Black Dance

II. GINGA

Milo, 1952–56

A BABY. In these scenes, we can alternate between objective and subjective camera, be now inside, now outside the baby’s head, the baby’s eyes. A screaming, skinny, jittery, seizure-prone baby, brought to this publicly-owned Catholic hospital at age three weeks and left there. Abandoned with relief by a man whose hands were shaking.

The world is fuzzy. Moving shapes, lots of white. Women’s voices, shrill or harsh. Clipped syllables. Snippets of language — but that, too, is fuzzy, tone rather than words. The sisters all speak French.

“Garbage. . A little piece of human garbage.”

“Human? Are you sure?”

“Now, now, sister. Jesus loves us all.”

“Hard to believe sometimes. Born in withdrawal. .”

The kid’s in a cot, surrounded by other kids in cots. Large, white female shapes move jerkily up and down the rows of cots. Close-ups on female hands. Reddish fingers emerging from starched white sleeves. Swiftly and unceremoniously, they change the infant’s clothes and diapers, bathe it, feed it from a glass baby bottle, set it back in its cot.

Footsteps fading. Lights switched off.

In the half-darkness, the infant drifts into a brief sleep — then starts awake and clutches out wildly for contact. There is none. It’s just spent nine months surrounded by total touch, liquid warmth, gentle rocking rhythm and suddenly — nothing. Dry air, echoing void. Heels clacking in the distance. The baby squirms and flails, wrings its hands, grabs at its face and at the air around it. Its diminutive arms and legs wave in the empty cosmos. Its high-pitched crying wakes other babies, who also start to cry. Neon lights flick on. Footsteps move in. Voices whisper annoyance: It’s that Indian whoreson. Arms reach down, flip the baby onto its stomach. Tone of reprimand and threat. Footsteps fade. Lights flick off. Other cries fade.

Smothering, its nose and mouth jammed against the sheet, the child twists its head and gasps for air. Yelps. Wrinkles its forehead. .

(Hmm. Excuse me, Milo, but. . think we’ll be able to find an actor for this role? Won’t we get sued for cruelty to dumb animals? Maybe we should do these images numerically, you know? Cost a fortune, but. . yeah, sure, sure, we need them, we absolutely need them. Okay. We’ll see. .)

Here we could accelerate to give the impression of endless repetition. Empty ceiling. Empty air. Darkness. A huge, fearful darkness. Other babies crying. Rustling sounds and footsteps in the dark. Lights flicking on, off. Neon flickering. A woman’s claw-like hands snatching up the screaming, blue-faced baby, holding it high in the air and shaking it, then dropping it in its cot—thawump. Petrified with fear, it stops screaming. Footsteps move off.

Fade to a different quality of darkness — one that indicates time passing, a page being turned. A few months later. . same white ceiling, same thrum and hum of French voices, but: exit the regulation hospital linen. The baby is being trussed and trundled, wrapped sausage-like in the cruddy blue blanket it first arrived in. New faces, not as blurry as the old ones — the boy’s eyes are beginning to focus. Voices, not only in French now but also in German (even scrambled, the difference between the two languages is clear). Strong lights, long hallways. Shoulder camera to convey the jerks and jolts — he’s being carried out of the hospital. Wham. Dazzling sunlight smack in the face. Whoosh. Blue skies, fresh air, high green waving branches. Slam of car door. Moved, held, jostled, slam slam, revving of motor.

Everything is a shock to Milo’s system after six months in the humdrum hospital routine, but he no longer cries. Already he has learned that crying serves no purpose, learned to block out, black out, sink deep within himself, into the dark cave of silence that will be his refuge all his life long. From within his silence, beneath the impenetrable banter of his new German foster parents, we can hear the drumbeat of his mother’s heart, his mother’s people. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . Milo’s throbbing silence will be the background music for the entire film.

MILO IS TWO. These scenes will be shot from the vantage point of a two-year-old, amidst the feet and legs of giants. German is now more or less right-side up.

