Only in the Movies (11 page)

“He’d just tell you they’re all snobs and let it go at that.”

“Speaking of snobs,” Instant whispered, and cocked his head toward the centre of the room.

Chad Bromley strolled through the reading room, chin high, casting his gaze from side to side like visiting royalty as he negotiated a path through the tables and chairs. He approached our table, then yanked the chair from under Instant’s feet, making them drop to the carpet with a muffled thump. Chad casually sat down, crossed his legs, adjusted the crease in his grey flannel pants and flicked a bit of fluff off one of the tassels on his polished loafer.

“I wonder if this library has any books on human aggression,” Vanni said to no one in particular.

Chad gave her a hard look. “Who
knows
?” he said, and smirked. “Ask Ms. Kahn. Maybe she
knows
.”

Vanni held Chad’s insolent stare. “Doorknob,” she said sweetly. “Wingnut.”

“Hey, Jake,” Instant commented lazily, “I think we’ve got a hardware theme going here.”

“Dipstick,” Vanni added when the colour rose into Chad’s face.

“Nope,” I said. “Automotive.”

“Hamburger. Weenie.”

“Make that culinary,” I said.

“That the best you can do, Miss Universe?” Chad drawled.

“You pimple on the arse of a sand flea.”

“Biological,” Instant pointed out.

Chad blinked first. He broke off visual conflict with Vanni and opened a John Grisham novel.

Ignoring Chad, the three of us got back to work, which in my case meant more aimless doodling.

After a few minutes’ silence, Instant muttered, “Well, I’ll be …” and got to his feet. He slouched over to the window. Shading his eyes with his hand, he peered out. “Hmm,” he said to himself, then returned to his seat. But he kept his attention trained out the window.

Curious, I asked, “What’s up?”

“Oh, nothing really,” he replied slowly.

I glanced at Vanni inquiringly. Her attention remained on her notebook, but her eyebrows rose slightly, which meant “I don’t know.”

It’s strange how compelling body language can be. Instant sat canted expectantly toward the window, focused intently on something in the distance. Finally Chad raised his eyes from his novel. He looked out across the snow toward the river, squinting against the glare.

“What are you staring at?” he demanded.

“That old guy out there, sitting on the bench,” Instant answered.

“What guy?”

“It’s a sad story. The poor fella’s crazy.”

“I don’t see—”

“He thinks he’s invisible,” Instant said solemnly.

“There’s nobody there,” Chad snapped. “You mean the bench by the path, right?”

Instant nodded. “He must be freezing in this weather. See, he knows that if he puts his clothes on—you know, with a heavy coat and hat and some snuggy gloves—he’ll be
warm, but people would be able to see him. Strictly speaking, they’d see the clothes, but it’s the same difference. He doesn’t want that.”

“But there’s nobody—”

“It’s really tragic what happened to him last time,” Instant interrupted, shaking his head sympathetically.

Silence.

“Well, what?” Chad demanded when it became clear that Instant was not going to say more.

“Walking around nude is illegal, even in this town. He was arrested.”

“Wait a minute!” Chad said, a note of triumph in his voice. “How could the police arrest him if they couldn’t—”

“He tried to understand how the cops had caught him. After all, he was invisible. He was totally baffled. Couldn’t figure it out. Anyway, they hauled him into court. The judge told him he was going to jail for indecent exposure. The old guy protested, ‘How can you convict me for exposing myself when you can’t see me?’ So the judge said, ‘If I can’t see you, how come I know you’re standing right there in front of me?’”

“Exactly,” Chad put in, as if he’d just scored a point.

“And the old fella answered, ‘Because you can hear my voice.’”

Chad fumed. “You’re nuts.”

“That’s exactly what the judge said to the invisible man when he sentenced him to six months in the loony bin. ‘You’re insane,’ he told him. But the old man wasn’t too upset. He planned to escape. He figured it’d be easy because—”

“Yeah, yeah, don’t tell me. Because he was invisible.”

Pause. Chad, his cheeks red with frustration, began to read again. After a minute or so, Instant sat back in his chair.

“I wonder how he ended up sitting on that bench, though,” he mused.

“There’s nobody on the damn bench!” Chad exclaimed through gritted teeth.

“Shhh!” came from all sides. A girl at the next table pointed to the For Quiet Study Only sign and gave Chad a disapproving look.

“Buzz off!” he told her.

A minute or so passed in silence.

“So what’s this invisible guy’s name, anyway?” Vanni asked innocently.

Chad slammed his novel shut, jumped to his feet and stomped away, bumping into tables as he wove his way toward the door.

Instant looked very pleased with himself. “I guess Chad never saw that movie,
The Invisible Man
,” he said.

“The original version, with Claude Rains?” I asked, showing off.

“That’s the one.”

Vanni fixed me with her eyes. “Please confirm that you are
not
going to tell us the plot.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I laughed.

