1, 2017, and location, Montreal, Quebec, and claps his hands once in front of Vincent’s camera. The camera is attached to a track that orbits the circle of light on the bare floor and stares at the featureless, flat-black side of Fife’s face. It’s lit only by the overhead spot shining down on the unseen side of his face. The light gives his profile a molten golden edge, surrounded by impenetrable black space.

  For a few seconds everyone is silent. Then Fife says that he’s going to begin by answering a question that no one knows to ask. Or no one is rude enough to ask. It’s a question that was asked of him many times long ago and over the years, asked and presumably answered truthfully and completely over and over, so to ask it yet again would either be stupid or insulting. Rather, to ask it here and now would seem stupid or insulting or both, when in fact it is neither.

  The question, he says, is simply this: Why did you decide in the spring of 1968 to leave the United States and migrate to Canada?

  For nearly forty-five years he has been answering that question, creating and reaffirming the widespread belief, at least among Canadians, that Leonard Fife was one of the more than sixty thousand young American men who fled to Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s in order to avoid being sent by the U.S. military to Vietnam. Those sixty thousand men were either draft dodgers or deserters. Fife was believed to be a draft dodger. It’s what he claimed from the day he crossed the border from Vermont into Canada and asked for asylum.

  The truth, however, as always, is more complicated. Therefore, consider the preceding as merely a preface. For here begins Malcolm Shoumatoff’s controversial film Oh, Canada. Although brilliantly shot and edited by Shoumatoff in the late Leonard Fife’s own manner, it is a disheartening, disillusioning film about Fife, one of Canada’s most celebrated and admired documentary filmmakers. Oh, Canada shocked and disappointed the millions of Canadians who for nearly half a century believed that Leonard Fife had fled north in the spring of 1968 solely to escape being sent by the American government to kill or die in Vietnam. While his filmed deathbed confession may have been cathartic for Fife himself, it has brought many Canadians to question our past and present national policy of offering asylum to so-called refugees. Refugees are people who have fled their countries because of a well-founded fear of persecution if they return home. They are assumed to have seen or experienced many horrors. A refugee is different from an immigrant. An immigrant is a person who chooses to settle permanently in another country. Refugees are forced to flee. Leonard Fife claimed to be a refugee.

  RUSSELL BANKS is the internationally acclaimed author of eighteen works of fiction, including the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, The Book of Jamaica, and Lost Memory of Skin, and six short story collections, as well as several works of nonfiction, most recently Voyager: Travel Writings. Two of his novels, The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, have been adapted into award-winning films. Banks has been a PEN/Faulkner finalist (Affliction, Cloudsplitter, Lost Memory of Skin) and a Pulitzer Prize finalist (Continental Drift, Cloudsplitter). His work has received numerous other awards and has been widely translated and anthologized. Banks is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was New York State Author (2004–2008). He lives in upstate New York with his wife, the poet Chase Twichell.

  BLISS BROYARD

  * * *

  The Party

  The party is much more intimate than Eleanor expected: only forty or so people are gathered on the deck and patio. Nearly a third of them are black, which is the most black people Eleanor has seen in one place outside of Oak Bluffs so far this summer on Martha’s Vineyard. Although Alden Michaels backed Hillary in the primaries, nobody seems to hold that against him. He was Bill’s closest advisor, after all, and good friend. Now his wife, Susan, is throwing a party, and it’s the one social event this summer that the Obamas are expected to attend.

  How in the world did Eleanor and Daniel make the cut? She is quite sure that she’s never met either of the Michaelses before. Is it because she’s a black Democratic Party donor? Or her advocacy work on homelessness? Or because the action-adventure movies her husband directs make a lot of money? She knows better than to ask Daniel what he thinks. Eleanor wishes she had his talent for walking into a room with the assurance that he belongs there.

  The Michaelses’ house sits high on a hill. The view leads across the road to a rolling sheep meadow that dips down to salt marshes, the Chilmark Pond, and the ocean. Eleanor has often seen painters with their easels set up across the street, trying to capture the view’s bucolic striations. From here, the road is hidden behind stone walls that were built back when most of this land was used for sustenance farming. If it weren’t
for the telephone poles, it could be 1809 rather than 2009.

  The guests stand in line at a makeshift bar on one side of the patio. There is no sign yet of the Obamas. With the news that morning of Ted Kennedy’s death, Eleanor wonders if they will cancel. He might be busy preparing his speech for the funeral. Or else it wouldn’t look proper for him to attend a party that night. For Lauren’s sake, Eleanor hopes that the Obamas will show up.

  It was to Lauren that Eleanor had been directing her speculations about why she and Daniel were invited and who would be there. Lauren in turn confided her excitement about catering for an event where not just any old president and First Lady of the United States would be in attendance (she’d cooked for Hillary and Bill before) but Barack and Michelle Obama. They laughed at themselves, gushing like schoolgirls over a pop star. But seeing this couple in the White House has given them both so much hope. Lauren and Eleanor sealed their friendship over the years through commiseration about all the things that were wrong in the world, so this shot of optimism and idealism made them feel strange and giddy, like the twenty-two-year-olds they were when they met rather than in their mid-forties.

  The line is growing at the bar, and Daniel has gotten waylaid talking with someone. Eleanor could go herself, but Daniel might view her impatience as yet another subtle criticism that he never puts her and the kids first. She resolves to wait and looks around for someone to talk to. An older elegant black woman who also appears to be waiting for someone nods politely at her. Eleanor smiles back and comments how the timing of Kennedy’s death is unfortunate for Sasha and Malia. “Here they are on vacation with their dad, when he is supposed to finally be off duty,” she says. “And suddenly it’s official business again.”

  “Well, that’s the job,” the woman says, sounding strangely defensive on Obama’s behalf. “I’m sure they understand.”

  “Hmmm.” Eleanor isn’t so sure. Her kids don’t understand why their father has to be gone for months at a time. Of course, there’s no comparison between running the country and shooting a movie, even one with a $200 million budget. But reasoning with kids often doesn’t work, in Eleanor’s experience. They aren’t known for their rationality.