This Location of Unknown Possibilities (16 page)

Marta recognized Chaz from the thudding knock. Retrieving the jeans, she said, “Hold on a moment, please.”

“
Zdravstvuj
,” he exclaimed as Marta swung open the door, “I brink you givt from Rossiya-Matushka.” A donut sat atop the napkin resting on his outstretched palm. “They're scrumptious. Sour cream and chocolate. From a bakery run by a Russian Doukhobor family. Who knew? They have pyrahi and borscht too.” He pinched his cheek. “Boy, I am going to pay.”

“It's been years since I indulged.” From the door frame Marta took in the scene. The cloak-like ambiance of a cloudless night, incandescent bulbs of Christmas-tree wattage, and fluttering moths now softened the glare and heat of their morning exchange. Traffic—an occasional flash of headlights trailed by a glowing slow-motion ray of red—was similarly transformed, subdued by insect chirps and the delicate rustling of breeze through leaves.

Chaz turned around to follow her gaze. “Yeah, it's nice, eh. No wonder strippers like soft lighting.”

“You have a poet's eye, apparently.” Marta felt the peculiar bloom of the moment vanish.

“So, is that a ‘No'?” He coin-tossed the donut into the air; it landed perfectly in place.

“Actually, it's a ‘Yes, thank you.'” Marta wrapped the corners of the napkin around the donut and clutched the packaged gift. Refusing would be impolite; she'd seal the donut's fate later. “Thanks again.”

“Sure, no problem.” Chaz extracted a beer can from a back pocket and lifted the tab. “So, I hear you were pissed about the script change.”

“I'm surprised you heard.”

“Any production is a small town, basically, so gossip's a fact of life, and our office is the information switchboard. Even the lowest of the low gets word eventually.” He stepped back and sat—arms crossed, beer bottle wedged between thighs—on the hood of the rental.

“Would you like me to disengage the alarm?” Marta noticed that she'd crossed her arms as well, hip against the doorframe.

“Yeah, sure, or you could haul out a chair. I've been on my feet all day.” She opted for the former. She expected he'd return to his room momentarily.

“Okay, where were we?”

“Change of plans.”

“Right.
The re-genrification.”

“You people are fond of that word,” she said. “I've never heard it.”

“‘You people'?” Chaz's widespread arms encompassed miscellaneous crew at the Star-Lite. “We people make them up, of course. Every group has its jargon, right? You oughta know. I sat through enough seminars lorded over by self-involved gasbags, and their vocab made my ears bleed.”

Marta smiled: outmanoeuvred. Naturally, she was no stranger to a slow rotation of fashionable terms imported from Europe that would be nonsensical only steps from campus:
Verneinung
, alterity, liminality,
méconnaissance
, aporia, space of abjection, opacity of the subject, regulatory discourses, Ideological State Apparatus. As with spices, she used them sparingly; she too had attended flatulent seminars.

“Anyway, TV's a different pile of bull.” The hood proving unyielding, Chaz moved to lean at the driver's door. “It's cheaper and crappier, more bottom line too, basically Entertainment Product. And it's parasitic, right, like those knockoff designer purses you can get at the Chinatown night market: the script borrows—that means steals—ideas from better and box office big-performer feature films or recycles plots and characters from other successful TV programs of the moment and puts them in the mash-up blender. Sells it for cheap too. It's like when porno flicks capitalize on the names of multiplex movies.
Foreskin Gump
and
Hung Wankenstein
;
Shaving Ryan's Privates
, get it?
They leech on to the trendiness of whatever they're borrowing from because they want to—” He drank from the can. “Ah, better. It's like when you mention that you're friends with someone famous. The connection makes you a celebrity by proxy, well kinda. Same deal with TV, sort of, but with cable the budget's way smaller. Cash in on somebody's else's success.

“So
Battle for Djoun
's no different. Ready to shoot, but not even close to original. It's Cheez Whiz—factory fresh, yes, but with no socially redeeming value. Um, kinda like a forgery too . . .
Predator
,
Aliens
,
Star Wars
, even bits of
The English Patient
,
Pride and Prejudice
and that movie where Sally Field rescues her daughter in Afghanistan. I forgot
Outlander
. The script picks off lots of meat from that carcass. It's a ‘dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants' kinda deal.”

“I suppose.” Marta detected rationalization. “By the way, it's Iran, in the Sally Field movie.
Not Without My Daughter
. Possibly
Norma Rae
too?

“Sure, why not. Some anal Film Studies grad student could probably find the source of every single line.”

“You're awfully cynical.”

