Point Omega - Don Delillo [6]
“What else?”
“A simple head shot.”
“What else?” he said.
“Any pauses, they’re your pauses, I keep shooting.”
“What else?”
“Camera with a hard drive. One continuous take.”
“How long a take?”
“Depends on you. There’s a Russian film, feature film, Russian Ark, Aleksandr Sokurov. A single extended shot, about a thousand actors and extras, three orchestras, history, fantasy, crowd scenes, ballroom scenes and then an hour into the movie a waiter drops a napkin, no cut, can’t cut, camera flying down hallways and around corners. Ninety-nine minutes,” I said.
“But that was a man named Aleksandr Sokurov. Your name is Jim Finley.”
I would have laughed if he hadn’t delivered the line with a smirk. Elster spoke Russian and he pronounced the director’s name with an earthy flourish. This gave his remark an extra measure of self-satisfaction. I could have made the obvious point, that I wouldn’t be shooting large numbers of people in textured motion. But I let the joke live out its full term. He was not a man who might make space for even the gentlest correction.
He sat on the deck, a tall man in wrinkled cotton trousers of landmark status. He went barechested much of the day, slathered with sunblock even in the shade, and his silvery hair, as always, was braided down into a short ponytail.
“Day ten,” I told him.
In the morning he braved the sun. He needed to enrich his supply of vitamin D and raised his arms sunward, petitioning gods, he said, even if it meant the stealthy genesis of abnormal tissue.
“It’s healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line. I assume you know that,” he said.
His face was long and florid, flesh drooping slightly at the sides of the jaw. He had a large pocked nose, eyes maybe grayish green, brows flaring. The braided hair should have seemed incongruous but didn’t. It wasn’t styled in sections but only woven into broad strands at the back of the head and it gave him a kind of cultural identity, a flair of distinction, the intellectual as tribal elder.
“Is this exile? Are you in exile here?”
“Wolfowitz went to the World Bank. That was exile,” he said. “This is different, a spiritual retreat. The house used to be owned by someone in my first wife’s family. I came here on and off for years. Came to write, to think. Elsewhere, everywhere, my day begins in conflict, every step I take on a city street is conflict, other people are conflict. Different here.”
“But no writing this time.”
“I’ve had offers to do a book. Portrait of the war room from the viewpoint of a privileged outsider. But I don’t want to do a book, any kind of book.”
“You want to sit here.”
“The house is mine now and it’s rotting away but let it. Time slows down when I’m here. Time becomes blind. I feel the landscape more than see it. I never know what day it is. I never know if a minute has passed or an hour. I don’t get old here.”
“I wish I could say the same.”
“You need an answer. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I need an answer.”
“You have a life back there.”
“A life. That may be too strong a word.”
He sat head back, eyes shut, face to the sun.
“You’re not married, am I right?”
“Separated. We separated,” I said.
“Separated. How familiar that sounds. Do you have a job, something you do between projects?”
Maybe he tried not to dose the word projects with fatal irony.
“Sporadic jobs. Production work, some editing.”
He looked at me now. Possibly he was wondering who I was.
“Did I ask you once before how you got so scrawny? You eat. You throw down food same as I do.”
“I seem to eat. I do eat. But all the energy, all the nourishment gets sucked up by the film,” I told him. “The body gets nothing.”
He closed his eyes again and I watched the sweat and sun lotion runneling slowly down his forehead. I waited for him to ask about filmwork I’d done on my own, the question I’d been hoping not to hear. But he’d lost interest in the conversation or simply had the kind