Slow Fade (8 page)

SAMENDRA ARRIVES
. . .
Looking at the sadhu, he gives him a coin and claps his hands. The sadhu takes the coin but doesn’t walk away. “I could not leave,” Samendra says, sitting down opposite them on the sand. Anticipating Jim’s inevitable question, he says that as far as he knows Clementine is in New Delhi and that he can give them an address. It is obvious by the shy hesitant way he mentions Clementine’s name that he is strung out on her. “She was not a bad student but she had no real interest in music. She quite severely damaged her hand, you know.” They didn’t know. “Yes, yes,” he goes on rapidly. “She was in a taxi and there was a flat and as they were changing the tire the jack slipped. Her hand was on the ground and she just left it there for the car to crush. Quite amazing the way she left her hand there. I watched it myself.”
. . .
They sit facing slightly different directions as if they had lost their connections with each other, the sadhu staring straight at them as before
. . . .
Jim asks: “What happened with her? I mean, I always knew she was using Indian music as a hustle to have an adventure, to break away for a while, but this is very extreme.”
. . .
Samendra smiles at them. “Before the, ah, accident,” he says, averting his eyes and staring off at the sea, “your sister was visiting a man who sat with Ramana Maharsi, the enlightened being from Arunachala whose body has now left us. This man, Chandra Doss, who sat with Ramana Maharsi for six years, is not a swami or anything like that. He is a simple man who has a family and sells bidis, these little cigarettes, in the marketplace. You can see him there anytime. He makes all these bidis and he sells them. Your sister met him because that is where she bought her cigarettes and she began to talk with him. Everything was falling apart for her and she thought that she might have to return home and Chandra Doss told her that it was true that everything was falling apart and that it would get worse no matter what she did and that she should embrace that state rather than deny it; what Ramana Maharsi calls the Atma-Vichara, to inquire intensely after the self. And so she inquired intensely after her self because that was what she was doing anyway, although in a very ignorant way, and soon all she was left with was the chaos of her own thoughts. Then Chandra Doss told her to say neti neti, or, no, not those thoughts either, and that is where perhaps the real crises began because she could not accept the existence of the Aham-Brahman.” “The Aham-Brahman?” Lacey asks, bewildered by this explanation which has been spoken very fast, as if Samendra wants to get it all said so that he can just split. “Yes. Yes. The I. The absolute. The noise of her own mind brought a kind of madness upon her.”
. . .
“You mean she flipped out?” Jim asks impatiently. Samendra appears pained, as if Jim is being purposely obtuse, which he no doubt is. But Samendra proceeds anyway. “One might say that your sister became gradually obsessed with the awareness that she was not her thoughts. I was a witness. I was there every day to watch. She would not talk to Baba about her music. She would not respond. She would not practice. Her whole life seemed to stop.”
. . .
“What does that mean, she’s not her thoughts?” Jim asks, almost shouting. “Of course she’s her thoughts. Cogito ergo sum, baby.”
. . .
Samendra stands up, frightened and embarrassed by the aggression in Jim’s eyes. He turns away as if he cannot bear it any more, then suddenly whirls around to face them. “Tat-tvam-asi,” he shouts, his face beaming as if he has remembered a magic formula. Sitting down, he smiles at them sweetly. “Tat-tvam-asi. Thou art that. That is what your sister began to meditate on. I remember that quite clearly. Of course I do not know what it all means because I am not sannyas. I am a musician. Perhaps you should ask Chandra Doss about the teaching of the great sage of Arunachala.”
. . .
“She’s become some kind of freak,” Jim says quietly. They sit there silently until suddenly Samendra laughs and claps his hands. “You see, your sister discovered she could not control her thoughts for one second. That is something that we know here that you in the West are perhaps ignorant of.”
. . .
Jim stands up to leave. “I don’t know how to deal with that
. . . .
No, no.” Samendra jumps up to stand beside him. “I seriously doubt whether you can stop your mind for one brief moment.”
. . .
“Why should I stop my mind?” Jim asks. “I need all I can get out of it.”
. . .
“I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request,” Lacey says. “After all, it’s what Clementine was obsessed by.”
. . .
“I’m not in the mood for mystical parlor games,” Jim says, nodding to Samendra. “In any case, I appreciate all this information. At least we know she’s off on her own adventure and doesn’t need us showing up looking for her.”
. . .
Confused and insulted, Samendra bows and walks across the beach to the house
. . . .
“I think we should still try to find her,” Lacey says on the way back to the hotel. “Obviously she’s in an extremely perilous place.”
. . .
“Who isn’t in a perilous place?” Jim says. “Maybe she should find us.”
. . .
They have a terrible fight on the street that ends with their walking off in separate directions
. . . .

