HERE IN THE cave, I attempt to hide from the ever-present battle. It’s almost impossible to focus on the Calcium memories what with all the explosions, nightmarish screaming, and gnashing of teeth. My boss, the editor of the Slammy’s Gazette, appears, suspendered, cigar-chomping, in my head and orders me back onto the battlefield to report on the war. I don’t think I have ever seen him in person, only in my brain. I’m not certain he exists in person. In this way, he is much like the historical Jesus. Still, he is terrifying, with his sleeve garters and green eyeshade.
“Rosenberg, why the hell are you just sitting there like a sack of shit?”
“Sorry, chief. I was just thinking about a movie I saw.”
“Well, get off your goddamn ass! There’s a war on, son! You want the Trunk Trumpet to scoop us?”
“No, sir. I just—”
“I don’t recall asking to hear your pansy excuses! The world needs to know what’s happening!”
“OK, chief. Sorry.”
My editor steps back into his office, also in my brain, and slams his brain door. A framed photo of Truman holding up a newspaper saying Dewey beat him falls off the brain wall outside his office and crashes to the floor of my brain. Broken brain glass everywhere.
“I’ll be back,” I whisper to my memory of Calcium and head to the front.
All’s quiet when I get there. I spot a soldier sitting against a stalagmite, having a smoke, staring up at the constellation of Gemini Pollux created by drilling holes into the ceiling of the cave.
“Hello, soldier,” I say.
“Evening, mister.”
“How was the fighting today?”
“Tough. I lost five buddies from my unit. But I ain’t sad. They died fighting for the country they loved.”
“Which country you fighting for, soldier? I can’t tell from your French army kepi hat.”
“Slammy’s,” he says. “One hundred percent pure beef, one hundred percent pure patriot!”
“You have any message for your loved ones at home, soldier?”
“I love you, Mary Lou. I’ll be home to you soon and—”
His head gets blown off, and I reflexively jump behind the stalagmite for cover. I’m shaking and panicked and I can’t remember the name of the woman he said he loved. It’s especially bad because with his death, his quote would’ve been a great end to the piece. There wouldn’t be a dry eye in the cave. I’m pretty sure he said Marilyn. It’s really not the kind of thing I want to get wrong, because it could create bad feelings if his girlfriend (wife, daughter, boyfriend, thon) thinks his last words were to someone else. But I’m almost certain he said Madeline and that’s what I will go with. I drop the piece and a photo of the soldier (pre–head explosion, of course!) on my editor’s desk in my brain. He picks it up, looks at it.
“Good stuff, Rosenberg. Now get the fuck back out there.”
I peek out from behind my stalagmite. Hundreds of Trunks hover, in sleep mode, charging their batteries with electrical cords plugged into outlets along the cave wall. They bob gently up and down like buoys. It’s almost peaceful. The CEO of Slammy’s, who it turns out is now Barassini in a ball cap that reads in braille, “Blind Faith Is True Faith,” is projected on a gargantuan television screen, sound asleep in his office chair. His snores fill the cave through mounted speakers. I watch out for snipers, who, as any non-dead war correspondent will tell you, never sleep. Somewhere in the distance, a lone bugler plays a mournful rendition of reveille, which seems odd as I always thought reveille should be chipper. Maybe this is a reimagining of reveille, the way someone might take an up-tempo pop song and turn it into a sad song. I often enjoy this kind of reimagining, of course not when Kaufman tried it with “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” in that abysmal “sad white middle-aged man” movie Anomalisa. Then it was terrible, making a mockery of the very spirit of the original version of the song by Cynthia Looper, an anthem, of course, to female (trans woman) empowerment, a song that at its core states unequivocally that women (trans women) do not need men (trans men) in order to enjoy themselves (trans selves), a melodic version of the brilliant feminist rallying cry of the 1970s, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” (coined by the great 1930s American film actress Irene Dunn, no less!), because as everyone knows, a fish would have little to no use for a bicycle, a) because it lives in the ocean and can easily swim where it needs to go, and b) because a fish has no legs, so how would it even pedal? Barassini wakes up to the alarm on his Slammy’s Phone playing “Hypnotised” by Coldplay. He groggily feels around, presses STOP, and looks eyelessly into the camera.
