The Lost Expert, page 29
“It’s intense,” Chris said. “The character I’m playing, he’s dealing with a really strange situation. He’s supposed to be this superhero type, and he’s trying to be that, but it’s not really about that at all. It’s more about the expectations he’s putting on himself, and how hard it is for one guy to do anything, really, that can make any kind of difference in such a crazy world.”
Jack nodded thoughtfully.
“Yeah,” Chris said, riding a rush of energy. Jack was buying it, buying into the new Thomson Holmes. Sure, why not? Chris
was just that good. When was the last time they’d even seen each other? “I think it’s the idea of having the sense that you can do more with your life, because you’re not like everyone else. But then you find out you really are like everyone else, just with this added burden. And meanwhile, everyone has an agenda for you, has big expectations, and you just aren’t sure how to deal with it all, you know?”
“It’s the perfect role for you.” Thomson Holmes’s Dad pointed at Chris’s chest with his fork. “You know what I mean?”
“Sure,” Chris said, smiling wryly. “I know what you mean.”
Jack got himself up. “Dessert time,” he said. He patted his belly. “Not that I need it.”
“Let me help,” Chris said, also standing.
“No, no, you’re a guest.”
“Please, Dad. Let me help.”
“Well, all righty. There’s a key lime pie in the fridge. I’ll grab the plates.”
Chris hadn’t had key lime pie before.
“Got the taste for it down in Florida,” Jack informed him. “When I was living there. After —” Jack hesitated, then realized he’d painted himself into a corner. “After I split with your mom,” he eventually mumbled.
“It’s really good,” Chris said through a mouthful of sour-sweet and graham cracker crust. The less he knew, the better. It could be a new start, he thought optimistically. It could be a new start for both of them.
“Look at you,” Thomson Holmes’s Dad said. “Look at you go.” He smiled paternally, served Chris another piece.
Over coffee, already made and left in a thermos, his father told him a bit about his friends at the complex. Mostly he played golf with Bob Grossman, the retired optometrist across the street.
“Grossman’s a kidder, like me. We get along all right.” He also played euchre and poker, and sometimes went to movie night. “But you know me,” he said. “I’ve always been a bit of a loner.”
Thomson Holmes’s Dad stood up slowly, almost ceremonially. He stuck his chest out. “Look, Thomson,” he said. “I know how you value your privacy, and it’s not my business and all that. And I know we haven’t exactly gotten along, what with my problems and all. And then after your mother passed, rest her soul. But I’m still your dad. And I haven’t really been there for you. I regret that. I really do. Look, son. Can I ask you something?”
“Uh, sure.” Chris knew what was coming. Maddy had drilled it into him. Just say the same thing over and over again: It wasn’t me. I would never do anything like that. It’s a fake. I’ve never even met that girl.
“Are you in some kind of trouble?”
Not what he was expecting. “Why would you ask me that?” Chris did his best to keep his voice neutral, his face impassive.
“A man came to see me,” his father said gravely. “He wasn’t a regular visitor. He let himself in. He was sitting right on my sofa when I came home from across the street.”
“A man?”
“A man. He was asking questions: Where were you? When had I last heard from you? I said, ‘Who the hell are you? Get out of here or I’ll call the cops.’ He just smiled at me. He had a real ugly smile.”
“What did he look like? Small guy, black hair, scar on his face?”
“That’s the one. You know him?”
“What else did he say?”
“He said that you’d been bad. He kept asking me if you’d told me. ‘Told me what?’ I asked him. But he just kept saying, ‘Did he tell you? Did he tell you what he’d done?’ I told him I
didn’t know what he was talking about, that I wasn’t answering his questions. I told him to get the hell out before I called security. I think he was just trying to scare me.”
“Or me.”
“Thomson, he’s behind it, isn’t it? This whole video thing?”
Relieved, Chris nodded. He felt like crying, like someone had died or been born.
“Son, are you in trouble?”
