How to Film a Real Escape
-Kevin Tasker
They’d been on ‘vacation’ three weeks when Rex ran out of film. He purchased replacement reels from a low-mouthed clerk who described them as ‘raw, electric, magical.’ The camera butchered two spools before he managed to set it right.
In that day’s movie, they were coming up through the water on the dark of a wave, the man’o’war. Their shoveled brows were high, wet and shining. Filmed at a downward angle, they sprouted from the surf like broken spores culled from a nervous breakdown. Thomas on the shore had bony edge lines, short trunks, scabby knees, sap in the pits of his eyeballs. By all accounts save age, he was ancient. His hair a shade more yellow than the grey and timeless sand. Alice let her kite flutter skyward like a blemish on the film reel. Rex put the camera down. He watched the kite. Alice approached him in a sundress patterned in cherries and golden delicious apples. Her arms were slack. He opened his mouth. “So,” he said. Trying to talk to her about what he wanted to talk about was like attempting to make a call on a phone without a voicemail. He was not so much lulled by each echo in the insistent ringing as he was befuddled by them. Alice had a face like an orchid someone had split up the middle and sucked on for a day before discarding. They held the back of their hands, knuckles compressing. The boy had one of his feet in the water and raised the other like a fleshy old flamingo. The camera, as Rex held it dangling, was still on. It would show a view of the hotel behind them, shot upside down, a ruddy sucked-in structure bursting in a hundred windows from the sky. Alice was dying, he knew, as he used his hands on her neck. Needing to be kneaded, she told him. Her end began as a thing she had very much wanted to love. The disease in her spine, as it arched and sunk, was the epitome of the type of failed mechanism she had always cared for, whether in scraped-kneed playground champions (as Thomas was, at times when he left his books) or single toothed geriatrics with dirty nails at the slow-to-die assisted living home on Hawkins. To everyone flailing, she had lent a hand. The same hands, now wan and frail, would take care in holding herself, at least before it advanced to its deepest intents.
“So what?” she said.
“So we’ll have lunch inside today.”
“Yes,” she said, “We’ll have to.”
Rex dreamed that the only way to conquer his depression was to pull a six foot zip-tie out of his right nostril and then to trap the rest of his family in it. He awoke to a tired rain. The camera on the desk was a sentry, its enormous lens focused unseeing on a host of sandy but colorful seashells.
They were in the kitchen. On the counter, a ghastly photo of their distant relatives standing straight in a black and grey vineyard. The century had recently turned. Rex experienced a wild urge to turn the photo aground, to see the interior of this faraway world. A place he might love to stay. Instead, he stared at his wife.
Alice said, “Thomas, don’t have another cookie.”
Mischievous, the boy licked the last Oreo. “I have to eat it now,” he said.
Alice stared at Rex as he gave a belly laugh. It was the first time he’d laughed in days. He juggled his camera and continued laughing for a while.
“You shouldn’t have taught him those things,” she said.
He shook his head. “I didn’t teach him anything.”
That night they drove around the other hotels and Rex filmed the murk of the draining sunset. They drank tea from gas station cups. He told her about his dream.
Of the zip-tie.
“I admire you for dreaming up enough pain to keep the world as a wonder,” she said. He caught her with the camera in profile. On film, she was bright like something stolen.
She received nightly RESTRICTED calls from ex-lovers, though she been married for two decades. She felt most nights that Rex had intervened on her loose but exciting trajectory. You were made aware of time by sushi, as its avocado innards browned, or by heavy beige drapes over the sliding glass doors like canvas issued at military hospitals--they became speckled in rust from the sky that was sea salt. Alice cried a little as she thought about the numbers barred from sight by RESTRICTED. She knew which men by the length of the ringing. How long they deemed worthy to wait for her. Sad erudite Charles only let it ring twice. He was busy watching PBS specials. Lawrence, who was now corpulent and feverish, she imagined, a power plant worker, would call four times in quick succession.
