Ash Cinema Read online

  Pan back up into a sky full of clouds that trudged past like warships. Then it came down to a child standing next to a tree, the girl from the cover. She was small, maybe ten, maybe not even, her hair black and skin pale as the body that became a tree. The film was black and white but I thought her dress was blue because it appeared as a pale grey, the way the ocean looks on a cloudy day. Black and white, but her eyes were bright, a different shade of grey from all the other colors, a dark light. The girl knelt next to the tree and reached her hands into the dirt and pulled out a human skull. The press of the keys intensified, the notes drawn longer, a fuller sound reached, but the bells remained the same contrast. The girl stood and walked towards the camera cradling the skull the way one cradles a small child. Her face, calm, relaxed, her eyes watching the skull in her arms. She reached the camera and the image flipped to watch her walk away from the tree. Cut to the girl standing at the edge of a body of water, her eyes cast to the horizon, the wind blowing her short hair. The piano dropped then and only the chime of bells remained until the girl began singing. Her voice, soft, a child's, but the words, I couldn't understand. It didn't matter, though, I knew what she meant. Rocking the skull back and forth in her arms, the bells dimming until there was only her voice, her incomprehensible lyrics not meant to be understood linguistically, but emotively. It was not what she sang, but how she sang, the music of the song, not the lyrics. Slowly, gradually, her song stopped and she bent over and placed the skull into the water. While she did this, the camera panned round and faced her so I watched her face, her hands, as she placed the skull in the water instead of the horizon and the rippling water. The shot remained there on the skull, its bones chipped, cracked, and worn, and I saw her small feet stepping away from the shore to disappear.

  The camera followed the girl for the next twenty minutes. The piano returned, the bells returned. She stood deep in the woods and found a dying deer. Taking its limp head in her hands, she pressed her forehead to its forehead and remained there, the camera steady, medium shot, the piano rising until she pulled back, the camera diving forward and taking her point of view, staring directly into the eyes of the now dead deer, watching its life fade from it, the piano now joined by soft drumming, all barely there cymbal brushed with a soft bass every other melody cycle of the piano. The camera retreated to a longshot at grasslevel watching the girl holding the deer, her body pressed against its no longer breathing torso. Faded out and faded back to her footsteps, the shot panning along with her but remaining below kneeheight. The crunch of leaves mixed with the odd percussion, the melodious piano and bells, a natural percussion of rhythmic feet and thick layer of leaves. The camera jumped up to the sky and the sound of crunched leaves grew louder and louder till the piano and bells were washed out. The sky was different than before, thick layers of clouds and the odd falling of rain. The black and white of the film caused the clouds to glow with a peculiar aura that reminded me of Gorecki's singer on that mountain and the piano returned, droning, melancholic, the bells now sounding like tears, and then the percussion of steps and brushed cymbals combined with the softness of falling rain. An odd melody, a mix of repetitive minimalism and naturalism.

  It was so lonely. The film continued in this way. She watched life die, caressed the creature in its final moments, then, sometime later, collected the skull and brought it to the shore, where she sang to it, for it, through it, until it was ready for the water. The film lasted maybe half an hour but it felt like hours and also no time at all.

  I sat staring at the blank screen after it ended unsure of what I had seen, what it meant. My mind was a mess, confused, overstimulated, oversaturated. Never before had I seen such an idiosyncratic film. No dialogue, not even a single word spoken in the entire half hour, just this odd manual task, this herding of the dead, small melodies given to each skull laid to rest. I didn't understand so I put it back in its case, then put in something else, something with Dick van Dyke, maybe.

  None of it stuck, the next thing I put on. Halfway through, I forgot I was watching anything. I sat watching the walls and the movement of the ghost in the room with me, the ghost of a man, I thought, the way his presence was larger than him, how his shadow was pale and flickered. Sitting there, not lost in thought, but vacant of thought, as if viewing Falke's short film had worn me out, physically, mentally, maybe emotionally. I was dead to the world until the librarian entered and told me they were closing for the night.

  The streets were alive at night but vagrancy was more common and they had places to stay that promised at least a bit of safety, warmth, and food. If I ever have to be homeless again, I'll head back.

  I thought maybe the reason so many ghosts came from the west resulted from the amount of homeless who end there. The barely alive trading places with the newly dead. I don't know.

  All that night, through the random mutterings, the screams of too many potentially undiagnosed mentally deranged adults, came the images of that little girl and all those skulls. A vivid and essential eye, every scene, no matter how strange, imbued with a powerful sense of beauty and aesthetic. The sweeping motions, the choreographed movements, the in-camera special effects and the illusion of constant continuity, every image arranged like a painting, displaying power, emotion, resonating through me. It wasn't just one scene or image that stuck with me, but all of it, every moment, and I realised then, too, that the song, the single melancholic movement of the piano that touches every instant still rang in my ears and her song, those words that weren't words, still echoed in my head. The entire film replayed on my eyelids over and over, not a second missed, somehow perfectly imprinted into my mind as if it came from my very dreams.

