He wiped my mouth, my nose with his hand, pulled me close to him and kissed my eyes, wiped away the tears and whispered, the tears heavy in his voice, 'Please, go on living.'
***
So many times in my life spent drowning. The rain crashed through the broken sundown, blinding, the walls crumbled, and I yearned, my heart bursting, the past bleeding from me, flesh on flesh like flowers drifting downstream. I was in a dream, all my life, a nightmare I couldn't wake from, flooding my lungs and veins, then electric bright fireworks flashed and the nightmare turned to ecstatic visions, the sky from grey to blue because of a first kiss, the days with silent heartache but fiery unfettered love, the memories I mourn now like Gorecki's singer swept up in her sorrow and loneliness, and the thought came, the beauty of a new dawn, so I promised to keep it sacred, and I pray my way through the rain, the flood, the drowning gasped breaths waiting for those happy days promised me in my youth, the sunrise without remorse.
***
How long until I see you, till the sun comes shining through? Back when we were so new, so young and old, and you promised, and I promised, I'll never forget you.
***
I spent the days at the library listening to Gorecki but mostly rewatching Sebastian's films. Even when they ended I watched them. Anytime my eyes closed I saw Genevieve painting or running through claustrophobic hallways searching for a woman who may not have ever existed. Searching for herself. I watched them so many times that I began to understand them. In The Hand of God she wasn't searching for the man's wife but for herself. All the running around, the hallways and staircases that went in all directions, montaged to a dizzying effect always led back to her, a slow pan and long take of her doing a simple action. Making food, folding laundry, cleaning her gun, these were at the center of the film. The noir, the detective mystery was a means of discovering the innerlife, the woman behind the door, the woman through that final pane of glass. I even began to know or at least imagined that I knew what she said in her silent dialogues with other characters.
'All things come and go but we know we won't break.'
'The Devil's got a grip on me.'
She ran from and after the mystery, the homme fatale, only to watch him die and she was left alone, the way she began. She knows she won't break though the Devil has her, despite what comes and goes.
Obsessed. The only way to describe me in those days, the only way to define my identity was through those films. The film of Genevieve painting was about life, Songs for the Dead was about death, and The Hand of God was about everything in between, about identity and memory, but they were all about isolation. And it was about me, it seemed. I felt whole while watching them, no longer alone, despite the subject matter.
The nice things about libraries is that they have computers. Anything can be discovered on the internet, a quick Google search and millions of bits of information appear. When the films became too much for me, too much for me to not know more, to not understand everything about Sebastian Falke, I turned to the internet.
He made ten short films, many of which only existed in databases. Five of them were lost completely. The other ones existed but there was no information about where or who had them. He had a single feature length film, which, like all of his shorts, were commercial and critical failures. His feature was called Who Do You Run To? and told the story of a man stuck in a hole. At eighty seven minutes it was his longest work and was also his last completed work. In a way I knew it was the one that mattered most to him, the one that carried the imprint of his soul. But the reviews were devastating. 'Trite,' 'idiotic,' 'incomprehensible,' 'the longest hour and a half of my life.' Not a single positive reaction to the film and it, too, was said to be lost. Sometimes movies are so bad that they're good but even this was deemed too worthless for that. The film was released twenty years before I did my search when Sebastian was thirty seven.
Interviews were available online but only a few. He grew up in Ohio in a small town to normal parents. An average childhood by his own account. His family moved to California when he was fourteen and he finished high school there. His first film was the one with Genevieve. He made it when he was eighteen. It got him a lot of attention, both positive and negative, in the art community. Some said it wasn't a film, some applauded his brave use of angle and movement, his finely tuned eye. He had an affair with Genevieve that lasted ten years until her death at the age of forty eight. In those ten years he completed all but one of his shorts, Songs for the Dead. They had a torrid love affair which often got them more attention than their work. They fought often and publicly. Numerous affairs, shattered lovers, all that. They were a pair of rebellious artists living on the fringe of the fringe, avant gardists without a center. His films continued to be equally mocked and praised. Mocked for their incomprehensibility, their ignorance of dialogue and language to convey story. Praised for their boldness, the cinematography, their vivid aesthetic, and Genevieve's acting. Outside of the fringe artists, though, there was no attention and the films disappeared as if they never existed, showing up at a film festival here or there for a single showing. There had been no showing since before I was born, though.