Lying flat on the kitchen floor, the little boy plays with a couple of potatoes that are fancy racing cars. Propels himself forward on his tummy with low vrooming noises. Is suddenly grabbed by the arm—What are you doing? Milo! What are you doing? — yanked up off the floor and into the air.

An angry woman has again taken hold of his entire being with one hand. Her other hand swats at his shirt and pants to dust him off, batting his penis on the way down. Still he doesn’t cry, but his pedaling legs strike the woman’s thigh — she cries out and releases him. He falls in a heap on the floor.

Milo is locked into a little closet under the staircase, in total blackness. We’re in there with him — listening. Straining with all our might to hear sounds on the far side of the door. Hearing only our own breathing. We breathe in unevenly. Hold back our sobs. However long this lasts, it’s an eternity.

Daily life in this household — quick flashes, not all bad: little Milo being spoon-fed. . sung to in German at bedtime. . dressed by his foster mother in a navy-blue snowsuit, boots, scarf and mittens, and taken out by his foster father to horse around in the snow. . trying to pet the neighbor’s cute little cocker spaniel through the slats of the fence between their yards and being reprimanded by his foster mother No! No, Milo! Dogs are too dirty!. .

He’s sitting alone on the pot, doing nothing. His foster mother checks, rechecks, finally gives up and roughly pulls up his pants. Later, furious to see he’s shat himself, she disgustedly shakes out his underpants above the toilet, all the while berating him in German. Then she pins a diaper back onto his bottom, too tightly — the toddler’s frown reflects his shame and discomfort — and shoves him back into the closet. Turn of the lock, clack. The blackness. Little Milo breathes in and out; a faint whine of fear is now audible in his breathing. His heart beats; time beats.

Suddenly the door swings open and Milo’s world is flooded with light.

Who is this woman? Blond and young and beautiful, she drops to her knees so that her face is on a level with his, laughing in her low voice: What ya doin’ in de dark, little one?

Question of your life, Milo. What ya doin’ in de dark?

The kneeling woman holds her arms out to Milo as no one ever has. Tentatively he moves forward and is grasped and gently clasped to her welcoming flesh. She presses his face to her neck, not too tightly. Dizzy, he breathes in the commingling of perfume and sweat beneath her blouse. At last she draws back, smiles at the stunned child and murmurs, Come wit me? Come wit your mom?

Taking him by the hand, she leads him out of the closet, down the hallway, out the front door and down the steps. .

Here we’ll need music, Astuto, for it’s a June day of insane felicity. The two of them go to a fair and ride on a merry-go-round together, laugh and lick ice cream cones as their horses go up, go down, yes, the laughter, the splendid music and the woman’s flashing smile, her arms that lift him to set him on the high horse, the licking, the laughing, the going round, her dark eyes so tender gazing at him, her arms that lift him down to set him on the ground, in fact it was probably then that she bought him the ice cream cone, for he would have needed both hands to hang on to the pole, his impressions are all mixed in child chronology, the woman waving good-bye to him, sunlight dancing on his mother’s blond hair, how could he know its real color was black, how could a three-year-old ever imagine that the most beautiful woman in the world would damage her own hair to make it blond? Be good now, son, be strong, little one. You’re gonna have to be strong, you know that? A resistant—whispering into his ear the Cree name that means resistant. . Dat’s your real name, she said, and repeated it. Don’t forget it. It’ll help you. Opening the closet door. . Come wit me, come wit your mom! What ya doin’ in de dark, little one? Shutting the closet door. .

Then sccccrrrratch—BLACKOUT.

• • • • •

Neil, May 1914

A MEETING OF the Irish Volunteers, somewhere in Dublin. Men’s voices speaking in loud tones of urgency and anger. In the audience, Neil Kerrigan, at twenty-two, seems a different man. His features are graver, and he listens with all his might as gaunt, earnest poet and school director Padraic Pearse takes the floor.