CUT TO JIM WALKING DOWN THE STREET
. . .
so sunk in anxiety and despair that he barely notices a street festival of chanting pilgrims, snake charmers, sword swallowers, and acrobats. He passes a wooden platform where Kathakali dancers move through the rituals of an ancient myth with slow graceful gestures. One woman, her face divided into two colors, red and blue, laughs with one side of her face and cries with the other. He moves on, through screaming children throwing bags of water and urine. They surround him, taunting him, covering him with red dye, and drenching him with the awful fluid. He stands there helpless and enraged, unable to control himself
. . . .

LATER, HIS CLOTHES STILL DRENCHED
. . .
he finds himself before a cigarette stall on the corner of a busy thoroughfare. A small gray-haired man with most of his teeth missing sits on a rug at the rear of the stall sorting through a pile of handmade cigarettes. Jim stares at him, unable to approach. Several times he tries and the man waits expectantly, looking up at him. Jim glances at his watch, as if he has an appointment. Across the street pilgrims perform bathing rituals in a deep green pool in front of an ancient temple where women have spread out their laundry to dry on the stone steps. Monkeys chatter in the trees. A funeral procession passes, a child’s body lying on a board covered with garlands of fresh flowers. “Time is a cruel master,” the man says, but Jim can only nod. Finally he buys a pack of American cigarettes and leaves
. . . .

AT THIS
point, Wesley, sitting at a café on the beach at Mazatlán, stopped reading the typed transcript of Walker’s tape even though there were more than a few pages remaining. It was past noon and he was on his third margarita and he felt slightly dizzy and more than a little hung over. Walking toward him on the beach were Sidney, the second unit cameraman, and Harold, a young producer from London sporting a new Panama hat and a Hawaiian shirt who had flown in the previous night and whose mission Wesley had somehow forgotten. He was not happy to see them. He needed time for his own thoughts, for this sudden permission he seemed to have granted himself toward an interior dialogue, or failing that, at least a period of refuge from the gleeful and vicious publicity he had received since his walkout and subsequent firing two weeks ago. “Neti, neti,” he said aloud, realizing he knew nothing about Walker’s mind and precious little about his own.

“You certainly chose a bucolic spot for yourself, Mr. Hardin,” Harold said, maneuvering his bulk into a chair as he and Sidney sat down at the table.

He paused, trying to feel his way through the sullen atmosphere Wesley was projecting. The fact that he was in awe of the legendary director didn’t help. Wesley sat immobile, his face half hidden underneath a peasant’s straw hat, staring at the thick line of jungle where squads of green parrots kept up a raucous chatter. Inside the café the jukebox played Hank Williams to an empty room. After a lengthy silence, Harold tried again: “Your charming wife told me to tell you that she won’t be joining us for lunch. She pleads guilty to a shopping compulsion directed toward native rugs.”

Wesley said nothing, looking at Harold with a preoccupied frown until Harold was forced to look away. Sidney, on the other hand, didn’t mind Wesley’s mood, much as it seemed to match his own, and he waited until he had ordered a drink before he tried to bring the situation into some kind of focus.

“Harold might be able to come up with money to continue shooting. I filled him in this morning about the stuff we shot in Durango and those few scenes down here and the one with Evelyn on the fishing boat.”

“Of course I have to look at the footage,” Harold said. “But I’m thrilled with the whole concept. And I think a personal straight-from-the-guts exploration of a major crisis in a famous man’s life has broad popular appeal.”

“I was thinking just the opposite,” Wesley said.

“Indeed?” Harold said. “Sidney gave me the impression you were quite excited about the way things were going.”

“I don’t want to think about results, which means I don’t want to think about money, which means I don’t want to consider turning what are essentially private notes into a feature film. I started shooting out of rage, just wanting to shove it up the studio’s ass. I’m not interested in hustling my private life and I don’t want anyone else doing it either.”

“Then what am I doing here?” Harold asked.

“I don’t know,” Wesley said quietly. “And I don’t want to know.”

“Does that mean a wrap?” Sidney asked.

“For you it does.”

Wesley watched a sailboat slowly coming about in the offshore breeze and felt himself to be in a kind of agony. He was either saying things that were too personal or not relevant at all.

“Are you considering other projects?” Harold was asking.

“I’m developing a script to be shot in India. A contemporary story about young Americans searching for themselves and finding the opposite.”

“That seems a sweaty task,” Harold said. “Sort of a producer’s nightmare.”

“I would rather read about it myself,” Wesley admitted.

“Perhaps you don’t want to work at all. Perhaps it’s time for philosophy and rumination.”

“Perhaps.” Wesley rose slowly from his seat. Swaying slightly he looked down at them, his face stern and yet somehow fragile. “My store is not open, gentlemen. Either for personal little forays into my beleaguered psyche or for broad popular entertainment. But perhaps you can develop something between yourselves.”

