City of God (19 page)

—As the earth spins on its axis, its planetary sloppage of water rises in tidal swells continuously around its periphery, bulging like the cornea of a farsighted eye. At the same time, the earth's rotation sends the sea waters spinning in opposite directions, westward in the Northern Hemisphere, eastward in the Southern, so that if water could plait, the earth would twist into a long blue-green braid. If for some reason the planetary rotation decreased sufficiently, the waters of the earth would fly off and crystallize into an ice blue ring that would eventually attenuate and head into space, an enormous comet with all its plankton, crabs, fish, bivalves, whales, siphonophores, and shipwrecks flash-frozen for eternity. The planet's remaining core of rock and mineral and molten magma would glow for a moment like an ember, or like the section of a radiant creature's toothy jawbone, before it crashed into the moon, creating a big burning smoking mass of disintegrated ores that would be neatly sucked up into the sun like krill into the mouth of a gulper eel. So be thankful to God that this system of cosmic checks and balances, as eccentric as it is, seems to be working. And just as there are the Alps and the Himalayas and the Andes and the Rockies, so there are undersea mountain ranges even more vast. And just as we have our sunlit river-running canyons, so does the sea bottom have its deep trenches. And as we have our flatlands and deserts, so does the seabed stretch for endless miles of abyssal plain. And just as we have our mountain goats standing transfixedly faced into the wind on the unequal crags of our highest mountains, so does the lightless, airless ocean bottom, with its tons of pressure per square inch, have its living tube worms and anglerfish, sea spiders, whipnoses, and sea lilies undulating slimed in the soundless blackness, their mouths agape and tentacles upheld to catch the flocculent dead matter drifting like snow from the blue and green ocean above. Nameless creatures composed of tendrils with suckers on the end, stems with mouths, or jet-propelled worms with toxic stingers and ink-ejection mechanisms,
receive as God's bounty a perpetual fall of death that keeps them alive as they squirt and wriggle about their business. This is all part of the Universal Plan. We are instructed that life does not require air or light or warmth. We are instructed that whatever condition God provides, some sort of creature will invent itself to live in it. There is no fixed morphology for living things. No necessary condition for life. Thousands of unknown plant and animal beings are living in the deepest canyons of the black, cold water and they have their own movies. Their biomass is far in excess of our own sunlit and air-breathing plant and animal life. At the very bottom of the sea are smoking vents of hydrogen sulfide gases in which bacteria are pleased to flourish. And feeding upon these are warty bivalves and viscous, gummy jellies and spiny eels with the amazing ability to fluoresce when they are attacked or need to illuminate their prey. God has a reason for all this. There is one fish, the hatchet, which skulks about in the deep darkness with protuberant eyes on the top of its horned head and the ability to electrically light its anus to blind predators sneaking up behind it. The electric anus, however, is not an innate feature. It comes from a colony of luminescent bacteria that house themselves symbiotically in the fish's asshole. And there is a Purpose in this as well which we haven't yet ascertained. But if you believe God's divine judgment and you countenance reincarnation, then it may be reasonably assumed that a certain bacterium living in the anus of a particularly ancient hatchetfish at the bottom of the ocean is the recycled and fully sentient soul of Adolf Hitler glimmering miserably through the cloacal muck in which he is periodically bathed and nourished.

—Moviemaking everywhere in New York and now they're here filming a scene on my block. Had to happen. A hum of self-importance fills the air. Police stanchions holding off traffic. Cables, scaffolds, camera lifts, reflector screens. Stars hiding in their trailers. Crowds waiting upon the ponderous filmic decision to verify my street.

Now I remember. Coming back from my morning run, I ran into two men taking serious pictures of the block. This was months ago. I
thought they were Europeans. Europeans love the narrow thoroughfares of Soho. The nineteenth-century paving stones. Tight passage for the horse troops.

One man shot, the other loaded the cameras and carried the bags. I felt proprietary. Would they photograph the ancient garage from which no car escapes? Would they catch my Chinese streetwalker? Would they love the two exhausted trees? Would they sense the urban grit in the souls of all of us who live here, even on the clearest spring morning with the spray rising in rainbows from the Department of Sanitation water trucks?

It was just past dawn, and the low angle of sunlight brought out the solid geometric volume of the industrial iron-fronts, their recessed doorways and deep-silled windows.

In the late afternoon the photographers were back. The look of the street is different then. Sunlight attaches to the particulate matter churned up by the day's traffic, so that it seems adrift, a floating fall of luminous dust coming down the narrow corridor of the opposed buildings, sifting through the bars of the fire escapes, opaquing the big loft windows, shining off the Belgian block pavement, and seeming to drain away with evening into the blackness of the ancient garage and the culverts at the corners.

So that's what they were. Film patrol. And now look, an army on bivouac. Caterer's van. Generators. Portosans. Everything needed by troops on the move. Self-sufficient in a country they don't live in but only occupy from time to time.

All at once the street is bright and clean. I realize it is washed in light. Ordinary-looking people are going about their business. A cab pulls up, a man jumps out and grabs the shoulder of a woman who is walking past a building entrance and turns her around to face him. It is a seriously aggressive gesture, though quite tame by film standards. They talk, and from four stories up, I see the resistance of the woman accosted, it is in her posture. All of this is the action, but then they walk away, casually, in different directions, as if nothing of what they've said has mattered, and I realize the scene ended before I knew it and now the lights go out, and the cab backs up the way it came.

Now men with walkie-talkies are all over the place. A team of workers is placing litter in the street. For miles around, the city not being filmed is oblivious of its unimportance.

Silence again, the lights come back on. A cab screeches to a stop, the door flies open, a man jumps out and grabs a woman by the shoulder.