The permanent Islanders unlike themselves looked like lawyers or reclusive collectors of insurance money. They smelled of cold cream and papaya, like all the long-chilled grocery stores. The faith of the sun in the people to cover their bodies left little room for fairness and their flesh was battered, snug, lined in mazes without end. Rex rubbed Alice head to toe with sunblock and took turns with each of her breasts, molding them. He spent similar time with her toes.
Ten or eleven pages of wrinkled notes in red, blue and black ink for the woman watching the house were torn from a notebook and wedged under the phonebook and then he told her the woman might not find them there so Alice put them on the pillow in the master bedroom then rethinking this, scuttled up to retrieve them and ending up placing them beside a plastic basket of cherry tomatoes that was the de facto dining room centerpiece after Thomas shattered the Madonna that once, aside from the salt shaker, held dominion there.
The notes, or some of them, read:
Skillets-underneath Telephone in cupb. Big pans-Kettles etc in cupb. Rt. of Sink. There are Canned veg/fruit-etc. in Basement on rack near Drier. Beer-Basement Refrig Also. use Anything-any Food-etc.-etc.-I have dehumidifier running in Basement. I usually leave it plugged in continuously. Unplug it if you wish. If it rains in torrents-there may be a foot of water in Basement. I keep front drapes Closed at night--open a couple of feet in the morn. You know how to work the thermostat. I just let all the tick tock--Bang Bang clocks run down when I’m gone. Such a relief--usually just at the climax of a TV show--one clock will start to chime--and chime--and then the Banger does its duty--By the time 3 or 4 of them have told me the hour has come--the TV show is on the credits and I never did hear the ending! Now the bathroom has a problem--There are no washcloths. I hate my hair--she should have cut it first. Its too long all over. I haven’t found a replacement plastic latch in Bath. I changed the Bedding completely--even the mattress cover. Hope you can sleep OK. You may want to bring your own pillows. Now, if it pours there may be a little water just as you go into ‘new room’--makes floor slippery and dangerous. The door locks are Strange--makes life exciting. Some lock [horizontal]--some lock [vertical]. I just try the knob to see. I need to get more laundry soap for you. Also coffee. Just saw some ugly ants in kitchen on cupb. by stove today. I Hate them. Remember. Ice makes a terrible noise when it drops into ice tray.....I don’t know when we’re coming home--but we will eventually--
Her death was something Rex could neither fear nor control; he expected it every morning. He kept the camera close at hand, with the intentions of filming her awakening, but he always waited too long before pressing the ON button. Thomas wanted always to be the first awake; he was bitter when he bounded into the kitchen to find eggs awaiting him on a platter embossed with an owl. Once, just once, Alice had cooked for her husband in only a crimson scarf--he laughed like a boy being tickled--and caught herself briefly on fire. He could remember this only as a story. He did not remember the smell. He did not expect his own death or that of the boy who one day met a girl by the water and her and her family came over to their hotel for supper and there was much laughter and kind, soulful glances from the girl’s parents who knew, or thought they knew, all about Alice, as people who visit the dying do, as they suppose the definition of their lives is in their ending and Rex, drinking slowly martinis with no olives, could not find the words to correct them. He did not film anything that evening and the girl and Thomas sat on the balcony and he imagined they were talking about him, and how good he was to carry Alice on.
RESTRICTED Lawrence called six times, portending despair he couldn’t know.
