Lithgow 34

Calculations for Correcting Gravity

By Michael Lithgow

Years ago, I lived near Chinatown, in Vancouver. I was poor, and the apartment was a dump—I don’t think it had been renovated in decades. The funky kitchen cupboards covered with thick red paint, the enormous battle-scarred toilet, the clawfoot tub, the floors made from wide planks of wood scuffed and filthy from years of mop water, all suggested decay. The rooms were musty, the walls made of discoloured plaster, and the whole place was dark and cold in the damp West Coast winter. The only warmth came from two ancient radiators. The hiss and spit of scalding water when you untwisted the valve to bleed the coils was a danger every time, but when they worked, the radiant heat was lovely.

My girlfriend Azelia and I rented a bedroom from the young woman who had the lease and whom we almost never saw. She worked in a bank. My goal at the time was to be a journalist. I wanted to save the world by revealing the corruption and vicissitudes of humanity one story at a time. I had a pessimistic view of things, so much so that I had sworn off ever having kids. Who would want to bring a baby into this hopeless mess? My life was my work. And then, it was work and Azelia.

Azelia was a filmmaker. Her first feature-length film had just screened across the country in the handful of artist-run exhibition spaces Canada has for independent film, and the small crowds that came loved it. She was the darling of the Canadian avant-garde cinema crowd, at least for a moment. I didn’t really understand her film at the time. It's about the inexorable force that love sometimes exerts—the ‘black hole’ that can open and draw hapless people together despite obvious incompatibilities, despite their wisest self-counsel, and despite their uncontrollable and most likely unconscious desires to hurt each other. Love stories are a cliché, that’s for sure, but one that never quite gets old. For those of us who have been there—sucked past the outer rim of the blackhole where physical debris from trapped and detonated objects gathers before being drawn forever over the event horizon into the gravity well—it can be cathartic to see someone else suffer like that, and to be reminded of the thrilling intensity and extraordinary spell cast by that kind of love. The physicists are right, of course; once past the event horizon, there’s no way out without being deformed, reformed or transformed.

But Azelia’s film was also about filmmaking. Like many young filmmakers fresh out of school, her movie was a commentary on cinematic technique. Her “argument,” she explained, was against the way box-office cinema overlooks the banal. In fact, it doesn’t just overlook it, it disappears it entirely. Everyday details and routines are erased and replaced with Freytag pyramids of rising action, grand climaxes, complications and so on. Azelia’s film focused on the unexceptional. Visually, it was a statement about the significance of the banal and how we overlook it at our peril. If you think about where most of your life is spent, you’ll realize the banal is a very important place.

In the film, an eccentric, middle-aged woman from Australia, named Ruth—a grade school teacher—falls for this much younger guy. Ruth is an unusual character. When she was starting out as a teacher in the 1980s, she bought a house in Sydney. Twenty years later, the house had quadrupled in value. She sold it, retired early in her 40s, and moved to Canada. The film picks up not so long after her big move. Her existence in the film is about as frugal as you can imagine, decades ahead of the Marie Kondo minimalists and tiny-carbon-footprint folks, all because she was living on the meagre interest from the substantial sum she socked away after selling her house. Her apartment is spartan, everything sourced from tasteful binning or secondhand stores, her one extravagance being two male betta fish that she kept in separate jars, one called Virtue, and the other called Ego. Sure enough, whenever one fish noticed the other, it flared up, spread out its excess fins and tried to scare it away.

Like I said, she was eccentric.

The images shown on screen reveal various mundane details. A sidewalk with pedestrians and ho-hum little storefronts, all looking disheveled and run-down. An interior shot of a grocery store and a shelf filled with 50% off almost-expired food. A dull-looking apartment building on a busy street. An empty-feeling apartment with only a few pieces of old furniture. We learn later that the street Ruth lives on is a major traffic corridor for commuters from the suburbs. The emptiness of her third-floor apartment is in fact crowded with the constant sound of cars, and at one point she says to no one in particular that the traffic makes her feel less lonely. The sound reminds her of the ocean, and as soon as she says it, you can hear the ocean in the swishing sounds of passing cars, too. There's a shot of a big living room window facing northeast, wide open, and you can see a sliver of ocean in the port through a crowd of houses, apartments and structures at the pier. In the distance are The Lions, the mountains right across the harbour on the North Shore. Each morning, Ruth dampens a small cloth and wipes away the thin film of black soot from car exhaust that accumulates on the surfaces in her apartment.

