The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [100]
She opened the box and produced a stack of DVDs. Buster saw Five Easy Pieces and Orpheus, movies he remembered Annie loving, movies he did not particularly enjoy or, to be honest, understand. In the pile, Buster picked up The Third Man, a black-and-white image of Orson Welles on the cover. “I never saw this,” Buster said, “though I know I should have.” Annie brightened, swiped the DVD from his hands, and tapped it on the bed as if she was a conductor about to begin a symphony. “This one,” she said, “holy shit. It’s got a writer as the main character. And there’s an actress in it. And somebody gets killed but maybe he’s not really killed. Maybe he disappeared on purpose.” Buster shook his head. “Did you just ruin the movie for me?”
“If a movie is really amazing,” she said, “you can’t ruin it by giving the plot away. The plot is incidental to everything else.”
“So this movie is the story of our lives?” Buster asked.
“It’s the story of our lives, if our lives were better and more interesting,” Annie replied. “Let’s watch it tonight.”
That evening, the two of them settled on the sofa, Buster’s computer resting on the coffee table, the movie opened and they listened to the score, nothing but a zither, so chaotic and atonal that Buster had the sudden urge to turn off the movie. They watched Joseph Cotten run all around Vienna, looking for a man, Harry Lime, who might or might not be dead. In the movie, there were shadowy, suspicious people at every turn, people who pushed Cotten into stranger and stranger places. Buster wished for shadowy, suspicious people in his own life. When Lime turned up indeed alive, Buster felt an instantaneous and shocking relief, even though he understood that it would have been better for everyone if Harry Lime had really been dead.
Atop a Ferris wheel, Orson Welles told Joseph Cotten how Italy’s thirty years of war and terror and bloodshed had produced the Renaissance and Michelangelo, and how Switzerland’s five hundred years of democracy and peace had produced, goddamn, only the cuckoo clock. It was the exact kind of thing that Buster could imagine his own father saying. Annie told Buster that Orson Welles had written that line himself, had added it after the script had been finished, and Buster felt that Orson Welles and his father would have been best buddies if they had ever met.
Once the movie was over, Cotten and the authorities tracking Orson Welles through the sewers beneath the city, Cotten finally shooting Welles dead, Buster turned to his sister. “I know why you picked that movie,” he told her. Annie smiled and said, “It fits our life in a few ways, I guess.” Buster pointed at the screen, which was now blank. “It shows you that you have to stay vigilant to find a missing person, even when people tell you not to, that it’s possible to bring them back from the dead.” Annie shook her head. “I picked it because it shows that after you bring someone back from the dead, you get to kill them yourself.” Annie whistled the song from the movie, doing a terrible job of it, and ejected the disc from the computer. She placed the DVD back in its case and snapped the box shut.
Buster was the only person in the house, to his knowledge, when the phone rang. Annie was at the grocery store, something that had once been a chore now being an excuse to get out of the house; she also had begun to warm up to the fact that now that she had been back in town long enough, people were beginning to recognize her, to ask for her autograph. Annie admitted that it was not a bad feeling. People were polite, always kind, and none of them seemed to have seen the disaster of a movie that she had recently made. They knew