Vilmos Zsigmond's Last Film

(This is the eulogy offered during a memorial service for Vilmos Zsigmond on January 23rd, 2016 in "Little Chapel by the Sea" in Pacific Grove, California. Vilmos was 85 when he died shortly before midnight on January 1st, 2016)

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met him 22 years ago through my wife, Barbara, who is one of Susan’s six sisters. (Susan was Vilmos' second wife)  But I did not know him closely until he became ill last July. It was then I began to visit him each day, and you could say, I fell in love.
            Here is something of the man I knew.

 (Vilmos's World; Tata, Hungary; 1955. Copyright@2015)

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e was named after his father, a 6’5” soccer goalie who played with one of the great Hungarian club teams in the late 1930s and later coached a professional Moroccan team. The game that Vilmos never forgot was one his father played against Milan.  Late in the first half his father got kicked in the face.  His nose broken, bleeding badly, the manager suggested he come out. “No, just give me a towel,” Vilmos sr. said, then wiped off the blood and played the second half. 

          “He was so pissed off; he was like a tiger,” Vilmos would remember.

            The Hungarian team won; ‘Villy’, as his father was called, was taken to the hospital where hundreds of fans came to visit him.

            Vilmos, the son, never forgot that moment watching the tiger and desperately wanted to play soccer himself, but his father told him he was too small and weak and suggested he play table tennis instead.  It turned out to be good advice.  Vilmos became an excellent player which lead to a job in a rope factory and then to educational opportunities, apprenticeships, and authority. 

            And then one day while taking pictures in a field on the out-skirts of Szeged, he met a gypsy fortuneteller who told him, “you will sail on a ship across a great ocean to a big city, where you will become an important artist.”  

           

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is father offered just two bits of advice: whatever you choose as a career be the best at it and always trust your intuition. Incidentally, his father followed a family tradition and created several leather-bound scrapbooks, meticulously filled with family photos, including Vilmos’s sister and every last cousin. But not a single photo of Vilmos’s mother.  Which is its own story.  

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s for his career, Vilmos became a cinematographer by chance, by choice, and by obsessively hard work.  He was a lighter and regarded among his peers as a poet-magician who believed in the power of shadows, who believed that realism should trump the artistic. Yet at the same time Vilmos was most gratified to capture the abstract nature of a scene. Or a moment.

            “I’m not that good at making things up!” He told me several times.

            He was an artist with the gift of cinematic sight, but he was also oddly geeky. His small studio in Big Sur was more like a Radio Shack outlet than a dark room.  He loved devices, apps, updates, and computer shortcuts, and yet in his thrall often became the fisherman caught in his nets.

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e was drawn, so he said, solely to the look of something and had little interest in the plot. Sometimes at the end of watching a movie he had only the barest sense of what went on, but was acutely aware of angles and colors.

            When the shooting had finished for Brian de Palma’s Blow Out, the ending was still a muddle; de Palma asked Vilmos what he thought the ending should be.  The choice was between tragedy and a happy ending.  “I’m a cinematographer,” replied Vilmos. “and it doesn’t make any difference to me who lives and who dies. it’s your choice. I’m merely another spectator in the theater.”

            That was not quite true but he could see both sides: the artistic value of the sad ending and the commercial value of the happy ending.  He could see both sides but could never decide for himself.

            His interest in photography began with an uncle who gave him a book written by Eugene Dulovits, a prominent Hungarian photographer and camera inventor. This he read while spending three months in bed recovering from a kidney infection when he was 17.

             That infection forecast his last illness.

           

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he man was an academy award winner, but also an escape artist — although his bushy brow would furrow at the idea.  Still, he was always escaping to or from. In 1956, from Hungry to New York. A couple of years later, from New York to Hollywood.  Years after that, from Hollywood to Big Sur and then San Francisco. He was forever just leaving for the next city. The next movie, the next honor, the next class to teach.

            Always loyal to his commitments, no matter how ill he was or ill-conceived the project. 

            A year ago he went to China for a week just so that someone could put his name on their film.  And then back to Los Angeles to teach a class, which cost him more to go to than he made, and back to Budapest for his gallery opening and back to Monterey for another film class. 

            He could never say no, especially to students and apprentices. To nearly anybody. He fed off being wanted, which is perhaps partly a reflection of the lonely childhood he described to me. Without one parent or another.  Serving as a waiter at the age of 10 in his stepmother’s tavern.

            Always between poverty and the bourgeoisie.