The next day Rex saw Neal, the father of Thomas’ girl, trying to pitch a white umbrella in the sand. He took long steps around it and swung his red hair which was really long and looked awfully itchy. “Need a hand?” Rex said even though his hands were in the pockets of his rough Bermuda shorts. When together the two men couldn’t get the umbrella to stand, Neal offered to let Rex drive him in his cadillac about sections of the island far less populated. Rex did not tell his family where he was going. He told himself this was what he needed. He drove quickly and Neal didn’t seem to mind. The radio said that pieces of incredible debris: cars, trees, tangled root systems--were washing toward the States from somewhere polluted and damned. The sky was thin and cloudless. The freeway let them out to a narrow road elbowing its way into shaggy, ambivalent forest. The humidity stretched and manipulated the horizon. Neal turned off the radio and started playing the beginnings of songs, letting his face jiggle and clench to match them. He often spent drives this way, making suggestive gestures to the upward crescendos as songs began, imagining he were in the end of movies where soundtracks swelled before blackouts. He was also drinking scotch in thick mouthfuls and no longer thinking clearly and could feel a pain as it gurgled in and out of him in spasms and beyond there were longing trees that sheltered little and the birds rousting along the absent heavens whined. Rex half-watched creatures savagely trapped in their grassy hunter’s blinds, eyeing the passing car with distaste and scrutiny. Neal, to distract himself from the pain, thought about eating out women for gorgeous hours, if not days, as though it were the only pleasure he knew to give. The women, in his mind, were ex-lovers as they had never been. Immaculate and fierce. Rex had never had thoughts like these. He drove. The road continued through water-logged grass and there was a dull glimmering fog ahead of them. His fingers were raw on the wheel and the sun over the hill as it snapped open as a roaring eye sent systemic splutters all along the galaxy. There came a burst of white river birds from the bottomland that cackled in collusion over the canopy where others unlike them rousted, their waxen backs bent to the sun as it broke free of the world’s outer shell.
Rex dreamed of taking the zip-tie and spooling it around her to secure her soul to his body. In the dream, the camera was placed by the wall to film this operation.
Three days later, the couples dined again. Sweet potatoes and poached salmon with three bottles of insanely expensive wine. The children joined them this time at the base of the table like a two-headed tiny intruder. Neal’s wife, Catherine, was an English teacher with haunting green eyes and a slight nose. Her mouth always seemed to be open a centimeter. She had a neck you might want to touch with both of your hands, but never squeeze. Her hair smelled softly of vinegar. Alice sat in her wheelchair and admired, as much as she could, the men as they spoke and rolled back in their chairs with insulting and dry light laughter.
“It was all sort of this ritual we had. To stay up all night together. Someone said that it was not really normal. But I didn’t care,” Neal said, “It never bothered us a bit.”
Catherine blushed, drank wine. She had a tattoo on her foot of Nietzsche. “Yes,” she said, “Three times a week we watched the sun rise. It was a thing.”
Rex said, “I can’t remember the last time we did that.” Alice gave a neutral smile and asked him to pour her another drink. He had cut up her vegetables even though she could still do it herself. Her lack of balance made him keep her away from the knives. That and her double vision. Things crawled through her skin, she could feel them. She purred at him as he said, “Maybe we can do it sometime soon though, eh?”
Neal talked about the way that the trash coming closer worried him and asked if they heard of the millions of jellyfish swarming into the now dead reactor in Japan.
He said solemnly, “I don’t know what we’re going to do with this world.”
Rex had an impulse to go and grab his camera. But then he remembered the children had played with it that day and, swinging it over his head, Thomas cracked the lens. “You’re old enough to know better,” Rex told him, but it didn’t really mean anything. He wondered how he might record her death if it came before he was able to replace the lens. With wine, he hid this thought away. He knew Alice was obsessed with trying to determine what he might be thinking about her and so he always appeared contented, though this, in itself, might have been troubling.
“We had other rituals, of course,” Neal said, “Coming here is one that has maintained. We usually come down for Christmas. They have a neat restaurant on the island that used to be a hotel. It is really very beautiful. Lots of wallpapers stitched together like crazy.”
Alice felt her bowels loosening, but she made no indication. Her husband tugged at his fine linen shirt and she wondered if he felt what she did. When he was young, he had sort of looked like he would become a famous part of something. And yet--
There were two awful mad calls from RESTRICTED.
