Black Dance

VIII. SAUDADE

Milo, 1970–75

WE NEED to think about what we want to keep in and keep out from now on, Milo, baby. As it stands, we’ve got something like, uh, ballpark estimate. . seven hours of film. Sure, there are a coupla precedents in the history of the medium — sublime trilogies such as Satyajit Ray’s Apu or Fritz Lang’s Doctor Mabuse. . But still, we have to be careful. Wouldn’t want the audience’s attention to wander, now, would we? Especially in this next sequence, which deals with the most chaotic period in your whole life. .

MAYBE START OFF with news footage from the spring of 1970, during which the Front de Liberation du Québec sets off one bomb after another, killing six people and inflicting considerable material damage on symbols of English domination in the province. Windsor Station in Montreal (through which Neil dragged little Milo the day they first met), monument to Queen Victoria, Dominion Bank, Queen’s Printing Press, Loyola College, private mailboxes in the cushy Anglo suburb of Westmount, Bank of Nova Scotia, Royal Air Force. . Milo can be seen gleaning these events, sometimes on TV as he chats and laughs with prostitutes in sleazy bars, more often over the transistor that keeps him company as he shoots up in the men’s room of the Voyageur bus station, wanders through the dark back streets of Old Montreal, and sleeps out under bridges.

A summer’s night. High on heroin, Milo sinks onto his back in the grass, looks up at the night sky and sees a shooting star. (Right, Milo, you’re the shooting star. Yeah, I get the joke, you’re the star of the film and you’re shooting up. Great, very good, very funny.) Segue from the shooting star into the whiteness of his heroin heaven at age eighteen. Not a bland, colorless, boring white — no, a divine, milky, creamy white; a frothy, nourishing, tepid white, sweet as fresh cow’s milk — not buttery, not fatty and stomach-turning, no, the milk and honey of the River Jordan! The drug picks him up in its soft white arms and gives him the sublime, melting, liquid sensation of being held and rocked and soothed and sung to, comforted and cuddled and kissed forever and ever, amen.

Yes, Astuto, I know how much you loved heroin.

One day in May, the whiteness in Milo’s brain turns into that of a flock of Canadian geese that fills the entire sky. Pan to the young man staring up at them. Clinging to his arm is a pert and pretty, dark-haired girl by the name of Viviane, also looking up. Their mouths are open in amazement. Milo recites a few lines from “The Wild Swans at Coole.”

De trees are in deir autumn beauty,

De woodland paths are dry,

Under de October twilight de water

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon de brimming water among de stones

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

Viviane looks at him adoringly.

“Sounds beautiful!” she says. “Who’s it by?”

“Yeats.”

“Never heard of him.”

“A great Irish poet from the beginning of the century. Good friend of my grandfather’s.”

“Boy, that grandfather of yours sure made a big impression on you. You talk about him all the time. You gonna introduce me to your folks one of these days?”

“Absolutely.”

Milo grins broadly. . and, to keep her from asking more questions, plants a fierce kiss on her mouth. Just then, in a deafening beating of wings, the wild geese alight in the field next to them and the couple bursts apart. It’s as if they had caused the event — as if a thousand large white birds had landed just to watch them kiss. They contemplate this living, threshing sea of whiteness at close range.

CUT to a red Chevy convertible, Viviane at the wheel, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail, speeding through the state of Nevada. As the sun beats down on his face, Milo leans back in the passenger seat with his feet on the dashboard.

CUT to the two of them making torrid love in a small hotel room in Reno, Viviane on top.

CUT to a private home in L.A., a couple of deck chairs by a swimming pool. Dressed in a skimpy bikini, Viviane is sipping a gin and tonic through a straw and letting a tall, dark, handsome stranger talk her up. Milo and their host are playing chess at a table under a pergola a few yards away. From time to time, Milo glances over to check out the scene next to the swimming pool, and the host watches him watching. When Viviane and the stranger rise and glide toward the house hand in hand, Milo moves his queen.