She is a modern day hippy, a direct product of her frugality, eating $25 worth of almost rotten vegetables weekly (scavenged from discount bins and day-olds), wearing vintage rags in clever and attractive ways, walking everywhere, disheveled hair, no makeup, almost never going out for a coffee or a sandwich or a nice piece of pie, not unless there is a special occasion and the expense is carefully accounted for in her slim budget.

Then along comes Jack. This guy is truly penniless, working part-time as a waiter at a corny 1950s diner and trying to be a writer—a poet of all things. She comes into the restaurant one day to celebrate—a big deal for her; she's excited about a young cousin coming to visit from Australia, scheduled to arrive in a month. She was celebrating with a big splurge on pie and coffee for the occasion and feeling fortunate and friendly. It is a slow night, so Jack has all the time in the world for chit chat. As they talk, the camera focuses on other things: a distant shot of the whole restaurant mostly empty; a close-up of oil boiling in a deep fryer; the cook wiping down a greasy surface in the kitchen; knives hanging on a wall along a magnetic track; an insect moving silently near someone’s foot. We learn that Jack is a uniquely driven young man. Most twentysomethings exist from one party to the next, lots of buzzing from one relationship to another, one job to another and so on, experimenting with and enjoying the early fruits of making independent decisions while suffering the slings and arrows of the very same thing. But not Jack, who was determined to become a great writer. He works, reads books and writes. He had stumbled in and out of a few relationships, but nothing serious or satisfying. Nothing and no one could hold his attention like literature. Until he met Ruth. Ruth changed everything.

“I think my film is useless,” Azelia said to me one day, months after her cross-Canada screening had ended. We were sitting in our room, which was so small we had to sit on the bed together. I was surprised to hear her so down on her work. “Your film is great!” I said, trying to boost her spirits.

“Sure. Maybe. I mean, I think it’s a great film—not great, but an important film in a certain small way.” She always surprised me; her confidence was impressive. “What I mean is: useless. Not a bad film. But it doesn’t do anything, not much anyways.”

I have to admit, I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. A film that doesn’t do anything? What does that mean? She was right, in one sense: it was a boring film. Maybe boring isn’t the right word, but it was the kind of film—I’d seen many since I started dating Azelia—that made you unpleasantly aware of yourself, in an uncomfortable chair in a dark room. It was like film by Jean-Luc Goddard—irritating on a certain level and hard to make sense of, but also, unexpectedly, compelling. Take Detective for example. Just what the fuck is that film about? Even reviewers at the time didn't know what to make of it—they all say it's a work of genius, which undoubtedly it is (it's Jean-Luc Goddard!), but when you really dig into what they say about the film, it’s pretty clear they have no idea what the story is about or why it is told that way. What the film isn’t, however, is standard fare. It makes your brain squirm, like Azelia’s film, and is exactly opposite to the kind of film that hooks your nose and drags you from one emotional briar patch to the next.

“What did you want it to do?” I asked. “I mean, all the exciting things—most of them—happen off-screen. That was your point, right?”

“Hmmmm,” she said.

“But even so,” I continued, “the film lingers. I couldn’t get Ruth and Jack out of my head. I still think about them.” It was true.

"I want to change cinema,” Azelia said. “I know that sounds grandiose, but I want to make cinema that gets people to take a second look at their lives, you know? I want film to be a chance for people to change their lives."

It was an ambitious aspiration. I sat with it for a moment. "The thing is," I finally said, "that's great, I mean, for those who want to change their lives."

She gave me a funny look. "Who doesn't? Anyways," she sighed, "I'm not sure anything is changing in the world of film."

"Here's how I think about it," I said. I could tell she needed cheering up. "Your film is like a fingernail."

“What?"

"Hear me out! I mean, your film really got under my skin, became a part of me, you know? And just like a fingernail, maybe it will sit there entirely unnoticed for most of my life. But when the right moment comes, it will be there to keep the tip of my finger from being chopped off. You know what I mean? Your story sunk in deep, it’s in here. Who knows when I'll need it.”

Azelia smiled.