Neal was talking about how he’d spent a whole day waxing Catherine’s car for her and she kept looking toward him in a conspicuous way that made Rex wonder if she had been drinking before she arrived and when the story seemed not to be going anywhere, Rex began to twist in his seat and he couldn’t, just couldn’t, look at his wife because he hated her. He wanted to go sit out in the old cadillac and, if possible, allow someone to crash into it. He didn’t want to crash himself. They were becoming permanent Islanders. He could feel it. Something in the air was different; the A/C kept on and on like a bomb inside was constantly exploding. Everything in the world was a symptom, he told himself, a symptom or a superstition. His son, the ancient, wasn’t eating, only licking his food and returning it, piece by piece, to his owl plate. Rex longed to feel again the way he’d felt when he was depressed-in-love in the beginning of his life with women who came close to him and read what he read and who were, in their bodies, quite healthy. Catherine said she hadn’t loved Neal at first, said she had taken convincing. Said they’d traveled together a little and had displaced themselves from the rest of society, in ‘a bubble,’ she said, and how that had almost ruined them. She said it was weeks before they ever had sex in the sunlight. Rex blinked and twisted and swallowed his insanely expensive wine, his eyes shaded by the way his face has turned itself coldly downward. “My life, I’ve felt, is one big film, that has been edited out of order,” he said. Neal nodded as if he understood this even though it hadn’t come from anything they’d been talking about.
“Sure,” Neal said, “We all feel that way some of the time. It’s okay to feel that way. As long as you’ve got a woman to keep a check on you.”
“As long as you’re on a little vacation,” Alice said and they all looked at her expectantly, her firm eyes distant and droopy and her hair askew as if she’d cut it herself but really he’d done it and his hands had shaken and his eyes as they meet hers, reflected her just the right way. He knew that now somehow, as it happened, she was really, for the first time, his.
Rex looked at the camera broken on the bed, and imagined home movies he’d made as a boy that were invariably gory with corn syrup and red food coloring for blood and concerned always with men who had premonitions, who cannibalized one another, who got half-naked and slung themselves against bars where his father kept tangled green garden hoses, men who knew little of women, men who stalked crows, men who attended school to doodle hit-lists, men who were really just boys ill-trained to live and cry and venture forth into unnamed futures; these were the men he remembered, the men he would never really know.
-Kevin Tasker
They’d been on ‘vacation’ three weeks when Rex ran out of film. He purchased replacement reels from a low-mouthed clerk who described them as ‘raw, electric, magical.’ The camera butchered two spools before he managed to set it right.
In that day’s movie, they were coming up through the water on the dark of a wave, the man’o’war. Their shoveled brows were high, wet and shining. Filmed at a downward angle, they sprouted from the surf like broken spores culled from a nervous breakdown. Thomas on the shore had bony edge lines, short trunks, scabby knees, sap in the pits of his eyeballs. By all accounts save age, he was ancient. His hair a shade more yellow than the grey and timeless sand. Alice let her kite flutter skyward like a blemish on the film reel. Rex put the camera down. He watched the kite. Alice approached him in a sundress patterned in cherries and golden delicious apples. Her arms were slack. He opened his mouth. “So,” he said. Trying to talk to her about what he wanted to talk about was like attempting to make a call on a phone without a voicemail. He was not so much lulled by each echo in the insistent ringing as he was befuddled by them. Alice had a face like an orchid someone had split up the middle and sucked on for a day before discarding. They held the back of their hands, knuckles compressing. The boy had one of his feet in the water and raised the other like a fleshy old flamingo. The camera, as Rex held it dangling, was still on. It would show a view of the hotel behind them, shot upside down, a ruddy sucked-in structure bursting in a hundred windows from the sky. Alice was dying, he knew, as he used his hands on her neck. Needing to be kneaded, she told him. Her end began as a thing she had very much wanted to love. The disease in her spine, as it arched and sunk, was the epitome of the type of failed mechanism she had always cared for, whether in scraped-kneed playground champions (as Thomas was, at times when he left his books) or single toothed geriatrics with dirty nails at the slow-to-die assisted living home on Hawkins. To everyone flailing, she had lent a hand. The same hands, now wan and frail, would take care in holding herself, at least before it advanced to its deepest intents.
“So what?” she said.