“Good morning, my fellow Americans, it is a good day for saving on all Slammy’s merchandise—fifty percent off today only!—and a good day for saving civilization as well. Remember that our goal at Slammy’s is to serve you, to provide you with top-quality goods and services, conveniently and at a reasonable cost. The same cannot be said of our competitors. The question you have to ask yourself is, how much are you willing to sacrifice for this convenience and value, or for the right of Americans like yourselves to have an idea for a product, to start a small business like we did, to work hard to build that business, to acquire wealth, honestly, through hard work and sacrifice? You have to ask yourselves this: Did all those Trunks work hard to acquire their wealth and lasers? Did they start their professional lives as humble hypnotists/Broadway actors, as did I? Or are they lazy, bloated robots, built by robots, whose very presence is an affront to our way of life? At Slammy’s, we employ only people, not machines, to make your food, to ship your products, to build your water bicycles, your robots, to wash your—”
By this point, the Trunk robots have switched themselves off sleep mode, disengaged from their outlets, and are listening to Barassini’s speech. As one, they begin to sing “The Girl From Ipanema” in a beautiful, relaxed, jazzy a cappella rendition. Doors open inside my brain (and I assume the brains of others out here on the battlefield), and a beautiful bikinied Trunk emerges, walking by me with hips a-swinging. He is the girl from Ipanema. Jesus, he’s beautiful. I can no longer hear Barassini’s voice at all. The perfume wafting toward me from Trunk’s warm, meaty body is heady: vanilla, lavender, musk, old man sweat. He beckons me to him with a delicate finger. This unattainable goddess is beckoning me! The me in my brain, my homunculus, as it were, walks toward him. Suddenly Marjorie appears, floating above me in a diaphanous gown, a sexy angel Halloween costume. I look up; Trunk looks up.
“Curses,” he says.
“B.,” Marjorie coos, “at Slammy’s, we care about you. We deliver ourselves to your doorstep, hot and juicy. And at Slammy’s, we’ve got real junk in our trunk, not just massive, shit-stained, old white man KFC-fed ass.”
Marjorie rotates in space, a sexy rotisserie chicken—much healthier than KFC—so I can see her buttocks, which are truly magnificent. I look again at the beckoning Trunk and find the illusion gone. He is once again, in my estimation, almost unfuckable. My allegiance now is to Slammy’s, to Marjorie, to pussy, not cock. An exploding mortar shell shocks me from Marjorie to the real horrors of war. Not fifteen feet from me are a pile of maimed soldiers, dead and dying. Some are dressed as Star Wars stormtroopers, some as Batmans, others as Wonder Womans. There’s even a skinny, sad-looking fellow dressed as Mandrake the Magician and a middle-aged Bob from Bob’s Burgers, whose blood-soaked apron conceals what I assume is a soon-to-be-fatal evisceration. I take pictures of the wounded. I take pictures of the dead. It is my job; I am a chronicler of war. Later in the mess hall, unfortunately seated between Hawkeye and Trapper John trading TV-level quips, I attempt to clear my mind of the suffering I witnessed today and remember more about the end of the movie.
SO, CALCIUM DIGS in a cave. Is it this cave? The very one I am in? I think I recognize that stalactite over there. His paleontological hobby staves off his loneliness, it seems, for there is something reassuring in the notion that life is a long, uninterrupted chain, that he is part of this chain, that it will continue after he is gone, that there is hope: that there is a future, not only a past. I feel thusly as well. This cave has been his most fruitful dig site, he explains in voiceover. We cut to a panning shot of all sorts of odd fossilized remains, reconstructed animals filling the ballroom of his mansion. Today is no different: He uncovers a skull, a new species, enormous, with an unprecedentedly large brain pan. We recognize it as the skull of a human being. Calcium speaks to it:
“What are you, my friend? Such an odd skull as this I have never before seen. Alas, poor creature, would that I had known you. I feel a sudden and profound kinship. Is it that we share a similar cranial design and that by this similarity I infer a similar intelligence, a similar Weltanschauung? Would we have been friends, my giant, my string bean? Would my own lonely soul find relief in our association? I like to think so.”
Calcium continues to dig, finding more and more of this human skeleton. With his immense ant strength (ants are ten thousand times stronger than humans), he drags his haul back home, bone by bone. This takes a full five hours of screen time. Once there, he assembles the skeleton (seven hours of screen time), then goes about the painstaking task of forensic facial reconstruction (thirteen hours). I studied anatomy at Harvard and notice there is something amiss with the skeleton’s clavichord. Has it been damaged? I also marvel at Calcium’s technique, which is as remarkably skillful as it is highly accurate. In fact, once complete, the skeleton’s face quite closely resembles my own.
