THE MORNING IS nice. Coffee and matzoh brei. I like it. My bitch, Clown Laurie, is a good cook. I’m feeling comfy in my daytime yarmulke: khaki, relaxed fit, lots of pockets. I’ve gotten online (uppercase C) and am looking up hair yarmulkes. It occurred to me last night that if there is such a thing it would allow me to cover my bald spot without incurring accusations of vanity and that if there is not such a thing, it could be a decent moneymaker. There is such a thing, it turns out, and I order three in salt-and-pepper: the Julius Caesar, the Jude Law, and the Nicolas Cage.
Today I’m scheduled to do Charlie Rose (in this reality, he seems not to have been disgraced, or maybe he has already reinvented himself as undisgraced), and then this evening, I’m presenting the first Ingo Cutbirth African American Animation Award to Floyd Norman.
All in all, life is good now. There is, however, a slight nagging feeling. It might have to do with all the lying. I made a promise to Ingo, over his grave, to preserve and protect his legacy, his film. Once I inadvertently burned it all up, I made a second promise to Ingo, this one while I was on fire in the parking lot of Slappy’s (why is it Slappy’s now?) to recover his film, as completely as I possibly could. And in a very real sense, I am almost living a lie now. And it’s not only lying about the truth of Ingo’s film—what I know the film really was, not this ridiculous antithesis my doppelgänger put into the world, but the real, brutal, terrifying comedy that was Ingo’s life’s work—but also the deception toward Clown Laurie. This skullcap I now wear makes me think that I am always seen by God, that I cannot hide, that I need to come clean, face the worldly consequences, face the otherworldly ones as well. I am, after all, when all is said and done, an ethical human being. In the heat of the moment, of desire, of anger, of grief, I grab my iPhone from my back yarmulke pocket, punch in “Commissioner Al Rappaport,” and dial before I can talk myself out of it.
“Hey, B.,” says Commissioner Rappaport.
“Hi, Al. Listen, I need to talk to you.”
“What’s up, buddy?”
“You remember that body in the alley?”
“The one from last night? The clown one?”
“Yeah. Listen—”
“Of course I remember. It was just last night.”
“So, anyway, listen—”
“It’s taken care of, B. It’s gone. Incinerated. Up in smoke.”
“You burned him.”
“Yup. Bye-bye, clown. All gone. Nothing to worry about, B. It never happened. He never existed.”
“But he did.”
“Prove it.”
“What?”
“You can’t prove it. No one can. Everything is fine. Enjoy your life, good sir. You deserve it.”
“Um—”
“And, really, thank you for all you do.”
“Yeah. OK, Al.”
“Ciao, bitch!”
He laughs and hangs up.
I WANDER THE streets. It’s different now. Everyone recognizes me, asks for autographs, photos. I am cheered from the outside seating at restaurants. Passersby tell me my book saved their lives, that they can’t wait for the Netflix series. It’s different, but I’m not sure it’s better. I mean, sure, in almost every way it is. A man dashes out from Barneys and offers me a cashmere sweater he had just purchased for me after spotting me through the store window. It’s got to be nine hundred dollars if it’s a penny. It’s nice. Soft. Heather gray, which I like and looks good against my plaited beard, while expertly concealing the beardruff. But still, there’s a queasiness.
I think about the murdered man, and even though in my opinion (and Rappaport’s!) he never truly existed, certainly not in the way I do, in that he was, for lack of a better term, a replicant, and in my opinion he existed only to rub more salt in the wound that is my psyche, which has had nothing but salt rubbed in it since as long as I can remember, since I was a child even. Still, I feel some guilt. He (it?) was a breathing entity with a face. That he had my face, in some way, allows me to feel justified in removing him from the world. It is my face, after all. It was my face before it was his. He was copying me. At best, he was a face plagiarist. He stole my face and deserved to be called on that. How is he any different from Stephen “Shattered” Glass in that regard? People felt righteous outrage at his transgressions. Granted, no one murdered him or suggested his murder as far as I know. Nor should they have! But this is a more serious infraction. Now, it might be argued that his “cloneness,” for lack of a better term, is not his fault. He never asked to be a clone. I mean, I assume he never asked to be a clone. Perhaps he did ask to be a clone. In any event, whether he did or did not, his existence was not my fault, and I should not be expected to tolerate it.
In addition, I believe his very being was designed to hurt me, to make it impossible for me to live in the world he now inhabited. So in a very real sense, his murder was an act of self-defense. Still, one does not ever enjoy killing a human, be that human clone or nonclone. And having to beat the life out of a person’s clone stays with a person. I can, to this day, which is the next day, still see his lifeless corpse in my mind’s eye. And I know he was loved by many, many people. That he was loved for propagating a lie should not condemn him to death. If that were so, who among us would be spared? But his lie denied the world the true genius of Ingo’s work, replacing it with a predigested pabulum of no real value to the future of film and, dare I say, humanity. It, of course, can be argued that he did not know he was lying, that as a clone, he had been programmed to believe he was telling the truth. I tend to think this was the case.