Movies are using up the cities, the countrysides, the seas, and the mountains. Someday every inch of the world will be on film. The planet will have flattened into an enormous reel. The night sky will screen us. The film stock will play out and drift and undulate, twist and spiral Möbiusly through the galactic universe. Life will not be simultaneous, it will be sequential, one story after another, story after story, as if all the DNA of every living thing were extended, on one strand, one byte at a time, to infinity.

—movie version: guy gets back from his morning run, sees a film company setting up on his street. The scene they are doing, a woman coming out of his building, a cab pulling up, a man leaping out and confronting her, grabbing her by the shoulder, she pulling back, her defiance, his rage. . . looks very familiar to him, like a scene from his own life.

All morning the scene is shot and reshot. He watches from his window. It becomes clear to him that the scene being filmed is. . . accurate. There's no other way to put it. He had done that, found his wife leaving just as he got home. The actor playing him is taller, with a thicker head of hair, but generally of the same build and long, slung-jawed face. The actress is a dead ringer—blond, lovely, slender, supple-hipped.

He can't imagine what is going on, who is making the movie, what script they may be working from. Had she written it? But how? She lived out to the edges of her life, filled it all with her restless animal integrity. And with such fine contempt for reasonable self-interest. When had she written about him, about their connection, their failed connection? Why would she have bothered?

His loft, with its large, unshaded windows, was furnished effortlessly, by her unerring impulse. Even now, the careless perfection of it makes him reluctant to move a thing. That flung-about inevitability of the furnishings gives him the illusion of her presence, of the continuation of their life together. She had found the place, lived there alone, and then he had moved in. It was hers, and was still hers, the place, the street, the neighborhood, though she was gone.

He wonders why he has stayed, why he takes the chance.

The company downstairs finishes its work, packs up, and the street is deserted by the end of the afternoon. He thinks maybe he is overwrought and reading too much into the coincidence of that scene, but unable to get it out of his mind, he spends the next few days testing the proposition that it is his life, or their life together, that is being filmed. To his dismay he is able to track the company around town, guessing where they are by assuming to know the locations they must choose from. He finds them up at Columbia Journalism, where she got her master's, he sees them at the Italian restaurant on Ninth Avenue with the decor restored to the way it was before the ownership changed. They even have the right table, the one in the corner under the sconce with the charred shade.

His attempt to approach the filmmakers is easily thwarted by the A.D.'s with the walkie-talkies, the security guards. Not that he is anxious to make himself known. He catches glimpses of the actress, and it seems to him with each successive scene they do she is becoming more and more like his wife. He doesn't know what to do. There are location days at Kennedy Airport, at Lincoln Center, at Battery Park. Eventually, he stops tracking them and retires to the loft to wait. And just as he knew they would, they knock on his door early one morning and move in, cables, cameras, lights, reflectors. He makes no attempt to stop them. Chairs are set up for the director, the script girl, the actors. Everyone seems to know him as the leading man. He is made up and takes his place as the camera rolls: There is a knock at the door. He opens it to find two detectives. They identify themselves and want to ask him a few questions. Would he mind if they came in?

“You'll think this is crazy or perhaps that I'm crazy,” he says later, on the set of the overnight lockup, where he sits with two actors playing small-time criminals waiting for their lawyers to spring them. He realizes he is talking compulsively, but he can't stop. “Maybe I am crazy, but I swear to you something is going on with movies
in a way even the people who make them don't understand.
I mean, something weird has happened, so that I'm convinced that the people who ostensibly make them are no more than instruments of the movies themselves, servers, factotums, and the whole process, from pitching an idea for one, and getting the financing and finding a star, I mean, the whole operation, while seeming to depend on the participation of directors, producers, distributors, and so on, and for all the animosities
and struggles among them, the struggles for control, the interference of studio heads, and profound dicta of the critics, in fact the entire booming culture of movies—all of it is illusion, as the movie is supposed to be, a scripted reality, whereas it's the movies themselves that are in control, preordaining and self-generating, like a specie with its own DNA. The human agencies who realize them, are subsidiary, like garden bugs who come into being to pollinate flowers, or those birds who live to ride atop the backs of African rhinos and beak away their lice.

“There are more movies now than ever, you have to agree at least to that, they are in a population explosion, in theaters, on television, on cable, on tape, on discs, they're everywhere, you can't escape them, they are creatures, movies, incredibly astute, complex creatures who persuade us that they are manifestations of our own culture, with individual identities but participating in genres, just as we are individuals but within ethnic frameworks. You think I'm nuts but it is possible, I mean you just ought to consider that possibility, that movies are a malign life form that came to earth a hundred or so years ago and have gradually come to dominate not only our feelings but our thoughts, our intellects. They are feeding on us, having first forced us to invent them and provide them with the materiality of their existence, which is film or, latterly, tape. Maybe you would have a better idea of what I am saying by thinking of them as having the same desire to suck us up into themselves as a tapeworm in our guts, one planetary tapeworm living in the guts of the earth, using up the cities, the countryside, the seas, and the mountains.

“But I don't expect you to agree, I know what you're thinking, and not even if I invoke those pseudoscientific horror movies to you, wherein one person, a scientist perhaps, sees some great threat to humanity that he cannot persuade the world of until it is almost too late—a giant bug, or plague or alien specie from space, a King Kongism of disaster is what I'm describing—even knowing that convention and having seen versions of it over and over, you are not about to credit me with the scientist's perception—the awful knowledge given only to the lonely hero, and perhaps his loyal girlfriend, herself the daughter of an eminent scientist, who will die during the course of the film—
because you think I've been watching too many movies!