“I will call this heretofore undiscovered species the Great Ache, from the Greek akhos, meaning grief.”
My recovered memory of this part of the film is so startling as to be revelatory.
“I’m sorry,” Calcium says to the head (my head?), “that I ran out of Pantone 489C clay and found it necessary to use the Pantone PMS 2583 clay on the southwest quadrant of your face and neck.”
Oddly, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the purplish clay falls precisely where lies my own aforementioned port-wine stain birthmark.
“It’s fine,” I remember myself saying during the screening, sitting in the hard wooden chair alone in Ingo’s apartment, for it was after Ingo’s death. I feel a shiver of recognition running up my spine now, as I felt it then. Or is it down?
“I do have some plant matter here I might use to cover up my pigmental inaccuracy. I call it old man’s beard. Not that you are old, my giant, it is simply the informal name for this substance, which I know formally as Usnea.”
With this, he pulls some hair-like lichen from a storage bin and adheres it to the lower third of the reconstructed face. This is when, in the screening, my jaw hung open. For it is me. Without a doubt, this is my skeleton, my skull that Calcium has dug up a million years in the future. That this all exists within my memory of Ingo’s film adds to my confusion. Did Ingo shoot this scene after I moved in across the hall from him? Or did he, with otherworldly prescience, anticipate my arrival? Either way, I now understand why this film felt so very personal to me after my initial viewing, for I am in it. The film is about me.
“There,” says a gentle Calcium. “Perhaps there was indeed such odd fringe hanging from your face. I have no way to know, but it seems feasible that a creature might evolve such a fringe for warmth or perhaps as a display of great reproductive health and virility, both of which I feel certain you had. I believe you were likely the most sexually healthy—”
I die! I realize. Here is the proof. I don’t know exactly when, but at some point in the future, I die and am reconstructed, an exhibit in the natural history museum of a sentient ant.
“Of all my fossils, I love you best,” says Calcium. “What did you think about when you were alive, sweet creature? What were your worries? Your joys?”
“Probably the same as yours, Calcium,” I responded. “Art, mortality, Tsai.”
“Likely the same as mine,” Calcium muses. “Art, mortality, Betty. Oh, I do so like talking with you….What shall I call you? Is B. for boron right for you? Or shall I call you Rosenberg after the desert rose gypsum formations above the site where I unearthed you? Or perhaps the two in tandem?”
Either! Both! And I shall call you Calcium, I thought.
“You can call me Calcium,” he says. “You know, B. Rosenberg, my own kind, the ants, seem so happy in their lives. But I don’t know how to fit in. At parties, everyone else knows exactly how to act, while I sit awkwardly in the corner. I have a strategy that never works: I attempt to look sad and deep. Sometimes I read a book to appear thoughtful. For some reason, I believe that’ll attract someone. I guess because it would attract me. So there I sit, waiting for another ant to come over and say, ‘You look deep and sorrowful. What are you reading?’ But it has never happened. And of course the other ants don’t speak at all, let alone know what a book is, so it never will. But still I continue with this ‘pickup’ technique, even though it is a dismal failure. I tell myself (for sadly there is no one else to tell) that this is perhaps the very definition of insanity.”
“You can tell me!” I said to the screen.
“But I can tell you, Rosenberg, of course,” says Calcium. “Even over eons and eons, I know you understand me.”
“I do,” I said.
And then for some reason, I start to cry. Now. Here.
“I am so lonely, Rosenberg,” Calcium says once again. “So terribly lonely.”
I recite some Tennyson for him: “So runs my dream, but what am I? / An infant crying in the night / An infant crying for the light / And with no language but a cry.”
“Y’know, Rosenberg,” Calcium continues, “I’ve developed this method of looking at the world, a sort of framing device, if you will. How do I explain this? Hmm. What I do, I attempt to cultivate a sort of distance, or rather detachment, from difficult events in my life and in the world. I allow a certain lightness to envelop them. I gently mock them and myself. I call it ‘boking fun’ or ‘jokking,’ and if performed properly, it transforms a painful experience into a tolerable one.”
“We call that comedy or humor,” I said to the screen that now lives in my memory. “And I for one question its effectiveness and even its value. Although, in my time, there is a genius we call Judd Apatow, who—”