“May I read you a poem I’ve just written?”

I have turned my face

To this road before me

To the deed that I see

And the death I shall die. .

“Even the Daughters of Erin are arming themselves!” Thom McDonagh chimes in. “Arms, discipline and tactics, they say, should be the one thought, the one work, the one play of Irish men and women.”

Never before has a revolution been led by poets, marvels Neil’s inner voice. All the brightest and most brilliant men — yes, and women, too.

His cousin Thom had taken him to Monto and now he has brought him to Sinn Féin. Thom wants to make a man of him, and Neil is grateful: occasionally he even feels his blood stir with something akin to genuine indignation.

Thom has been drilling, Neil has not. Thom has been marching up and down, running, hiding, taking rifles apart and putting them back together, aiming, doing target practice. . Neil has been reading for his final examinations.

“Sinn Féin!” Thom shouts, leaping to his feet along with the others (and this Gaelic expression will be translated as a subtitle: Ourselves alone!).

“Well, perhaps not quite entirely alone?” Neil whispers. “It does seem we’ve been seeking and receiving a fair amount of help from the Germans.”

“Hasn’t politics always been the art of intelligent compromise?”

“I s’pose so.”

“No struggle is pure, Neil. The Germans have the same enemy as we do, and they’ve promised to argue for Irish independence at the peace conference after the war, if there is a war, and there will be a war. They have arms and ammunition and we do not, so we need and shall take their help. We shall do what must be done in order to win, conquer, establish and impose ourselves.”

Neil’s right foot bounces impatiently on his left knee. Again we hear his thoughts in voice-over. .

I know as much, sweet cousin, about our people’s moral strength as about their military weakness, and have no difficulty grasping that it is in Ireland’s interest, if there is a war, and there will be a war, to aid and abet the German military in every way, generously sharing our coastline and coastal waters with German submarines and accepting German weapons in return. . But none of this dying stuff, Pearse. Nor shall I follow in the diverging footsteps of poor Willie Yeats, torn between political activism and the inane theosophical ramblings of Madame Blavatsky! Yeats will get lost and I shall go on, for I have a job to do on this earth.

The bard now aspires, as he avows, to be Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish. As for me, my soul is at white heat. I shall write of the fine determination in these meetings, the men and women in revolt from the mud and blood of their childhood, with official British history pounded into their brains at school but body memories of revolting injustice at the hands of the British occupier. Peasants dispossessed by the thousands, their land reclaimed, their villages burned, their cottages toppled with battering rams, their children screaming in the cold and rain — yes, Irish children trembling and dizzy at school, trying to think and to study on an empty stomach. I shall describe how today’s young heroines and heroes of Erin scramble to find meaning in old tales, in the claim to roots, grunting as they snuffle like pigs in Celtic drivel, shoving their snouts into the soil of Ireland, seeking to unearth true meaning, old meaning, deep dark smelly truffle meaning. As if the Celts had not themselves invaded this island! They were invaders as much as the Brits were, merely a few centuries earlier! Our culture is not in the past; it is in the future! Our heroes are not the puffed-up Cúchulainns of yesteryore, but the amazing men and women who, hic et nunc, devote their lives to shaking off the shackles of the shite-eating Brits.

“Yes, we are prepared to die,” thunders Pearse, “but for our country, not for another! If war breaks out, my friends, you can be sure that the British will use us again as they have used us always. They’ll turn us into cannon fodder, as they did in the Boer War fifteen years ago.”

“I was there!” pipes up a haggard, gravelly-voiced man whose hair is streaked with gray. “Saw it with my own eyes, I did! Spent ten years o’ my life fighting the Brits in South Africa. Raised the Irish Transvaal Brigade against them! Became a Boer citizen, I did!”

“That’s MacBride,” Thom murmurs.

Neil takes a closer look at the orator. Bad posture, bad complexion, red wine in his veins, Major John MacBride is an unpleasant man, whose bushy mustache no doubt conceals a weakness of the upper lip.

