MUSICAL TONE:
“At Slammy’s Neighborhood Clinics, we guarantee you’ll be seen by a qualified healthcare consultant within fifteen minutes of your arrival. We know that when you’re sick, the last thing you want is to wait in a crowded waiting room. At Slammy’s, our patients’ impatience is always priority number one.”
Digger digs for much-needed supplies for her troops: armaments, medicine, dried rations. But her gift seems to have completely vanished. The Diggers suffer great losses, lose confidence in their leader. Digger doesn’t understand what has happened. For the first time, she questions the existence of God. She will, of course, never know, as we know, that it is because the meteorologist has died.
“Slammy’s welcomes all Diggers. Your leader has deceived you; she is not divinely inspired. She is a charlatan whose sham has now been exposed. Join the Slammy’s war effort, and for a limited time only, get half off any Slammy’s food products or merchandise. Slammy’s: We dig you!”
THE FILMIC MEMORY of Mudd and Molloy flying around Cheryld’s cave, dusting, flits through my brain.
“Listen, I’ve been thinking. I found some cloning machines in the cave while I was out picking berries.”
“OK. And?” says Mudd.
“What if we clone ourselves—”
“You want to clone ourselves?”
“That’s what I said. If we clone ourselves—”
“Why?”
“I’m trying to tell you. If we—”
“OK, tell me.”
“I’m trying.”
“OK.”
“If we clone ourselves, then use that time machine—”
“That time machine?”
“Yes. To send our clones back to when we were born a—”
“We have a time machine?”
“There’s a computer in the cave I discovered while collecting edible fungus that can send things back in time.”
“Is that possible?”
“I don’t see why not. The computer has easy operating instructions.”
“OK. Good. Just one question.”
“Yes?”
“What’s a clone?”
“A genetic duplicate of a person.”
“Like a sculpture.”
“No.”
“I meant a really realistic sculpture.”
“No, it’s alive.”
“Like when I was a living sculpture early in our career? God, was anyone ever so young?”
“No. Like a duplicate. Exactly like the person. It moves, it talks.”
“So like a sex doll.”
“No. Like an…identical twin.”
“Oh. OK. I think I get it. Like my twin, Dead, who died as an infant.”
“Yes. Except alive. So if we send these clones back in time, then they can grow up and have the chance for the comedy success that was taken away from us.”
“What’s to say they’d want to be comedians?”
“They’d be us. We want to be comedians.”
“Yes, but they’d be raised in different circumstances. That might send them on different paths.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s the old nature versus nurture question.”
“Which question is that again?”
“Nature versus nurture.”
“That’s not a question.”
“Y’know, is a child born a certain way or does the way they’re treated create their personality?”
“Born.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I feel comedy is in our bones.”
“This seems illogical.”
“How do you explain Picasso, Mozart, Joe Yule, Jr.?”
“All their fathers taught them the business in which they ended up.”
“The exception proves the rule.”
“Why not just keep them in our time and raise them as comedians ourselves?”
“There’s no funny anymore. I don’t know what the hell is going on. I wouldn’t be surprised if comedy were made illegal soon.”
“Barinholtz 451.”
“What?”
“Ike Barinholtz is a comedian.”
“Uh-huh.”
“MADtv?”
“And?”
“It’s like Fahrenheit 451.”
“What is?”
“Barinholtz 451.”
“Uh-huh. I still don’t know what you mean by any of this, though.”
“Fahrenheit 451 is a novel by Ray Bradbury.”
“Yes?”
“It’s about making reading illegal in the future.”
“OK.”
“So Barinholtz sounds like Fahrenheit.”
“I mean, sort of.”
“And you said banning comedy was going to happen. So I was trying to come up with a comedy word that I could stick in front of 451 to make a joke about banning comedy. And Barinholtz was the closest I could come up with. At least in the short term. He’s a comedian.”
“OK. Are we done with that?”
“Yes. But I do think your idea is dangerous. We can’t alter the past without terrible repercussions.”
“And on what do you base this assertion?”
“Movies. The Grandfather Paradox.”
“What’s that?”
“A small change in the past can create enormous changes in the present. No, wait, that’s the Butterfly Effect. The Grandfather Paradox says you can’t kill your grandfather in the past because then you would never be born and therefore couldn’t go back and kill your grandfather.”
“That is irrelevant to our issue.”
“So no grandfather killing in this plan?”
“None.”
“Well, OK, I guess. That makes me feel better. But how will we know if we’re successful?”
“We’ll know immediately. Because if it works, they will be famous in the past.”
“And what if they aren’t?”
