The Conversation Continues
He asks me what the poison is. I don’t know precisely what he means, what he might be driving at. I figure it could mean anything – an open-ended question that makes no judgments depending on my answer. Although I don’t see why I’d need to fear him or his judgments, regardless of what I say. And it’s a curious thing: I wonder if he is making any judgments. He sits there, across from me, listening, listening to my answers, listening to what I’m saying. It’s not possible, I think – is it? – that someone should listen without judging.
Or is it me judging – myself? Is it me thinking what comes into his mind as he sits there, listening? A thing like that is possible; isn’t it? That we can sometimes sit and listen to someone without judging them?
It’s guilt; isn’t it, Step? It is my conscience. And I know what about. I do know what about. I know. I know. There’s no lying that’ll help make it not so, there’s no changing the past or how it brought me to where I am today, and how I am, and who I am – and what kind. The quality of my character, the backbone of a man’s soul.
Does it matter what we did with our lives? What our past is made of? Yes, it matters. Dear God, it matters. I’m so sorry, I’m sorry –
Jack – what’s the poison?
He’s engaging me; he’s asking me. The voice of my interlocutor comes at me across the dark and over the table as though it were coming out of my past. And it is indeed coming out of the past, as it’s been a long while, a very long while, I believe, since we’ve spoken.
It’s everything, I tell him. Everything.
How can everything be poison, Jack?
His voice reaches me long after he has spoken, as if carrying across a canyon. The word ‘poison’ echoes, repeating again and again, against the walls.
I don’t know, I say. Okay, look. I mean, no matter what angle you approach it from and no matter where you go, it ends up poison. In “Kansas City Confidential”, the poison is greed. A retired cop comes up with the perfect heist involving a million bucks, but everything backfires, and he gets killed. Only in the end does he repent, just before he dies. In “The Big Combo”, some small-time gangster with a debilitating inferiority complex rises up in the underworld through the conscious application of acquired ruthlessness. He thinks of himself as Number One. Number Two, he says, doesn’t count. Eventually, his megalomania drives him into a corner like the rat that he is and devours him. In “The Stranger”, directed by and starring Orson Welles, after World War Two, a high-ranking Nazi hides as an American in the States, where he harbors plans for a worldwide Nazi resurgence and dominance following a successful Third World War. He gets impaled by a life-sized mechanical figure on a clock tower wielding a sword – meeting an end that is somehow strangely appropriate, though I couldn’t tell you why. In “He Walked by Night”, a former police department employee, though not an actual cop, who is also a veteran of a just-ended Second World War, goes on a robbing and killing spree in Los Angeles, having somehow developed a high level of cunning and evasion. He relentlessly pursues his criminal goals with blood-chilling proficiency. No emotion, no remorse. And no rhyme or reason, as they say. He is eventually cornered in the city’s cavernous sewage system and killed, but absolutely no explanation is given for his motives. Like in Shakespeare.
The figure across from me shifts uncomfortably. Why does the mention of Shakespeare cause him mental anguish, pain? Or maybe it isn’t pain, but something more akin to desire, unfulfilled, longing. We long remain silent. I have completely lost my sense of passing time in the dark. Then I hear a tired and strenuous intake of breath, and my companion asks me what about these films is like Shakespeare, though he doesn’t speak the name, stopping just short of saying it.
I say:
We see the poisonous workings of greed, jealousy, envy, wrath, hunger for power, malice, lust, but these evils often seem to erupt out of a black depth that we can never fathom or define, even though that black depth is us. Heinous acts are committed based on this confused concatenation of vicious impulses despite our free will to choose and act otherwise. Either the vaguest explanations for these motivations are given in the texts or there are no explanations at all. Because there can be no explanations. We are simply faced with the bare-knuckled facts of their consequences, and the rest is how we deal with them.
The figure, who I think is Saint Stephan, remains silent. I continue:
In the movie “D.O.A.”, which stands for Dead on Arrival, an innocent man is poisoned to death by an irradiated substance because he unknowingly becomes a link in a chain of criminal activity.
So no one escapes, the figure says. Even if they are innocent (it seems difficult for him to continue)… even if they are innocent and uninvolved, minding their own business, and simply wanting to be left alone, to do their work, someone else’s poison gets them anyway.