“There were five hundred of us battling the Brits down there, and who did we end up shooting, I ask you?” MacBride shouts. “Our own Irish brothers, our flesh and blood, the Dublin Fusiliers and the Inniskillings! It broke my heart, boys. The British prance about on tiptoe like sissy ballerinas, protected behind a great thick wall of Irish flesh. They wait till we’ve been mowed down, then take credit for the victory.”

“He loves to tell the story,” Thom whispers. “In Paris, he told it so often that he grew addicted to red wine.”

Neil nods. John MacBride is a national hero, but he is also Willie Yeats’s worst enemy, for it was he, a Catholic, a commoner, an adventurer, whom Maud Gonne, the great love and light of the poet’s life, ultimately chose to marry. In 1903 Willie had been traumatized by Maud’s telegram informing him of her plan to convert to Catholicism and become MacBride’s bride. He’d written her letter after letter begging her not to make so grotesque an error. . but to no avail. And oh, how it had tortured him to think of the two of them together. Maud, like himself, a person of upper-class Protestant and thus innately superior background, a higher type of person, in touch with life’s most subtle, mystical, poetic, ecstatic, esoteric secrets — Willie’s own brilliant, precious, unspeakably beautiful Maud — in bed, naked, her skin against the skin of this silly, noisy warrior, this callow, superficial, bragging, filthy, lower-class Catholic. . No, the image was revolting, intolerable!

Like everyone else, Neil had followed the complex history of the love triangle in the newspapers. True to Yeats’s predictions, within a year after the irons of holiness had been clamped round their bodies and wedlocked, John MacBride had disappointed his wife — and Maud, shortly after giving birth to the son they named Seagan (Gaelic for Seán), had sued him for divorce.

Oh, but it was ill thought of in Ireland, both to divorce and to cast aspersions upon Irish military heroes, especially if one happened to be a British-born Protestant female. Perhaps Mrs. Mac-Bride was not, as she claimed to be, a Volunteer committed to Irish freedom, but rather a filthy spy paid by the British to infiltrate the Volunteers! Meanwhile, poor Willie Yeats had continued to moon, sigh, long, pine and yearn for her, occasionally attempting to win her over by striking the stance of political commitment, but consistently reverting to his mistrust of the masses, the lower classes, the Catholics. .

My dear is angry that of late

I cry all base blood down

As though she had not taught me hate

By kisses to a clown.

And so it was that as dramatic hours ticked by and her country suffered — that is to say, the country that, though born in England and raised primarily in France by French governesses after her mother died when she was five, Maud felt to be hers, given that her British soldier of a father, after having deserted the army and taken up the struggle of the Irish nation against his own and taught her to fight for justice always, had died in turn when she was eighteen and madly in love with him, thus making his political combat her raison d’être once and for all — as general strikes followed lockouts, which gave rise to demonstrations, riots, shootings and imprisonments, as Home Rule was denounced by Ulster as a thin disguise for Rome Rule and defeated and the tension rose. . poor, gorgeous, frustrated, flaming-tongued, red-haired Mrs. MacBride was reduced to following Irish news from abroad, writing articles and raising money in Paris for the cause of Irish independence but no longer actually daring to set foot in Ireland for fear that, were she to leave France, she’d lose legal custody of young Seagan. .

DAMMIT, ASTUTO — ARE YOU sure it’s a good idea to bring this old love triangle into our movie? No, I haven’t forgotten your theory about stories being trees with roots and trunks and branches, but this tree of ours keeps sprouting huge new branches we simply won’t be able to afford. . I mean, even apart from budget, we can’t afford storywise to follow every little branch down to the smallest leaf and twig, you know what I mean? Our spectators are gonna get confused. First you make sure they know the Catholics of Southern Ireland are trying to rid themselves of the Protestant Brits, then you tell them Yeats and Gonne are pro-independence Protestants — about as typical as pro-Hamas Israelis, right? What’s with this Maud Gonne anyhow? You’d think you yourself — and not poor shortsighted Willie Yeats — were desperately, endlessly, hopelessly in love with the woman. Hey, man! I mean, she died sixty years ago!