“Well, well,” the host says. “I wonder where that lovely girlfriend of yours has wandered off to.”

“Checkmate,” says Milo.

CUT to Milo running alone on the beach as the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean. A long, searingly beautiful shot.

He and Viviane hug each other good-bye. She puts her suitcase into the trunk of a white Chrysler convertible and the handsome stranger drives her away.

Milo and his host at midnight, next to a campfire on the beach. After dropping a couple of tabs of psilocybin, they make sublime love in the sand. The camera politely turns upward to film more shooting stars overhead, but we gather from the sound track that Milo’s sex pushing warmly into him is making the host so happy that he weeps. Milo shouts when he comes — a gorgeous shout.

(Important decision that summer: you take advantage of the hospitality and kindness of this wealthy Californian to shake your drug habit. Even in the ideal conditions your host provides for you, your withdrawal — like your mother’s twenty years earlier — lasts a full month and is undiluted hell. . but you wade through it, Astuto wonder, and come out on the other side. I love you for that, though I admit I haven’t got the slightest idea how to film it.)

At summer’s end, Milo drives Viviane’s red car back east through Canada. Stops in Saskatchewan to pick up a female hitchhiker with carrot-colored hair. The girl is wearing blue jean cutoffs, a bright pink shirt knotted above her midriff, dirty old sandals and a black Stetson, pulled down past her eyebrows so the wind won’t blow it off. Milo chats with her as country-western music blares from the radio (Patsy Cline? yeah, let’s say Patsy Cline). The girl laughs a lot, crinkling her eyes at his jokes. Her name is Roxanne. Milo and Roxanne make love in a cheap motel room. Close-up on the bedside table: we recognize a packet of birth control pills. Times have changed.

Milo moves his things into Roxanne’s dark little apartment in East Toronto.

CUT to an interview with the dean at the University of Toronto.

“Yes, Mr. Noirlac, I’ve grasped the fact that your girlfriend is registered in the nursing program here, but I’m afraid that does not qualify you ipso facto for our theater program. We absolutely must have access to your school record, at least some sort of proof that you graduated high school.”

“I understand, sir, but alas, my school it is in ze rural Quebec, and it burn down in ze spring.”

“I see. Well, it’s probably just as well you left; all hell’s breaking loose up in La Belle Province, as they call it. Large numbers of Quebeckers will be leaving soon, if you want my opinion. Large numbers of anglophones, especially, taking their money with them. An independent Quebec won’t have an economic leg to stand on. Be that as it may, if you wish to attend this institution, you’ll need to take entrance examinations.”

“No problem, sir.”

CUT to the dean warmly shaking Milo’s hand as he winds up a short speech on Opening Day.

“Not only did Milo Noirlac pass those exams with flying colors, ladies and gentlemen, but I’m proud to announce that the university has awarded him a scholarship to cover his tuition for the next two years.”

The audience applauds.

Voice-over (actually I’m not sure of this, but we can put it in now and take it out later): beyond the drone of Opening Day speeches at this institution formerly known as King’s College, maybe we could hear Neil’s thoughts during his commencement ceremony at Trinity half a century earlier: 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 flames?

Yes, Trinity College in Dublin and King’s College in Toronto — founded some two and a half centuries apart but both under the auspices of a friggin’ British monarch, eh?. .

IN RAPID ALTERNATION between English and French: scenes from the year 1970–71, the Toronto scenes shot in studio, the Quebec scenes taken from press archives. Sound track: excerpts from the FLQ Manifesto, maybe mixed with rock music from the time (Charlebois or Joplin). . and always, faintly, in the background, the capoeira beat.

Milo sitting up late into the night, working with gusto at the kitchen table, smiling as he writes. . Like more and more Quebeckers, we are fed up with paying taxes that Ottawa’s envoy to Quebec wants to hand over to anglophone bosses to “incite” them, if you please, to speak French and negotiate in French. Repeat after me: main-d’oeuvre à bon marché means cheap labor; British diplomat James Richard Cross and Labour Minister Pierre Laporte are kidnapped by the Front de Libération du Québec. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. .