Chris stood up too, felt himself drawing to his full, new height. The pool gurgled gently, and somewhere in the gated complex a car alarm went off then stopped. Chris stared into the red-rimmed eyes of Thomson Holmes’s Dad then, finally, pulled him into a hug.
“I got it all under control, Dad.”
When it was over, the old man kissed him on the cheek with trembling lips. There was a smell — egg and suntan lotion and sweat all mixed together. It wasn’t a bad smell.
Script 22
EXT. THE JEWISH GHETTO — DUSK
THE LOST EXPERT stands outside the rabbi’s small house. In his arms, he holds SARAH, lifeless yet beautiful, long hair spilling over the Lost Expert’s muscled arms. The PEOPLE OF THE SHTETL, pale, dirty, gaunt, gather around him. A MAN begins to sing a song in Yiddish, the words reverberating with sadness.
SINGER
Veynt nit brider, veynt nit shvester.
Veynt nit muter nokh ayer kind.
PEOPLE OF THE SHTETL
(joining in)
Az es falt, falt der bester:Der vos hot undz getray gedint.
ESTHER and the RABBI hurry down the street, followed by the waddling BEADLE, somehow still implausibly well fed. They push through the
small crowd, and a hush falls amongst the Jews of the shtetl. The beadle and Esther begin to wrap Sarah in a white sheet. The sky darkens, and thunder booms in the distance. It starts to rain. The rabbi, his face ashen, suddenly holds his arms above his head and bursts out in prayer.
RABBI
Shma Yisreal, Adoinai, Elohenu,
Adonai Achad!
Thunder flashes above the head of the group, and rain mixed with hail hurtles down. The Jews shuffle off to find shelter where they can. Esther gently tugs at the Lost Expert, urging him to come inside. The Lost Expert takes the white-wrapped body from the beadle. He cradles Sarah to his chest. The rain falls, relentless, the white sheet turning translucent, revealing the surprised face of his dead wife.
EXT. THE JEWISH CEMETERY — MORNING
THE LOST EXPERT stands in front of a plain pine coffin. Beside the coffin, the GRAVEDIGGERS prepare the hole. Behind the Lost Expert are the PEOPLE OF THE SHTETL, shivering and starving, revealed in the bright sunshine. The RABBI prays silently as the gravediggers finish digging and plant their shovels in the newly upturned dirt.
RABBI
Bring me your hungry and your wretched. I shall not turn them away. So it is written. Here is our friend’s wife, the wife of a man of righteous truth. We shall not turn him away. Though we are hungry, though we are lost, we will not turn him away. Not on this earth, nor in the world to come. The tzaddiks have written that the greatest charity is done in hiding, without anyone knowing. We are all in hiding now — but we will not turn away from who we are, from who we must be.
The rabbi sweeps his hand to indicate the wall in progress behind him, a foreboding half-completed structure of concrete and barbed wire. Behind it are several construction vehicles guarded by men wearing dark sunglasses and fatigues. They patrol back and forth, shotguns against their chests, watching the gathering suspiciously.
RABBI (CONT’D)
But let us not hide our hearts. Let us be open and true, let us revel in Hashem, in his love for us, in the love of this man, this ger toshav, and his beloved Sarah. Are we loved? We are. We shall be. If we die, then we die in love.
Abruptly, the rabbi turns to the coffin. The gravediggers begin to lower the coffin into the hole.
RABBI (CONT’D)
Yitkadel ve yitkadadash …
PEOPLE OF THE SHTETL
Yitkadel ve yitkadash …
A truck rumbles to life, and work on the wall recommences. The Lost Expert, at the lip of the grave, stands next to the rabbi and watches as one by one the Jews of the shtetl take turns slowly shovelling dirt over the plain coffin.
Section 25
THE THERAPIST’S OFFICE WAS bright and angular — like an Apple store. Therapy for the stars. Chris thought of Dr. Wong’s office, the giant, expansive painting that hung over his burnished, heavy maple desk. It had been rented, he recalled, from the Art Gallery of Ontario. The detail bothered him — the memory, its realness.