Yeah, I know, Milo. Dead people are as real as we are. And characters are as real as we are, too. Bringing them alive is our job. In fact, it’s the only thing that justifies our being alive (for those of us who are). I agree, I agree, it’s just that — look — listen to me, there’s an information problem here, because we know stuff no one at that 1914 meeting of the Irish Volunteers could possibly have known. Right? To protect his reputation, John MacBride sued a Dublin newspaper for libel, and from then on the Irish public was kept in the dark about the details of Gonne’s case against him. No one ever learned that one night in Paris, when she was off at a political meeting, MacBride had come home blind drunk and attempted to rape every female in the household, including Françoise (the maid), Elaine (Maud’s father’s illegitimate daughter), and Iseult (Maud’s own illegitimate daughter). I mean, the facts get really complicated here. Okay, don’t get all het up, we can leave it in for now. We’ll figure something out.

NEXT SCENE: a solemn procession of students, scores of them, some taller, some smaller, but all male, bodies draped in black gowns and heads topped with flat caps, filing down the Trinity College walkway, up the monumental staircase and through into the grand auditorium. Judge and Mrs. Kerrigan, Neil’s parents, are in the audience.

(If we want to recognize them, we’ll need to establish them in the first scene — maybe, creeping home at dawn from his disastrous night on Talbot Street, the young man will not have been able to slip into bed unnoticed, maybe his mum will have been standing sternly waiting for him at the top of the staircase, maybe she will have called out sharply to his dad to interrupt his shaving and come take a look at this cur cringing down there in the entryway, its clothes disheveled and liquor on its breath. . Or maybe his younger sister, Dorothy, passing him on the front steps that morning as she strutted off to school, will have snitched on him. .)

Neil, his right foot bouncing with impatience on his left knee, is back at last night’s rally. Over and above the drone of official commencement ceremony speeches: In the great tradition of our forefathers. . Outstanding institution founded by Queen Elizabeth in 1592. . — he hears the rebels’ voices rising, hot with desperation.

“Our strikes have failed! Our men have gone back to work with no rise in wages! And now, with our young’uns dying of hunger and tuberculosis, half the city jobless, living in the dark off bread and tea, hundreds of pure, virtuous young Irish women reduced to chattel at Curragh for the fun and games of the British soldiers, those arrogant bastards still riding up and down our city, occupying our castle and our customhouse, running our lives and humiliating our quiet citizens with their shouted orders — now, as if that weren’t enough, they want to draft us yet again! We shall resist, we shall resist.” (Chanted in Neil’s brain, the phrase rises and becomes a slogan.)

“Dear, dirty Dublin is starving! How many are we? Seventy thousand. Seventy thousand Cúchulainns! Seventy thousand heroes! Sure, up in Ulster they are more, and better armed. The buggars are talking about secession. Unionist buggars. Creeping, cruddy traitor coward bugs. They may be more, but justice is on our side. This cannot go on. Up with free Ireland!”

“Neil Kerrigan.”

Hearing his name called, Neil mounts the steps to the stage and strides forward, as practiced earlier in the day, to shake the rector’s right hand and receive the paper cylinder of the LLB diploma from his left. The rector’s assistant sneaks up from behind to drape the ermine ribbon around his neck and Neil starts in surprise; the man accidentally knocks off his cap, he bends over to pick it up and his own falls off. Neil picks that one up and they bang heads straightening up, then sheepishly trade caps as the audience titters loudly for at last something has happened, at last they are no longer bored, and when Neil moves back to his seat grasping his diploma their applause is as wild as Victorian applause can be, i.e., audible. Neil’s sister Dorothy leans over and simpers into his ear, “You’re red as a beet, you know.”

