BARASSINI QUICKLY PUTS me under. It’s just a matter of flipping the emotional toggle switch he has created for me, which is an actual toggle implanted at the base of my neck, below the collar, with what Barassini describes as a direct line to my brain center, or Neuro Hub, as he calls it. He explained he saw something similar in a Black Mirror episode and it turns out it works. It feels like a tooth nerve being probed, but only for a second, then it opens up my receptivity. I like it because it’s efficient and reliable and our sessions are only an hour, so we can get right to it. So I scream, then relax.
“Tell me about the film,” he says.
“I still can’t remember much,” I say. “As usual.”
“Well, just start talking. Make it up. See what happens.”
It seems I’m not the only one who’s grown impatient with my lack of progress.
“I don’t think that will get me to the truth of it, Master,” I say. I don’t know why I called him “Master.” It’s not something he requires or even ever suggested as far as I remember.
“Listen, the past doesn’t exist. Can we agree on that?”
“Yes,” I say, leaving off the “Master” this time. I feel embarrassed that I said it at all. Like calling my teacher “Mom.”
“And we agree it exists only as thought, that is to say, the past exists only in one’s mind?”
“I guess.”
“Well, where else? Show me where else!” he yells.
“Nowhere else. You’re right.”
“Then if it does not exist, it can be anything you decide, since it does not exist.”
“Well, I mean—”
“Yes?”
“We do share common memories as people.”
“Do we? Do you have the same memories of your family as your brother?”
“Not exactly. But there is a commonality, certainly, which suggests that there is some objective truth to what we remember.”
“So you’re saying our obligation to others is the thing that requires us to pull memories from our memory rather than our imaginations?”
“I suppose…Master?”
I’m displeasing him. I thought the “Master” might help now.
“But in the case of your movie, there’s no one who shares it. N’est-ce pas?”
“Oui.”
“Therefore you have no obligation to anyone to be accurate.”
“My obligation is to the brilliance of it. That film changed me. Now I think I’ve changed back or maybe into a third thing not nearly as good as the second thing or perhaps even the first thing, which may not have been the first thing at all, for how can one really know what the first thing was? It’s even ossible there were many things before the first thing—”
“Did you just say ossible?”
“No. For as we grow, we are constantly changing. I suspect as a child I was happy and pure and free. I don’t know for certain. Maybe that’s only nostalgia rearing its ugly head. But I do know this: Ingo’s movie effected a change in me that brought me peace and clarity, and I want to find that again. I want to regain what I have lost. I need to remember it accurately. I want to be able to see it again in my mind’s eye, the way Castor Collins saw God during his pilgrimage to Vienna.”
“How do you know about that?” says Barassini, his eyes narrowing like the Verrazzano Bridge.
“What?”
“Castor Collins’s pilgrimage.”
“Every schoolboy knows the story. And girl. Why?”
Barassini is silent for a long while, maybe an hour. I read a magazine from the rack.
“All right,” he says finally. “I am going to get the true movie out of you. I find myself reinvigorated. We’ll utilize a dangerous and untested technique. There’s been some research, but only at this point on syphilitic mice. The results have been promising; the mice remembered buried childhood trauma. The ones that didn’t kill themselves, that is.”
“Wait, what?”
“Here’s how we’ll proceed: It will be as an archaeological dig. We will excavate the shattered shards of pottery of your mind, piece by piece, then dust each piece off, removing all extraneous dirt—the non-movie elements, if you will—then glue it back together. It will be a painstaking, exacting process, not without its extreme risks to both of our psyches, but we will prevail.”
“So, when you say dangerous—”
“For you mostly, yes. Very.”
“How so?”
“You’re going deep, my friend.”
“I see. Well—”
“You want this movie back?”
“More than anything, but—”
“This is the only way.”
“OK,” I say. “But what have we been doing this whole time if this is the only way it can—”
“Before is a fiction, yes? Didn’t I teach you that?”
