cog: Dad would
believe me.
is the line where his everything tilts just that much
upon its axis so that all colour, sound, and scent come a deal less fixed, to
ask of him their reconsidering.
Until this point, regardless of that occurring on the
tv screen, the film for him had been really all about her, no matter how it
might feature through his own history.
They had gone to the video shop specifically to rent
just this one film. Had gone twice, even, in that they had been unaware they
would require proof of identity and address to join the franchise, necessitating
the walk back to his room for both, eventually receiving the little laminate
card permitting them borrow overnight up to three cassettes at a time, and returning
with just this one despatched in its generic plastic case,
Skunk (in the
video shop, holding up “Blade Runner”, it having caught his eye): What about
this too? Same year I think.
ache1
(waving the “E.T.” box): We have all that we need right here.
and then at
the counter
cog (remarking
her E.T. doll): Don’t you already own this?
ache1:
Not in this country I don’t.
and a fresh bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey purchased
en route home.
Oddly, before the film begins, she sets her own E.T.
on a chair at some remove, and does not return to him until the end credits. He
believes this to be the longest he has known them apart since their re-union.
He had forgotten, if he had indeed ever even
remarked it, that the film’s opening forest scenes play out their minutes
without dialogue, eventually inserting his own words into the ongoing wordlessness:
Skunk: Doesn’t anybody
ever say anything?
ache1: Sh- God.
gesturing to him for the uncapped whiskey bottle.
His subsequent and particularly witless attempt to
ease this friction of which he sensed himself the source served only as further
provocation. Hoping to alert her to something of which she might not previously
have been aware, he offers,
Skunk: Eh? That’s not, would you shine a torch at a spaceship? How far-
prompting ache1 to grab up the vcr’s
remote controller, push the pause button, and freeze the screen.
ache1: Are you going to do this through
the whole thing? Don’t, actually, I don’t need your answer here. Whatever you
say will just be ah, some… Here’s the
answer: No.
Skunk: Okay okay okay, got it. Proceed.
and having relinquished whatever it was to which he
had been so tightly clung, finally found himself watching now the film and her
both, hoping he might discern upon her face, in her demeanour, whatever she
herself might have been seeing when first she saw it, hoping to see manifest
here what it was had impacted so deeply upon her then that she would still watch
for again these many years, this many viewings later.
Left behind, the little alien lost in its
involuntary exile is the obvious analogue, and equally as easily dismissed,
redundant in that she had loved this film long before ever knowing those vectors’
trajectory along which her own life would unravel. But does she see it now, he
wonders.
And thus distracted, remembers: he had himself seen
the film twice before at the time of its release when in his teens, and then
since only in part, catching a fragment here or there on tv, but sitting
watching it through, now, with her, recalls that first time had been at the
request of a friend who lived in the city nearby where the film had first
arrived, and to whose house he had had to travel on the schoolbus, praying he
would not be asked to produce the requisite pass.
At its saddest ebb, with E.T. dying, his friend had
pretended to cry, saying
cog: I knew
this would happen.
referencing not the plot but his own tears, an
unconvincingly earnest performance which, regardless, Skunk knew would be
recounted in school come Monday morning.
Elsewhere, some
other film, some other time
ache1:
Pathetic. Look.
pointing at the
screen
ache1:
Not a damp eye in the house. Nothing worse than someone crying with dry eyes. If
you’re crying you’re crying. If you’re not, you’re not. You’re just… drying.
He had arrived home the following afternoon, on a
normal bus this time, to find hidden in his schoolbag a tiny bootleg E.T.
keyring his friend had purchased on their trip round town that morning.
Not only could he not recall what had ever become of
it, he could not even remember the time of its keeping, there having been an
odd proprietary sentiment about the film amongst him and his friends,
parcelling out the culture as they did with each selecting for their own
individual appropriation.
Days perhaps, though possibly even weeks later, he
had gone again with his mother, who even absent him might still have gone alone such was the
momentum of that wave upon which it had arrived, though for him it was more the
opportunity to watch again the trailer for another film which had seemed to him
more promising*.
He remembers their walking in to their own local cinema,
the gritty sense of its not having been cleaned after the previous screening, the
inert smells of abandoned popcorn and smoked cigarettes, and the projector’s
beam visible in the air above their heads; too the smell of his mother, the
smell of himself, embarrassed to be in the company of this woman already
disappearing, taking those first tentative and as yet still infrequent steps
toward that lunacy to which she would eventually succumb.
Her tears at least had been authentic, gripping his
hand so tightly from some point early in the film through to its conclusion the
flesh would bear spot bruises for days, their changing colour to be inspected
by his fascinated classmates every morning.
cog: Dad would
believe me.
and only now remembering the family on screen lacks
its father, the wife her husband.
cog: I can’t. He’s
in Mexico, with Sally.
and too wondering if this is the moment where his
mother-
Skunk (barely audible, interrupting himself): Dad
would believe me.
ache1 (not having heard): What’s that?
Skunk: Huh?
He is suddenly overcome with an urge to rewind and replay
this one line over and over, as if within its words and their delivery is
somehow contained that code to permit him unlock those aspects of his childhood
as continue to remain inaccessible.
cog: Dad would
believe me.
Memories now compel his left hand grip hard at
itself, and absent any real pain still he winces.
Skunk (forced): I’d
love a pizza.
ache1: JESUS!
The video spools on.
The whiskey disappears.
The bottle empties.
*”The Dark Crystal”
