We already know Nicolas Cage is up to his ears in this riveting drama. The question is: What’s he going to do about it? Well, that’s at least one of the questions, anyway
Saint Stephan asks Nicolas Cage a question.
“I don’t rightly know, baby, but the place seems pretty fearsome.”
As silence falls between them, they drink their coffee without looking at each other, as looking would imply an agreed meaning that now escapes them and disintegrates in the all-devouring and unending colossus of space that surrounds them.
“The airport concourse that rises out of the mall way-way down there,” Nicolas Cage suddenly proffers, “eventually turns into a vast theater of public accusation, trial and execution. Anyway, that much I do for a fact know.”
More silence.
“And I also know there’s not just one airport.”
Nicolas Cage’s earlier air of easy confidence and nonchalance has been shattered. We hear the strain in his voice as he struggles to bring the tightening sound of fear and panic in his throat under control, modulating its depth, volume and timbre, coordinating it with a consciously slowed breathing. He has begun to perspire.
But as he speaks, we witness his transformation as he detaches and becomes someone other than, someone outside of, Nicolas Cage, and now it is someone else speaking and not himself.
“What we see down a-ways from here is just one of many airports,” he says, masterfully controlling a perfectly calibrated twang that closely resembles, we are made to feel, the gamy idiom of mid-southwestern small-town blue-collar after-work nighttime bar argot dominant in the region in the mid-1970s, for if Cage is not replicating this speech based on actual study and knowledge, he is brilliantly approximating it thanks to the sheer power of his actor’s intuition and his almost unmatched experience in movies.
“Really? How many?”
“Oh, I don’t know, man, but it’s like the airports just go on and on and all of this repeats over and over again, albeit in myriad variations and slightly different combinations.”
Now we lose the conversation for a while, but when we pick it up again, Nicolas Cage is telling and asking Stephan, “Hey, and did you know there are movie theaters under this airport.”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, it’s really great, but it’s like that computerized food court at Newark Airport. Or, for that matter, like this one. It only works if you’re passing through, you know, connecting between flights. But if you’ve gone to baggage claim, you’re outta there, baby!”
“You mean, you can’t go to the movie theater?”
“No way. It’s how the place is built. If you’re moving between gates, and you’ve still got a shitload of time on your hands, you can go see a movie. But if it’s your last stop and you go for your bags, you can’t get back to where you came from. I’m telling you, man. It’s the way it’s built.”
“But that sucks.”
“Yeah, but what can you do?”
Stephan is upset. He’s thinking hard.
“Yeah, but you CAN go see a movie if you don’t go claim your bags!”
“Sure you can,” says Cage, “but then, while you’re at the movie, your bags are going round and round the carousel long enough for airport staff and security to notice, so they’ll probably be confiscated, maybe even destroyed and then, you know, good luck trying to get them back.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, well… at least you saw a movie…”
A Losser passes by.
No reaction from Cage.
Another Losser walks by, cutting in very close to Cage and Stephan’s small table, clearly vicious.
Stephan notes the Quotidians walking by, keeping their eyes to themselves, and like Cage, supposedly also not noticing, acting as if everything’s normal all around and nothing out of the ordinary is happening.
Yet another Losser walks by, and the small table between Stephan and Cage nearly tips over by itself from the force of the hate. Plates and their coffees fall, the large mugs and china shattering, silverware clattering as it scatters toward other tables, some occupied by Quotidians taking, or trying to take, no notice, and others behind which, somehow and suddenly, tubby and spread-kneed Lossers sit, raging pink and greatly annoyed, and no waiters running out of nowhere to obsequiously clean it all up – not a damned one… And now –
Part filed by Jack Step – from Kyiv
[Here, for some inexplicable reason frustrating to us, the writers change – Kyiv Unedited Secret Editorial Board]
And now more Lossers slow down as they pass by looking at us with beady sidewise glances steeped in suspicion.
“Nyug-nyag-nyaow, nyug-ag-nyar…” they snarl and growl. The walleyes goggle in their sockets, go round and round, they oogle and oggle.
“They do not strive for excellence,” Cage says.