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n the hospital, even to the end, he was always talking about escape.  From the place, from his condition. “How did this happen to me?” he would say and shake his head and roll his eyes, and then he would demand that I push down the bed rails and pull him up. “You have to get me out of here,” he would say, and there was no delirium. But when I got him sitting up he couldn’t stand, and all we could do was shake our heads.

            He was so much tougher than his father imagined.

            And yet through these last months he was forever apologizing or thanking.  “Don’t worry about it,” he said one night in his apartment when he fell out of bed and needed help to get back. “I’m fine. I can stay here on the floor. It’s okay.”

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e could be wickedly stubborn.  A year ago he had an auto accident driving from Big Sur to Los Angeles.  He fell asleep.  The car crossed the road, went down a ravine near San Luis Obispo and was totaled.  He got out, made his way up to the highway, and still found his way to a dinner engagement that night in Los Angeles.

            And when was it, not long before that, when he tried to outrun the highway patrol on the road into Big Sur. Realizing he’d been clocked at 80 miles an hour he ducked on to a side road but the police found him. 

            As the officer leaned in the window, Vilmos, with the utmost charm, responded, “Is there anything wrong officer?”

            Vilmos was ever gracious, always full of compliments.  He was both naïve and savvy; simple and sophisticated. He sometimes gave the sense of being distracted even when he wasn’t.  Sometimes, I thought it was a cover.

            In the years I knew him, I don’t think I ever saw him get truly angry.  He could be cutting but he didn’t keep his knifes. 

            He loathed controversy.

            He was endlessly contradictory.

            Once he said, “Hungary is part of my heritage, but I feel more American than Hungarian because I spent the best time of my life in America.”  

            Another time he said, “the best part of my life was coming out of the school in Hungary where I learned the art and craft of cinematography.”

            Incidentally, he was a democrat and loved President Obama — for his eloquence and sense of fairness. One of Vilmos's greatest hopes was that he might convince his friend Prime Minister Orban that Obama was a great president.

          

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is favorite movies included, among so many others, The Cranes Are Flying and Ballad of a Soldier.  As for style he felt Bunuel was too artistic, too impressionistic. At the opposite end, he felt Sven Nykvist was painfully stark, painfully realistic. 

            And what about your own films? I asked. Which is your favorites?

            We began going down the list and after a while it became clear that every movie beginning with Deliverance was his favorite.  But perhaps the Deer Hunter above all.  And Heaven’s Gate, which he always believed was a masterpiece and finally, all these years later, critics are beginning to agree.

            Other cinematographers he revered included G.R. Aldo who shot Vittorio de Sica’s Umberto D, the classic post war black and white film about a man and his dog.  Vilmos was particularly drawn to the ending when the old man decides to commit suicide and lies down on the railroad tracks with his dog.  At the last minute the dog jumps away and the old man follows. 

            “The dog was saying, ‘you can kill yourself but you’re not killing me.’ And so the old man chooses life, they get back to their routines and become friends again.  It is a very life-affirming moment.”

            If Vilmos was ambivalent about ’the happy ending’ he was always looking for the life-affirming moment — in a film or in life.

            

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everend Erickson, please don’t be offended if I tell you that Vilmos never believed in Lutheranism, much less the Catholicism forced on him by his stepmother. Just a few weeks ago, with death sipping soda in the corner, he told me that he believed in a divine intelligence; how else to explain such a wondrous and unfathomable world. 

            His skepticism for organized religion grew out of his distrust of functionaries, whether from political parties or the church.  What he believed in, and what he trusted, had nothing to do with Man, only Man’s creator. 

            His greatest regret was not spending more time with his children.

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nd what else did he believe in?  He believed in his ability to make the right choice. Looking back on his life he said once, “I always make the right choice to do something useful. That’s why I went to meet my father in Salzburg in 1955.” Vilmos was at a crossroads just then and took an opportunity to ask his father for guidance. 

            “The decision was made by accident. I sought his advice because he was finally available. I had all the choices: to go to Paris, London, or Australia. But then my father said,’ go to America’; so I get a hold of Laszlo (Kovacs), and I said, ‘let’s go to Hollywood.’ “

            Vilmos added, “I don’t believe you can make your own luck. You’re either lucky or not.”

