TONIGHT AS THE nurse changes my bandages, once again comically pressing “her” balloon breasts against my face to great laughter, I recall another scene (do I recall it or am I inventing it?) in which Calcium sits alone in his house and writes in his journal:
Let us say, for the sake of discussion, time functions just as a motion picture through a projector, in that it is made up of discrete moments, that true movement is an illusion of perception paired with the mechanism of a cosmic “projector.” If this were so, then an element traveling in the converse timal direction would instantly disappear without a trace from the view of a so-called “forward traveling” observer. Perhaps my experimental compound embarked on such a route. There is no way to know with certainty, as any attempt to re-create the compound would again result in instantaneous disappearance of said compound and would allow no “time” for evaluation. And what if this element were somehow alive, or perhaps viral in nature? It was, after all, bullet-shaped, not unlike the rabies virus. How might it interact with the environment in which it finds itself? In other words, what might I have done to the past by creating it? What might I be doing this very moment to the past with my continued recklessness? Traveling forever away from this alien reality, I can never know. It haunts me.
A clown orderly bathes me by tossing a bucket of confetti on me. Laughter.
“What does any of this mean in my life, such as it is now?” I wonder from my hospital bed. “This is all just a movie. And I, in reality, am in bandages and confetti in a clown hospital in a cave at the end of the world. If I am a series of discrete images, then am I even alive in the conventional sense? Am I an illusion to myself? Are we all just a series of photos?”
Calcium, on his knees, pleads with an unseen force. His God? The universe? His own psyche?
“Why am I so alone? Why have I been left friendless? I ask so little. My life has been one of service, an attempt to better the circumstances of my species. And now the one thing I did for me—building B. Rosenberg, a prehistoric monument many times larger than my largest skyscraper, a symbol of inclusion that I posed with arm lifted high, holding a torch to light the way of lost and weary travelers, a gesture of great goodwill—is gone.”
I feel an overwhelming affection—an abiding love, really—for Calcium, this stop-motion ant in a movie…no, not even…my recovered memory of a stop-motion ant in a movie, colored by all the inexact haziness of memory. Just as my distant memories of the animated birds Hegel and Schlegel bring me comfort, as my memories of those cartoon saints Willibald and Winibald warm me, remind me of the joys of siblinghood in these desolate “only child” times, as my memories of Groebli and Mauch, the animated ice-skating monkeys, remind me that sometimes the closest of ties can be between those not physically related. In the end, we find our families, don’t we? I’m worried about my eyesight, though. There seems to be a tunneling, a degradation of the peripheral. It is difficult to assess its progress, especially swathed, as I am, in bandages, but I suspect, were there to be a time-lapse, I would be experiencing an irising similar to the technique ubiquitously employed in the end sequences of silent films. Perhaps it is glaucoma. Perhaps the movie is over.
Perhaps there’s no more to remember. Yet there’s so much still to worry about. The future is still coming, whether or not the movie continues, one frame at a time, one worry at a time. How will it go? Where will I go? I wish I had a friend in the world right now, not a million years hence, once I’m dead. What good is that? I wish I had my Calcium by my side here: together solving crimes, discussing philosophy, et chetera. I wish I had a Groebli. I have never in my life had a Groebli. Someone to call who would tell me it’s going to be OK, someone with whom to ice-skate. Wouldn’t that be a relief? I need a hobby. I’ve always needed a hobby. I never learned to skate. I never took the time. It was always about studying for young B. Where did that ambition come from, that desperate ambition?
The movie is over and I am unmoored. What can I spend my time thinking about now? What do I remember of my own life? Not Ingo’s movie, but my own life? I can’t bring myself to start again. I can’t even enter the Slammyplex to do my film criticizings. Those movies are not for me. I don’t know who they’re for. They’re not films anymore. They’re…bombardments, mindless assaults on the senses. There is, I have heard, one film currently playing, quite well-reviewed, I am told, consisting entirely of a young person of indeterminate gender screaming, “Look at me!” at the camera over and over for ninety minutes. The Slammy’s Gazette called it “the quintessential coming-of-age story for our times,” but I will not see it. They went on to say, “Borchard Melnoir delivers the performance of their career. Their yelling embodies the pain of all Hupersonity.” Where is the nuance? I ask. Of course, I applaud its multiracial, multigendered cast—we’ve certainly come such a long way in that regard—but I fear we have as a culture foregone subtlety. I will not endorse this trend with my Slammy’s Bucks. Movies for me have always been a way of understanding the world. It’s all come to naught, though. Even Ingo’s film, what does any of it matter? So I remember it. Who cares? It has changed nothing. My time has passed, and this is what I’ve done with it.
But wait.
There is still more to Ingo’s film. It comes to me now, as if to save me from this emptiness, from my own failures. It is a blessing. There is, perhaps, a God.