CUT to the well-heeled crowd milling about in the great chandeliered reception hall after the ceremony. False smiles glued to their faces, Neil’s parents shake hands and accept congratulations left and right; Neil is repeatedly asked to reenact the little incident with the caps, to show how it went. We hear him seethe. Do they not know? Is it possible they do not know that Irish babies are dying of hunger a mere stone’s throw from here? That hundreds of our country’s best men are rotting in the jails of Britain for having dared to defend our dream of independence? That their world is about to go up in smoke?

A horse-drawn carriage takes the four Kerrigans home in silence. As they move through the front door, the maid calls out from the kitchen.

“A parcel came in the mail for you this morning, Mr. Neil, sir. Postmarked in London.”

“London?”

Neil’s hands tear at the package: a book. A book of stories.

Joyce’s Dubliners!

“Oh my God, then it actually has happened, Jimmy actually has managed to publish his tales.”

Envy and admiration vie in Neil as he quickly flips to the title page. .

(No, Milo. I’m sorry, but we cannot go into the history of the publication of Dubliners at this point. No. Out of the question. You know too much. Shut up. Maybe Neil can tell his grandson about it years later, in Quebec. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. .)

The camera moves in close to read the words inscribed above and below the title in Joyce’s surprisingly graceful, legible hand:

Here at long last, fully seven years after my pregnant brain gave birth to them, are my Dubliners — a greedy, hypocritical, weak, silly, pusillanimous people who love to lie through their teeth and of whom, because of the vise of virtue in which our country is currently imprisoned, the truth can only be told from afar. I take the greatest pleasure in offering them to my friend Neil Kerrigan.

And in parentheses beneath the scribbled signature:

(Are you a man yet?)

“So he managed to get around the law after all,” says Judge Kerrigan, “by publishing them abroad.”

“What would that man know about Dubliners, I wonder?” scoffs Mrs. Kerrigan. “He’s been in Europe for a decade!”

“And why would he send them to you?” Dorothy pipes up. “It’ll be a bad influence, won’t it, Mother?”

Neil’s hand moves in wonder on the page of a genuine published book in which his name has been inscribed by the author. . CUT.

Neil in a pool of warm lamplight in his bedroom that evening — deeply, utterly absorbed in the tales.

A few hours later: Neil talking to himself as he walks along the Liffey in the depths of night.

I shall someday write as well as or better than Jimmy Joyce or Willie Yeats. I think, oh no, I know I can. Practice law, yes, fine, no problem, for a few years — just to get myself established. But in the dark, in secret, I’ll soon start spinning magical webs of words to enchant the masses. I’m only twenty-two. No writer is world famous at twenty-two — with the possible exception of Rimbaud, but he doesn’t count because he retired from literature at age nineteen to smuggle weapons to Abyssinia. I’m only twenty-two, and though Jimmy Joyce is fully ten years older than I, his first real book (apart from slim volumes of student poetry) has just now come out, and is not an extraordinarily fat one, either. Besides, he’s not serious competition. He’s gone off to Italy or Yugoslavia or wherever and will probably, now that he’s got Dubliners out of his system, forget all about his native land. I’ve been training since the day I was born. The pablum of priests my mother fed me was spiked by my teachers with the heady brandy of Irish lore, I guzzled down Shakespeare, Milton and Browning on my own, and now I feel ripe and ready. The fruit of my imagination is fairly exploding with seed. Semen and sense! A billion teeming, bubbling words in the cerebellum like a billion sperms in the ballocks — fertile, gusty, gutsy, true. I’m merely waiting for the event that will jerk my brain into gear so it can start spewing out lengthy chapters filled with violence and beauty, philosophy and pain.

I, I, I! Not shy, sweet, bespectacled William Butler Yeats, losing himself in Ouija boards and reincarnation for the love of Maud Gonne; not distant, bad-boy, scoffing, scabrous, scatalogical James Joyce, fiddling with twaddle, but diffident in face of battle — neither Willie nor Jimmy but I, Neil Kerrigan and no other, shall father the great literary opus of the new Ireland! I shall be both true poet and true fighter, my name greater, higher and louder than anyone else’s — Neil Kerrigan! Have you read the latest Kerrigan? Louder, higher, greater, the full male thrust of my loins surging into my poems and tales. . Pen is sword. Penis is word. PENISWORD. .