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n a book written in French and published in 1955,  Vilmos’ father gathered together 100 anecdotes from his career.  In one he wrote, “At the end of the first half, In the locker room, feeling very discouraged, I told myself that it was over, that I was too old of a soccer player and I had nothing to offer. Even that acclaimed intuition that had served me so faithfully throughout my career had abandoned me. But no – during the second half, our luck turned and soon the score was 2-2 and that lead to a third goal giving us the victory. My intuition was still good; I was not yet ‘finished.’ “

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n a conversation not long ago, Vilmos commented that when you look at a Rembrandt there’s always a story, and your eye, in the hands of a master,  knows just where to find it.  Of course, the same is true of photography. 
            “If you take a picture of a storm,” he told me one night and then paused, his face tilted up to the light, eyes closed, for a very long time laying out his words. “If you take a picture of a storm, it would not make any sense unless there is a boat, just the sea is not enough. And so you use the boat to explain the ocean. You must always have a human element.”

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week before he died, Vilmos and I sat in the empty lounge of the dialysis unit in a San Francisco hospital.  We were watching a basketball game and the nurse was trying to persuade Vilmos to take his medicine; he was in and out of his delirium.          

            It was at times like these that sometimes we made movies, often with just one scene.  Short subjects as it were. One movie was about a wall-sized armoire, each drawer jammed with exotic liqueurs and secrets from his life. Another movie was about the nurses handling an emergency: his own. This time it was about Kobe Bryant, the great Laker’s star, now playing his last season.

            "Can't you see I'm working!" Vilmos said to the nurse, whose patient Filipina smile could not be undone.  She apologized, slipped her spoon with applesauce and pills into his mouth, and fled to her station.

            He spent several minutes assembling his imaginary crew and then asked, “Who’s missing?”.

            “The starlets,” I said on the fly, thinking of Susan (his wife), and Julia (his daughter from a previous marriage). They’d gone down to the cafeteria.

            “Yes, we need the starlets,” he said. “Ok, then we will wait for them.”

            “Set your F stops at 248,” he went on, and then thinking of the cameras behind him he added, “How many meters do they have left?”

             “They have enough,” I said. 

             “Both cameras?”

             “Both cameras,” I said.

             “There must be 50 meters in each camera. Tell everyone to take their spots.”

             “Take your spots,” I said, feeling like the first officer in an old submarine movie.

             “Where’s Kobe?” he said, then turned to me, suddenly playful, clear-eyed and sure. “We’re recording this, right?” he said, with the wink of a man who had suddenly escaped his delirium.

            Just then the starlets walked off the elevator.  As they came into his view he looked at me with mock exasperation, as though to say ‘starlets never respect the clock.’ 

            But there was another look as well, a look of such fondness and relief at their presence you could hardly imagine.

            Vilmos waved his hands and clapped. Everyone, real and imagined, found their marks.  He was following his intuition just as he always did.

            “Action, action, action,” he shouted, and off we went.

The mortician from Paul's arrived with his assistant.  They were from Oak Grove; they were in their late 20s;  he in black sweater; she in a black pants suit; two from Charles Adams, with strange accents: she said nothing, he prefaced everything with "your dear most loved one".  "We are going to move your dear most loved one to the van, always with the most respect."  "We are moving your dear most loved one, with the most respect, to the gurney."  "Is it okay if we now cover your dear most loved one under a woolen shroud" — which covers the white, plastic body bag,...  And so my last sight of him was his face, yellow as the late afternoon sun.  From the kidneys I suppose.  Otherwise, his skin was clean and clear, with just a slight blemish under his left eye,  from the black eye he'd suffered in October when he fell out of bed one night and we couldn't get back up in....

And then he was gone.

I sat next to his bed, just the two of us.  His wife had gone to rest in another room.  It was coming up on 11:30 p.m. (January 1).  I'd found a copy of Heaven's Gate in among his vast collection of films, put it my laptop and was intent upon getting to the scene with the homesteaders waltzing on rollerskates.  He once told me his favorite film was The Deer Hunter, but he was also very proud of that scene in Gate.