“So we’ll have lunch inside today.”
“Yes,” she said, “We’ll have to.”
Rex dreamed that the only way to conquer his depression was to pull a six foot zip-tie out of his right nostril and then to trap the rest of his family in it. He awoke to a tired rain. The camera on the desk was a sentry, its enormous lens focused unseeing on a host of sandy but colorful seashells.
They were in the kitchen. On the counter, a ghastly photo of their distant relatives standing straight in a black and grey vineyard. The century had recently turned. Rex experienced a wild urge to turn the photo aground, to see the interior of this faraway world. A place he might love to stay. Instead, he stared at his wife.
Alice said, “Thomas, don’t have another cookie.”
Mischievous, the boy licked the last Oreo. “I have to eat it now,” he said.
Alice stared at Rex as he gave a belly laugh. It was the first time he’d laughed in days. He juggled his camera and continued laughing for a while.
“You shouldn’t have taught him those things,” she said.
He shook his head. “I didn’t teach him anything.”
That night they drove around the other hotels and Rex filmed the murk of the draining sunset. They drank tea from gas station cups. He told her about his dream.
Of the zip-tie.
“I admire you for dreaming up enough pain to keep the world as a wonder,” she said. He caught her with the camera in profile. On film, she was bright like something stolen.
She received nightly RESTRICTED calls from ex-lovers, though she been married for two decades. She felt most nights that Rex had intervened on her loose but exciting trajectory. You were made aware of time by sushi, as its avocado innards browned, or by heavy beige drapes over the sliding glass doors like canvas issued at military hospitals--they became speckled in rust from the sky that was sea salt. Alice cried a little as she thought about the numbers barred from sight by RESTRICTED. She knew which men by the length of the ringing. How long they deemed worthy to wait for her. Sad erudite Charles only let it ring twice. He was busy watching PBS specials. Lawrence, who was now corpulent and feverish, she imagined, a power plant worker, would call four times in quick succession.
The permanent Islanders unlike themselves looked like lawyers or reclusive collectors of insurance money. They smelled of cold cream and papaya, like all the long-chilled grocery stores. The faith of the sun in the people to cover their bodies left little room for fairness and their flesh was battered, snug, lined in mazes without end. Rex rubbed Alice head to toe with sunblock and took turns with each of her breasts, molding them. He spent similar time with her toes.
Ten or eleven pages of wrinkled notes in red, blue and black ink for the woman watching the house were torn from a notebook and wedged under the phonebook and then he told her the woman might not find them there so Alice put them on the pillow in the master bedroom then rethinking this, scuttled up to retrieve them and ending up placing them beside a plastic basket of cherry tomatoes that was the de facto dining room centerpiece after Thomas shattered the Madonna that once, aside from the salt shaker, held dominion there.
The notes, or some of them, read:
Skillets-underneath Telephone in cupb. Big pans-Kettles etc in cupb. Rt. of Sink. There are Canned veg/fruit-etc. in Basement on rack near Drier. Beer-Basement Refrig Also. use Anything-any Food-etc.-etc.-I have dehumidifier running in Basement. I usually leave it plugged in continuously. Unplug it if you wish. If it rains in torrents-there may be a foot of water in Basement. I keep front drapes Closed at night--open a couple of feet in the morn. You know how to work the thermostat. I just let all the tick tock--Bang Bang clocks run down when I’m gone. Such a relief--usually just at the climax of a TV show--one clock will start to chime--and chime--and then the Banger does its duty--By the time 3 or 4 of them have told me the hour has come--the TV show is on the credits and I never did hear the ending! Now the bathroom has a problem--There are no washcloths. I hate my hair--she should have cut it first. Its too long all over. I haven’t found a replacement plastic latch in Bath. I changed the Bedding completely--even the mattress cover. Hope you can sleep OK. You may want to bring your own pillows. Now, if it pours there may be a little water just as you go into ‘new room’--makes floor slippery and dangerous. The door locks are Strange--makes life exciting. Some lock [horizontal]--some lock [vertical]. I just try the knob to see. I need to get more laundry soap for you. Also coffee. Just saw some ugly ants in kitchen on cupb. by stove today. I Hate them. Remember. Ice makes a terrible noise when it drops into ice tray.....I don’t know when we’re coming home--but we will eventually--