His eyes sign, his head flicks up, but quickly, almost imperceptibly, to show me whom he means, as his hands remain motionless either side of his extra-large Coffee Cabriolet. The look on Nicolas Cage’s face visibly darkens.
“Let’s go,” he suddenly says.
I do not perceive how we move or where, but now we are in what I take to be one of the halls of justice – one of those ghoulish gruesome theaters of public accusation, trial and execution, as described to me by Nicolas Cage.
We have closed the doors against all Lossers. We are safe – for the time being, anyway.
More time passes – how much, I truly can’t say. Now Cage wears a look that is cold, lost, and horrified.
Is this how he feels, I ask myself. Or is he merely acting.
I was waiting for the rain,
Heavy, night-ushered, in windswept torrents.
I knew my release would depend on bad weather
Because it’s good at killing exultation,
So no cheering, or them clapping their hands,
Not even tears and embraces
From the people I’ve known, happy to see me,
Just my quiet knocking on the door
And muddy shoeprints on the carpet
As I walk in, my living death with me
And the two of us sit at the kitchen table and have a drink
While the rest of them step away in a cautious half-circle
Staring, wondering what they should do.
I knew you’d let me go when the injections stopped,
And when you started letting me sleep some
In the daytime or nighttime, it doesn’t matter
I didn’t know what time it was, anyway,
Oh, and also when you started giving me a little more
Than hot broth-flavored water – I guess to fatten me up
Yeah, so, I’ve been waiting for the rain,
Crushed under The Galaxy
I finally thought of my own salvation
And played the idiot you thought you’d created
Ha! I must have played him well
‘Cause I saw you nod and that was when I knew
You thought me harmless, and so it followed
On a night just like this one, you’d let me go.
When you took me, I was working…
“No,” I tell Cage, “hit down on the word ‘working’ with something like a quiet anger, to show how important your work was to you, that, which you so loved to do, and had meant everything to you, and how they tore you from it, inhumanly, violently, with tremendous envy and malice and hatred, and uprooted you from the community in which you’d done it, and which had touched so many people…”
“Okay, uh, like this?: When you took me, I was WORKING…”
“Yes, that’s much better; it hews much closer to the pain and the pathos of everything you’re now going through; everything you’re trying to say…”
“Gottcha…”
“Okay, keep going…”
When you took me, I was WORKING
With tools that my father gave me
I went from garden to garden
Planting the czar of flowers…
“That’s PLANTING – hit it harder, Nic, like before…”
PLANTING the czar of flowers
So don’t speak to me of thorns.
You came to destroy my work
And impose an order of your own…
Yeah, I’ve been waiting for the rain, all right.
People stay inside, windows go unused…
The rain makes good cover for a garden-dwelling ghost…
“Cut! Oh, Nic, Nic – that was great! I mean, I’m quite literally speechless – no words, no words whatsoever. Unbelievable! Hell, I’ve got chills running up and down my spine…”
“Well, I just fell in love with the script, you know, Saint: the story of this innocent man who’d been destroyed by malevolent forces who hated him, and just when it looks like justice will actually be served and these people are about to be put on trial for what they’d done to the man, there’s this bizarre inexplicable twist and it’s THE MAN who’s put on trial INSTEAD OF THEM, and when I read that, Saint, I was like, oh, man, and isn’t that, like, so much closer to the truth and the way life is and the way the world really works? So when I read those lines, I just, you know, I just went with my first gut feeling, because it’d moved me so much, and I, you know…”
“And you took it there, Nic, you hit it spot on! Thank you, thank you so much, that was truly beautiful. Yeah, that was –”
Just then, a coterie of Lossers bursts into the courtroom – bearing ill will, of course.
“We’re confiscating everything here, including that screenplay and that large red-and-black-lettered banner that reads ‘The City Men!’ rolled up behind the bench there – I guess you thought we wouldn’t see it, nyarg ag ga – by Special Losser Court Order, signed by The Right Venerable Judge Losser…” says one.
“That’s right,” says another, “and we’re also changing Los Angeles to Losser Angeles – nyug nyaaaoow nyag…”
Filed by Saint Stephan, December 25, 2016, where the treetops glisten, and children listen, to hear sleigh bells in the snow…