Yeah, I say, that’s right.
He pauses. This time, the silence is heavy, very sad; he is thinking, going down deeply, and far, far back. He is angry, resentful. He is deeply pained and overcome by loss and mourning.
But he breathes out of the state and says:
You’re good with the movies, Jack. Like Manny Face.
Manny Face?
Yeah, Jack, you know. The dark handsome elfin B-actor who reviews movies for The Checkout.
Yeah, I know. Manny’s my good friend. I’m the one who got him the job.
I don’t know why he hasn’t gone to see a recent film in the theaters lately, Jack, as that’s his job, but takes in old movies off the Internet.
I don’t know, either. Maybe he figures there just aren’t any good movies coming out anymore.
But isn’t there any control over what he does at the website? What about the secret editorial board of Kyiv Unedited?
I don’t know.
But what’s the point of reviewing old movies? I thought the point was to review the new ones.
I told you, I don’t know.
The questioning gets annoying, but I check my anger, and then I say:
I know he doesn’t like going to the theater alone. He’s got this chick, and I think the situation now is he can’t go out to the theater with her, since he’s knocked her up, so they stay inside and he watches movies in his loft while he takes care of her.
But there’s a movie house right across the street from him – the best one in Kyiv, Jack.
I don’t know, I don’t know (I don’t feel I owe the figure anything – nothing by way of explanations, or information, or conversation. It’s all been voluntary till now. It’s like he doesn’t understand the power of personal relationships, and I’m not about to break it all down for him and give him the details. I know, for example, that Manny’s playing it safe, staying away from public venues, protecting his Tango Baby from The Hunched Cornish. But this, something tells me, is nothing the figure needs to know. It’s beyond his reach. It is neither anything he’s involved in nor anything he can influence even if he did know. It’s true, we tell people things that don’t concern them for the very reason that they don’t concern them. In the same vein, we don’t tell them things that we think do concern them. I just figure this is none of his business).
You figure this is none of my business, Jack?
Yeah, that’s right.
Do you also figure you might not be talking to me if you didn’t feel like it?
No, I don’t figure that.
Is it the pressure of my being here? Would you rather be alone? Would you like me to go?
No, it’s no pressure. It’s just what people do – most of the time, anyway.
What’s that, Jack?
You know. Someone sits down. It’s hard not to talk to them. I mean, it’s done, in situations, under certain circumstances, but…
But not under these circumstances, Jack?
Yeah, that’s right. I guess so.
Why is that, Jack?
I don’t know! I don’t have an explanation for everything.
How’s Dirk?
Dirk?
Dickerson.
I don’t know, I don’t know. The last time I saw him, he was… I think he’s dead.
He was running across a bar to stop a killer as you watched from the press box above, after he –
Yeah, that’s right, I say, laughing – after he beat the shit out of me.
And you think he’s dead? Is that why you’re here?
I don’t know – why I’m here. If he’s dead… I… I…
Maybe he’s not dead, Jack. Maybe that’s not what happened at all. And if it did, maybe it was only in your imagination.
I don’t know, I tell you, I don’t know!
I break a sweat. I wipe my forehead and temples with the back of my jacket cuff. Again, my hand begins sweeping over the table. My fingers hit something; the nails ring against a glass.
Go ahead, Jack. It’s all right.
Go ahead, what?
Pick up the glass.
I resist what the figure is saying; what he’s telling me to do. Nevertheless, I somehow end up holding the glass. It’s a heavy tumbler. I automatically start to swirl it around and hear a liquid with ice cubes clinking inside. Without wanting to, I breathe in the aroma though my hand holds the glass at a distance. Alcohol. Whisky.
Johnnie Walker, Jack.
A tremor runs through me. I see the outline of a bottle, and the man with the breeches, the boots, the coattails, the top hat and the walking stick striding past me.
Don’t worry, Jack, he won’t walk away.
What do you want? What do you want?
It’s what you want; isn’t it, Jack?
My silence.
Go ahead, Jack. It’s all right. No one’s going to judge you. Especially me.
I don’t remember the moment it happens. But it goes down, and that burn. It feels so damn good.
Jack Step, April 4, 2014