YOU OKAY, MILO? You all right, man? You want me to call the nurse or anything? Yes, I know the tubes are supposed to be bringing you everything you need to stay alive — Irish whisky, beef stew with plenty of potatoes, late Emily Carr paintings, early Wim Wenders films, the return flight of Canadian geese in May, Pierre Elliott Trudeau (sorry, just wanted to make sure you were still alive), ah, heroin, capoeira ceremonies in Salvador de Bahia, endless nights of fucking with Paul Schwarz. . hey. What else could you want, right?

Sure, Astuto. I’ll let you take a five-minute nap, and then we’ll get back to work. .

• • • • •

Awinita, April 1951

RAIN AND DARKNESS, seen through the window of the cruddy little bedroom above the bar.

Awinita’s stomach is rounder than before, and she wears a floaty blue shirt to make this less apparent. We’re in her eyes again, currently looking down. A man’s hands come in under the shirt. Gently, she pushes him away.

“Aren’t you forgettin sometin’, sweetheart?”

We see the man’s hands dig a wad of bills from his jeans pocket. A heavyset man in his forties. Unpleasant body: rigid, rilled with fat. Turning, he licks his thumb and counts ten singles onto the little Formica table near the window.

“Would you mind maybe,” says Awinita in a husky whisper as he comes at her undoing his belt (close loud sound of the belt buckle, one of the Pavlovian signals that warns the woman’s brain it will soon be time to waft her elsewhere), “from de side or from behind?”

“Yeah, I’d mind,” the man says, pushing her toward the bed and grabbing at her blue shirt to tear it off (but, being inside of it, we’ll never see her body in these scenes). “Damn right I’d mind. I pay good money to fuck you and I’ll fuck you however I bloody well feel like fucking you, ain’t no squaw gonna tell me what position I gotta fuck her in, for the luva Christ! No skin off my back if you lose your bastard! Make one less Injun on welfare, guzzlin’ down my tax money!”

A spot of pink. It grows, shivers and shimmers into a carnation. . The flower grows a long green stem and dances gaily for a couple of seconds. . Then the stem splits in two and its ends rise up to meet above its head. Meanwhile it goes on dancing. Watching it is painful — like watching a ballerina dancing on her crotch.

The rain hurls itself against the windowpanes. Fleetingly, in the shadows, we see the man heaving with his full weight on top of us.

“Don’t you know what condoms are for?” he says. “Don’t they teach you that up on the res? They sure should! Only useful education for Injuns. Well, no point in usin’ one now, eh? Can’t get pregnant twice, can you? No matter how two-faced you Injuns are, not even you can conceive two bastards on top of the other. Huh. . uh! Uh!”

In slow motion, in black and white, pelted by unrelenting rain, Awinita lets herself into a tin-roofed shack. One room. No electricity, only candlelight. Packed dirt floor. Fireplace made of clay or mud and willow sticks. Her floaty blue shirt is the only touch of color in the scene. Gathered in silence around the table are her mother and several siblings, their faces drawn and still with hunger. Smiling, Awinita sets her purse on the table, opens it and proudly withdraws a huge roll of dollar bills. But far from lighting up, her family’s faces only grow sadder. Tears roll down their cheeks. Awinita stands there, money in hand, not knowing what to do. The dim light grows dimmer.

Back on Saint Catherine Street, we hear the door slam as the john departs.

CUT to Awinita seated at the bar. People milling around her, music. When the barman brings her a Coke, we see that the stool next to hers is empty.

“Thanks, Irwin.”

