If All Else Fails (9 page)

The old man who
watched the deer. He had dreamed his second wife in his dreams. He had dreamed that. But she had
been real. She had come when emptiness and bitterness had possessed him. When the feathers of his
youth had been torn from his wings. She filled him again with bright pieces of dreams. And for
him, in that second half of his life, far from his son and that first one, he began again.
Flying. No­ticing the world. His eyes saw the green things, his lips tasted the sweet things and
his old age was warm.

It was all bright
and fast and moving, that second life of his and they were childless and godless and were
themselves children and gods instead. And they grew old in their bod­ies, but death seemed more
like an old friend than an inter­ruption. It was sleep. One night the fever took her.
Peace­fully. Took her while she slept and he neither wept nor followed. For she had made him
young again and the young do not understand death.

"Ill help you put
it on the stretcher."

They opened the
door.

And the old man
watched the boy and did not understand death. And the young boy watched the deer and understood
beauty. And the deer was watched by all and the Great Being above. And the boy saw the deer for
what she was. And like her, he became great and golden and quick. And the old man began dreaming
that-

Frank Strong Bull's
hand, his son's hand, closed on his shoulder and shook him, none too gently.

They opened the
door. The body was gone.

The last time it
was seen, the body was chasing a deer that pushed its beauty through the world, disappearing from
an old man's sight into the depths of the forest.

Peter Renoir makes
an entrance into her apartment. He is impelled by a desire to rebuild a dream in which he can
lose himself. It is a conviction indisputably expressed in his choice of a tie. His tie is as
broad as the Mississippi delta. It glows in the dark. It is invisible.

Semina was
spread-eagled on a quilt in the center of the living room. She has just returned from a canceled
engage­ment at a beauty parlor and is suffering the consequent withdrawal symptoms.

She opens her eyes
as he enters and says, "You can achieve enlightenment only by following through to the end an
ob­session that has its source in a spiritual sickness."

The scene shifts
subtly and we can see that Peter Renoir is now spread-eagled on the quilt and it is Semina who is
making her entrance into the living room.

She circles the
centerfolded man cautiously. She thinks she knows the truth and thus has more of an opportunity
to face that amount of it, traditionally denied her. Self-awareness has occurred to her. With
startling abruptness, she has become a factor in Peter Renoir's world. Peter Re­noir is stunned
and experiences a flashback.

He is deeply in
love with a girl named Norma Jean, but while still in love with her, he realizes that he himself
is
Norma Jean or rather that Norma Jean
is potentially within him. He is fourteen years old and his voice is changing.

An old man in a
park terrifies him. The old man repre­sents the pitiful inadequacy of human illumination to
com­bat the all-encompassing metaphysical darkness of the world. The old man sat in the park
waiting for little boys who looked exactly like Peter Renoir to come along. The old man had
escaped from a circus. The old man broke light bulbs between his teeth and did not laugh as he
chewed the broken glass and swallowed it. This was the old man's spe­cialty.

Peter ran through
the park, late for his violin lesson and he saw the old man. The old man made him sit down on the
bench beside him. The shadow cast by the old man covered the boy's face, at one point almost
obliterating him.

The old man talks
very pleasantly and entices the boy to tell him about his dreams. As the boy begins to talk, his
voice cracks. The old man laughs. And it is then that the old man terrifies the young boy. The
old man tells Peter that his voice is not changing. No, it is still the same voice.

"It is your ears
which are changing," said the old man. "Your ears are bad and one day they will turn into
loud­speakers."

Peter ran from the
old man in terror. Somehow the old man had instilled in him another set of dreams that had not as
yet suggested themselves to him. Rejection. The fear of rejection. He imagined that Norma Jean
had agreed to go to the movies with him but, once there, insisted that she be al­lowed to sit in
the row behind him. Further, he imagined that his ears would trumpet out the message, "You don't
even want to touch me!" just as she is giving into the temp­tation to go to the
restroom.

Throughout this
flashback, our consciousness is split be­tween these two characters. On the one hand, we have the
fear of loudspeakers and, on the other, the temptation to go
to the restroom. By means of this duality, a tension mounts that is in
itself the essence of the tensions in all human rela­tionships. The film approaches the climax.
Peter Renoir is afraid to turn around and look at her for fear of missing the end of the movie.
Peter is afraid to turn around because Norma Jean might have yielded to temptation behind his
back. Norma Jean is afraid to yield to temptation because she too fears that she will miss the
end of the movie.

Suddenly, there is
a power failure in Minneapolis and the movie theater is plunged into darkness. Peter Renoir is
stunned. Norma Jean is stunned.

The lights are out
in the restrooms too.

The flashback ends
and we are left with Peter Renoir futilely trying to cope with Norma Jean's darkness. In
des­peration, Peter begins to insist that he sees her, despite the total darkness, that he loves
her which forcefully brings home the idea that the Minneapolis Power and Light Com­pany have only
very clumsily attempted to destroy a dream. Unknown to the suffering boy, Norma Jean has crawled
out of the theater on her hands and knees. When she reaches the street, she explains the
experience to herself.

"Naked was I born
into the world, and naked I go on the screen again. My only regret is that I had to resort to
crawl­ing on my hands and knees to escape the shock of compre­hension. If I have materialized my
dreams into factories, it was not done in malice; and just because I am THE WOMAN, there is no
need to read any religious significance into it."

After this
heartfelt confession, we experience the unpleas­ant sensation of watching a human personality
disintegrate before our eyes and she makes one additional statement. "I hope the restrooms in the
Greyhound bus depot are clean."

As she leaves, we
hear a voice explaining in textbook fashion, "NOW YOU DO THIS . . . NOW YOU DO THAT . .
."