As the evening wore on his breathing stabilized; the morphine seemed to be working finally.  Earlier in the evening he sounded as though he were drowning and hadn't the strength to get a full breath. But now the passages had partly cleared; he reached for each breath like a swimmer in a slow crawl.   I swabbed his lips with a wet sponge the size of a teaspoon. I gave him an eyedropper's pinch of water. Before, he had responded to liquid, but not now.  At one point, I pressed on his shoulder and he moved, as though startled, and took a clear breath.  I moved away for a moment and returned.  A slightly foul scent hung in the room.  For no reason, I sat down again in the chair next to his bed and recited the mantra, om mane peme hum.  My wife had done something similar the night before. I repeated it perhaps a hundred times or more, reaching that point when the repetitions pile up on each other and only the beginning of the mantra can be heard.  My voice was quickly running out and I thought to get a glass of water.   I stood up and glanced at him; his breathing seemed to have all but stopped.  I reached to find a pulse in his neck, which seemed cool.  I tried his right wrist; leaned closer to his mouth. I wished I had a mirror.  I tried the other wrist, but there was nothing. I wondered if I was doing it correctly. I tried again.  It occurred to me that he had crept away on a breath and I hadn't noticed....

The death of VZ. At nearly 11:40 pm, January 1st, 2016.

All bundled up in the wheelchair he looked like the father in Five Easy Pieces (his closest friend László Kovács shot that film). In the middle of the afternoon, we rolled him from one house to the other, up past the swimming pool, down the old driveway to the cabin with its fabulous view of the coast stretching south from Pfeiffer Pt.

Someone put on his head the baseball cap he always wore on the set and then his dark glasses. Someone else brought still another blanket. The sun was full on his face. I suspect it was too much; he hadn't had to endure the sun like that in months. He said nothing. I couldn't tell if his eyes were even open. Finally, after but a few minutes, I heard him whisper, "let's go back". The next day he was gone.

There was a time nearly 30 years ago when he first saw this view and imagined he'd found Shangri-La. Coming all that way from Szeged, where as a kid —his mother estranged, gone off with a lover never to return; his father away in Tangiers coaching a professional soccer team — his life had often seemed limited, lonely and drab.  And here he was on top of the world, with the most beautiful light.  In the end, that was the greatest attraction. Certainly it was spectacular to see the coast and the whole curvature of the earth, but it was the light that he treasured.

Today, out of nowhere, 12 vultures appeared high up in the branches of two California Pines. The trees stand next to a balcony where we go at night to watch the universe expand. The gigantic birds, in their cowboy long coats, barely moved, but you could see the eye of one, blinking as though electronically.  Another vulture extended his wing for a moment, like a big man looking to scratch his armpit. Another hung its head on its chest, the face particularly worn and ugly. "Does this mean today will be the day?" someone asked.

We stand around his bed, working out the details of his extraction from the hospital.  He has finally decided that he's had enough.  Last night he tore the catheter out of his neck that enables a connection to the dialysis machine, which he's been a slave to for more than a month, three days a week, three or four hours at a clip, and always as though the prey of an ambivalent and inept dracula.

And still he goes on.  The pacemaker demands it.  But now by withdrawing from dialysis, he has committed to a quick end.  The kidneys will shut down in a week, or less.  And just now, even with fresh blood he does not look well.  His face suggests 'The Scream.' Head thrown back, mouth open. You think of Munch's inspiration: "One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord — the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became The Scream."

Perhaps, the cinematographer is filming just such a scene right now: like a scene from The Deer Hunter, but more ghastly even, a true metaphor for his abhorrence of what's been done to him, of what goes on each day....  The nurses have surved him well; the doctors not so much, particularly the one in charge who had him come down to his office, in September... Or was it late August.  The 'managing' doctor is a small wiry man, with an air of

Nevertheless, the case worker is confident: "This is a great man, he has brought happiness to many people. You never know where people go in their minds." The case worker is a chubby butch with a Brooklyn accent and a camp counsellor's demeanor.   She offer a long monologue about visitations with the dead. "My guardian spirit is my mother, of course," she begins, "and whenever I see a butterfly I know she's around."

I wondered if the cinematographer could hear her.  His bushy eyebrows twitched, which they often do when he is trying to suffer fools.

"It's important to ask the patient, if you can," the case worker went on. "Of course, sometimes, you can't, it's always delicate, but sometimes you can ask how they imagine they will be reincarnated. I know someone who said they would come back as a moth and they did!"

Said as though reappearing as a moth was like coming back as a fabulous prince.

The great cinematographer is down to his last shots.  The lighting is no longer an issue.  The angle is not important.  No one cares what this will look like; only he can see what's going on.  He's the director now, and suddenly, from deep in his hospital bed, he reaches out through the hallucination, with his right arm — bruised to black, bristling with blood lines — with his gnarled craw hand, to adjust the picture. Not the camera, but the scene itself. He moves the actors around with his fingers; rambling on in Hungarian; his bushy eyebrows twitching.  And then he yells out, in English; "Where shall I cut this?"