After Genevieve died, Sebastian didn't make a film for ten years. It's a lost part of his life but he popped up occasionally across the country to start a fight, show one of his old films, or ruin a marriage. He grew fat in those days and appeared dishevelled and confused. His life had fallen apart without her. And then, one day, five years after his last appearance on the radar, he débuted a new film, Songs for the Dead. It had Genevieve's last appearance on film and, knowing this context, allowed me to understand the death, the rebirth better. He was booed out of the theatre and the critics hated him unanimously. Backhanded compliments explained his strong aesthetic but bemoaned his continued inability to write and direct. And then, shortly after, his first and only feature appeared at Cannes, again to boos and cries of outrage.
The reviews never hinted at the story because they insisted that there was none, that it was a series of images, of long drawn out takes of a man living in a hole.
He was alone. I knew it then. The isolation I had seen in his films had only grown, increased. After the failed film, he vanished completely and many thought he died. A few reports said he lived in northern California in squalor. For twenty years he had been alone. For ten years before that he had lived in a hole. For ten years before that he lived in a nightmare affair that destroyed him and buried him alive with nothing but his memories of a life that the world saw as worthless.
The privacy for people that no one cares about is much lower than a celebrity's. It didn't take long to find Sebastian's phone number and then his address. I could be at his house in two hours.
***
That night I begged until I had money for a bus, did a lot of running, a lot of hiding, after a while it became habit, those weeks on the streets. Dodging rapists and cops, begging, stealing, sleeping in unlocked cars, under locked ones, bridges, find a woman, like I said, safer that way. If you're lucky you can get money quick. This wasn't one of those times but I got there. I slept at the shelter or tried to, too excited to sleep, the reels of film playing over and over, filling me. For the first time in my life I didn't feel alone, clutching those films in my head, savoring every frame. In the morning I showered with soap and stole some clothes. They didn't fit, baggy jeans and a too tight top, but I thought it was kind of sexy. I got one of the volunteers to cut my hair off my neck. She did an all right job.
I got to the station early, bought my ticket, begged for a sandwich, didn't get one, but someone left most of a muffin on a table. The guy was pissed when he got back to no muffin and no coffee but I didn't care. The bus was mostly empty so I curled up on my seat but still couldn't sleep. Just kept shaking and smiling holding onto my knees to make sure I stayed together, whole.
***
First I found him at a local coffeeshop but I said that already. Just sitting there looking like he step
ped out of his grave to drink coffee. Delicate, his movements, his face, his demeanor. At any moment he stood on this precipice, this cliff or edge or boundary, and if he crossed it he'd collapse, disintegrate into dust to be carried off by the wind into the ocean with the rest of the deadsouls. That first day I mostly watched him, followed him. He walked and walked but never went anywhere. His only stop the entire day was the coffeeshop but he walked for about two hours his head in the air, mind miles away, his gait slow but deliberate. His house mirrored him, barely together, on a tightrope ready to dismantle, its atoms and molecules dissipate and leave nothing left but a heap of dust.
My heart beat so loud I couldn't think and my throat was dry, clicking every time I swallowed. My body on fire, every single atom burning alive, ready to burst, I waited as long as I could without dying and knocked on his door, a hollow thud.
Nothing. I waited forever but no response so I knocked again and waited and knocked and waited but he never came. I wandered around his house. It was small, single story, and only four rooms, a perfect little square. The curtains drawn, no light went in, no sight went out.
Buried alive, living in a hole. The long grass infested by weeds broke the pavement of his walkway. He lived like a ghost already. Lost in the world of the living, hiding in shadows, dropping echoes as films, the dirty coffeecup. I sat on his stoop and waited, picking grass and throwing it in the air, covering ants with it and shoving blades down antholes.
The sun began to set and I had nowhere to go, no orientation, even. Following him got me lost, so lost I didn't remember even how I got there, so I kept knocking and then kicking and then yelling for him, screaming his name over and over, no longer caring that I had come there only to meet him, the desperation grabbed me by the stomach and pulled down through the earth threatening to bury me there outside his door.
'Who the fuck are you?' His voice growled, rasped, and slurred. Standing there, drunk, peering at me with one eye.
So taken by surprise I just stared at him, my mouth agape, my body frozen, but sweat all of a sudden covered me and my shirt stuck to me. I swallowed hard, 'Sebastian Falke?'
'What the fuck do you want?' He steadied himself on the door, his legs too used to the slur of the drunken world to stand with the sober.
Nothing was going right. The plan, I don’t know. He took me in his arms, kissed me, told me that he'd take care of me and love me. I was sixteen then, it seemed possible. Instead of a man I met a growling beast, a monster returned from the dead, woken from his infinite slumber. I knew he was in there, though. The man who made those films. He had to be.
I told him I wanted to talk about his films and he slammed the door.