  I always wanted to see movies of my dreams but now the movie was my dream.

  My pillow was wet with tears by morning, my chest and throat ravaged from the sobs. I ran back to the library when I finally could lie down no longer in the shelter and waited for the doors to open.

  I watched Songs for the Dead again, bawling the entire time, not even sure why. This girl's whole life consisted of carrying life from the land of the living to the land of the dead, from their bodies to the ocean, for it was surely the ocean. So lonely, I felt myself crumbling, unable to even watch, just drenching the arm of the chair with all the loneliness I carried. And the music, the lonesome keys and their opposing chimes with so much space, so much silence in between. The sound of the film was about space, silence. It could have been made one hundred years before, back when films didn't have sound. He chose, Sebastian Falke, to let this silence out, to echo into the emptiness inside of us. He created an abyss for me to stare into that stared back into me and tore apart what I held inside, breaking down the dams of my memories, my emotions, until I became just the shell, the life of me pouring out in torrents the way that poor miserable girl spent her life shepherding the about to die and ushering them into a new existence, a lifeless existence, with just a song. That song, so full of emotion, subdued and subtle, at first it was only the halfnotes of a child singing, but by the end it becomes so elegant in its simplicity, so perfect in its harmony. A harmony created by contrast that was established by that first scene, of death and creation.

  Death as an act of creation.

  It was at the heart of every scene. The film, I memorised it in my attempts to sleep the night before. I could recreate the position of every leaf from memory then.

  The tears turned from despair and hollowness to elation by the end of my second actual viewing, though I spent most of it not watching but trying to piece myself together under the penetrating gaze of the film. It pointed the camera deep inside me and dug up all the memories I had killed and buried. There was no resolution to my feelings, not any crystallizing image that made everything all right, but, I don't know, maybe I cried all the evil out. The film purged me of all that I hid inside me so long, exorcized me of all the ghosts that haunted me. I don't know, really, but when I took the film and placed it back in its case, nothing seemed so
desperate anymore. The curtains had been drawn on my life and sunlight breathed into the dusty room of my heart.

  The library had three of his films in their collection and I watched them all that day. They were all between twenty and fifty minutes. The second film I watched was the mural competition starring Genevieve and I recognised her as the first woman in Songs for the Dead, the one who becomes a tree. She starred in the other one, as well, The Hand of God, Genevieve played a one handed PI. A noir, silent, heavily implemented chiaroscuro. The story, given in a series of long takes mixed with frenetic cuts of images and actions, assaulted the viewer, forcing the story into me, the story of a man searching for his wife who disappeared some time in the past. The roles reversed, the femme fatale being a man, the PI a woman, and nothing turned out. The case, a deadend, the man who hired Genevieve killed, and no answers for her, just the trail of bodies. The film ended with a slow falling away of the camera, beginning on her face while she sat at her desk after hanging up the phone, her eyes downcast, confused, welled with tears, and the camera panned out further and further until it exited her office and the door swung closed. She looked up then and the backward pan stopped, my eyes and hers caught, then it faded to black. It was aggressive and painful, the contrasts in rhythm, timing, and pacing. It lasted forty eight minutes and there was dialogue, but it couldn't be heard. Two people would talk but the shot would be far away or through a window so I only got the body language, the facial movements, not the words. The music, strings, lots of them, but mostly cello, deep and resonant, sweeping through the frenetic montages and breathing through the long takes.

  All the films were aesthetically similar, the long takes, the sweeping camera, the minimal music, the absence of dialogue, the beautifully composed shots, the way the light played so perfectly into the shots, almost as if on accident, as if he pointed the camera at just the right time for the image to become perfect, unforgettable. Everything appeared too perfect to not be accidental.

  ***

  Some days remind me of him more than others. The rain brings him back especially but I don't know why. I have no memory of us in the rain, of even staying in bed all day with the sound of rain filtering through the walls and ceiling. The rain brings untold mysteries with it. A promise of new life, that's what the smell is. How everything smells a certain way in the rain, even flowers and people, that scent of rain permeates and lives in everything. And then the smell of impending rain, too, unmistakable. Rain itself is no great secret, how and why it happens, but the way it shrouds the world, makes it darker, closes everything in only to breed with the earth and give new life.

  The boundary between worlds, that's what rain is. Ghosts fill the streets and cover the walls in the rain. It reminds them of something, probably, something they left behind. They feel rain, or so I've been told. It's their last grip on the real world, on this side of the boundary between living and not. They leave echoes behind then, little traces of themselves. That tenuous grasp they have on this world, they take advantage of it, consciously or not, and mark places the way a dog marks territory. And the only way for them to do that is to leave their sounds behind, echoes, tiny memories of their life.

  Maybe that's why some ghosts hate. They left too much behind and now they're just an empty collection of memories that recognizes us and hates us for what we have and what they lost. Even here now, while writing this, I feel them, the spines on my back raised, the hairs on my arms reaching out to touch the skin they should have but don't. The smell, like I said, though, is how I know them, mostly. Funny how they don't leave smell behind the way animals do but instead leave sounds, audiomemories. Incidentally, dogs don't like me because of the ghosts. Most pets, really.

  But the rain, I keep waiting for him to come back on one of these storm clouds that passes over the ocean. If the rain really is the boundary then this is when it should be easiest for him. I think that's why I miss him so much in the rain, because I know he can find me.

  The ocean of the past, I still hide from so much of it and rely on all that I don't run from. Everything before him, I waited for the nightmare to end, and it did when he accepted me into his arms. It was a new birth, a new life, but it flashed too briefly and left me with only these rabid bits of time that eat me, these memories that haunt me, but he, the ghost I need, remains lost.

  Some days I pray for rain, for thunder and lightning. Standing on the rooftop with an iron cross around my neck begging for lightning to strike me because maybe he'll come with it or maybe it'll take me, throw me in the ocean with the other lost ghosts, and reunite us, my Sebastian and me.

  ***

  Not everything was perfect between us. I loved him fully but he loved me hesitantly. Part of him was ashamed, in despair over it, afraid that he'd be punished for me.

  'I can't face you today,' his back turned, feet hanging off the bed, head in his hands. 'If I take you, there'll be no relief.'

  I put my hand on his shoulder, 'We'll escape.'

  He shrugged me off, 'I'm ruining you. I'm an awful man for what I'm doing to you.'

  'I need you.'

  He turned to me, bags heavy under his redeyes, 'You don't. You really don't. If you leave me you'll find your proper life, relief, escape. There's a world out there for you and you're wasting away with me in this coffin of a house. It's too much for me to bear, to know what I'm doing to you.'

  'I found you.'

  'And I should've ran. I should have never touched you the way I did.'

  'I touched you,' my hand crawled across space and touched his on the bed.

  He took my hand, linked fingers, and stared. 'There will be no end to this if I don't make you go. You'll rot your life away before it's begun. I'm to blame.' He raised his head and looked me in the eyes. So sad and alone. I could tell how it hurt him so to say it because he had nothing left. There was only me and before me he was festering here, waiting to die. 'You gave me new life. You brought me back. Running through meadows, that's how this has all been for me. Birds singing and sunshine. I'm old enough to be your grandfather.'

  'I don't care,' crawled on my knees to him, taking his head in my arms, 'I don't care. We'll run forever, through fields and mountains, just keep running.' Face to face, his head in my hands, his face was a mountain crumbling, a sunset bleeding, a heartache putrefying. 'I need you and you need me.'

  His hands took me, those soft delicate hands, right below the armpits and laid me down on the bed and he walked out the room, slowly, me calling his name after him.

  We sat on opposite sides of the door he locked for hours.

  'You're only sixteen,' his voice heavy, weighed by regret. It hurt me, the way he suffered, how I knew he wanted me still, but couldn't accept it, couldn't live with me.

  'I love you,' my voice may have died at the door, so weak was it mumbled into my knees, swimming through my tears. 'I love you.'

  For a long time we said nothing but we knew the other sat there inches away, waiting. Waiting for what? So much of my life spent waiting for an indescribable moment off in the future. Waiting to wake from the nightmare of life, waiting for the ghost of the man I love, waiting for him to open the door and take me in his arms.

  ***

  After that we spent hours in bed exploring one another with new vigor but nothing was resolved.

  'You need to promise me something,' the light was dim and he stroked my head, ran his fingers up and down my back.

  My head was on his chest, eye closed, playing with his stomach hair.

  'You need to promise me that you won't stay too long.'

  The tears welled in my eyes again though I thought I had none left. 'Don't leave me.'

  ‘You need to being your life.’

  'You are my life.'

  His chest inflated and deflated, a huge breath. 'I've spent many years waiting for you. I've waited for you since before you were born. You lived in my dreams that I was caught in, afraid to let go of. I gave you the moon then, gave you everything for saving me
, bringing me back to life. You're my Orpheus that travelled through a lifetime of hell just to save a pitiful old man. But I can't have you, can't keep you. You belong to the world and I to death.'

  He felt my tears on his stomach, I know he did from the way he gripped my shoulder. 'All my life has been a nightmare till now.' My sobs that I tried to hide shattered my voice. 'Because of you I'm still alive, still able to go on living.' I turned to him, whispered, hoping the words wouldn't flounder before they reached him, 'Don't you love me?'

  His hand on my cheek, I closed my eyes and leant into it, the softness of skin, the smell of sweat, my orgasm still on the hand that held me, and that moldmusk surrounding us. 'My dear, one day you'll meet a man, a man your own age. He'll give you everything that I never could. If I saved your life, he will make your survival worthwhile. He'll expel the ghosts that haunt you the way I can't. I'm too old to give you anything but what little is left of my heart. It's not enough and you deserve so much more.'

  'So alone without you,' my chest heaved, gasped, my throat raw, the snot dribbling from my nose and mouth but he didn't care. 'All my life, a cage without a window, but you you you you,' I broke off, unable to continue.