With that he left them, walking slowly down to the beach along the edge of the sea, his white linen pants rolled up past his ankles, his blue cotton shirt falling loosely over his waist. The air was heavy and moist and he walked in a slow shuffle through the sand. His body was no longer friendly to him. His joints ached and his breathing was shallow and he moved with no obvious purpose or direction. He could not remember a time when he wasn’t involved in some project, either going toward or leaving behind. There had always been something to fasten on to, people around to keep him going, keep him on the point, pull him through. It was true that over the past decade he had come to take it all for granted, that he had in a sense just gone through the motions as developments formed around him from the accumulated weight of his professional presence. It was a somewhat startling fact that he was still functioning at all after more than thirty films in the can, that the inevitable damage to body, mind, and soul, although severe and now seemingly terminal, had been held in check enough for him to sustain a reputation as a safe and bankable director. There had always been a raw primitive edge to his work, a kind of sentimental passion that every once in a while would bring in gold from the box office. But all of that was gone now.

He took off his white linen jacket and lay down on the warm sand. But the noon light was hard and exhausting and abruptly he moved off the beach to sit in the shade of two giant palm trees. The light was softer and more diffuse and that pleased him. An awareness of light was what cushioned him when he approached a scene, what protected him from the mechanical boredom of the medium. But fuck light, he thought. He was headed for a black hole. The journey of his son toward the disappearance of his daughter reminded him of that. He resented having to read Walker’s pages. It was a forced and unnatural arrangement, one that he shouldn’t have initiated. But unfolding the remaining pages, he began to read anyway:

INTERIOR — DAY
. . .
Jim walks through the hotel lobby, obviously distraught, his clothes torn and matted from the festival hi-jinks
. . .
As he picks up the key at the front desk, he is handed a slip of paper from Samendra with Clementine’s address in New Delhi
. . . .
Entering his room he reaches for a bottle of Scotch on the dresser. The curtains are drawn against the late afternoon sun and Lacey is sleeping, curled in on herself as if for protection. She opens her eyes, regards him. “Could you come into bed and just hold me for a minute?” she asks
. . . .
He takes a long pull from the bottle and steps out of his clothes before he answers: “I have to get into the shower. I’m covered with piss and slime and probably have about three months to live.” He disappears into the bathroom
. . . .
As he’s standing under the shower Lacey enters beside him and starts soaping his back, kissing him on the shoulder. “I get panicked when you get weird and aggressive.” She reaches around his waist and takes hold of his cock. “I need an adventure,” she says, squeezing him gently
. . . .
He shuts his eyes as her soapy fingers surround him. “What kind of an adventure?” He turns her around and lifts one of her legs so that he can slide into her. “Any kind as long as it’s new,” she whispers as he slowly begins to move inside her
. . . .

(I’m stopping here to say, who are you, Pop, and why are we indulging in this devious contract? Somehow, wherever Clementine is, she would probably find our attention unnecessary, even distasteful. She never needed your approval, for one thing, at least not as much as I did and still do. And then, too, she might not want to be found. It’s as if you and I are both in a waiting room and need to pass time while we wait for our separate exits. But Clementine might not be in the waiting room, at least not this one. She might have stepped outside altogether. But we can’t let her go, can we? And I can’t let you go, nor you me, no matter how much we might want to release each other. So send money and I’ll send pages. Post the next check to General Delivery, Salt Lake City, and add expense money and whatever paternal bonus you might be able to spare. We’re traveling through Utah, angling toward Nevada. I had a slight accident with my leg so the healing process has been interrupted but nothing serious. The process within is another story. But one positive aspect to our contract is that it gives me a slice of time to deal with culture shock while I unravel my own back story. I’m grateful for that even if it means confronting death and separation and a few other essential questions that I have no answers for
. . . .
By the way, your instincts about A.D. Ballou, if instincts is the right word, proved to be shrewd and on the point. Without his relentless ambition to find a slot in the movie biz I would never have the edge or perversity to continue, and as it is, of course, I might fade at any moment. I have to threaten you with that from time to time as that is what you inevitably threaten me with. Although Mr. Ballou, for one, is determined to bring all the elements together. But from what I hear on TV and read in the papers, any future projects you might conceive are strictly in the realm of fantasy. Is it true that the head of M-G-M has been quoted as saying as far as he’s concerned you’ve “misdirected your last film”? Perhaps you think an independently financed film will rescue you, but I can promise you that India doesn’t rescue anyone. It’s like the movie business in that way
. . . .
Did you notice how I controlled the scenes for you, keeping the exteriors to a manageable minimum so the background doesn’t devour the foreground? And the sex is mostly in easy close-ups where you’ll be able to shoot interiors out of the country if the censors bother you, which they will. All of this sounds as if I think you’re going to go over there. I don’t really. Evelyn told me that you think you’re dying, but I told her you always say that and probably what happened was that you stumbled for a brief moment on your own inhibited sense of impermanence
. . . .
Waiting for your next installment
. . .
Walker.)