Ruth and Jack sleep together pretty soon after they meet. Neither has a lot of money, so dates weren’t at fancy restaurants; instead, they take turns showing each other their favourite things in the city. On their first date, he takes her to a community garden well after sunset where they sit on a bench sipping from a cheap bottle of white wine listening to spring frogs sing their lusty symphonies. On their second date, she takes him to a pedestrian bridge over train tracks at Ballantine Pier, a rickety old thing overlooking the big industrial port. They sit at one end of the bridge—quite high off the ground—and watch the sun’s last rays turn rusty cargo containers, cranes and huge ships into poetry. Her apartment was around the corner from the spot, and soon after the sun sets they continue making couplets and quatrains on the bare mattress in her bedroom. The camera focuses on the view looking out of Ruth’s living room window, a picturesque nightscape, lights twinkling in the port. You hear the swishy sounds of cars going past down below. There's a shot of an empty stairwell (there was no elevator in Ruth's building), a dead plant in a small pot. There’s a shot of Virtue and Ego drifting listless in their jars. You can just make out tiny distorted images of the couple moving on the mattress reflected on the surfaces of the jars.

Ruth’s father had died about six months earlier, and what she didn’t reveal right away to Jack was that every day since his death she’d smoked weed—had kept herself stoned, more or less. Meeting Jack interrupted this pattern of masking her feelings in a haze of cannabis. She found that she didn’t want to be stoned as much—didn’t like being stoned with Jack—and so her grief started bubbling up in funny ways. Jack had no idea what was happening as he didn’t know anything about her mild cannabis addiction. They had started to talk about leaving Canada and moving to Guatemala, a dream she had had for a long time, where the cost of living was cheap and the weather warm. Jack, impetuous young poet that he was, gulped and said hell yes! willing to follow her anywhere, which was really the blackhole of love sucking Jack past the event horizon and into its unfathomable maw.

Jack's pennilessness started to worry Ruth. Why was he willing to go to Guatemala without any money? Did he expect to be looked after financially? What could he do to earn his keep? He couldn’t even speak Spanish. And so on. Ruth became paranoid about their planning. Maybe it was the weed, or maybe she was onto something, but either way she shuts him out. Shuts down, is more like: stops interacting with him, stops returning his calls. Jack goes nuts. She was the first thing—the only person—whom he found more compelling than literature. He says in the film it felt like his stomach had been removed.

“That’s why I shot it that way,” Azelia was saying. Our roommate was uncharacteristically hanging out at home, watching TV, so we were hiding in our room for privacy. All around us were piles of dirty and clean clothes, and rows of books lined up along the floorboards, unpacked boxes of our stuff. “The blank view from her apartment," Azelia continued. "The soot. It’s all so important!” We both fell silent. I saw in my mind’s eye tiny grains of pollution—whatever soot is made of—landing lightly on a clean kitchen surface. “And everything else. The ugly building she lives in. Her empty apartment. The alienation of cars. Her fish. That’s the landscape of Ruth’s life. It’s terrifying, on a certain level. But it’s also beautiful.”

“I guess,” I said. “But what about us. Right now. The scene, the action. It’s right here now. The bed is where the action is, right? And if not now,” I winked. “Later.” I was teasing her. “The tension is here. Not in, like, that pile of random clothes right there." I was pointing to a pile of her clothes on the floor.

“OK, sure, that’s true. Sort of. But what does ‘here’ really mean?" she asked. "Is it the bed? Is that where ‘we’ are? Even the erotic tension—I know you're teasing. But sometimes, I get turned on when I’m with you in the kitchen, or listening to you make coffee in the morning. Or, like that mouse in the wall.” She was referring to a mouse that lived in a small hole in the baseboard behind the desk. After making love late at night, we’d sometimes lie on the bed listening to its little scratching sounds, sounds now indelibly imprinted with tender post-coital feelings. “I don’t know,” she continued. “It feels like our ‘special’ lives”—she hooked her fingers aggressively in the air to make clear she didn’t think our lives were so special—“are suspended in this vast web of what we don’t notice. We call it 'ordinary'. What are we saying when we leave this out of our stories?”