"Anywhere you like," I tell him.

 "But where are the keys?"

"They're right here," I say.  The keys to your whole life, right here.  Everything is metaphoric at this stage.

"I  thought we'd lost them," he says.  But no, you assure him, Marceau like; no, they're right here, and they'll start up whatever you need to start up. He's now content.  And so we return to CNN.  He spent the Paris massacre in accute care;  the San Bernadino massacre, in palliative care. Tomorrow, more dialysis.  Tomorrow then will be a bad day.  So many bad days in a row.  Can we make it to Christmas?  That's the hope.

Meanwhile, he is back in his film. Maybe he's shooting Umberto D; one of his favorites, almost as much as many of his own films....  He's back in his film; everyone is part of it.  "It doesn't matter," he says suddenly.  But this is not a reference to the film; this is a broader recognition.  So it seems.  Would he trade this for all of his fame now?  His academy award?

And then just to squeeze every last drop of irony out of the evening, here on the monitor at the top of the room is Tony Bourdain in Tangier.  Why it was just a year ago that Tony was having lunch with the cinematographer, himself, in Budapest, talking about all his great movies, about what it was like  to escape in 1956. But here is the real irony:  it was in Tangier where the cinematographer's father once coached soccer; in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and the son would come all the way from Hungry to visit, oh what fabulous visits those were, and the son would never forget his father.  There was no greater hero, in life or the imagination.

He watches it all out of one eye, with the oxygen pump making the sound of white noise, with the Filipinas remaking the bed in the other half of the room, with the slow realization coming, that no, no he may never leave here after all....

How unsettling is the face of the movie star long gone!  The worse if on a black and white poster. Let's say a woman in her prime. I'm thinking of Ava Gardner or Jean Moreau.  A woman with an edge.And isn't it remarkable how a certain photograph enables a great beauty to spit in the eye of death, and in the same moment capture the equivalent of a longing for the years before a great war.

The lighter is dimming.  The man who loved light is less and less loved by light in return.  He's gotten tangled up, like a dolphin in nets, tangled up in those tubes and wires, and all the paraphernalia that goes with living at man's end.  Meanwhile, the doctors won't say.  They're afraid to predict an outcome; afraid of being sued.  Afraid that when people find out the true consequences of say a pacemaker, they won't want it.  If the signs are stable, they say, then there's nothing to do.
     
Yet the lighter is in more and more pain.  The data is hopeful, yet he feels worse and worse. His knees are swelling; he can no longer walk; he's dizzy; he's losing his coordination, his ability to reason.  It galls him no end that he can't remember 'chicken, sauce, tea' five minutes after you tell him to remember those words.
     
And all the while he's kept in a resort-like rehab center where the admitters tell everyone that there are two Diebenkorns hanging on the walls. What they don't say is that the rehab area includes the forensic wing.  Down the corridor from the lighter, a woman goes through 108 bird calls every evening.  Then some occasional screaming.  Nurses shake their heads. Drugs are readily available, although it's hard to find a nurse to provide them.  Who knows what's wrong with these nurses? They find a bleeding sore on your elbow and then forget to take care of it.  Life goes on, but just barely. The light in this place is mellow and ghastly.  The cat wandering around is 17-years-old. There's nothing to be done. The man who has defined cinematic light is left alone.  His friends have largely deserted him.  Still, he's willing to play his part whatever it is, but he is as though without a director to explain the scene.  And all the while he listens to Gorecki's Symphony No. 3.  With Dawn Upshaw.  Not what you should be filling your head with at such a moment;  the tears roaring down his tough cheeks the color of a dirt road after a good rain.

"Is there any better coastal view than from Pfeiffer Pt.? asked the local Gatsby, a wannabe Gatsby. But then he shook his head. "But this is the problem; it's being discovered."You see that road to the beach down there. Well it's now filled with people making their way to Peiffer Beach. So many are dark skinned. They seem to be more South Asian lately, from places like Fremont and Concord.  But that's not all.  Did you hear about the two Chinese people run over on Route 1. They were walking right down the middle of the road taking photographs, oblivious to the traffic. I don't know what the were thinking."