“Nope, not at all. I'm not writing or directing or really doing anything creative. I consider myself part of the production, like a secretary or a factory worker. If it was—or is that were?—
1974
and we were—um, was?—talking about my job at the Ford plant assembling Pinto hatchbacks—a crap car if there ever was/were one—you wouldn't say, ‘Oh, you're so cynical, knowing that your daily grind contributes to another ugly death trap being on the road.' No, you'd say, ‘Wow, that gig's union,' or, ‘Think you can get me on at the plant?' You're paid to deliver the goods on time and maybe under budget, and that's what you do. I don't think you have much of an idea what it's like to work in the real world.”

“Thank you for the psychological profile.” While hardly novel, the assessment stung. “You can call me old-fashioned if you want, but I'm invested in the longevity of a work.
Why bother with so much effort only to arrive at
product
that winds up in a virtual landfill, like plastic junk from a dollar store? It's counter-intuitive.” If Chaz knew about her own dabbling in junk he'd see the disingenuousness of the claim. Marta couldn't pin down her earnest stance on the matter; her responses bleated out abstractedly, in the spirit of debate.

“Okay, gotcha. If I had a job assembling crap plastic whistles that would end up in a dollar store, I could still say I was making something meaningful—someone buys it and plays with it and has fun and, oh, by the way, I've fed my family. That's not nothing. It doesn't all have to be
The Cremaster Cycle
, right?”

A man from
#9
poked his head out, the glaring expression a perfect substitute for words.

Chaz stepped close to Marta. “Christ, chill man. It's not even close to eleven.”

“We've just managed to get the twins to sleep,” the man whispered. “The wife and I are grateful for the break.”

“Okay, we gotcha, man. I hear ya. My sister has kids and says they're quarter-pint vampires that suck out her life force.” The man closed the door gently. In low register Chaz said, “Christ, it's not like the Pope held a gun to their heads and screamed ‘Procreate!'”

“I'll take this awkward moment as my cue to depart. Thanks again for the donut. I'd better meet with Lora before she disappears for the day. She's still there, right? We need to hash out if I'll be helping out tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I'd say so.” He checked his watch. “Oh, right. My car won't be ready by the morning, so I'll have to impose on you one more time.”

“Okay, we'll see. You're in my debt now. Goodnight.”

EXPERIENCE ITSELF

1.

S
unken into a wilted lotus position at the centre of the bed, Marta massaged the tender underside of her bare foot. The muted television splashed irregular shapes on the walls of the otherwise unlit motel room, and as she slowly rotated a thumb along the puffed arch Marta felt her eyes drawn away from the broadcast—a cartoon breakfast cereal square dancing and singing, elfin smile set wide and spidery stick arms flailing for a convincing performance of glee—toward the stillness beyond the frame of the open door. The murky space past the asphalt lot might be siren-calling to a reawakening nocturnal instinct, but Marta's unlimber muscles, tendons, and ligaments wailed louder yet. Simply untying laces had been a chore; after removing the left shoe and sock she'd postponed the bother of the next foot until an indefinite later and chortled at the idea of sleeping through until morning half-shod and fully clothed, like the fiery-bearded vagrant she passed by on workday mornings en route to the campus-bound bus.

Never in her career years had she been so tired; she could imagine individual cells deep within her body howling, their microscopic brows furrowed and nostrils flaring in fierce outrage at the animated cereal square's infinite joie de vivre, calculation and bloodlust erupting from their tiny pounding hearts.
Factory workers in poor countries have every right to malign their bosses
, Marta thought, bonded in sisterhood with the truly oppressed for fleeting seconds.

Alongside religious zealots and tabloid devotees across the continent, Marta had long assumed Hollywood's legendary appetite for cocaine to be symptomatic of a bottomless moral vacuity. And yet after the grueling, eye-opening, and Industrial Revolution-like schedule of Day One—a trial by fire, not one minute under fourteen hours—another strictly utilitarian purpose had been revealed. If I continue on here, Marta concluded with resignation, sugar and caffeine, cocaine's legal surrogates, are going to become my new best friends. Neither sat in short supply at the production office; stockpiled chocolate bars were there for the taking.

Bleary-eyed and hunched over a cooling foot, she replayed scenes from the inaugural shift, peevish and silently castigating her imagination for being so blithely disconnected from servile, workaday actuality. While a reasonable ignorance of specific details of filmmaking had been made clear from the start, the surprise and dismay resulted from fathoming the inaccuracy's totality.