Awinita sips her Coke. A blond man in his thirties (glasses, attaché case, suit and tie) perches his straight businessman’s ass on the stool next to hers. Close-up on his face: close-shaven, thin-lipped, a faint air of nastiness around the mouth. .

(Yeah, you’re right, Milo — it’s important to get the johns’ faces, show how frighteningly diverse they are. All, though, are weighed down by their stories, and desperate to shake off some of the weight. .)

Irwin brings Awinita a Coke, takes a banknote from the blond man, rings up two rum and Cokes. .

“Tanks,” says Awinita, nodding vaguely at the drink. “Pleasure. What’s your name?”“Nita.” “Hey, Nita, I’m John.” “Good to meet you, John.” “Good to meet you, Nita. Had no idea I’d be meeting somethin’ so good when I ducked in here.” “You jus’ wanted in out of de rain, eh?” “Right.” “Well. Cheers, John.” “Cheers, Nita. .” (Problem, Milo. Familiar problem: what to do with boring dialogue. . Nah, skip it. Maybe shoot the scene from the far side of the room, over by the jukebox, now playing Nat King Cole’s “Too Young.” Just their lips moving. .)

The blond man looks at Awinita and she looks back at him. His eyes say, “Are you. .?” and hers, “Long as you’re not a cop, baby,” and his, “Here, upstairs?” and hers, “You got it all figured out, smart boy.” Leaning forward, his lips form the words, “How much for the back entrance?: and hers, “Fifteen.” The businessman winces. “Hey, that’s steep,” he says, making as if to bolt, but already Awinita’s hand is on his thigh, already his blood is racing and they both know the moment for mind-changing has been left behind.

Three five-dollar bills on the Formica table.

He hadn’t noticed. Only when he puts his arms around her from behind does the fact of Awinita’s pregnancy register on his brain. His hands freeze on her belly.

“Jesus,” he says.

“Kinda doubt it,” says she. This makes him laugh, which relaxes him.

Awinita’s eyes are closed. On the pale pink screen of her eyelids. .

A whole forest of cartoon trees shoots up at once. Multicolored birds flit swiftly in and out of their branches — their singing, too, is sped up. Shrill trills and twitters, jerky flutters. In the space of a few seconds, the sun rises and sets several times. The seasons rush past: the trees shed their leaves, look dark and wintry for a moment, then sprout new leaves again.

Meanwhile, we hear the sound of a belt buckle — a different belt buckle. A zipper being undone. Clothes rustling. The sound of a key turning in a lock. A mattress creaking. A door being pulled to. A key turning in a lock. A door being slammed. Ta, ta-da DA. . Yes, we can bring in the capoeira beat here — but faintly, as a hint, a way of breathing, a vestige. Ta, ta-da DA. . A key turning in a lock. Pants being zipped up. A belt buckle. Pants being zipped down. A man pissing into a toilet. Loose change jingling. Ta, ta-da DA. . A man guzzling beer, then burping. Key in lock. Snore. Door slam. Fart. Quarrel in next room. Doors. Mattress creaks. Zippers. Buckles. A man groaning as he reaches climax. This sound track gradually dies out. FADE TO BLACK. Howling wind. . CUT.

Awinita sits smoking at the bar, looking tired.

“Want a coffee?” the barman asks her.

“Sure. Tanks, Irwin.”

Another man comes to sit on the stool next to her. Tall and youngish, with filthy long black hair and a phony leather cap. He has a lisp.

“You alone, mith?”

“Not anymore!”

“Mind if I thit with you for a while?”

“Make yourself at home.”

Just then the door to the bar opens and Declan walks in, hatless. Though wet, his red hair is longer than when we saw him last; he hasn’t returned to jail. Close-up on his green eyes as, catching sight of Awinita, they light up in a hazel blaze.

We move toward him: Awinita has left her lisper in the lurch.

“Well, if it ain’t Mister Cleaning-Fluid.”

They’re in each other’s arms.

“I missed you, Nita.”

“I missed you, too, baby.”

CUT.

• • • • •