Driver's Education (5 page)

I enjoy it and I'm good at it, I'd like to think. During these mornings, when I come to work early, or during nights when I stay at work late, I'll sit at our editing bays, surrounded by logged tapes and the vacant cubicles of our empty office. I'll sit alone with the overhead lights off and I'll watch them, the tapes, so many times over again.

I'll slow down the footage of the cast members; I'll speed it up. I can tell you who looks the prettiest when she cries, or the most terrifying when he laughs. I can tell you whose smile is real, and whose is fake, and what percent of the time. I can tell you that when he's nervous, or uncomfortable, he'll start grinding his teeth. I can tell you that she peels away her cuticles when there's something or nothing to do. I can tell you which sort of men find her lack of beauty appealing.

I can tell you about the sort of devastating melancholy that seizes them when they realize they can no longer surprise one another.

But there's something in it, honestly. Something in turning ordinary people into these exceptional and exciting creatures. It is, I think, the very basic illusion that if I can move one piece, or shift one talk, or misplace one mistake, then I, me, Finn, can create something fascinating and wonderful and wholly unique.

So I'll splice arguments together sequentially, how they are supposed to happen, from fight to discussion to reconciliation. And then I'll switch the order—I'll turn reconciliations into catalysts for fights, sobbing admissions into causes for looped laughter. I'll succumb to some of my own youngish adult impulses and edit footage involving first kisses together with bouts of drunken vomiting. I'll run footage of dialogue in reverse. I'll slip in sound bites from other conversations into scenes where such bites don't belong: five minutes of seven people telling one another to
answer the phone
and nothing else; five minutes of seven people telling one another
I hate you,
telling one another
leave me alone,
telling one another
I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you.

Then, as the morning grows late and as the cubicles around me become less vacant and as the city becomes more crowded, I'll erase it all and start over again.

•  •  •

By noon—this noon and every noon—I'm tired, but not tired enough to sleep. My eyes are crossed and the pull of the building's air-conditioning has left them scratchy and dry. I go to see Karen.

The glass door to her office is open, but I knock anyway, and she says,
Yes, Finn, come in
. It faces west, her office. But we are only on the fifteenth floor and we are surrounded by buildings that are much taller, much grander than ours, and so the view to the river is blocked; each day Karen stares into a medical services company and—much farther below—the pocked roof of a T.G.I. Friday's.

She hides each day behind three wide computer screens and at least a thousand pictures of Hugo, that goddamn dog. There's always seemed something a little insincere about them. Almost as if their joint purpose is to remind her that she loves him. That despite what she wants to believe Hugo isn't the reason the Israeli waiter has decided he likes boys. There are these moments when I imagine her alone in her glass office, sitting Indian style on the rough blue carpet with the frames piled high in her lap. They reach past her shoulders, past her small ears, until they press their flat faces against the ceiling. She'll hug them. She'll press her wet face against their soft wood corners. She'll say,
It's not your fault,
without really knowing whom she's speaking to.

Or I don't know. Maybe she doesn't do any of that. Maybe she really does love that goddamn dog. Though I don't know what's to love, really. He's basically just brown, and he has indigestion problems, and he often smells like salmon.

“Have you ever been to Pittsburgh?” I walk past her desk and stand at the window and watch a million people perform medical services at a million grey desks.

“Yes.” Her eyes stay fixed on the three screens. On two of them: paused raw footage from the show, profiles of The Boy and The Girl, strong aristocratic noses leading their faces as they walked away from each other. On the other: rotating still shots of Hugo. Hugo in the bath. Hugo at the beach. Hugo reclined on a shag carpet, legs spread like Mata Hari.

“What's it like?”

“It's awful.”

“How awful?”

She clicks something and the footage crawls forward at a fourth of its original speed, the space between The Girl and The Boy stretching.

“Better than Cleveland but worse than Philadelphia.” Then: “This isn't working. This shot isn't working.”