Milo and Roxanne walking in Toronto Island on a Sunday afternoon — cottages, gardens, paths, sunlight trickling through red leaves and dappling the sidewalks. . fed up with our obsequious government, bending over backward to seduce American millionaires, begging them to come and invest in Quebec, that Beautiful Province in which thousands of square miles of forests full of game and lakes full of fish are the exclusive property of these all-powerful lords of the twentieth century. . Pierre Elliott Trudeau announces the implementation of the War Measures Act. Mounted police gallop madly through the streets of Montreal. . Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . Canadian army helicopters whir overhead.

Milo and Roxanne making love. . fed up with hypocrites like Bourassa, who use the armored cars of Brink’s, that perfect symbol of foreign occupation of Quebec, to maintain the province’s poor “natives” in the terror of poverty and unemployment to which they are so well accustomed. . Sirens, flashing lights, police searches. . Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . Posted on every street corner in downtown Montreal, thousands of helmeted, camouflage-uniformed soldiers hold their machine guns at the ready. .

Milo and Roxanne quarreling in the kitchen — Roxanne throws a cup at Milo; it grazes his forehead and smashes against the wall; he leaves the house. Fed up with promises of employment and prosperity, whereas we’ll always be the eager servants and bootlickers of the big shots. . Civil liberties are suspended. Huge demonstrations are held. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . People are beaten, kicked and dragged by the police; blood runs down their faces. Five hundred well-known artists, writers, organizers and militants are arrested and thrown in jail.

Milo watching TV, a six-pack of Molson and a carton of Player’s at his side. . As long as there are Westmounts, Mount Royals, Hampsteads and Outremonts, those impregnable fortresses of Saint Jacques Street and Wall Street high finance, we Quebeckers will resort to any means necessary, including dynamite and guns, to kick out the big bosses of economy and politics, knowing they will stop at nothing to screw us over. . Pierre Laporte’s dead body is found in the trunk of a car, a chain around its neck. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. .

Silence. CUT.

Milo in bed. The Black Hole has got him.

Roxanne (wearing different clothes, to show that days are passing) bends over him solicitously: “What’s the matter, my love?”. .

“Are you going to get up today?”. . “You haven’t left the house in more than a week.”. . “What’s the matter, my love?”. . “Did something happen?”. . “Did something happen, Milo? Are you depressed?”. . “Do you want me to call a doctor?”

Turning away from her, Milo pulls the blankets up over his head and feigns sleep. Sleep is still and always a problem for him. (Even today, my love, even today. .)

The telephone rings. He sits bolt upright in bed and yells.

Roxanne rushes into the bedroom: “What’s the matter? Jesus Christ. . You scared the shit out of me.”

She bursts into tears. Milo holds out his arms to her in hopes that she will comfort him.

“It’s okay,” they whisper to each other. “We’ll be all right.”

“I just made some tea,” says Roxanne. “Do you want a cup?”

Milo nods. Slowly gets out of bed and hobbles into the kitchen. Can’t look at Roxanne. Sits down at the table. Pours salt instead of sugar into his tea.

“Milo!”

They look at each other. . then avert their eyes, each embarrassed to see the other knows they know that it is not okay. They will not be all right. No, not at all. .

I’VE SEEN YOU that way, Astuto. I’ve seen you sink into lots of black holes over the years and lose lots of stuff in their depths — and when I say stuff, I mean fairly important stuff. Language. Your name. . your profession. . your age. . your wallet. . your computer. . track of time. Yeah, I’ve seen you vanish, man. Turn into a void before my fuckin’ eyes — and a lasting void, at that! No way anyone can kiss you then. Nothing anyone can do but let you stare at the wall for as long as it takes you to snap out of it. It’s pretty impressive. You succumb utterly to your malaise. Surrender all arms. Relinquish language and revert to pure, animal survival. Say nothing, see no one, stay home, stare at the wall. A triumph of inertia. A splendor of blackness. All your energy condensed into an invisible point in the depths of you, one that takes up no space but freezes everything around it. It feels like turning to ice, I remember your telling me once. Yeah, like Glacier — the white giant of Indian legend who invaded the northern lands in prehistory, shaping hills, polishing stones, slowly displacing millions of tons of rocks and gravel, covering all, paralyzing all for thousands of years. But ice is nice, you added. Can’t do much wit water. Ice, you can sculpt.