“Um. I—”
“Good! So let’s begin!”
“But the mice killed themselves?”
“Some did. Some merely began to drink heavily. It might have been the syphilis. But you are a man, not a syphilitic mouse, yes?”
“Yes,” I say. “If I have to choose.”
I’M EMPTYING THE metal trays in the salad bar. Darnell says it’s time because the cantaloupe pieces have gone pale and soft. I’ll cut some fresh after. It passes the time. Between 2:00 and 3:00 A.M., it’s very quiet. Darnell, smiling at his phone, texts someone, while I think about Barassini, how he seems to have become motivated by my mention of Castor Collins. It is all quite odd. When the front door opens, we both look up, Darnell reaching for his baseball bat. This is always the way it is late at night. One does not want any surprises in the late-night deli business. This time the surprise is a pleasant one; it is Tsai.
“Hey,” Darnell says.
“Hi,” she says back with a sweet smile. “I was hoping to get a sandwich.”
“Sure. B.! Make the lady a sandwich.”
I nod and head behind the counter.
“Hi,” I say. “What can I get you?”
“Turkey and Swiss on a French roll.”
“OK.”
“A little mayo and mustard. The yellow kind. Um, tomato, lettuce, onion.”
“Would you like coleslaw, potato salad, or a bag of chips with that?”
She says, “Chips,” as she heads to the front of the store to look at the racks of candy. It’s also where Darnell sits behind the cash register.
“I can’t decide what to get,” she says. “What’s your favorite candy?”
“I enjoy a nice Kit Kat now and again,” Darnell says.
She places a Kit Kat on the counter.
I make the sandwich but watch Tsai. From here I can only see her ass outfitted for all the world in a pair of black yoga pants. She leans her elbows on the counter, which pushes her ass out toward me.
“I’ve seen you here forever yet I’ve never introduced myself,” she says to Darnell. “How rude. I’m Tsai.”
“Darnell,” says Darnell. “Howdy.”
“I like that name,” she says. “Darnell.”
“Thanks. Your name’s dope. Like S-I-G-H?”
“T-S-A-I.”
“Oh, cool. That’s like Oriental or some shit?”
Jesus, I think. Oriental? She’s going to rip him a—
“Yeah,” she says. “My grandparents were from China.”
“That’s cool. That’s cool. That’s very cool. China. That’s in the ocean, right?”
What does that even mean?
There’s a silence, then out of nowhere, Darnell asks if she gets high. Tsai says she does.
“You wanna?” he asks.
“Mm-hm.”
“Yo, B., watch the front,” Darnell says as he grabs his backpack and leads Tsai into the supply room. I hear the alley door unlock and assume they have stepped outside. The sandwich is finished, wrapped, in a paper bag along with a separately wrapped pickle slice, three napkins, and a bag of potato chips. I bring it up to the register and wait there for approximately seventeen or so minutes. The alley door opens and they find their way back into the store. Tsai giggles at something Darnell says.
“Yo, B.,” Darnell calls to me. “Ring Tsai up. Give her my discount.”
“Aw, thanks, Darnell!” chirps Tsai. “You’re such a sweetheart.”
I ring her up minus Darnell’s discount.
“$5.50 please,” I say.
Tsai hands me a ten-dollar bill but is looking back at Darnell, who’s at the hot section of the food bar, picking at the macaroni and cheese with his fingers.
“That was fun,” she says. “Thanks.”
“Any time, Tsai from China,” he says, mouth full of macaroni.
Pearls before swine.
“Oh my God, you’re adorable!” she says to Darnell. I hand her her change. She takes the bag. “Night!” she says to Darnell, and she’s out the door.
“Damn,” Darnell says. “She hot! I’m gonna have to eat me some of that Kung Pao chicken. Know what I’m sayin’, dude?”
I do know what he’s saying. And I step into the employee bathroom to masturbate. I suspect Darnell will masturbate in here once I finish. It passes the time on these quiet nights. I always prefer to go first.