It was a good question, and as I thought about it, I began to think journalism wasn’t so different. Ordinary does not make headlines. Soot falling on kitchen counters, mice scurrying behind floorboards—no way. A journalist needs exciting and fresh and original every time. The banal is the opposite of fresh. It was what made Azelia’s film so fascinating.

The story of Ruth and Jack had two distinct parts: the collision phase of falling in love—like a stone falling from a cliff. And then the second part—the fight against gravity in which they tear apart and re-collide over and over. They try to pull away, and then smash back together, each time with ever more calamitous results, until finally like magnets whose same poles have almost touched, they are propelled into the universe in opposite directions, never to cross paths again.

After Ruth ghosted Jack the first time, he took the crazy feelings he had and threw himself into his writing. He was determined to move on as best he could, even though he couldn't. Ruth returned to her frugal existence and routines. Like Jack, Ruth tried to throw herself back into her life, but something was wrong. She began to question things. What kind of a life did she have, really? A few thrifty habits, the savings account she lived on, and wiping away the soot on her counters. Ruth, too, ached in a way she had never experienced before, even though all the indicators were that Jack was bad news for her. She was overcome by a need for purpose in her life, and if not purpose, meaning.

Ruth’s 14-year-old cousin finally arrives, and she is thrilled. Now she had purpose, at least for a while. The cousin was also a link with her family who she felt very far away from in her new life in Canada. She took him everywhere, showing off as many of Vancouver’s free things to do as she could think of, and also some of the not-free things. The little expenses added up—admissions here and there, coffees and pastries, a meal out every now and then, larger grocery bills. She had to dip into the capital portion of her savings. Her cousin, of course, was worth it.

Ruth didn’t have many close friends. A lot of acquaintances, but not necessarily the kinds of friends she could invite, for instance, to go to the movies with her and her cousin on a random Wednesday afternoon. A victim of ache and relentless gravitational pull, she invited Jack to the movies with her and her cousin. As a friend, she said. She half expected him to say no, but he came. It looks awkward and tense as they sit beside each other in the dark theatre, but it's as if electricity is passing back and forth between them. You see their fingers on their seats just centimeters apart. You see a close-up of their faces lit by the flickering light of the movie. You see spilled popcorn on the floor. There’s a shot from behind, their three heads in a row, dragons or something flying around on the screen. She touches his hand, and they both sit fantastically still and highly aroused. After the movie, the trio walk through Chinatown chatting and laughing, eating steamed buns and Chinese pastries, sitting in a small residential park nearby. Ruth was careful not to take Jack's hand in front of her cousin, but they brushed shoulders regularly, and each time you sense it is electric and thrilling.

It starts to lightly rain, so they make their way back to her apartment, sending her young cousin off to bed and then sitting in her sparse living room attempting to talk about what had happened between them. The sounds of tires moving on wet pavement from down below wash up from the street, filling the many pauses in their conversation. The evening deepens, they move closer together on the old sofa and soon, after spreading a picnic blanket on her floor, they begin silently removing each other’s clothes. It is a hungry, clumsy and thrilling kind of entanglement, all the more transgressive because they did not want to wake her cousin. They licked and sucked and fucked intensely and lovingly for quite some time before she shooed him out the door, not wanting him to spend the night. None of which, of course, is shown on the screen directly.

The bedroom that Azelia and I shared was cramped and messy—we didn't even own a dresser for our clothes! We lived out of the boxes we used to move our scanty possessions from apartment to apartment. But we were young enough—and in love enough—to enjoy such close quarters. We fucked almost as often as we had meals together, but the reality was that we spent most of our time out of the apartment: Azelia busy at the artist-run production studio where she made her films; she was on the board of directors, helping to write grants for the group, looking after the Steenbeck and all the other fussy, expensive film gear, not to mention her own projects to work on, dream about, write grants for, plan, etc. I was busy at the radio station where I worked as a journalist and show producer. I was trying to save the world, and it might sound silly but I believed we could, and so did the other journalists I worked with. My long days at the radio station and Azelia’s at the studio meant we only collided into each other in the evenings to share a meal, talk late into the night, make love, maybe watch a movie, share some wine, and then, in the morning, have sex and breakfast, and then set off in our separate directions. We were young, we didn’t need much sleep to make it all work.