Her death was something Rex could neither fear nor control; he expected it every morning. He kept the camera close at hand, with the intentions of filming her awakening, but he always waited too long before pressing the ON button. Thomas wanted always to be the first awake; he was bitter when he bounded into the kitchen to find eggs awaiting him on a platter embossed with an owl. Once, just once, Alice had cooked for her husband in only a crimson scarf--he laughed like a boy being tickled--and caught herself briefly on fire. He could remember this only as a story. He did not remember the smell. He did not expect his own death or that of the boy who one day met a girl by the water and her and her family came over to their hotel for supper and there was much laughter and kind, soulful glances from the girl’s parents who knew, or thought they knew, all about Alice, as people who visit the dying do, as they suppose the definition of their lives is in their ending and Rex, drinking slowly martinis with no olives, could not find the words to correct them. He did not film anything that evening and the girl and Thomas sat on the balcony and he imagined they were talking about him, and how good he was to carry Alice on.
RESTRICTED Lawrence called six times, portending despair he couldn’t know.
The next day Rex saw Neal, the father of Thomas’ girl, trying to pitch a white umbrella in the sand. He took long steps around it and swung his red hair which was really long and looked awfully itchy. “Need a hand?” Rex said even though his hands were in the pockets of his rough Bermuda shorts. When together the two men couldn’t get the umbrella to stand, Neal offered to let Rex drive him in his cadillac about sections of the island far less populated. Rex did not tell his family where he was going. He told himself this was what he needed. He drove quickly and Neal didn’t seem to mind. The radio said that pieces of incredible debris: cars, trees, tangled root systems--were washing toward the States from somewhere polluted and damned. The sky was thin and cloudless. The freeway let them out to a narrow road elbowing its way into shaggy, ambivalent forest. The humidity stretched and manipulated the horizon. Neal turned off the radio and started playing the beginnings of songs, letting his face jiggle and clench to match them. He often spent drives this way, making suggestive gestures to the upward crescendos as songs began, imagining he were in the end of movies where soundtracks swelled before blackouts. He was also drinking scotch in thick mouthfuls and no longer thinking clearly and could feel a pain as it gurgled in and out of him in spasms and beyond there were longing trees that sheltered little and the birds rousting along the absent heavens whined. Rex half-watched creatures savagely trapped in their grassy hunter’s blinds, eyeing the passing car with distaste and scrutiny. Neal, to distract himself from the pain, thought about eating out women for gorgeous hours, if not days, as though it were the only pleasure he knew to give. The women, in his mind, were ex-lovers as they had never been. Immaculate and fierce. Rex had never had thoughts like these. He drove. The road continued through water-logged grass and there was a dull glimmering fog ahead of them. His fingers were raw on the wheel and the sun over the hill as it snapped open as a roaring eye sent systemic splutters all along the galaxy. There came a burst of white river birds from the bottomland that cackled in collusion over the canopy where others unlike them rousted, their waxen backs bent to the sun as it broke free of the world’s outer shell.
Rex dreamed of taking the zip-tie and spooling it around her to secure her soul to his body. In the dream, the camera was placed by the wall to film this operation.
Three days later, the couples dined again. Sweet potatoes and poached salmon with three bottles of insanely expensive wine. The children joined them this time at the base of the table like a two-headed tiny intruder. Neal’s wife, Catherine, was an English teacher with haunting green eyes and a slight nose. Her mouth always seemed to be open a centimeter. She had a neck you might want to touch with both of your hands, but never squeeze. Her hair smelled softly of vinegar. Alice sat in her wheelchair and admired, as much as she could, the men as they spoke and rolled back in their chairs with insulting and dry light laughter.