“Can I tell you something?”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
“You can’t ever tell anybody, right?”
“It will be completely confidential. Unless you’re planning on hurting yourself.”
“No, it’s nothing like that. It’s something that happened when I was a kid.”
“How old were you?”
“Twelve. I think. Maybe eleven.”
“Go on.” The therapist — a small, precise, monochromatically dressed figure of indeterminate age and gender — exuded an indifference Chris found oddly calming.
“We used to spend our summers up north. It was an unpopulated, wild area. There wasn’t a phone or electricity or anything like that. It was me, my best friend K, and his uncle. I’ll call him Uncle Bobby, okay?”
“Okay.”
“We stayed in a cabin, more like a shack, I guess. It had barely any furniture, no kitchen, no running water, no electricity. It was practically falling down. Uncle Bobby lived there full-time. At least, I always thought he did, but now I don’t know. He couldn’t have lived there in the winter. He’d have frozen to death. Maybe he did. I don’t know. He was K’s mother’s brother. But I don’t think she’d ever actually been up there. I never saw her there, anyway. They sent us up there by bus. So I don’t know if she knew …”
“Knew what?”
“How run down it was. What it was really like.”
“Please continue.”
“Anyway, our parents sent us up there for most of the summer. It was just the three of us. We hardly ever saw anyone else. The whole area was just woods and bog and swamp and small lakes. It was mostly Crown land that was wet and boggy and in the middle of nowhere so nobody cared about it.”
“Crown land? What’s that?”
Shit, Chris thought. It was getting harder and harder to remember that his childhood memories did not belong to the person he was supposed to be.
“Uh, yeah, I mean state land. Nobody owns it. K and I spent our days wandering around, building things out of scavenged timber, following bear prints, looking for snakes under rocks. Sometimes we snuck up on the cabin. We’d spy on Uncle Bobby, who never really did much but sit around in his underwear smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and sometimes chopping wood. It was buggy as hell, but he didn’t care.
“Anyway, that’s how our days went. We developed all these patterns and rituals, things we did over and over again. Some of it was pretty weird. Uncle Bobby didn’t notice. We mostly stayed out of his way. But sometimes he would get all paranoid and accuse us of stealing his stuff. He’d whip empty beer bottles at our heads as we ran away, and they’d just barely miss us. He’d dump all our stuff out of our packs and make us strip down to our underwear, and then he’d talk about what a pair of skinny little faggots we were.”
“That’s what he said? That you were ‘skinny little faggots’?”
“Yeah. He was pretty crazy, I guess. It was just the three of us out there, the whole summer.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“So this one time, me and K, we were at one of our spots where we liked to hang out: a long rock ledge on the edge of a huge swamp. It was really beautiful, really quiet there. It was one of my favourite places to go. There were frogs everywhere and these big boulders that you could sit on and stare out over the water. There were always bubbles coming up through the dark grasses and different creatures suddenly appearing and disappearing. You could watch the water for hours. We built a kind of lean-to against the rocks, a shelter that we would go in, and we had some candles in there and mosquito coils and comic books and stuff, you know, we were just kids.
“This time it was a cooler day, so we’d built a little fire and we were heating up something to eat. Probably beans, we ate a lot of cans of baked beans. And there was the smell of the woodsmoke, and the sunshine through the trees was all dappled on the rocks, and we suddenly saw a real big water snake swimming in the bog. K was really into snakes at that time, so were both watching this big black water snake swim along the rocky bank, and that’s when it happened.”
Chris closed his eyes.
“Please go on.”
Chris could not.
“Thomson, if you’re not comfortable going on, you don’t have to.”
“No, I — I’m okay.”
“Take your time.”
“That’s when the shooting started. Bang bang bang. The air was all stirred up around us, dirt and smoke and bits of rock. And there were shots in the water too, the water exploding and splashing — erupting, kind of.
“At first we didn’t really react, we didn’t know what was going on. There were bullets whizzing by us, and shrapnel from the big rocks. I got cut pretty bad on my leg, but I didn’t notice.