“I think I’m pregnant,” Azelia whispered one night. It was June, about one in the morning. We were both naked, letting the heat of an early summer evening settle on our sweaty skin, lying quietly beside each other. Azelia had a frightened and vulnerable look on her face.

“Pregnant?” I said.

“Maybe.”

My first thought was abortion.

I’m not proud of this. When I was in high school, I got a girl pregnant. She was Catholic, and after many tears and much high-pitched speculation about keeping the pregnancy, getting married, hitching our young lives together over this new little life, or terminating it, she chose with her family's support to get an abortion. It was frightening and complicated and awful. And stupid. I’m under no illusion about my sufferance, which was a fraction of hers, barely mentionable. So when Amelia told me she was pregnant, abortion was shamefully my first thought.

"How do you know?" I asked.

"My period is late."

"How many days?"

"Eight."

"OK. Have you taken a pregnancy test?"

"I was waiting."

"What for?"

"To tell you."

I fell silent.

"And my breasts feel swollen."

A baby.

The idea of bringing kids into the world was anathema—a selfish and cruel act, I thought, given all the terrible things humans did to each other. But something else happened after the word ‘abortion’ lumbered through my mind. A little door blew open, and in it—standing on the other side of it—was a version of myself I had never seen before, a version of me as a dad. It was the craziest thing. I couldn’t think of anything more unfathomable than raising a child; not even following someone to a country where I couldn't speak the language, like Jack in the movie, seemed as farfetched. But something about the idea of being a father stuck.

We had been careless, of course. We used condoms at first, but once my STD report came back negative (Azelia had insisted and offered to show me hers, but I never asked to see it), we got sloppy; well, not just sloppy, we both preferred the feeling au natural. We’d keep an eye on her cycle, avoiding penetration in the fertile days before and after ovulation; pulling out and cumming on her stomach was all part of the hot action. And now she was pregnant. Stupid is as stupid does, right? And the wisdom of this insight didn’t help at all.

She was trembling. I held her close and hugged her.

"This isn't my first pregnancy."

"OK," I said. I was surprised, but then again, there was no rule that said we had to reveal every detail of our medical pasts.

"It was ectopic. The egg got stuck in one of my fallopian tubes. I didn't know, and I got really sick. I was taken to the hospital where they removed the fetus and fallopian tube."

I had a million and one questions, and Azelia patiently answered them all. What was clear in all of this was that getting pregnant for Azelia was a potentially life-threatening situation.

Despite the late hour (it was one in the morning), I dressed and launched myself out into the Vancouver night to get a pregnancy test at a 24-hour London Drugs about 2 km away. The night was quiet and warm. My brain was buzzing with the situation. I didn’t want kids. The world was too fucked up, too ruined to bring another lost, hungry soul into the mix, not to mention the evils of greed, colonialism, patriarchy, fascism, and so on and so forth. How could we save the world if we were going to bring more ozone-spewing, oil-burning humans into the fold? We called those people “breeders”. We were better than that.

But not even the thought of being a breeder could completely submerge this new feeling.

It started to lightly rain.

The pharmacy was the only brightly lit thing on that part of Hastings street at that time of night. Inside the store, the fluorescent lights made me feel self-conscious, as if my skin was translucent; and, of course, buying a pregnancy test looking like a wet, homeless dog at one in the morning wasn’t exactly putting my best foot forward. The middle-aged man behind the counter rang in the purchase and looked at me hard. It definitely wasn’t a friendly look, but it wasn’t mean, either. It was exactly like what my father’s face might have looked like if he knew: a terrible judgment softened by disappointment.

Walking back to our apartment, the streets had turned shiny black, the wet asphalt reflecting streetlamps and the headlights of cars as they swished past. She took the test. It was not exactly conclusive, but it looked to both of us like there was a faint, very faint second red line. We hugged. She cried. My brain wrestled with vertigo. We fell uncomfortably asleep in each other’s arms.

Jack and Ruth’s reunion was exciting but short-lived. Jack was young. Or maybe his age was irrelevant, and he was just immature. He could be volatile—he was a poet after all. He could reimagine the trajectory of his life on a whim, but this also revealed something unstable in his makeup.