In the room's solitude she realized that if the day had not exactly pummeled her with a series of public humiliations and admonitions—the proverbial spanking in the parking lot surrounded by unsympathetic onlookers clucking their approval—the overall experience had been humbling nonetheless. Relief, such as it was, arrived in the form of awareness that the day's cautionary tales—conveniently sized and ready-made for Sunday school lessons: pride goeth before the fall, look before you leap, and so on—had played out in the wholly private arena of her consciousness. Through Lora or Jake's eyes Marta would have appeared no different than any other novice, charging ahead half-cocked and making wrong assumptions left and right. And for them the gaffes and apparent naiveté might have been endearing one minute and irritating the next, but never worse; her raw hubris and patent exceptionalism had been disguised by a professional skin of polite reserve.

Marta saw the distasteful truth, though. The queenly disposition galled her especially. She'd grossly inflated her worth and envisioned a lofty arrival, the rich aura of professional entitlement granting the power to select whatever she deemed suitable—like venerable Dame Such and Such dipping bejeweled manicured fingers into a box of exquisite chocolate truffles. The pearl before swine snobbery looked grotesque, laughable: no to this and indubitably no to that, but perhaps—just maybe—she might dabble here, infuse one cog in the movie-making machine with a patina of unadulterated quality by virtue of a singular gift—penetrating intellect, courtesy of top notch genetics and impeccable ivory tower grooming.

Eyes squeezed shut, Marta saw herself in a sideshow: ladies and gentlemen, feast your eyes on the philosophunculist extraordinaire!

2
.

T
he day came nowhere close to meeting her expectations. Nor had the discussion with Lora the night before. That exchange had turned out to be less a negotiation than a tipping domino trail of firm negations uttered between cackles—“No way, Jose,”
“Good luck with that one,”
“Ha, out of the question.”

Marta had knocked on the front door of Joan's of Oliver happy with her resolve—at last—to lend a hand to the production, but the ensuing conversation only clarified the resounding difference between objective reality and Marta's fantastic version of it as well as the total unionized rigidity of the enterprise from root to flower.

In no time she'd learned that she lacked seniority of any kind and that scholarly credentials counted for naught; and without any professional affiliation—paid membership in one of several unions, that is: another prerequisite Lora and Jake might have mentioned at the studio—she possessed no real access to the key positions into which she'd generously slotted herself; neither here nor there, she floated, a non-entity. Marta had suggested working with words, naturally, “doing rewrites,” or adding lines and even scenes in the interest of an alchemical elevating of the leaden script.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Lora had replied brightly.

When, grasping for straws, she mentioned Script Supervisor, Lora—all business now, the mask of affable informative hostess secured away—had pounced on the idea: “No go with that, sweetie. You see, she's already in place, hired on ages ago. And, besides, do you even know what a Script Supervisor does?” Marta didn't, perfectly aware that the only responses she could give, “Not exactly” and “Supervises the script,” would sound preposterous, so she held her tongue and waited for Lora, whose face appeared avid with ready answers.

The phone rang exactly then, the timing from a drawing room farce. Quick to answer, Lora swiveled the chair and slid open a filing cabinet drawer. She handed Marta a thin volume of stapled paper.

After reading the cover—
On Da Set: A Guide 4 Da Green
, which featured a hand-drawn daisy character wearing hip-hop pendants and opaque sunglasses; the hipster-flower crashed bull-like through an old-fashioned film set—Marta turned to the table of contents, not alphabetical but a listing of positions ranked by importance. Chaz's gloomy account of his cur status had basis in fact, she saw: PA stood at the very bottom of the sheet. She flipped to the guide's mid-point:

“Script Supervisor: The script supervisor (aka, continuity script supervisor), is responsible for many key tasks before, during, and after a film's production. A script supervisor's main duty: to document all details surrounding movie scenes—as they are filmed. That means keeping track of everything from (
1
) the types of lenses cameras operator uses to (
2
) the exact positions of the performers. A script supervisor also marks lines through the script to keep the director up to date about how many of the scenes have been completed, or
covered
in film speak.”

I'm way off the mark
, Marta had thought. Accustomed to being regarded as knowledgeable as well as to feeling competently informed, Marta felt a blood rush of embarrassment at Lora's explanation of the job by proxy.

Only later did a fallback occur to her—the flash of insight arriving via the all-purpose adage about life, lemons, and lemonade: she'd branch out and learn a new, possibly valuable skill set. Failing that, a consultancy position, something not mentioned in
On Da Set
, held promise if only because the uniqueness appeared to excuse it from being subject to territorial union legalities. Script consultant, creative consultant: were those possibilities? One might be, she guessed, although any screenwriter would resent an interloping amateur with a snob's tilted nose and delusions of literary grandeur.