I don’t know how many times I saw you endure these crises of inexistence. Far from improving as you grew older, they grew worse — because you’d earned your stripes as a screenwriter; people knew you were brilliant and they expected you to perform. All of a sudden, strangled by anxiety, you’d find yourself unable to write. You’d miss deadlines and appointments, break promises and contracts, fall behind on obligations. Money would stop coming in, unpaid bills would pile up, bankers and tax inspectors would start harassing you. You would unplug your phone and stop checking your mailbox — no one could get in touch with you. And of course, the worse it got, the worse it got. The idea of their mounting resentment would make you cringe with shame, so you’d crawl further still into your hole.

At last, after weeks or even months of hibernation, something would move and it would be over. In one fell swoop, your light would be and your strength would come rushing back a hundred-fold. You’d write feverishly, day and night, pouring your innermost being onto the page. . And people would forgive you every time, because what you wrote in those phases was just, unassailably, excellent.

I’ve always loved you, Milo, neither despite nor because of your black holes. With them. .

SUCH, HOWEVER, WAS not the case with Roxanne. After two years of riding your soul’s roller coaster with you, hanging on for dear life, she got fed up and kicked you out. Bequeathed you her black hat and left you to your black holes. You were twenty-one, with a college diploma and not a red cent to your name. .

There was only one place in the world you could head: New York City.

Odd jobs: waiter, taxi driver, fishmonger, lighting technician, nurse’s aid. . You take up boxing for a while, discover you have a gift for the sport, start making good money at it and even consider going professional. . but one day you’re fighting this humongous black man and you knock him out. Looking at him lying motionless on the floor, you realize this sport could kill you, so you hang up your gloves: your mother wouldn’t want you to meet so pointless an end.

Riffling through the Times one evening in a Dunkin’ Donuts on Seventh Avenue (in 1974 if I’m not mistaken), you’re brought up short by a headline — Seán MacBride, cofounder of Amnesty International, has just received the Nobel Peace Prize. The name rings a bell. MacBride. . MacBride. . You close your eyes and your grandfather’s voice comes arcing back to you over the thousand miles and days: Poor Mrs. MacBride was reduced to following Irish news from abroad. . for fear that, were she to leave France, she’d lose legal custody of young Seagan.

Seán and Seagan: homo homo? Yes, Milo. Same man. His mother, Maud Gonne, had fought her whole life long for the rights and the release of political prisoners, she’d even founded an association called Amnesty — and now, by God, her little boy had gone and won the fucking Nobel! You’ll drink to that! Hightailing it out of Dunkin’ Donuts, you head for an Irish pub you’re partial to on Forty-Second Street — and, in loving memory of your grandpa Neil, dead these five years, down half a dozen pints of Guinness, that near-black beer topped by a stripe of creamy foam. .

FADE TO WHITE.

• • • • •

Neil, 1920–1923

SOUND TRACK of live music: Québécois songs accompanied by fiddle and accordion.

(We’ll need to get a researcher working on this, Milo; I’ll bet you’ve got no idea what songs would have been sung at sugaring-off parties in the 1920s, am I wrong?)

The large barn space, next to the shed in which Neil was trying to write about exile when his ephemeral son Thom was born, has been temporarily converted into a dining/dancing hall. Long tables have been set up. Squeezed together on benches, several dozen men, women and children wolf down heaping platefuls of fried potatoes, fried sausages, hotcakes, tomatoes and toast, all drenched in maple syrup. Behind them, others dance, stomp and clap in time to the tunes stirred up by the little orchestra.