W
ITH ONE WEEK TO GO
until my BP proposal was due, I still had nothing solid to offer. My mind was a blank. The proposal had to be approved by a teacher in the project’s discipline. Instant had already gotten the nod from Mr. Lewis, the chunky, tuba-playing head of music. Vanni would go through Mrs. Cleaver, and Alba through Call-Me-Saul. Because I was not attached to a particular program, I had to hand in my proposal to Ms. Pelletier.

Except I didn’t have one.

A screenplay, certainly. But a screenplay of what? I could adapt a novel. I could write a remake. I considered
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, the famous sci-fi story, but there were already at least four movie versions. I remembered bragging to Alba that one day I would do
Casablanca
with her in the Ingrid Bergman role, but as long as she was with Chad—or anyone else other than me—that was out, too. Besides,
Casablanca
was so perfect it would be almost sacrilege to lay my greasy hands on it.

“What are the chances Pelletier would buy into a case of screenwriter’s block?” I said as English class was getting under way.

Locheed had divided us up into “collaborative outcomes-based groups,” and Vanni, Instant and I had been joined by Daneale Halliday, a girl in the vocal-music program who also sang R & B at a club on the weekends. I had the feeling Instant had a thing for her.

Instant shook his head in answer to my question. Vanni smirked as if to say, “Yeah, right.” Daneale didn’t respond at all. She was focused on the play we’d been assigned to interpret.

“We have to discuss this,” she pointed out, anxious to get us on track, “and build an interpretation.” She checked her wristwatch. “In twenty-eight minutes.” She picked up her pen and held it above her notebook like someone ready to take dictation.

“Easy,” Instant began. “The play is about humankind’s brave but essentially futile struggle to find meaning in a hostile and indifferent universe.”

Daneale gave him a blank look. Her oversized brown eyes blinked once. “Come again?”

Instant repeated his sentence. The three gold chains hanging from Daneale’s ear brushed lightly against the coal black skin of her neck as she bent her head to write.

“So we done here?” Instant asked innocently.

“Sounds good to me,” I replied. “Mission accomplished. Outcome achieved. In”—I looked at my watch—“three minutes.”

“What do you mean, ‘a different universe?’” Daneale asked.

“Not different,
in
different,” Instant replied. “The universe doesn’t care about us. We’re just dust. Molecules. We live; we die. None of it matters. Life is pointless.”

I knew Vanni couldn’t keep out of a discussion on such a heavy topic for long. “Vladimir and Estragon spend the whole play waiting for Godot,” she explained, “but he never shows up.”

“Godot?” from Daneale.

“You haven’t read the play, have you?” I asked her.

“I had two gigs on the weekend. I didn’t get home ’til three, earliest, both nights.”

“I think Godot means God,” Vanni went on. “It’s a French nickname applied to the English name for
Dieu
. You know, like Pierrot is Pierre. Godot is God. The play was originally written in French. The author was Irish, by the way.”

Daneale nodded. The gold chains swung. “Oh.”

“So God doesn’t care about us,” Vanni said. “That’s my interpretation. He doesn’t arrive. Instant is right. Life is meaningless. The play ends where it began. Didjever wonder—”

“I think it means there
is
no god,” I interrupted. “Godot doesn’t appear because he doesn’t exist. He’s a figment of V and E’s imaginations.”

“So let me get this straight,” Daneale said with a hint of exasperation. “Samuel”—she picked up her copy of the play and checked—“Beckett, who was Irish, wrote a play in French, which he himself translated into English, which tells us God doesn’t exist and life is meaningless.”

“That’s about it,” I said.

“If nothing matters and everything is pointless,” she asked, smiling, “then why bother to write a play?”

“Good point,” I said. Maybe Daneale wasn’t such a dud after all.

“So we done here?” Instant asked again.

“Yup,” I said. “Right, Vanni?”

“I suppose. Now we can get back to Jake’s Big Project.”

“Which, like Godot, doesn’t exist,” Instant added helpfully.

Daneale ignored us. She was writing furiously, trying to put down everything we had said before she forgot it. Instant watched her.

“I had an idea, though,” I said tentatively.

“Uh huh,” Vanni said skeptically.

“A movie about three nauseatingly lovable British kid-wizards named Henry, Harriet and Randy who go to a school of sorcery where everybody has a magic wand and annoying teachers in academic gowns reward the students by giving them points.”

“Uh huh.”

“And one day Henry persuades his two pals to help him cast a super-spell. They wave their magic wands all over the place.”

“Uh huh.”

“Henry wants to make his aunt, uncle and fat, obnoxious cousin disappear in a cloud of brimstone smoke. But the three lovable magicians screw up—they’re only kids, after all—and they end up time-and-distance travelling to an American plantation called Tara, just before the Civil War.”

“Uh huh.”

“Henry’s spell has caused a race-reversal. Scarlett O’Hara is a slave. So are all the other white people.”

Daneale looked up from her writing. “This is starting to sound good,” she said. Instant laughed. Vanni smirked.