Jay G shook his head and smack his lips.  "I'll tell you what's next: last week two Norteno gang members from Salinas robbed a golfer at Torry Pines, in Monterey. They took the man's $1,000 golf club.  It's a miracle he wasn't killed. And what were they going to do with that? Sell it.  But you see it's all turning out just as Trump says. It's the refugees.  The world is awash with people who aren't happy with their life somewhere else, and now they want to come here.  But America can't take all the people in the world. And anyway many were very successful where they were. Now they want more.  The foreigners always want more.  But then they don't want to work for it.  People in other countries, in other cultures, they're all just greedy. What other word explains it? But we know how to handle this. I've ordered two trained Malinois. Combat dogs.  They're the best. We're we're looking into barbed wire. The caretaker has an automatic rifle. 'Sure, you can keep that here,' I said.  We're all buttoning down. A package of food to last 10 years is arriving next week.  We've got a six-month supply of Kremlin Vodka from Costco. My wife is furious that we'll have to forego the kitchen remodel, but we just can't trust anybody now."

Where the airdale used to lay next to the fireplace, now a fine cigar box with its ashes.  Next to the bed where the husband used to sleep, a bill on the nightstand for July's hospice care.  And where the wife used to stand in the kitchen now stands a different woman, in the same skirt, making the same rice pilaff, still making all the ends meet, whispering to herself that this will be a good year.  She can always sense the future.  A good year bound to come after so many bad ones.  This will be the year , she is always saying to freinds at dinner, when the quantum coin toss will come up diamonds.  She considers it her rightful destiny, because after all she was born in the shallows of a river as her mother washed the sheets.

Philip Glass says he's come to see his life's arc through the music he's written, which is all part of some great lineage of music.  His place, his life's meaning, is somewhere in that lineage. And so the writer, the doctor, the professional of any kind has a place in the lineage of a certain craft. But what if you have no particular craft, merely a long list of dreams?  What if your craft is solely in the lineage of unfulfilled dreams.

Weeks ago, on the day the governor announced the water cuts, we went for a walk in Golden Gate Park. Twenty-five percent for San Francisco; well, that won't be so bad for us.  We said.  But then think of all the lawn people, the golfers, the corpses, the car washers, the little kid bodies at the public pools.

It was early evening; the wind subsided. Quiet set in. As we walked along, it suddenly occurred to us, to me at least, that the park itself seemed to have gotten Brown's message. As though the very thought of what was coming had gotten into the soil and dried it; just then as we were walking along, just as we were talking about it, and here was the moon glistening and the sea roaring, and yet the park seemed like the hopeful patient told he's cancerous and suddenly he's quiet, hardly breathing.

She's gone now.  It's been 8 years, or 9.  The truth is, I don't remember exactly.  I remember hearing the news.  I remember the airplane and the drive and confronting the Russian madame. I remember using some very foul language, in an effort to unnerve that little scene they had going; the Master's teachings; the whole communal conceit.  Well, not a conceit; it was a commune and it worked for the most part, but of course the politics were horrific.  A Canadian ranch and refuge for people on the run.  That's true.  Everybody there was on the run and she not least.  So after I had a my tantrum, which I enjoyed enormously, the Russian had me sit next to her at dinner, which I can tell you is never a boisterous affair.  Not even any slurping.  Just heads bowed to their soup bowls. "Could you pass the water?" someone might say.  After dinner, the Russian had me tell stories about who my mother had been before coming to the south of France and then later to British Columbia.  I told them and people were stunned — that she had once been a terrific tennis player, moving back and forth along the baseline like the lioness she imagined she was.... And some other stories.  But then I suddenly couldn't go on.  What good is it? And so now her memory is like a light down through the fog and I'm St. Ex, lost and not trusting, drawn to that light and trying to figure out what it means and how to deal with it, whether to see it as a landing light or a trick.

I've told you about Carbo; he's an angry man.  Always has been, and will be. There's nothing he enjoys more than needling people, than undoing them in some way.  His father was a college soccer referee, a little bitty guy and famous for giving out red cards at the beginning of games.  Normally, a referee would give a warning and then if that wasn't heeded, a yellow card, and if that didn't instill order, red. But Carbo's father didn't give a damn about protocol and he would wave a red card with no warning. He told Bernie once he did that because he wanted the players and coaches, and of course, the fans to know that he was in control, that he was never going to be invisible.  He wanted to be part of the show....  But above all, he liked to piss people off.