One night Jack and Ruth watch a film together about a young undercover cop in NYC who says “forget about it” every other scene. Sure enough, Jack starts saying it, too, even inflecting the words like he, too, had grown up Italian in New York. It was ridiculous. When they get into a fight, he starts tossing “forget about its” around like corn chips. It was no way to navigate a fraught emotional relationship. The camera, however, never lets up its relentless focus on small, banal details. Jack biting his fingernails. Ruth’s shamble hair, the way she was constantly tucking strands of it behind this ear or that, or swiping long bangs out of her eyes. Jack's fingers on his drink. Ruth’s fish ignoring each other in their respective glass jars.

In one marvelous and hideous scene, it all comes crashing to a halt. It’s the only scene up to that point in the movie where the camera shows Jack and Ruth’s faces while they are speaking. The shots were tight, in close-up, revealing the tortured quality of their faces in Technicolor detail. “Forget about it!” Jack bellows. “I want you to leave. I can’t do this any more,” Ruth says. “Fine!” he says.

His head a whirl of wine and high emotion, Jack flees her apartment, hops on his bike and wheels away into the Vancouver night on a bike ride he says, later in the film, that he would remember for the rest of his life. He says he felt like he was flying that night—pedaling, pedaling, pedaling away away away. They never speak again. He thinks he saw her on only two occasions after that, once in Vancouver in a store. He had frozen in place, then hid and slid out of the store hoping not to be seen. And once on a street in Paris. He had walked right on by. He was never sure about either sighting, whether or not it was really her. And it didn’t matter.

Azelia stopped drinking and started taking folic acid. “It’s for the baby," she said. "Just in case.” Azelia was thinking about abortion, too, mostly because of her fear of ectopic complications, but also because of her career. But she was also thinking about keeping the baby. The surgeon who removed her fallopian tube had told her it could happen again. In which case, she assumed, she would likely lose her other fallopian tube and then no longer be able to have a child. But she didn’t want a child now! Her career was barely getting off the ground. Having a baby would end it all, at least that’s how she saw it. Her gloomy vision of how motherhood would end her filmmaking career made sense to me. And my dream of proving myself as a great investigative reporter would also have to be set aside. I would have to find a real job that paid well enough to support a small family. We also talked about what a life together might look like—raising a child, the kinds of schooling they would need, dietary preferences, use of digital technologies. On a whim I got a subscription to Parenting magazine –I wanted to be ready, one way or the other.

A strange and tenuous possibility of a shared future began to unfurl. The braid of our love felt tighter than ever, and it all cast a strange spell. Her being pregnant seemed to draw our love in a new direction, although which direction exactly remained unclear.

“Feel the bump?” she asked a couple of weeks later, taking my hand and rubbing it over her abdomen. It made my head swirl.

She made an appointment with her doctor. As it turned out, she wasn’t pregnant. “A false pregnancy,” the doctor had said. What about the test? Apparently it happens sometimes—a psychosomatic reaction making the body act like it’s pregnant. Also, ectopic pregnancies can cause “false” positives. Maybe the egg was fertilized and lodged in the wrong place, starting up the hormones that can trigger a pregnancy test before it died and was flushed away. We’ll never know.

We were, of course, relieved.

But something changed. It’s hard to describe what, exactly. Our lovemaking changed. It no longer felt carefree, as if a shadow now hung over the bed where once pleasurable abandon ruled. We always used condoms after that. In the pause of things, when we stopped so I could put it on, we were reminded every time of the anxious dilemma we had been forced to face. I think maybe both of us started to evaluate the other differently. The yank of love was still in effect. But I started to notice Azelia's aloofness. Was it aloofness? She was still a kind of perfect person for me—beautiful, ambitious, funny, smart. I chalked it up to my own shortcomings—to being tired, or not as confident as she was, or too demanding, too needy. I started to feel vulnerable, which made me love her even more, or at least that's what it felt like.

She started working longer hours. "Started" is the wrong word. But her hours got longer, her projects consumed her. Sometimes she came home long after I was in bed asleep. I remember one night—it’s a silly memory, really—sitting at home wishing she was there with me, to have dinner with and make love. I waited up as long as I could and then headed to bed. As I walked past the hallway where the front door to the apartment was, I noticed her sneakers by the front door. They were quite old—a beat-up pair of white New Balance court shoes. They looked beautiful. It was an odd thought—what could be beautiful about an old dirty pair of sneakers? I missed her a lot and was wondering if her love for me had changed.