Her eyes have rings around them, but they aren't sunken and dark. They are flushed in white, skin pale and thin. We all have this look. All of us who've come to realize that our lives are best lived through the lives of others.

I say, “I've never been to Cleveland,” and I pull up a chair next to her.

She toggles the footage and plays it again. They are arguing about something, something that someone has said to someone else that is true, but not entirely.

“There,” Karen says, pausing the footage. She pushes phantom hair from her forehead. She cut it short and spiked it when she returned from Toronto. “I don't know what the problem is—but it's
there.
”

I pull my chair closer. I bring my face next to hers. I say, “I'm going to have to go away for a while.”

“This needs to be fixed. We need the ratings.” Then: “Oh?”

I say again, “I'm going to have to go away for a while.”

I roll the chair away from her and I sit with my hands folded in my lap and so does she and we both look at each other.

Outside Karen's office, at one of the editing bays, someone keeps playing a clip of one of the youngish adults laughing, hyperventilating.

“I'm guessing, then, that it's happening?” she says.

“Explain what you mean when you say
it's happening
.”

Karen pulls at her hair. She says,
I'm sorry,
which I'm already tired of hearing, even though I haven't heard it yet. Whoever is editing has stopped working on the laughing clip and has moved on to splicing together a thirty-second conversation about someone vomiting from a roof, topless, or pantless, which is played both forward and backward, English turning into gibberish and then back into English again.

She stands. She rests a hand lightly on top of my head, walking around me to the window. She looks out through tears in the skyline toward slits of atmosphere. Blue streaked with cirrus clouds, white afterthoughts stretching the length of Manhattan.

“How much time do you have?”

“To do what?”

“Before he . . . ” She trails off. She starts again. This time saying, “I just assumed that, possibly, something had happened with your grandfather. Because of . . . That maybe he had . . . ”

“He's fine,” I say, suddenly aware that I might be shouting. “He's just asked me to do him a favor.” Then: “And I owe him. I mean, you
know
I owe him.”

“I don't know if that's necessarily true.”

She picks up one of the 3 million pictures of Hugo. She traces the edge of the frame with her forefinger, the nail bitten down to the raw pink flesh.

She says, “Well, again. I'm sorry.”

“Maybe you should stop saying that?”

She sets the frame on a small glass table beside the window. “I don't know what to do with that clip.”

“Let me look at it.”

“I don't think you know what you're doing.”

“But you taught me everything I know.”

“I'm not talking about the clip.”

“I think,” I tell her, “I liked your hair better when it was long.”

I spin in the chair till I'm facing the three computer screens. Karen has paused the footage at this moment where The Girl has her top lip sucked against her teeth. Her forehead has three thin creases. I toggle
the controls, moving the scene forward, then backward. Lips sucked in, then pushed out; creases, then no creases, then creases again.

I can tell that she's taken a step toward me; her shadow eclipses the screens, I can smell the turkey, the mustard she ate for lunch. I can feel her hands resting slightly over the dome of my head, wanting to touch it, but not. Afraid she'll break something.

She just says:
Finn
.

I scratch at the space between my eyes. I run the tapes again. What bothers Karen, what she can't articulate, is this: at the moment of highest intensity, when you'd expect there to be a slap, or a kiss, or something wonderfully offensive, The Girl turns the other way. That's it—she just turns the other way. I think that, too often, it's the decency of people that always confuses us.

Karen keeps talking. “Have you ever noticed how the people on the street, on Seventh Avenue, move faster than the clouds? Maybe it makes sense, but I don't think it should. People moving faster than clouds. There's just something that seems so wrong about that, you know? Just so disrespectful. They should have the decency to move at the same pace, at the very least.”

“You should air the footage backward,” I say, finally.

“Sorry?”

“That's really all you have to do. Just—watch. Play the footage backward, and use that in the final cut.” I show her: The Girl turns toward The Boy; the creases in her forehead smooth themselves into clean flesh; her lips relax. They look at each other.