Poor little Peter
Renoir, unaware that Norma Jean has left the theater with cinematic style, gazes with fascination
into the darkness that surrounds him. He continues to insist that he sees her. That she is behind
him, is real and tangible. That she is his, and only his, Norma Jean.

It is at this point
that we discover that Peter Renoir is a sick man who once was a sick boy. We begin to sense the
irony of his life. As he talks to her empty seat in the dark­ened theater, we begin to understand
that he is in love not with a woman but with an IDEA. He has little awareness of the possibility
that he is rejecting life for an unattainable and false IDEA.

He offers to buy
popcorn for the idealized vision of her, having substituted her for the darkness of reality. Her
si­lence puzzles him, but he rationalizes it and dreams of tak­ing her erotically on the carpet
between the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth rows of seats. An usher brushes across his face with a
flashlight beam.

The usher is about
to urge Peter Renoir to be calm, to be cool, and to get the hell out of there since he is the
only one left in the movie theater.

The flashback
begins before the usher can speak and the old man who eats light bulbs meets a little boy named
Peter Renoir in a park. The boy is running to his violin lesson. He is late and his eyes are
blinded by the bright sunlight. The little boy has just been ushered out of a darkened theater by
a dark usher. The little boy is mired in the quicksands of il­lusion and reality.

The old man is kind
enough to scare the hell out of him. The old man instills in the young boy the awesome fear that
life is not Norma Jean being taken erotically on the carpet between the thirty-fourth and
thirty-fifth rows of seats in a darkened movie theater but is instead an old man in a park who
breaks light bulbs between his teeth and does not laugh
as he chews the broken glass and swallows it. This explana­tion of life was
the old man's specialty too.

The flashback ends
and Semina is making Peter Renoir a drink. The logs in the fireplace burn merrily. Outside, the
snow piles in drifts around their apartment. It is an idyllic setting with soft music moving into
the room from the stereo.

Semina hands Peter
his drink. Moisture condenses on the outside of the glass and leaves a ring on Peter Renoir's
face. Semina picks up the drink, dabbing at the moisture on the magazine page. She smooths out
the picture and holds it closer to the fire. Peter Renoir's face swells and wrinkles as the water
dries. Semina downs the drink with a satisfied sigh and closes the magazine with an abrupt snap.
She pitches it and the centerfold of Peter Renoir into the fireplace where it begins to
burn.

Semina saw the
place on your body where they made the fold. She saw the place on your body where they put the
staples.

She
laughed.

I'm going to die
with my feet in the trees. Eating barbed-wire sandwiches. I'm going to live so that all the
people who never had the time to get to know me are unaware that I got to know them. I used to be
sure that I could buy a stairway to the stars and that there were words I could say that opened
all the doors, like something magical you read out of a forgotten book in the dark of night. But
books don't bleed and thoughts are often only misgivings.

Take Cassie. Rotten
as a playtoy bird. Woman with no eyes and all handed. Makes me wonder if feelings I get are mine
altogether or just boats that float through my mental trees. Am I me or something launched by
somebody else? I wonder; new days seem old—this morning strangely seems like one I had had
before. Am I new and old or young and aging?

Take Cassie. Litany
of smothered light, makes me won­der. In women, I have lived, been kicked out squealing.
Terrified, I want to fulfill some sort of destiny, be buried someplace else besides in me. Maybe
in you. Maybe in the soil of some other Earth.

Have you seen
Earth? I mean, really. The funny, sad little molehill towns with names like New York and
Pittsburgh. Rabbit hutches or guppy breeding tanks. Something
deranged and artificial, every minute of it. Not anybody's idea of
a vacation. Certainly not mine.

Take Cassie, we
call her a drug, demeaning her. We call her mother night, apple angry. We pinch her dark trees
and climb her fences. Tie her to the side of dawn; aging, we flame out our hearts, crashing above
the mountain ranges of breasts. Are my feet armored? Have we rested for nothing, aspired to
less?

I aspire to cut,
what? Perhaps simply to cut. To hack, to spew out mediocrities. Let me die; let no women come my
way. Daylight and dark women. Burn them all. Dark women. What insane thoughts in them? What kind
of ani­mals are they?

Do they nest? How
often and how sharp the teeth? I have heard many men's questions and all the good answers have
been given long ago. But call it compulsion, call it what you will, no barriers exist until we
trip over them. Some people live so furiously, the barriers run from them. Am I a barrier? I know
I run a lot. But no matter, we ramble on. Looking at what we see, adding what's missing, and
making up the rest.

It's a good life,
here on the third planet from the sun. I know it's a good life because when you're number three,
you're a charm. Well, why not? Why not peace and serenity and dark women in the tumbledown night?
If only there were no dark men, but no matter. We have them convinced they shouldn't be and
that's almost the same.

Take Cassie, and
what do I mean. Take Cassandra, ah, the word itself, in its full length, a truthteller unbelieved
in her time. What a waste of starlight. The legend persists. Grind it down in the valley below.
Seasons are made to for­get. Forget it, let the truth oil the wheels, mesh with good and bad. Use
truth for lubrication but keep it trapped in the machine, endlessly touched by wheels. Busy. Keep
the truth busy. Change its meaning and diapers every day. Speak to me in circles. I only
understand circles.

Cut the rebels with
looking glasses and false senses of power. Mirrors praise beauty and we name planets after you
and you lubricate as if Cassandra never lived. We photo­graph the side of stone faces. We
photograph, recapture the planes of a face for a special something else, something more. We
photograph and freeze moments, while lurking memories move outside the frame. Oh, spin on darkly,
mother night. Hold the candles away from the light. Wish­ful, sinful, wicked too.