I saw her less and less. When I asked her about it she accused me of being clingy. I felt bad about it—who wants to be clingy? My feelings were the same, but she wasn't there the same way. I was loving a growing emptiness, an empty chair at supper, an empty bed. When we were together, the stars still shined brighter, for both of us, I'm sure of it. It's just that I wanted them to shine brighter for longer.

Azelia's next film project was in Europe. Through her studio, she had met some filmmakers in Berlin who were keen to work with her. She pitched them a version of her next film and they loved it. I sensed our love was still solid and joyful—she said so and I felt it. But there were other forces at work in our lives, not just the gravity between our bodies. After she moved to Berlin, a sadness settled in my life. I had been prepared to marry her, have a family, live a whole other life. I still loved her, even after she left. Love doesn’t just vanish. We didn’t stay in touch. She still lives in Berlin—or somewhere in Europe—she never came home. The sadness I felt opened up a space of doubt and questioning, and I think most importantly, a space of longing. The door that had popped open in my head never closed.

The last part of the film was the most prosaic. Shot like a documentary, it shows an old woman first, and then an older man—presumably Ruth and Jack—presumably in their homes, talking to the camera. We’re not told anything for sure, but these are the assumptions that make sense. The woman is sitting on the porch of an old house. You sense the house is in the country. The porch is made of wood, and you can hear in the background every now and then leaves trembling in a nearby tree. She’s talking about her life. She is recalling the “one big break-up” in her life, her one big love. “I have a theory,” she says into the camera, her wrinkled cheeks moving with each syllable. “Everyone has one big break-up, the soul-shattering kind,” she says. She tightens her lips together and drops her eyes. You hear the faint caw of a crow somewhere in the distance. “I was devastated. It ripped up my world.” Her eyes come back to the camera and you see something in them, something surprisingly youthful and bright. “It was like … like, I don’t know the right words. You’d know, if you’ve been through it yourself.” She seems to be accusing the viewer, but then you realize that she’s talking to someone, the person holding the camera—Azelia—who you hear cough off camera. The old woman licks her bottom lip, wetting it. “I suddenly saw myself in new light. It was a glare, really. An unkind brightness.” She exhales and looks off in the distance. “I fooled myself into thinking my lifestyle was a virtue! In the awful light I saw it as selfishness. Maybe a little of both.“ Her wrinkled face breaks into a smile that takes up her whole face, and I swear to god, if every face in the theatre doesn’t smile back in that moment, they are the faces of dead people. You could see some of the magic Jack had fallen in love with. The image of her face dissolves into an image of a large tree with an enormous canopy, leaves moving in the wind. Her voice comes in again, but the image of the tree stays. “I needed correction. That’s what I tell myself, now. When somebody sees you in the best light possible—isn’t that what love is? And when that light is taken away, what’s left shows something less.” She sighs. It is a sigh for the ages. The camera cuts to a close ground shot showing one of the legs of the chair she is sitting in and her foot in a sandal moving with slow nervous energy. We don’t see her face again, just a series of close-up details of the porch and house where she is sitting. We hear her voice. She describes what she calls a “right angle” in her life—she quit her daily weed habit, grieved her father’s death fully, re-connected with her faraway family, and got involved in animal rescue. She let her dream of living somewhere tropical fall away like chaff in a breeze, deciding instead to “stop running”, she says. She moved to a much smaller community in the country where she could build real relationships slow and steady. The camera shifts from her foot to a close-up of paint peeling on a piece of the porch, and then to moss growing on a shaded part of the house, and then to a reflection in a window of the large tree and more trees in the background—it looks pretty wherever it is, and peaceful—and finally, to a distant shot of the house. You can sort of make out the shape of the woman’s body in a chair on the porch.