We were on the phone on Halloween and Carbo asks me what I'm doing.  I shrugged.  He said, you get down here, I want to show you what these fucks are doing. He was so excited, I couldn't say no. Where are you? I asked.  So I go down to Market Street.  The place is on fire, weirdos galore, and there's a long line for a rock concert.  Right away I notice somebody wearing a sandwich board, which looks like an I-phone.  Very elaborate costume.  And the person in the sandwich has a doll in his hands and he's sticking the doll the way people do when they're texting. But he's doing it with pins so it's actually more like voodoo.  I get closer and who is it but Carbo. He's walking up and down while the people in line are texting and he's doing his own texting. He stands next to this group of boys and starts 'vexting' — that's the term he told me later.  'Yea, I vext 'em. After you text and sext and do any fuckin' thing, you vext. Put the curse on 'em. I hate those people.'

Meanwhile, the kids didn't really notice him; occasionally they would just turn and watch him and maybe laugh and they have no idea he's ridiculing them. He's just another weirdo.  I told him, let's go get a drink. Fuck that, he said, I want to piss some people off.  When he's like that, there's nothing you can do, so I just left him there, vexting, and went to a dive I know around the corner.

“It’s the ‘fake life’, she began.  “That’s what I call it now.  Don’t you think that’s a good book title?  I know it sounds a little down and maybe too simple. But don't you think?  It’s the ‘friend’ who calls to talk to you for five minutes, but there’s no conversation.  They tell you all about their lives, and it’s usually about one problem in particular.  Something won’t start or turn off; maybe it’s a mental condition or it's the kid, the car.  Menstuation. They make a few observations and that's the conversation.  There is no conversation.  And it all began on such a high note.  You were so happy to hear from this person but then just as suddenly the joy disappears and you’re thinking, why am I even friends with this person?  And the answer is because you don’t have a lot of friends and everyone is telling you to stay in step, stay tuned, stay up, get the latest gadget to stay in touch.  “Otherwise, we worry about you.” So you fake it up. All I really want to do is say, “I love you” and hang up before I can be disappointed.  Just take that one true thing, throw it out there, and leave it…. Here’s the worst, though.  I have these friends, and they’re well meaning.  They’ll call me and say, so Cassandra, how are you and we haven’t heard from you in a while and we just hope you’re getting out.  And you think to yourself, ‘you hope I’m getting out?’ That’s the last thing I want. Going out is just like the phone.  You’re so excited at the thought and then by the time you walk in the front door you just want to keep right on going, through the foyer, the den, the living room, the kitchen, the guest bedroom, and out the back door and back to your car.  So what I do is this:  I lie. I say, ‘I went to the most fabulous party the other night. I don’t know why you weren’t there.’  And they’re caught off guard and you make up some scripty thing about the agent you met or the cute guy who swept you away and actually did all the things he whispered he would do, and isn’t that unusual, because usually men these days always never do all the things they need to do for long enough and then they’re back to sleep in a flash and you can’t even wake them up to send them home.  But see I don’t have that problem anymore. Yes, I am withdrawing from sex, but at the same time I’m longing for romance, and then sometimes I’ll get in heat but then that diminishes and it’s just the thought of romance that’s enough. That’s what I realize. I’m happy with just the thought…. But here’s what happened this morning. I was going out for a walk, as I do every morning, I go out to the university, and there was this woman standing in the street weeping.  I don’t know what was the matter.  She lives across the street. I don’t think she's Hispanic; maybe Portuguese, but I just went up to her and hugged her and we just stood there for about 10 minutes in the middle of the street.  Incredible.  I felt so good later and it just stays with you for the whole day.”  There was the sound of ringing in the background. ” Okay, my friend, I love you.  Gotta go……

Often, there is a metaphor to capture the essence of calamity.  For the attack on 9/11 and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed, the metaphor is the 'falling man': that anonymous business man falling from the North Tower at 9:41 a.m. on that September morning, stopped in a remarkable photograph by Richard Drew. And stopped also by Don DeLillo in his novel, Falling Man — "then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life."

Everyone and everything was falling then. Falling from and away. Symbolic landmarks,  institutions, policies, the illusion of being isolated from the rest of the world, all falling to smithereens. People falling to the cement but also to fear and anger, to mistrust, and at the same time unity, for a moment, but then inevitably perhaps, to faulty judgments, to war and ambiguity, to a hunger for clarity and security, never satisfied.  It was all summed in the zeitgeist horror of the falling man.

The revelation from the metaphor was a reminder that like the man jumping out of the building, forced by fire or blown out, we have no control of our fate, and to make matters much worse we may have lost the faith to help try to win it back.