She says, “I worry about you, sometimes.”

“What do you mean?”

“I worry that I've taught you too much.” Then, as she finally touches me. As she pokes me softly in the nose: “I worry that you've watched too much reality TV.”

1956: The Avalon

By Colin A. McPhee

The Avalon Cinema was on Saw Mill Road, an eight-minute bike ride from the house in which I was raised. The night that it opened, the theater rented two spotlights from a company called Ducky Joe's that was based in the Bronx—but those globes only spent twenty-five minutes tracing circles in the sky. For the rest of the eight hours they were on loan, they beamed straight into the theater's lobby. Blinking, searching.

“There has been a break-in,” the lobby manager announced to the crowds who were huddled in frozen pockets outside the theater's glass and gold doors. His voice trailed to the rear of the pack, and as it did it collected whispers of gossip from the other onlookers. This was a town with a population well under ten thousand people, and General Eisenhower was sailing easily into his second term as president; crimes were small and inconsequential and received disproportionate amounts of thrill and fanfare. People stood on their toes to get a better look. Fathers placed sons on their shoulders.

It was a boy, a woman relayed to those surrounding her. At one moment he'd been standing near the front of the audience that had gathered near the glass doors ten minutes before they opened, his hands placed in his pockets as the excited and anonymous moviegoers enveloped the
space around him. No one had recognized him, though it's questionable if anyone tried. He was ten, or maybe twelve, or maybe eight, but it was said that he already had the lean ropy look of a runner, a jumper. This was all easy to see, even though he wore a sweater that was one size two big (it was blue, but also it could've been yellow). He had half-weary eyes and skin crusted with film from the city.

The boy hadn't looked nervous, or maybe he had, as the crowd doubled, then tripled, and then quadrupled. He'd looked up at the silver and green neon sign—THE AVALON—that crowned the theater's marquee, and he replaced strands of his stringed hair that fell in front of his face while regarding his reflection in the theater's glass and metal doors. At one point, he'd tried to reach out and run a finger along the gold engravings that adorned the doors' frames, but the lobby manager—who stood guard in front of the theater before it officially opened—had slapped his hand away. So the boy went back to combing his hair with his fingers.

“And he was alone?” someone asked.

Completely alone—or maybe not completely alone? It was difficult to tell. There had been other boys around him, but they didn't have his look. They'd appeared better fed, more filled out. They wore V-neck sweaters and wool caps and their skin was scrubbed clean. They'd stood at deliberate distances from him: the sort of preconceptualized space that boys imagine will prevent Them from turning into Him.

Because this was the Avalon's grand opening, there were vendors from the theater who stalked the crowd as we waited to get in. They wore striped caps and carried trays that wielded Coke and candy, popcorn with butter that clung to the evening's fog, wormed its way into our noses. A man bought some for his wife and daughter and they ate it in greedy handfuls.

The same woman who'd been speaking explained that the boy had bought some too—popcorn, that is. Or maybe it was a box of something else—chocolates, Flicks. He hadn't eaten it, though, and that was the strange thing. He'd held it to his chest very piously, as if it were some sort of offering. As if he were paying his tithe before kneeling for communion.

The woman said, “And then, suddenly, he was gone.”

“Gone?” someone else asked.

“
Gone
.” The woman nodded.

A mother who was listening to the story tightened her coat across her chest, pulling each lapel to the opposite shoulder. “Where did he go?” she asked.

The woman explained that it all happened so fast—or, not so fast, but
at once
—which is what the people standing in front of her had heard. The lobby manager (a man whose name we gleaned was Earl) had opened the doors at 7:30 with great pomp and aplomb, telling the crowd of hundreds that they were to be canonized as part of Sleepy Hollow lore, or Sleepy Hollow history, or the Annals of Cinema, or the Epics of Film, or all of the above, depending on whom in the crowd you asked.