Gods and Monsters by Christopher Bram

Author:Christopher Bram
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

12

LIGHT. BRIGHTNESS. THE GLARE FADES TO RED, THEN PINK. A CREPEY pink light stitched with blood vessels.

What time is it? He overslept. And they’re expecting him at the studio! Bloody hell. He cannot remember what day it is, what scene they are shooting, or even the name of the picture. He might be able to fake his way through until he can steal a glance at the script—except that he can’t see. He panics when he understands: everything is pink because he’s blind. His heart races, his breath quickens. Not even the Laemmles are so foolish as to overlook blindness in a movie director.

The pink cracks open, then rises like a curtain on a sunlit landscape. Knobby ridges grip a snowy slope. His own hand grips the pillow. Of course. He hasn’t lost his sight. His eyes were closed. He’s in bed. Now, if only he can remember something about the picture in production, everything will be fine. But as he steps inside his thoughts, searching for a title, an actor, something, the pinkness returns. He sinks back down into his own warm blood and falls back to sleep.

He wakes again five minutes later, with no memory of his panic. This time there is only sunlight, body, and bladder. His body remembers more clearly than his mind what one must do: sit up, legs to the floor, feet into slippers. He waits for Maria to walk him to the toilet. He cannot find his way without Maria. He seems to have called her, because suddenly she is here. His mind is numb, dark except for a glimmer in the back corner, like a memory of himself that unhappily watches in the bathroom as a stooped woman indifferently plucks apart three buttons of his pajama fly. He can handle his own prick, thank God, but the buttons overwhelm him. He supports himself with a hand on a round shoulder. They stand side by side, frowning away from each other. His first clear emotion each day is shame.

In bed he sits up and waits for Maria to return with the breakfast tray. It will be another hour before he regains enough mind to shower, shave, and dress, all of which he insists on doing for himself. He is not yet ready to renounce those dignities.

He stares down at the plate of toast, cut-glass dish of marmalade, the cup and saucer filled with a black hand mirror of coffee. Every thought, every sensation comes to him through the wrong end of a jeweler’s eyepiece. He sees one detail at a time, his mind stopping there, unable to see through to the activity that once knitted the details together. The threads of orange rind in translucent jelly are edged with sepia; he loses himself in their tangle. A new train of thought is required for him to take a knife and spread marmalade on a stick of buttered toast.

A life made up of isolated moments, epiphanies of trivia, is exhausting. Time doesn’t help. Changing the phenobarbital dosage doesn’t help.

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