Now, ISIS, ISIL, Islamic State — the very lack of an agreed-upon name is emblematic of confusion. The metaphor here is the beheading.  That's a zeitgiest horror. And if there is just one beheading, to match the falling man, it's not that of the two American journalists, or the British aid worker, or the French tour guide; no, for the moment it's the beheading of Colleen Hufford, 54, a worker at Vaughan Foods in a south Oklahoma City suburb.  She is nearly as anonymous as the falling man and her death is equally horrific. That she is a woman tops the horror.

And the revelation? It is that we have all lost our heads, and so survive by other means, by runaway emotion, by passing passions — and thoughtless rhetoric.  Which, of course, is true in America as well as Iraq and Syria.  In that sense we are cut off from our humanity, from ourselves, form reason, from evolution itself.  How can we argue for evolution when some of us are still feeling their way through the Dark Ages.

This is the other problem with suicide.  First, you give up your life for a pittance, the cost of a few flimsy synapses gone awry. Then you undermine everybody else. You put a fine Moorish arch on a cave-like little doubt. And, frankly, it becomes another key hole for the wrong key. Of course, it's the last thing on your mind when you're beyond recall, when you're gathering your belongings, whatever thoughts those might be...  That's the problem, particularly in this case, with someone so beloved.  Is that too strong? Cherished, certainly... The problem is that you set the trap for others also at wit's end, a gossamer away... "My God, if he gave in, what hope have I?"

But then by strokes of luck, completely out of the blue, you make your way into the dark, that lovely blackening, to your movie seat, to watch Calvary, the new Irish film by John Michael McDonough, best known for The Guard.  Starring Brendon Gleeson, in this film as well.  First, a cop; now a priest. Written and directed by McDonough, which is always a wrong for some filmmakers I know, who insist you must never direct your own script.

But discard inside double-A baseball: here you become the old, wise, once-married priest, in the hell realms, in amongst demons, all thoroughly possessed. Each by turns renounces your church, your priesthood and you. And finally, there is no escape and you are stuck with your integrity. In the end, your sad fate is that you do care for your flock, and not to fuck, and as fucked up as they may be. And so you grasp your Christlike moment, you endure that, it's your fate and desire, although suicide by any other name.

Still, the story rings true, even if the faith in that story is not enough to save you.  Even you.  No solace that somebody already did what you're doing, to save you from it. That's the real problem, you have to know what you're doing at a moment like that, but how could you. That's the absurdity.

But if you care to see it that way, if you're willing to stop watching the waves break and just walk home, then it's enough to get you through another day.  You just wish the poor man, with all of his dexterity, had seen it, seen the nature of true demon possession and how ephemeral that is, and how hopeful faith can be, not religious faith, but human faith, all that was born in the bang, the slime, the cave paintings, all of it.

Peet’s at Franklin Square. Two men at the next little round table. Big guy; little guy.  Ethnics.  Little guy: no distinguishing features, barely visible, impossible to remember even as you're starring at him.

Big guy: jowls in a baby blue t. With a tourist gallery of low-brow body painting. Don Quixote hanging on one arm.  SCOTUS on the other, in big letters. And then in the neck area, where the tie knot goes Lady Liberty with big tits holding her scales but gingerly.  Some writing you can't read. Code maybe. But not prison scratch.

"You know what I mean?" says BG.

LG nods but it doesn't look like he knows. 

"It's absolutely atrocious.  Some of the investors are fucking suing us.  And this is what it is, these fucking bastards have no fucking patience.  Know what I mean?

LG nods but he has no idea.

And they're saying, 'can’t you walk us through some of this shit?'  And I'm saying how hard is this. We have an idea for a site. The idea is you sell this to people who are dying.  What do they need? Hospice, a lawyer, mortician, a hug from the nurse, calls from people they knew in grade school. They need somebody to take care of all  that.  That's what we do.  Deathcalm.com.  We do everything you need in those last days, months, what have you.  One stop shop.  You go out feeling great about it because you know, everyting is taken care of.  Boom.  Secure. The kids, the wife, the dog.  All done. Boom.  But now Dick Tracy doesn't get it and so we have to explain and they're saying but you told us something else and we said, what something else, this is what we told you.  Take it or leave it and you said, and I'm quoting, "We'll take it."  How you gonna miss with this.  Everybody dies right. Everybody needs things taken care of.  We have a mailing list of people on medicare, people in the hospices.  Eberybody north of 50.  We send out a note. How hard is all this shit?"