Jack's final scene was similar to Ruth’s, as if he was being interviewed in a documentary. He’s sitting in a modern living room, upscale even, but not ostentatious. He looks well-dressed, like he’s been successful at something, although we never learn what. He still looks younger than Ruth, but he’s aged considerably, maybe in his 50s. “I fell apart after that,” he says. “It was the abyss. I started withering. I’d never felt anything like it.” The camera holds his face full-frame, so close all we can see are eyes, cheeks, nose mouth and chin—no background, just face. You can see the pores in his skin, little scarred areas like images of the moon’s surface. You guess he must have had acne in his youth. His teeth are a little crooked. “I had to change my life,” he says. “I moved into a rooming house, a hotel of pain, old men wasting away in little rooms—like me, I suppose, except I wasn't old. I hid there for a time, and then moved into an apartment not far from hers. I liked her way of thinking—live cheap, fuck the location. I moved into a shoebox in a building of shoeboxes across the alley from another building of shoeboxes, a ghetto of small apartments. I remember the noise—each apartment sending out into the alley the sounds and smells of poverty, sharing them as if we were rich.” It’s a funny line, but you don’t laugh, you just notice its cleverness and the way it softens the obvious pain and discomfort he must have felt. “I had never felt so alone. And I never have since. I started jogging. I jogged near her apartment, you know, vaguely hoping to bump into her, but also dreading it. I felt so much shame.”

“Where did the shame come from?” a voice off camera asks. It’s Azelia’s voice.

“I don’t know, I really don’t. It’s sad to think about it now.” The camera cuts away to a small layer of dust along a floorboard, presumably in the house where he lives, where he’s being interviewed. “I considered doing horrible, shameful things. It was like I needed the outside world to mirror how horrible I felt inside. I understood why people cut themselves, drink themselves to death, degrade themselves. It's equilibrium they’re after, needing the world to match the ugliness inside.” The camera keeps cutting to obscure close-ups—a glass sphere that seems to show an inverted, distorted miniature image of Jack in a room, a photo of a child with a dog, a struggling plant in a small pot. “But I also started to think about how to fill that void."

"Did you blame her?" Azelia's voice asks.

"At first,” he says. “But after months of falling apart, I realized that the big empty hole where I should have been wasn't her fault. It had nothing to do with her. Wow. What a realization. I started putting things into the emptiness, trying to make myself into someone I could live with.” The camera starts to show wide shots of the exterior of a house. It’s a nondescript suburban bungalow. Then it cuts to close-ups: a bush beside the house, weeds along the edge of a sidewalk, a swing hanging from a small apple tree in the backyard. Over these simple, even dull images, Jack describes his return to humanity—going back to school, figuring out a career, eventually getting married and having a family. The images are entirely ordinary, but there's nothing ordinary about the experience he's described. “I’m not sure any of that would have happened without that relationship,” Jack says over the images. “I would have crawled over glass to get to her, and I guess I did, in a way. Even though I never got there.”

“Do you still love her?” Azelia asks off-camera.

He hesitates. “No. That's not it. I think about her sometimes. I think of that tenuous future we started to build. I remember bicycling away from her apartment that night, I was on fire! I don’t know why, exactly. I was pedaling like a madman, like I was fleeing a demon. But also possessed and rocketing towards something. Where I am today—what I am—feels a little like an echo of all that."

It's an odd thing for him to say, and it takes a moment to put it together in your head, to see that what he is saying is that his life turned out OK in some significant way because of his entanglement with Ruth. That’s the last thing he says.

The camera holds on a shot of an uninteresting backyard, surrounded by a low chain link fence. It's a bit ugly, really. The grass is brown in spots. There’s a small deck behind the house that looks like it needs a new coat of stain, some outdoor chairs and a table, a patio umbrella that’s closed. Jack coughs off camera. You didn’t realize that the recording was still going, that he had only fallen silent. He clears his throat, but doesn’t say anything. A cloud passes overhead and the backyard darkens slightly. You realize that the camera is very very slowly zooming out, revealing in the most minute increments more and more banal suburban backyard. It is exactly like, but opposite, that famous film—what’s it called? Wavelength, by Michael Snow, a 45-minute slow-motion zoom in in a single room. The camera’s zoom-out is excruciating: 10 seconds, 20, 30. Why such a slow, widening shot of such a banal scene? Is it like a wavelength of light, or love, or something else escaping from a blackhole? The back door starts to open, and the screen goes black.

Michael Lithgow’s poetry, essays and short stories have appeared in Canadian and international journals, including TNQ, Literary Review of Canada, Fiddlehead, The Brussels Review, Canadian Literature, and Topia. His second collection of poetry was published in 2021, by Cormorant Books. He teaches at Athabasca University.