“And then Uncle Bobby started moaning really loud: ‘Boys, boys. You’ve gone too far this time, boys.’ He really sounded crazy, completely out of his head. So then K was like, ‘Holy fucking shit, he’s shooting at us!’ And we both started running. We ran along the rocks, but there was no cover. The bullets were whizzing along the waterline. But no matter how fast we ran, Uncle Bobby kept shooting at us. It was so loud. We were both screaming. I could hear K yelling, ‘Uncle Bobby, stop it, stop it! Stop it, Uncle Bobby! You’re gonna kill us!’ I started yelling too, ‘Uncle Bobby, stop it!’ Like we were trying to snap him out of it, but it wasn’t working. We kept running, and the bullets kept coming, and so did that horrible moaning: ‘Booooooys! Boooooooooys! Too far! Boooooooooys!’
“We came out of the woods at this big rocky cliff that ended in a steep drop into the bog. The shooting stopped. It was quiet. We were thinking we’d lost him or he’d given up and it was all over. We were trying to be all quiet and not breathe too loud, even though we’d been running like crazy and we couldn’t catch our breath. And we’re thinking it was over, he’d stopped, he’d snapped out of it. And then we saw branches rustling and bushes shaking. We froze. We couldn’t see him, but he was there, he was coming. The moaning got closer and closer, ‘Boys, boys, boooyyyysss.’ I look over at K. His eyes are closed. He’s practically crying. He starts whimpering, ‘No, Uncle Bobby, no …’ Then there’s a gunshot. I grab K and I pull him to the edge. One of us yells ‘Jump!’ but neither of us does it. It’s maybe fifteen feet down into the bog covered in lily pads with lots of big rocks pushing out of it. Uncle Bobby keeps coming, and there are more loud cracks, and I realize he’s not shooting at us, it’s just sticks breaking under his big, heavy boots. Finally, there’s Uncle Bobby, standing right behind us, close now, I can hear him breathing, I can smell his animal smell. And he’s, like, right over us, and we’re just standing there with our backs to him and we’re holding hands and we have our eyes closed and K is crying now, sobbing, and I’m, like, just standing there, figuring that was it, we were going to die.
“Then Uncle Bobby says, ‘Look at you two pussies. That one’s even pissed himself.’ And I looked down, and I could see the stain on my jeans, and then I felt it. ‘What a bunch of pussies.’ He kept saying that. And then he turned and marched back into the woods.”
“That must have been horrible to experience.”
“It was. But I haven’t thought about it. Not in a long time.”
“Why do you think it’s coming up now?”
“I stayed best friends with K. I was best friends with him for fourteen more years after that. We never talked about it. Never even once.”
“You never talked about it?”
“I guess we were ashamed.”
“What did you have to be ashamed of?”
“The way we acted, I guess. Like scaredy-cats. ‘Pussies.’”
“But he had a gun. He was shooting at you. And you were just children.”
“Yeah, but — we didn’t even try.”
“Try to what?”
“Fight back.”
“How could you have?”
“And that’s why.”
“Why what?”
“Why we couldn’t ever talk about it. As long as we were friends, we didn’t want to talk about it. It was like, if we didn’t talk about it, we didn’t have to think about it. I was so scared I actually pissed myself. I think there are a lot of things like that: if you don’t talk about them, it’s like you can pretend that they never happened.”
“But it did happen.”
Chris nodded.
“Yeah. It did.”
“And how does talking about it now make you feel?”
Chris made a pained face. “It’s like — I’m still that loser kid, all over again.”
“And how does that kid feel?”
“Bad, Doctor.”
“Bad?”
“Like he wants to …”
“He wants to what, Thomson?”
Chris doesn’t answer.
“Thomson, what does he want to do?”
Chris shrugged.
“Disappear.”
Script 23
INT. THE LOST EXPERT’S INTERIOR OFFICE – AFTERNOON (one year later)