As she gracefully lifts her skirts to twirl beneath her cavalier’s raised arm, we see that Marie-Jeanne’s stomach is rounded by the beginnings of a new child. Close-up on their feet, Neil’s now heavily booted and Marie-Jeanne’s sensibly shoed, moving not too clumsily round and round, toeing in and toeing out. Close-up on their faces: Neil’s red-bearded; Marie-Jeanne’s rosy-cheeked and sparkly-eyed.

“T’es pas vertigineuse?”

“On dit pas t’es pas vertigineuse, on dit t’as pas le vertige!”

“T’as pas la faim?”

“On dit pas t’as pas la faim, on dit t’as pas faim!”

“T’as pas fatigue?”

“On dit pas t’as pas fatigue, on dit t’es fatiguée!”

“Oh! I give up. Elle est trop perverse, votre langue.”

“Anyway, I’m neither dizzy nor hungry nor tired. . Just immensely happy. What about you?”

“I’m all right.”

“You worried about Ireland?”

“Yes.”

“Quebec is your country now, Neil. Even if he speaks English, the boy I’m carrying won’t be an Irishman, he’ll be a French Canadian. Are you sure it’s a good idea to read the Irish press all the time? It keeps you from sleeping at night, and in the daytime it keeps you from being where you are, sharing our joys and miseries. We’re your family now!”

“You don’t understand what’s happening over there,” says Neil in a low voice. “My comrades-in-arms are in the front lines. How am I to think of anything else? The IRA shoots eleven master spies from Britain who were following them everywhere, and how do the police respond? By shooting into the crowd at a rugby match! Twelve dead and seventy-two wounded! It’s insane, Marie-Jeanne!”

“I agree completely, it’s an unforgivable sin. The British will have to answer to God for Bloody Sunday. . But as for you, Neil Noirlac, you should stop worrying your head about all that. You’ve been here two years already. . It’s time you cut the umbilical cord between you and your native country!”

NEIL’S MEMORIES OF Bloody Sunday would come back to you, Milo darling, when a similar massacre took place in Brazil in August 1993. On pretext that four cops had been murdered by young drug lords, the Rio police stormed into cafés and private homes in the favela of Vigário Geral, opening fire at random. Twenty-one people were killed, none of whom was connected to the drug world in any way. History repeats itself, horrors rhyme and you, Astuto, were so porous, so sensitive to the tales of others, and yourself so unrooted in a particular time and place that the bloody rebellions and repressions that haunted your bad dreams and black holes could have been unfolding in Dublin, Montreal, or Rio. .

CUT TO A sumptuous panoramic shot of the Mauricie region from on high. The camera will move simultaneously through space and time. Trees sprout leaves that change color, fall off, sprout green again (we’re reminded of one of Awinita’s cartoon fantasies). . Snow falls and melts, animals materialize and vanish. . And in each season we will see Neil — dressed now in heavy winter gear, now in a T-shirt and light trousers, now in a red-and-black- or green-and-black-checkered wool shirt — working with other men, lopping branches off trees, inserting taps into trunks, pouring golden syrup from barrels into bottles, making maple taffy. .

Voice-over: Neil as an old man, talking to his grandson.

It wasn’t easy for me to get used to living here, Milo. It felt uncanny, not to say immoral, to be dealing with moose and maple syrup as my country sank into hell. A month after Bloody Sunday, in December 1920, Westminster passed Lloyd George’s Government of Ireland Act, effectively separating Northern from Southern Ireland. The North said yea, the South said nay, and they’ve never changed their minds since. All through the spring I could think of nothing else. I was desperate to join the Irish Republican Army, now run by Michael Collins and the brilliant, ebullient young Seán MacBride. Remember I told you about Maud Gonne and John MacBride? Well, this was their son. Like myself a few years earlier, he was taking a law degree when politics claimed his soul. At sixteen, he became the youngest lieutenant in the Irish Republican Army. In May, they took over the Customhouse and laid waste to it. Milo, it took my breath away! The Customhouse — the most conspicuous and detested symbol of British power in Ireland, after Dublin Castle — a heap of smoking ruins! The whole British administration paralyzed! Meanwhile Yeats, in London, went on churning out Irish plays and poetry; Joyce, in Paris, went on serially publishing his masterpiece Ulysses; and I, I, Milo — who had played such an important role in Ireland as lawyer, poet and rebel — what was I doing? Sitting here in Mauricie eating pork ‘n’ beans with Marie-Jeanne’s family. From the outside, an ordinary man among ordinary men. But from the inside: raging, suffering, crippled by my brain in a world of brawn.