It doesn’t, however, make him less dangerous to society. Hitler, as a result of his societal “programming,” truly, sincerely hated the Jews. His earnestness did not make the result any less dire. If I were able to go back in time and kill Hitler before he was to gain power, I would do so in a heartbeat. I would also kill any and all Hitler clones. This is not only because I am now Jewish, but because it would be the right thing to do. I understand going back and changing history can be fraught with unforeseen problems, but in the case of Hitler, I would be willing to take the risk. I feel similarly about my clone, which is not to say that I believe his crimes against humanity are equal to Hitler’s. But consider my position: Imagine if someone had replaced you in the world. Imagine you no longer had an identity, money, a place to live. Imagine you found yourself in oversized clown clothing-cum-fumigation tent, hungry, alone, reviled. You might be driven to do what I have done. Still, I feel some guilt. The bloody imagery stays with me. And I feel similarly about the donkey. To be clear, I thought he was a trick of animation when I stomped him. I stomped him the way anyone would and does stomp a trick of animation. When the first stomp revealed him to be flesh and blood, I was horrified, and the only humane thing to do was to stomp him twice more to make sure he no longer suffered. Still, I feel some guilt. Not only due to the rarity in this world of a tiny talking donkey—I would not be at all surprised to learn that he was the only one of his kind—but because it was a life. And no one enjoys taking a life. Of course, there are the psychopaths (or are they sociopaths now?) who do enjoy taking a life, but I believe them to be exceedingly rare, though not as rare, perhaps, as talking donkey puppets. Our misapprehension about this says everything about the Hollywood and news media’s obsession with such crimes. Certainly, I was in no way joyous in the act of killing him. If anything, I was horrified but knew it had to be done. One could hear the bones crack. I tried to turn myself in, but Al Rappaport would not have it.
So here I am, forced to contend in isolation with my now tortured psyche. Is there perhaps a way for me to free myself of this? Do I risk everything by revealing the truth about myself and Ingo’s movie? I could reveal it on Charlie Rose this very day. Surely, if I explain it well, people would understand my position and appreciate my honesty. Who among us would not have done exactly what I did? And I could immediately get back to work on my version, the true version of Ingo’s movie. I would return to my work with Barassini, if he exists in this world. This time I would have the benefit of material comfort during the remembering process as well as the comfort and love of a good woman clown. Would she stay with me once the truth was revealed? It is a gamble, but I believe she would. It is important to tell the truth. Everyone respects a truth teller. If there is a creator, as I now believe there must be, he or she or thon will reward me for my efforts.
I fall into an open personhole.
As I am climbing out, a car parks on top of the hole. I call up to the driver, explain my predicament. He hears me but refuses to give up the spot, even briefly. He’d been driving around for a half an hour looking for a place to park, he yells down to me. I do understand his predicament as I’m sure he understands mine. And I tell him so. We understand each other’s predicament, we conclude. There is something about the yarmulke on my head that does remind me to put myself in the other fellow’s shoes. That is a good thing. He says he is heading downtown and I should do the same. If he spots another manhole, he will pry it open for me with the crowbar he keeps in his hollow leg. I nod, which serves no purpose, as he cannot see me, and begin to make my way south, sloshing through the fetid water. There should be more kindness in the world. I do have a bit of time till I’m due at Charlie Rose’s studio and I need to head south anyway. And, really, when it comes down to it, the fact that the fellow was so honest about his predicament and also seemed sympathetic to my predicament, which I was honest about, encourages me to not make a stink (ha ha!), and the truth is, I’m down here already anyway, so why not continue on my way down here? And the truth is, when I think about it, if I’m down here, I can’t fall down here because I’m already down here. So there’s that.
It is exceedingly dark though. I have the flashlight on my new iPhone, but it produces an odd, diffuse, almost useless light. When I was a young man, flashlights did their jobs and illuminated the dark, not just small-print menus in dimly lit restaurants. It was a different and heady time. I point the phone toward the floor to use what little light it gives to avoid tripping over anything fecal, not to mention rats. The rats are the thing I dislike most about my sewer forays, as I’ve come to call them. There are rumors of rats down here as big as German shepherds, the people not the dogs. I learned this from what I consider a reliable source, a sewer worker who had appeared in the Frederick Wiseman documentary Effluence (1978). I had interviewed him for a monograph I was writing entitled Pipe Dreams about sewers in dreams in film. It was the first sewer-centric film study since Mark Kermode’s 1993 essay on the C.H.U.D. series, which I believe was entitled I, Mark Kermode, Am an Asshole. I cannot be certain though; several of his essays have been similarly titled.
I hear some sloshing of sewer water behind me and turn with a start, which causes me to lose my footing. I fall forward and land face-first into something soft and putrid. I pull my hand out, which is now glopped-over from the greasy mass, and I shine the iPhone flashlight at it. It is sickly white and stretches almost to the ceiling and as far down the tunnel as I can see. I cautiously touch my tongue to my mustache in order to taste it and find myself delivered immediately into a paroxysm of gagging. It is, as I suspected, one of those dreaded fatbergs: cooking oil and wet wipes and toilet paper and garbage and tampons congealed into a massive mass. I have no choice but to make my way through this nightmare to find the personhole my new hollow-legged friend will be opening for me, to make my way to Charlie Rose’s set, to reveal the truth of Ingo’s movie and my relationship to it. So I crawl through ten blocks of fat until the next available personhole.