“We keep sending more clones until two of them are.”
“I feel like there’s a logical flaw here but I can’t put my finger on it.”
“Shh. Let me swab your cheek.”
“FOR EVERY BURGER you buy, we donate ten cents to Books on Tape for the blind, Books on Paper for the deaf, and Books on Wheels for paraplegics. At Slammy’s, we care about your problems! Blind or deaf or in a chair, eat at Slammy’s cuz we care!”
Here, in this place, I am despondent. Days have passed, perhaps weeks. I have called three times about my clone, but he’s still not ready. Something about a broken pump. I sit alone, eat my lunch, and watch the cave ants swarm around some dropped Slammitalian Calzoney-O crumbs. I’ve long admired the industriousness and community spirit of ants. Since earliest childhood, I have been a student of entomology with a specialization in myrmecology. Later at Harvard, in fact, I even interned under the great E. O. Wilson. You are a remarkable young man, Wilson opined in his meticulous Palmer cursive in my Harvard yearbook. Among the finest I’ve ever had the pleasure of interning under me. You will surely go far in whatever field of endeavor you pursue, under many a great man to come. I love you. 2 Cute 2 B Forgotten.—Eddy. Ants are arguably the most fascinating members of the order Hymenoptera, unquestionably the most intelligent. But only as a superorganism, for that intelligence is evident only in the colony as a whole. Let’s face it, the individual ant is a moron. Whereas a certain colony of 700,000 ants from the Sudan has been shown to possess an IQ higher than Marilyn vos Savant of Parade magazine. They also handily beat Bobby Fischer at a chess match. It is true that this was during one of his psychotic episodes, when he appeared more interested in heckling Jewish-looking Icelandic spectators. But still: They’re ants!
“Slammy’s: Just a hop, skip, and spelunk away.”
Ants have been present and virtually unchanged on Earth for almost two hundred billion years and as such are considered one of the most successful species on the planet. Contrast that with, say, the Homo sapien at a measly fifteen hundred years old. The question is, what can we, as humans, learn about longevity from an ant? Ants, like humans, are social creatures. They think and act communally. The decisions they make individually are always for the good of their society. Certainly they can be aggressive to and warlike with other ants, but only ants outside of their own colony. This is where ants and humans diverge. Humans are social creatures, but even within their own communities, they act antagonistically toward others. This competitiveness of the individual will be the death of humanity. The solution is for humans, like ants, to be born into castes. Ideally, one could not, say, decide to be a film critic; one would either be born one or not. There would be no jealousies in such a world. I would, upon maturity, be given the New Yorker film critic position and it would be understood that I am the authority on all things cinematic. Others would be born doctors or gymnasts or hat blockers. We would each contribute equally within our particular job description toward the greater good. We could still hate those from other colonies, as ants do, but within our own colony, all would be peaceful. One would never have to think of oneself as an underachiever because there would be no such expectations (or disappointments) placed on those of the so-deemed “lower” professions. So, for instance, a trash collector would be as admired as a—
Egads! The ending of the movie! I recall it now! It takes place a million years in the future! Of course! Calcium! Of course! I still cannot remember the million leading up to it. That remains a blank. Perhaps in the continued recalling of this ultimate section, I will be reminded of or at least be able to piece together this enormous gap. As a film critic, cineast, filmmaker, confidant to the late Joseph Campbell (while he was still alive, of course! Ha ha!), and the inventor and perhaps the solitary practitioner of backward film viewing, I believe myself to be eminently and uniquely qualified to reconstruct a story in reverse. Just as my newly rediscovered friend Calcium is doing. We have so much in common, this uncommonest of ants and I.
And like that, it appears, fully remembered, the end of Ingo’s film. Where had it been buried all this time in this miraculous monstrosity called my human brain? How was it buried? I have no answer, but here it is nonetheless. I am certain.1 The film in the cave was wrong, a lie, a sham, a misdirect, a red herring (but to what end and by whom?). This is the entirety of the rest of the film. True, much is still missing. A million years is still missing. Not to mention, all the confusing and contradictory moments that continue to coexist within the body of the film, as well as the lapses and what have you, but these contradictions and missing swaths exist in the memory of my life also. Maybe this is the very thing Ingo was trying to say with his film, thus is the confusion of the human mind, and not just mine. Or maybe just mine, since the film seems to have been made for me and me alone, but, also, didn’t he say in that blank version I recently saw that there were other viewers before me, and didn’t he imply that there could be other viewers after me? So I just don’t really know anymore. But I do know this: The end is here. So perhaps I can reverse engineer the rest. For now, this is what I know: