Nate Dixon - Hybrid Memoir
Excerpt: “RENDEZVOUS IN MOVING PICTURES”
WHITE ROOM
There is:
No delineation of walls.
No floor.
No ceiling.
The white space spreads infinitely.
Beyond boundary. A vacuum. Beyond sound. A plenum.
Then.
Someone whistles Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
Then.
A speck of white on white in the white. Becoming room.
Perspective
drifting
down.
Toward a clutch of doctors in white coats huddled over a body on a table. When the first whistler reaches the chorus, the other whistlers join in. Hallelujah, they whistle. Hallelujah.
Sifting
down.
The camera
an autumn
leaf.
Into this
roofless
room.
The doctors are the whistlers. Lips puckered, they whistle behind their blue surgical masks.
BLINK. A pair of enormous blood-red lips overlays the scene. BLINK. And disappears.
Gracefully, they nod in time. The doctors dance a measured step. Their scalpels chime and twinkle as they swing and plunge into the depths of the patient patient.
Swiftly. Swiftly.
Then.
Completely. Still.
Then.
Swiftly—swiftly—again.
From the peeled paper gown of the patient, the doctors pull steaming entrails. Their arms, dipped in. [zoom in]. Then retracted, stained to the elbows. [still life]. Slopping armfuls onto the white tile—SMACK [still life]—where purple and gray forms [zoom in]—slither away.
Slugs and cankerworms inch over the white tile. Vermiform. Spreading—a dark ooze—spreading.
The patient’s black hair pours over the operating table onto the floor. Where her guts slink about. Her face in profile: freckled, pale, eyes wide, mouth pulled tight in a grimace.
Then—as if a light switch has been flipped—BLINK—the face changes to a sleeping man in a blue room, whose eyes pop open. He sits up in bed, rattled by his dream. His hands shake. He holds his head.
ATHENS, GA. JAUNUARY. LATE AFTERNOON
The façade of a squat two story apartment building. Rows of blue doors lead onto a narrow concrete landing covered in clutter. Lawn chairs and potted plants long dead. Bicycles and empty beer bottles. Broken children’s toys and stacks of mildewed books. D.—wearing a heavy coat and a toboggan—exits an apartment, his breath visible, and leaps down the exterior stairs of the building, a small duffle bag slung over his shoulder, a six-pack of high-life tallboys swinging from his fingers. He crosses the yard—planted with dwarf palms—tosses the bag into the bed of his pick-up truck, then slides into the cab and exits the parking lot in a spray of gravel and white exhaust.
DURHAM, NC. SAME AFTERNOON
The façade of Duke’s Cancer Center. Valets in red vests rush in and out of cars. Grown children push their elderly parents in wheelchairs. A woman in a walker swats her son’s hand away. An old man doffs his hat to a young doctor in a white coat. She smiles—tightly—at him as he pulls open the door, moves around him in a wide arc to remain out of reach, then wriggles—quickly—into the building like a fish.
C. exits the building from the neighboring door. The old man ogles her with his mouth agape. She looks like she has been crying. She checks her phone. A text message reads:
On the road. In Altamont by 8.
She types an answer, then pulls sunglasses from her purse and puts them on. She walks toward the parking garage. A group of white-coated doctors in blue surgical masks stand huddled together at a third-story window, their scalpels lifted above their heads like villains in a horror film.
THE ROAD
D.’s pick-up truck slides over the pink ribbon of asphalt. Up through the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the dying winter sunset. In the cab of the truck, D. fiddles with the radio. Country Music. Right wing chatter. Preachers on Revelations. He pauses on a scratchy NPR report detailing the latest developments in the #MeToo Movement. Snow begins to fall. He cracks a beer. Listening. Stares out the windshield at the bunched mountains shouldering into the sky.
C. sits flickering in the passenger seat beside him: a stop-motion puppet. A pixilation in profile against the passenger-side window. Her outfit changes frame-by-frame. Until she lands in a sleeveless leopard-print dress. At which point the scene behind her—out the passenger-side window—changes frame-by-frame. Landing finally on a white-sand beach. On a sunny Key West afternoon. Through the fringe of sea grape and palm frond foliage the water shimmers aquamarine. Children laugh and squeal at the sound of the surf. And under the water—out past the riprap island—manatees bump and roll in the blue beyond.
When D. turns to look at her, she disappears. Snow falls outside the window. He finishes his beer, crushes it in his hand, tosses it into the bed of the pick-up truck.
MONTFORD AVENUE. ALTAMONT, NC. LATE EVENING
Snow-covered Montford Avenue. Snow still falling. Gas-fed, wrought-iron streetlamps flicker beneath the oak trees, throwing fingers of light into the spread canopy. Enormous Victorian mansions crowd both sides of the street, their gables bellying forth like the gathered prows of armada ships, gingerbread shadows flickering decadently upon their faces. If not for the cars parked parallel along the cobblestones, the scene might be from the nineteenth century.
Sleigh bells jingling, ring-ting-tingling, too. Lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you.
The truck rolls onto the street. Stops. Backs up, the wheels spinning on the ice as D. attempts to park. He rolls forward and backward several times and finally gives up, the truck askew. He exits, grabs his duffle bag from the bed—among the crushed beer cans—and shakes off the snow. He peeks into the windows of the car parked in front of him. Stares at wet footprints in the slush. Fits his own feet to the footprints and follows them across the street—dancing—down the sidewalk, in a circle around a streetlamp—doing his best Gene Kelly impression—up the steps of an enormous old mansion that—at the turn of the nineteenth century—served as a rooming house for the consumptive. A plaque beside the door commemorates its age and function. D. reads writing scrawled onto the back of his hand and presses a lighted button—2B—below an intercom beside the door.
Inside, a tow-headed seven-year-old in blue and yellow SpongeBob pajamas appears at the top of the stairwell—blink—and descends carefully on his tip-toes, clinging to the banister. He opens—with difficulty—the heavy door to the outside.
CONSUMPTION HOUSE
D. steps inside and bows.
Sitar music twangs into the foyer. A yellow cloud of cumin, coriander, and mustard seed rolls down the stairs. The boy stares up at the man, silent. Expressionless. D. reaches out his hand as if to shake the boy’s hand. His mouth moves but instead of his voice: the fortissimo, down bow, con sordino Hitchcock chord hammers away:
The boy continues staring silently. D. moves his hand up and down as if shaking. Looks around the interior of the old mansion. The walls cracked and water-streaked. The gold numbers peeling away from the red doors. A pile of collapsed cardboard boxes slouches in one corner beside a broken bird cage, a rolled-up rug, a ladder. Someone has dismantled a mo-ped on the floor, the engine pieces strewn like artifacts on a bed sheet. The wallpaper peels above the wainscoting. The enormous chandelier tilts precariously to one side, the crystal poked through with holes. Several baluster spindles have gone missing from the railing of the staircase. Diastema proliferate, everything lopsided and warped. The insides all agape and smiling with missing teeth.
D. looks at the boy again. The boy sucks his thumb. An impasse. D. puts his hands on his hips and opens his mouth, but before he can speak, the boy—still expressionless—points up the stairs, past the oblong gas lamps flickering against the wall, to a young bohemian woman who has appeared at the top of the stairwell. Long skirts of circus reds and yellows hang to her ankles, blue scarves and shawls loop about her body. She wears bright stones wrapped with silver bands around her fingers. A blood-red turban hugs her head. She reaches out both arms and the boy scampers up the stairs to hug her legs. She smiles—enormous—a wide gap between her front teeth as the boy ducks beneath her skirts. She motions for the man to follow.
D. takes the steps two-by-two and trails her down the hallway—the music getting louder and louder. He leans this way and that, trying to get a bead on the boy. Trying to peek beneath the woman’s skirts to find the boy. A game of hide and seek. Until she stops at her apartment—the music booming, steam pouring from the door—and turns quickly to catch him lifting the back of her ballooning petticoats.
She snatches her skirts away.
He stands up—straight—puts his hands in his pockets, and studies the ceiling trim, whistling. A comedy act ensues from the days of silent film, the host mother pointing at her skirts and accusing D. of attempting to peek beneath them. D.—in turn—feigning ignorance, his hands shaking on his wrists—no, no, no—and pointing at the corners of the ceiling where the whole roof seems to be blowing away. The host mother wagging her finger at him—refusing to be distracted—and D. shrugging his shoulders, miming the boy climbing beneath her skirts. In trying to proclaim his innocence, he again opens his mouth and produces the hammering Hitchcock Chord:
She pushes open the cracked door to her apartment, points inside, then crooks her finger to the left. D. nods. And again, tries to explain himself:
She shakes her head. Repeats the hand gesture. Firm. Directions for him to get out of her sight.
AIRBNB
D. walks into the apartment—dark, but for the kitchen where a battalion of pots and pans simmer atop the stove. Potted plants droop and spring from shelves and tables, swing from bowls hanging in the windows. A bird chirps in a wire cage, seeming to imitate the tabla drums rebounding and rubbery from the enormous speakers hidden behind the potted ficus trees. The room vibrates with heat. A submerged green light swims in the glass box of an aquarium. Another sitar song begins. Lizards laze on brown limbs in the orange glare of a terrarium. A cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. The man sways through the room pulling off layers of clothing—his toboggan, his scarf, his jacket—avoiding the wooden crates and stools, tiptoeing between the scattered plastic toys. He turns in the hallway to apologize again, but the woman has already moved silently into the kitchen. There is no sign of her boy. A tumbling acrobat crouched atop his mother’s feet. Beneath the big top of her bright skirts. She hunches over the stove, and D. shakes his head as if he’s seen a ghost. Before continuing down the hallway, passing one door on the left before he comes to the next.
The door opens. A pair of hands reach out, grab him by his shirt collar, pull him into the room.
CHRONOTOPE ROOM: WITHIN
C. pulls D. through the door. They trip over one another and sprawl onto the bed. [repeat sequence in decreasing frame frequency]
A white radiator and a battered chest of drawers stand against the wall.
Then.
Two super-imposed eyeballs blink into being. One on the radiator. One on the chest of drawers.
The couple rolls onto the floor, kissing. [repeat in decreasing frame frequency]
On top of the chest of drawers, peacock feathers sag from blue glass bottles and a wooden ringmaster corrals a wooden menagerie.
Then.
The feathered eyeballs of the peacock feathers blink. The menagerie moves woodenly at the wooden ringmaster’s request.
Off the bed onto the floor kissing. [repeat in decreasing frame frequency]
A tapestry of Gustav Klimt’s famous painting The Kiss hangs on the wall at the foot of the bed.
Then.
The tapestry man squeezes the head of the tapestry woman as she tries to pull away.
C. pulls D. through the door. They sprawl onto the bed, kissing. Then onto the floor. [repeat]
An antique mirror with the glass running thin leans against the far wall beside the window.
Then.
In the dark, de-silvered freckles, eyeballs blink into being.
They roll onto the floor, kissing. Off the bed onto the floor. [repeat]
The eyeballs blink on the radiator, the chest of drawers, the peacock feathers. Blink. Eyeballs crouched inside the mirror holes. The wooden ring master cracks his whip. Klimt’s kept woman begins to sink.
CHRONOTOPE ROOM: WITHOUT
When C. and D. come up for air, they wear children’s faces. Rubber masks. They begin undressing each other with greedy fingers. [A series of still life-life photographs]
Ice collects in the frozen windowpanes. Outside, pink snow. Blanketing the consumption house, which bends and meanders out the window, stopping abruptly at strange angles, then beginning again. It has been added onto. Again and again. A forever project of renovation. With different materials. In different styles. Everything crumbling in the sprawled and dilapidated wings.
Their clothes fall like the petals of flowers.
Hanging in the air.
Puddled on the floor.
Standing in the window of the stone carriage house out back—standing and staring into C. and D.’s rented room—a man in a black bucket cap and black Adidas sweatpants sucks on a glass bong, then bends to set it down. Blowing smoke. When he stands back up, he has binoculars in his hands. He looks through them. Nods his head. Pulls down his pants.
Back in the room, C. and D., no longer in masks, pull their clothes back on. D. looks out the window and sees the man standing silhouetted in the carriage house. The stranger in the bucket cap waves. Gives him a thumbs-up. D. turns around to look at C.—still getting dressed—then looks back out the window. The stranger in the bucket cap hits his bong again. Blows a cloud of blue smoke at the glass—into which he disappears. D. shakes his head as if he’s seen a ghost. Then pulls the string. The wooden blinds fall down.