Carbine: Stories

Film

 Film = She emailed him that she had chosen to participate in the great renunciation. Couldn’t she have simply told him at supper? He was, theoretically, all for giving things up. This was some time after the big game. During the big game, he had sat there drinking malt liquor and cheering while she and the children watched in confusion and disgust. —You’re going to find out, he told her, that your wonder machine causes brain cancer. But it was an empty threat, and both of them knew it although he was reluctant to believe it. The way she did things, said things, in particular, so casually, so off-handedly. All of this, he was sure, had started much earlier. For example, the invitation from his work to the holiday party said his name and companion. Companion, he had never thought of her that way. He had to think back, and when he thought back, he thought he remembered something he had long forgotten. A desire. Hard to put into words. He had been puzzled by what he did not know about her—he had wanted to know everything. He wanted to know everything she thought and why she thought it and how she thought it and of course he wanted to control it. He had observed her. Talked to her. Questioned her. Sometimes he had imagined himself a scientist studying her with a purposeful and sterile objectivity. That was long ago, he felt. Lately, he had been losing things. He lost the little aluminum flashlight he kept in the glove compartment. He needed it for something and looked for it and it was not there. If that was not lost, what was lost? And he lost a pen, his good pen, the roller ball he kept in his shirt pocket at work. Vanished . That was a two-dollar pen. So he was all alone. He would go to China which was beneath the sea and live there alone. What else could he do but seek solace in religion, an idea he had long ago rejected, but that now struck him with a dim hope, for did not he, of all people, deserve solace? Maybe, he considered, that mystery he had seen in her so long ago was not in her at all, maybe it was something, some kind of untieable knot in his head. If he could give up trying to understand, only admit that it was and would forever remain incomprehensible. Maybe if he could not seek solace, he could try to find some comfort. He was not sure how to go about that. Where did you start—make a list of things that made you comfortable? It was this constant talk talk talk. These words in his head. Though shutting them off was not much of an option, maybe there was a way to make them say, do, something else. Sing him a pretty song instead of interrogating him in this hopeless dialogue. Then he was walking into work and there in the slush in the parking lot lay a perfectly good pen. Not his pen, though. This was a Japanese ballpoint that sold for a dollar, maybe a little more. Did he have to pick it up? He could afford to buy a pen, a thousand pens, if he wanted to. He did not have to pick pens off the slushy ground; he could afford not to. He left the pen where it lay. His desire of many years ago had dissipated certainly, and it was only a memory now. A memory that he could, occasionally, catch full force and truly feel. It seemed, though, that he had gradually abandoned his desire, that desire which was so compulsive it had seemed an inextricable part of him, some core element of his personality. Over the years he had realized, to his great embarrassment, that the two of them, him and her, were much the same. This realization was a bitter disappointment to him. She had seemed to him to be so much more than himself, and, in retrospect , than herself, as though she embodied some profound mystery, the revelation of which held for him a terrible and salvatory promise. When he realized they were more or less alike, that promise disappeared. He was troubled by what he did not know about himself. There was something he Film  was sure, probably something bad and plenty...