Once finished with the call, Lora preempted Marta's case-pleading with a palatable suggestion. “Look,” she began, features arranged to appear tentative and pensive even though any child could see Mom's mind was set, “before you vote on anything, why don't you show up tomorrow morning and see how we operate. You can hang at HQ, take the temperature of the place, inhale the funky air of the three-ring circus up close.
We'll get Chaz to ferry you around, take you out to set, et cetera,” she said. Lora's chirpy afterthought, “It'll be fun, like visiting Disneyland,” contained the false inflection of a camp counselor's prediction for an unpopular and skeptical child that “things might just work out, you'll see.”

Suffused with worry, Marta nonetheless agreed. In the jutting angle of Lora's jaw she'd perceived a dare, an unasked for challenge. A hard kernel of schoolgirl inside her understood that backing down meant shame and cowardice; without thinking, she met the taunt.
Okay, pile on the degradation
, she thought, unclear about the nature of her victory.

“Sure.” Her ego smarted from being relegated to the sidelines and deemed burdensome babysitting material for harried Chaz. “I'll see you bright and early tomorrow.”

She recognized a Hobson's choice: she could scarcely stamp her precious diva feet, storm off set, and cause the production to fold into chaos: as a non-essential, she could hole up at the Star-Lite in the morning and wait there in vain until sunset for a pleading call, or a concerned knock on the door with an urgent messenger—couriering four words: “We need you, please”—standing outside. A one-shift experience, then. If unpalatable, she'd be packed and ready to slip away without explanation.

3
.

T
he promised visit to Disneyland turned out to be eventful—a complex obstacle course of errands and tasks, in fact—but altogether uninteresting. Throughout, nostalgia for the classroom had appeared, unbidden like a sneeze. Marta had held that feeling at bay, convinced she suffered from nothing other than culture shock.

The production office's steep learning curve related to connecting names and jobs and positions on the rigid hierarchy to phone voices and a parade of faces stopping by, and Marta began to reconsider an earlier upbeat commitment to climbing it: dedication to the summit of Everest could be construed as heroic; ascending a mountain of rubble could not.

Before noon, she'd been introduced—“____, this is Marta,” as though her name alone, like Charo's, would suffice to explain character, value, relevance, and purpose—to various brusque department heads and their careerist assistants, as well as to a throng of carpenters, teamsters, couriers, delivery men, electricians, PAs, and a motley assortment of shaggy-haired, instantly forgotten others who dropped in and called with questions, concerns, requests, complaints, or emergencies—all urgent and in need of immediate response.

And she'd sat quietly in the SUV with studio reps and mysterious higher ups as Chaz, adopting a subdued facts and figures delivery persona, drove and conversed between airport, sets, and office. Between the pick ups and drop offs, she'd assisted on runs for office supplies (fans, markers, paper, power cords, and a white board, as well as coffee, snacks, bottled water and diet soda, fruit, and mounds of chocolate) and answered the insistent phone several times, confident that she could at least intone the secretarial phrase, “Please hold, ____ will be available in a moment,” with panache. Even that last, technically a no-brainer, had proven onerous; her lack of familiarity with every member of the crew seemed only to inflame the commandeering personalities emitting from plastic receivers.

The secretarial function had been thrust at her throughout the day, as though she looked the part.
When one man, an imperious and pushy extras wrangler with a cell phone perpetually clamped to a portly face, had instructed Marta—“Hey there, honey, would you . . .”—to fix him a coffee, Chaz, a godsend, had intervened and pointed toward the kitchen set up:
“Help yourself, man” within earshot and “Douche pile” thirty seconds later. Soon after, he'd explained to Marta “who's gotta kiss whose ass.”

Marta learned too that a short-term non-unionized consultancy offered a single perk: practical exemption from the Byzantine system of obligations and favours.
I've already encountered enough of that for a lifetime
, she'd thought with relief, frowning at the image of pallid, under-exercised buttocks beneath Tenure Committee woolens.

4
.

M
arta's eyes regained focus when a mobile blur interrupted the darkness. Chaz stood at the doorframe.

“Knock, knock,” he stage-whispered. “Wow, you're pretty zoned out, eh?”

“That would be an understatement.” Marta swung her legs to the edge of the bed in one gymnastic movement. “You frightened me. I guess leaving the door ajar is an open invitation.”

“Don't give it a thought, I'm a pussycat.”

“That's reassuring, though I'd guess that any psychopath worth his salt doesn't announce gruesome intentions up front.” Aiming for lighthearted banter, fatigue had landed her nearer to paranoid accusation. Overworking always brought out an inner scold.