Your aunt Marie-Thérèse was born in June. She was a sweet, healthy wee thing; Marie-Jeanne sang and spoke to her in French. In Ireland, North and South were at each other’s throat. My mother wrote to say that she and my father were considering having their assets transferred to banks in Belfast. Yes, even Catholics, now — if they were wealthy and pro-British — were being targeted, terrorized, forced to flee.

Southern Ireland won its independence on Christmas Day, putting an end to seven centuries of British presence. But the minute the terms of the treaty were made public, the Dáil, the Sinn Féin and the IRA split apart and madness set in — that special form of madness known as civil war. Backs were stabbed and guts ripped open as South killed South, son killed father and brother killed brother, not only in Dublin but in the provinces, down to the tiniest of villages. As time went by, people forgot what the issues were; caught up in an unending concatenation of revenge and bitterness and misery, a festival of gore, an orgy of hatred, they simply fought to fight and killed to kill. The army got pushed up into the hills; thousands of men were jailed. Maud Gonne MacBride begged that the prisoners be treated with leniency, instead of which they were summarily shot. Executions are terrible, said the Minister for Home Affairs, but the murder of a nation is more terrible. Yeats, now deeply immersed in a phase of automatic writing with his wife, Georgie, saw symbols everywhere. Convinced that the Christian era was drawing to a close and that we had twenty centuries of undiluted horror in store for us, he wrote “The Second Coming”:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Meanwhile the leaves changed color, dropped and sprouted anew, the Saint-Maurice River and Lac des Piles froze and thawed, the sap in the maple trees rose and overflowed, my sweet wife’s breasts and tummy swelled and shrank, our children mewled and spewed and grew. One day I received a letter from my mother. I’m sorry to have to share this with you, Milo, but my history is part of yours and I feel you should know even the worst of it. . Judge Kerrigan being known for his pro-British legal decisions over the years. . our home had been broken into, our china smashed, our paintings slashed, our pillows eviscerated, our garden trampled. . and my younger sister, Dorothy, who happened to be at home alone playing the piano that day, savagely beaten and raped by IRA revolutionaries or whatever they claimed to be. She was lucky to escape with her life. . My family promptly fled to Belfast, a city in which I’d never once set foot.

After reading that letter, Milo, I spent the rest of the day vomiting — just as I had on the boat coming over. I now had no place to go home to.

In May 1923, sickened by the inanity of the fighting, Éamon de Valera surrendered and the civil war ground to a halt. It had lasted two years and caused several thousand deaths. . That fall, Willie Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I could not go on.

END OF PANORAMIC LANDSCAPE SHOT.

CLOSE-UP ON NEIL in December 1923, thirty-one and miserable, on his knees at Marie-Jeanne’s bedside as she nurses Marie-Thérèse.

“I can’t go on like this, Marie-Jeanne. I’m sorry. . I adore you, but I have to make some changes. . If I can’t write, I’ll go crazy. Listen. . I’m going to look for employment as a journalist in Montreal. I’m sure I’ll find something. . I promise to come back. You can trust me. .”

“Listen, Neil! I have something to tell you! It’s a secret, you’re not supposed to know yet. My father wanted it to be a surprise, for your Christmas present, but as of next spring he’s going to add a floor to the house, just for you. Isn’t that fantastic, Neil? He’s going to build you an office, and you’ll be able to write!”

Neil’s head sinks until his brow touches Marie-Jeanne’s smooth-skinned hand. Night falls over the endless winter forest of Mauricie.

