Could that be the Molloy I am thinking of? It is a mystery. Perhaps I will find my answers there. Then I recall that when I woke from my coma, I asked if my name was Molloy. Molloy, it seems, is some sort of key to all of this.
“Do you happen to have a copy of the novel Molloy in the burn center library?” I ask.
“We do not,” says the nurse. “Since this is a hospital, our patient library contains only books that take place in hospitals. So we do have Malone Dies, by the same author, which takes place in a hospital, if that is of interest to you.”
“It is not. Doesn’t Molloy appear in the same volume as Malone Dies and The Unnamable, though?”
“Yes. But we cut those two out of the volume as they do not pertain to hospitals. Our library only contains books that pertain to hospitals. We could order it for you from Amazon, if you like. Hopefully it’ll arrive before you are released in five days. We don’t have Prime.”
“Yes, please,” I say.
AS I LIE here for the next five days, waiting for my release, I think. When I’m not focusing on how much more I can now see my nose between my eyes, I prod the newly empty space in my brain as if it were the site of an extracted tooth and the thing I’m prodding it with is my tongue. My psychic tongue. I’m prodding and poking it with my brain tongue. This empty space, this leerstelle, is what remains of my passion, which was Ingo’s film.
Memories come back piecemeal, not of the film itself, but of all that surrounded it. Ingo was a big, dull Swede, lumpy, unformed, hulking. Oddly, he had a full head of hair: white, neatly cut, conservative. But other than the hair, he was a golem with a snub nose and rubbery lips. It is difficult to imagine he was ever handsome or even presentable. We are informed by our desire scientists that symmetrical features are the most attractive. Ingo was not symmetrical. His snub nose was a messy, right-leaning blob. His watery eyes were of various smallnesses. His pale lips seemed to be trying to escape to the left. And yet with all this going on, his face was not even interesting. If I momentarily looked away, I found it difficult to recall. Growing up must have been lonely for Ingo. Women are distrustful of pretty and even handsome men, but they still desire them. And an unmemorable face connotes a character deficit. It lacks ambition. It reeks of conformity. Although I have never been seen as conventionally handsome (except by my mother ha ha!), I have been considered memorable, and because of that, I have a certain appeal to the ladies. Perhaps they see the intelligence in my eyes or the compassion in my mouth. I pride myself on my humility, so I feel a certain embarrassment even speculating about such things. Perhaps it is the mindful furrow of my brow. None of this is for me to say. My impressive forehead? But in Ingo, there were no such indications of character; there was only an emptiness, a blankness. I do not mean to suggest that he appeared as an automaton, for an automaton can be imbued with the appearance of personality. But Ingo was a sculpture abandoned mid-creation. And now it was too late. The sculpture was crumbling from age. It was turning to dust. What was he leaving behind? What had he to show for his lengthy time on this planet? The answer is nothing. It would be sad if only it were possible to feel for this creature, but his countenance did not allow for it. And because of this, we feel only anger. Ingo did not care enough to allow us to feel fully human by feeling pity for him. His small, unmemorable eyes pleaded “love me” but offered nothing for us to love. It was ungenerous and it made my blood boil. I felt the urge to haul off and punch him. As a student of the art of boxing, I can, of course, throw a decent punch. So even though he towered over me, I knew I could fell him. But I would not hit Ingo, and in this way I was the bigger man.
I rose above his arrogance. I would not play his game. He told me he was a filmmaker of sorts. It is all I could do to not laugh in his unformed face. I do not mean to brag but I can detect an artist on sight. It is my version of gaydar (which I also have). Artdar. This is not based on physical appearance. Both a Sam Shepard and a Charles Bukowski are equally conspicuous to me. It is in the eyes, or, in those rare instances where they have no eyes, it is in their fingertips. This is the case with blind filmmaker Kertes Onegin, who astonishingly acts as his own cinematographer (he does employ a focus puller, but she is also blind). His technique of “feeling the scene” as the actors perform (his films are all in extreme close-up and include his hand in every shot) creates an intimacy unlike any I have ever before seen in any film, and it has made him a target of the #MeToo movement (blind edition). Onegin’s movie снова нашел (Found Again), which explores a rekindled romance between two pensioners separated for forty years, is arguably the most erotic film ever made. That the bodies making love are old and that there is a fifth hand delicately describing the contours of these bodies adds in exponential measure to the experience of the filmgoer. I conducted extensive interviews with Onegin for my monograph Onegin’s Feelies. During our conversations, he required we sit within touching distance and would caress my face throughout, sometimes sticking his fingers in my mouth “to see how wet.” I remember thinking, this is the most true conversation I’ve ever had and also the least true and also again the most true. I will admit there was even an erotic component to it, and although I am not a homosexual by inclination, I did submit to this eyeless genius, this typhlotic Rembrandt late one evening after too much retsina. I do not regret this, for how can one regret true communion? Ingo had none of this to offer. Not in his soft, soggy eyes, like old grapes, not in his pruny, sausage-shaped fingers, like old plums. You are no Onegin! I screamed in my head. You are not my dear, dear Kertes! as I waited for that inevitable question:
“Would you watch my film?”
Let me say, quite bluntly, I am not an admirer of the cartoon in any of its myriad forms. It is to me cloying and sentimental. It is not film in its essence, which, to my mind, is the capturing of a moment. Animation is the manufacture of a moment, and, while one can admire the skills of the illustrators or computer fellows or clay manipulators, one cannot fully invest. It is always at arm’s length. From the very first motion picture recording, the magic was in the commitment to the tether of the ephemeral. Never before in human history had this been possible. Certainly there had existed still photographs for quite a while and that was miracle enough, but whereas a still photograph stops time, kills it, a moving photograph captures it alive. A butterfly in an enclosed habitat, not skewered and mounted on a pinning block. From the very early days, there have of course been the tricksters, the illusionists (among whom I must, with great sadness, count the animators). And certainly innovators such as Méliès have their minions, but, for me, he has never been a satisfying genius. It must be noted that Méliès was a stage magician and his interest was not in revealing life but rather using this new form to further his repertoire of chicanery. That is to say, his work is antithetical to honesty, to the bare-faced vulnerability I most require in my cinema-going experiences.
So it was with great surprise that my attitude was changed by Ingo’s film. It is animation as I have never experienced. Soulful, heartbreaking, profoundly felt. That it is accomplished in such a manner has made me rethink not only how life is lived and the physics of time, but as well, in a metaphysical sense, who we are and the existence of God. That Ingo accomplishes such a true thing not only with the illusion that is stop-motion animation but with the very artificial subject of “movies” gives me pause, undoubtedly the longest pause of my life. I only wish I could remember it.
“I’ll watch for three minutes,” I remember saying. “If it then seems worth my time, I will watch more.”
“In any event, it’s kept me busy,” he said, as he led me to a chair facing the small movie screen.
“I’ll sit after three minutes,” I told him. “If I choose to continue.”
Ingo hovered over me as the film started.
Some of it is coming back now, fuzzily.
It is silent, of course, as his work on it had commenced in 1916. Perhaps sound will be added eventually, I postulate, thus reflecting the coming changes in cinema and technology. That might make it an interesting curio, if nothing else. However, I’m afraid I will never know because, of course, it will be terrib— Wait! The first shot surprises me. It is not terrible, and I must admit I am a tad disappointed. Mostly because I cannot in good conscience quit after three minutes, but