It Chooses You - Miranda July [33]
Miranda:
What was your name again?
Joe:
Joe.
Miranda:
Joe. Right. Well, we don’t want to take up any more of your time. We’ll just get –
Joe:
That’s okay, I got time.
When we finally extricated ourselves, we just sat in the car, very quietly, and were oddly tearful. Alfred said something about wanting to be a better boyfriend to his girlfriend. I felt like I wasn’t living thoroughly enough – I was distracted in ways I wouldn’t be if I’d been born in 1929.
And yet the visit was suffused with death. Real death: the graves of all those cats and dogs, the widows he shopped for, and his own death, which he referred to more than once – but matter-of-factly, like it was a deadline that he was trying to get a lot of things done before. I sensed he’d been making his way through his to-do list for eighty-one years, and he was always behind, and this made everything urgent and bright, even now, especially now. How strange to cross paths with someone for the first time right before they were gone.
I called Joe again later that day – I didn’t let myself think very hard about it. I picked up Alfred and the video camera and drove back to the house by the airport. I suggested we reenact our first meeting; I would knock on the door, he would let me in, he would show me the Christmas-card fronts. Get it? Yep. Okay, let’s try it.
An unexpected thing happened when Joe opened the door, and it wasn’t the unexpected thing I now knew to expect. Joe ad-libbed. He told me to watch my step when I came in. He didn’t go straight for the cards – he showed me around a little. He pointed out some things he’d wanted to show me anyway. He hadn’t forgotten about the reenactment – he just had his own agenda. I had to interrupt: “Now I’m going to try to leave, and remember how you sort of wouldn’t let me leave last time?” He nodded. “Do that, don’t let me leave.” I headed for the door. “Stick around,” Joe called out. “I might show you some things you never knew existed.”
We went to the backyard to reenact Joe’s tour of his pet cemetery. “Our cat is named Paw Paw,” I said, thinking Jason could say something like this. Joe looked at me with confusion and I explained there was a cat named Paw Paw in the movie. “Was he named after the lake?” he asked. “No,” I said, and I tried to explain that he wasn’t completely real, even in the movie; he was more a symbol of this couple’s love. He interrupted me. “Because me and my wife met at Lake Paw Paw, sixty-two years ago.”
I drove home with a tape full of scenes that started out as improvisations but consistently careened into reality, becoming little documentaries. Joe could do what I asked, but his own life was so insistent, and so bizarrely relevant, that it overwhelmed every fiction. And I let it.
I thought about his sixty-two years of sweet, filthy cards and something unspooled in my chest. Maybe I had miscalculated what was left of my life. Maybe it wasn’t loose change. Or, actually, the whole thing was loose change, from start to finish – many, many little moments, each holiday, each Valentine, each year unbearably repetitive and yet somehow always new. You could never buy anything with it, you could never cash it in for something more valuable or more whole. It was just all these days, held together only by the fragile memory of one person – or, if you were lucky, two. And because of this, this lack of inherent meaning or value, it was stunning. Like the most intricate, radical piece of art, the kind of art I was always trying to make. It dared to mean nothing and so demanded everything of you.
I imagined Jason meeting Joe and experiencing the light-headed feeling that I was having. I knew I would fail at it, this reenactment; I would make something a little clumsier and less interesting than real life. But it wasn’t the Local Authorities telling me this; it came from higher up, or deeper down, and it came with a smile – a challenging, punky little smile, a dare. I smiled back.
SHOOTING
–
THE FUTURE
–
LOS ANGELES
–
Jason:
I’m gonna let it choose me. I just have