FADE TO BLACK.

• • • • •

Awinita, October 1951. .

THIS WILL BE the roughest of the Awinita sections, Milo, darling, as your mother starts shooting up again and you grow inside her womb, your tiny heart guzzling heroin and pulsing it through your bloodstream into your just-forming brain, numbing all your nascent senses. A section with no dialogue, just fragmented images melting one into the next as your mother fades in and out of consciousness. . sits at the bar and drinks phony drinks with her johns and real ones with Declan. . smiles at the johns and frowns at Declan. . takes the johns’ money and gives it to Declan. . climbs up and down the stairs between bar and bedroom, bedroom and bar. . takes off her boots, stockings, blouse, bra and panties and puts them on again, all her clothes getting tighter and more uncomfortable on her body as you grow but of course she can’t afford a pregnancy wardrobe. . closing her eyes so as not to see the faceless needy men pushing into her, asking her to love and care about them, until they come and leave.

This time, if you agree, we could go all the way inside her mind and simply knit together a series of fantasies and nightmares, using a sound track now familiar to us — that endless series of belt-buckle and zipper noises, panting, swearwords and racist insults, moans and groans. Yes, I know, Milo — you’re worried that not only the MPAA but the audience itself might tire of hearing these sounds, but if they think about it they’ll realize that what seems annoyingly repetitious to us after five minutes must be soul-death to those who, for whatever reason or combination of reasons, devote months or years of their lives to helping strangers ejaculate. Okay, these sounds could be drowned out every now and then by the beating of native drums, how’s that? (In October 1951, the laws that for over half a century had forbidden African Brazilians from doing capoeira, and Indian Canadians from holding potlatches, powwows, and sun dances, had just been abolished. .)

A train rushes toward a tunnel at top speed — but it turns out that the black arch is only painted onto the concrete, and the train smashes into it headlong. Somehow all the passengers are squish-bounced out of the windows. They land gaily on their feet and run around laughing and shaking each other’s hands, congratulating each other on their good fortune.

A city plunged in darkness. No streetlamps or neon signs. Even the cars have no headlights, but their blindness neither increases their caution nor decreases their speed. They keep smashing into each other — this time the passengers get killed, and it is their ghosts who nimbly leap away from the wreckage. They are small, amorphous gray creatures who dart about, gesticulating helplessly, eyes widened in shock. They weep silently on each other’s shoulders and console one another.

A narrow, glossy black snake’s head emerges from a hole in the ground. The snake twists its neck around to make sure that no one is watching, then hoists the rest of its body out of the hole. It is shockingly fat and clumsy, like an obese woman dressed in a black leotard, with a couple of extra limbs and bulges. The snake clumps around in a meaningless, ugly shuffle-dance, then rolls disgustingly on the ground.

A baseball goes soaring through the air in slow motion. The stitching comes apart while the ball is still in flight, and hundreds of tiny white parachutes drop gracefully from its insides.

A man shouts in anger. Suddenly his voice undergoes all its metamorphoses in reverse, and within seconds he is a howling baby.

Bodies plummet, human bodies hurtle downward through the air with groans of fear that sound like droning airplanes. A white flower opens with searing grace and purity.

The flame of a candle — now steady, now flickering, but always burning — reflects the sundry images with which it comes into contact. There is a vague procession of people, animals, buildings. .

A green shoot comes up from the dark earth. It sprouts two tiny bright leaves, then stops growing.

A milk bottle cap shoots off; the milk spews upward and falls in a thick white curve of milk.

That thick white curve of milk showers gently and felicitously down upon you both, Awinita and Milo, covering your bodies in a fountain of warmth, the mellow marrow-ecstasy of heroin. Eyes close gently, breathing slows, lips relax, hands open — oh, abandonment, oh, utter abandonment — woman and womb, skin and membrane, the mother a child to her child, the child a mother to its mother, adult and infant curled up around and inside of each other, outside of Time.

• • • • •