“It was all sort of this ritual we had. To stay up all night together. Someone said that it was not really normal. But I didn’t care,” Neal said, “It never bothered us a bit.”
Catherine blushed, drank wine. She had a tattoo on her foot of Nietzsche. “Yes,” she said, “Three times a week we watched the sun rise. It was a thing.”
Rex said, “I can’t remember the last time we did that.” Alice gave a neutral smile and asked him to pour her another drink. He had cut up her vegetables even though she could still do it herself. Her lack of balance made him keep her away from the knives. That and her double vision. Things crawled through her skin, she could feel them. She purred at him as he said, “Maybe we can do it sometime soon though, eh?”
Neal talked about the way that the trash coming closer worried him and asked if they heard of the millions of jellyfish swarming into the now dead reactor in Japan.
He said solemnly, “I don’t know what we’re going to do with this world.”
Rex had an impulse to go and grab his camera. But then he remembered the children had played with it that day and, swinging it over his head, Thomas cracked the lens. “You’re old enough to know better,” Rex told him, but it didn’t really mean anything. He wondered how he might record her death if it came before he was able to replace the lens. With wine, he hid this thought away. He knew Alice was obsessed with trying to determine what he might be thinking about her and so he always appeared contented, though this, in itself, might have been troubling.
“We had other rituals, of course,” Neal said, “Coming here is one that has maintained. We usually come down for Christmas. They have a neat restaurant on the island that used to be a hotel. It is really very beautiful. Lots of wallpapers stitched together like crazy.”
Alice felt her bowels loosening, but she made no indication. Her husband tugged at his fine linen shirt and she wondered if he felt what she did. When he was young, he had sort of looked like he would become a famous part of something. And yet--
There were two awful mad calls from RESTRICTED.
Neal was talking about how he’d spent a whole day waxing Catherine’s car for her and she kept looking toward him in a conspicuous way that made Rex wonder if she had been drinking before she arrived and when the story seemed not to be going anywhere, Rex began to twist in his seat and he couldn’t, just couldn’t, look at his wife because he hated her. He wanted to go sit out in the old cadillac and, if possible, allow someone to crash into it. He didn’t want to crash himself. They were becoming permanent Islanders. He could feel it. Something in the air was different; the A/C kept on and on like a bomb inside was constantly exploding. Everything in the world was a symptom, he told himself, a symptom or a superstition. His son, the ancient, wasn’t eating, only licking his food and returning it, piece by piece, to his owl plate. Rex longed to feel again the way he’d felt when he was depressed-in-love in the beginning of his life with women who came close to him and read what he read and who were, in their bodies, quite healthy. Catherine said she hadn’t loved Neal at first, said she had taken convincing. Said they’d traveled together a little and had displaced themselves from the rest of society, in ‘a bubble,’ she said, and how that had almost ruined them. She said it was weeks before they ever had sex in the sunlight. Rex blinked and twisted and swallowed his insanely expensive wine, his eyes shaded by the way his face has turned itself coldly downward. “My life, I’ve felt, is one big film, that has been edited out of order,” he said. Neal nodded as if he understood this even though it hadn’t come from anything they’d been talking about.
“Sure,” Neal said, “We all feel that way some of the time. It’s okay to feel that way. As long as you’ve got a woman to keep a check on you.”
“As long as you’re on a little vacation,” Alice said and they all looked at her expectantly, her firm eyes distant and droopy and her hair askew as if she’d cut it herself but really he’d done it and his hands had shaken and his eyes as they meet hers, reflected her just the right way. He knew that now somehow, as it happened, she was really, for the first time, his.
Rex looked at the camera broken on the bed, and imagined home movies he’d made as a boy that were invariably gory with corn syrup and red food coloring for blood and concerned always with men who had premonitions, who cannibalized one another, who got half-naked and slung themselves against bars where his father kept tangled green garden hoses, men who knew little of women, men who stalked crows, men who attended school to doodle hit-lists, men who were really just boys ill-trained to live and cry and venture forth into unnamed futures; these were the men he remembered, the men he would never really know.