He left me out there until it was dark, the breeze cold. I didn't scream or pound on his door, I just sat on his stoop crying until I thought the skin of my hands would prune. They didn't.
He opened the door without a word and when I turned he wasn't there. I waited for a few minutes but he didn't come back to the door so I went in. The house was a mess. Garbage and food and bottles everywhere. Everything stank of stale air and mold. Books rotted on shelves. The television was on but he wasn't watching it. I tiptoed through the house. I may have been on the streets for a few months at this time, only showering once, wearing the same clothes every day, but even I thought this place was filthy. I crept around but he wasn't there. At the far end was a small kitchen and across from that was a bathroom with a tub and sink and toilet. The only room left was behind the closed door attached to the main room beside the bathroom.
I sat on the couch watching television but he never came out. I heard him, though. Muttering, pacing, screaming in quick bursts that disappeared as if they hadn't existed.
Teeming with them. Ghosts. They lived here with him but he never knew. When he was drunk like he was that first day, though, a part of him felt it and that's who he talked to. He couldn't understand them but they came to him. I don't know why. I never talked to his ghosts. That's not the kind of things lovers do. Everyone's allowed some privacy.
On the couch I clung to my knees rocking back and forth without looking at the television. I stared at his wall until it went silent. I had come all this way, running from so much, and, now that I was there, what was I to do?
I cleaned. I filled bag after bag with the trash, the food, the bottles. All night, my first night with him, I cleaned and never even saw him. His bathroom had maybe never been cleaned but he had some bleach and a scrub. The kitchen was much the same. No vacuum cleaner but I didn't want to wake him and nothing was going to clean that carpet anyway. I opened the curtains which were really just sheets strung up over the windows and the first light of day poked through. Exhausted, I lied on the couch and watched the sun crawl across the floor.
***
I was woken by a prodding at my shoulder and a grumble, 'Who are you?' repeated until I woke up to see him poking me with his index finger
I sat up, brushed the hair out of my face, 'Alina.'
He leaned back and scratched himself, his eyes squinted as if not used to sunlight, though it was certainly already afternoon. 'What're you doing here?'
'You made some films a long time ago. I've been watching them, the ones I could find, and,' I watched his feet because I couldn't stand his small eyes, my hands clenched and damp on my knees, 'I wanted to meet you.'
I waited for his response, for him to throw me out or laugh in my face but he just stood there, his feet not moving. Raising my gaze, his face was in his hand, the other crossed his body holding himself.
'I watched your films, The Hand of God, Songs for the Dead, and one that didn't have a name about a woman painting. Watching them,' I stopped, caught my breath, 'all my life I've been waiting or running or trying to find the answer to some question no one ever asked me and then it all fit, everything came together, when I watched these. They're all I can think about and I've been watching them over and over and over for days. I, I had to meet you,' my voice trailing to a faint shiver.
He walked back into his room and I brought my knees up to rest my chin on, nothing going properly. After a few minutes he came back with a DVD and put it in and turned on the television. It was The Passion of Joan of Arc.
No words passed between us and I was careful not to touch him, to try to not exist. I recognised the name of the film from the library but I had never watched it.
It shocked me, hurt me. She was so beautiful, so sorrowful, and those eyes, the intensity blazing from them at every movement. Every tear reached out to me and I found my own tears to match. The quiver of her lip, the wide-eyed insanity. And then, her eyes faded, death was taking her one frame at a time, the same way death had been dogging me for so long that I could smell them everywhere, the ghosts, especially there. She faded and I crumbled with her. So invested was I that I forgot Sebastian beside me, forgot that I had travelled all this way to meet a man who didn't care who I was or what I wanted, forgot that I was just a girl, barely sixteen, on her own, alone, holding onto her knees to keep her very body together, to keep herself contained lest she fall apart and join the haunters. My heart failing, my vision blurred, I felt a hand on my neck, between my shoulders, I hadn't realized the way I sobbed, and then she awoke and so she was burnt for sins she didn't have, for her unwavering faith. Unfair, unjust, how life killed her before she had a chance to die, before she found what she looked for, the answer still beyond her, but, maybe, in death, burning.
My head fell to his lap and he stroked my hair and later I apologized for making his jeans wet but I didn't even care then who he was. There was too much in too short of a time, Gorecki, Falke, Dreyer. Each one splintering me apart but only Sebastian put me back together and his hands tried then, stroking my head and then holding me in his arms and then taking me to his room and lied beside me, sweetly, not trying to fuck me but just trying to keep me steady, keep me breathing, keep me together like I had been trying for so long and only just succeeding.
***
I didn't plan it like that but life can be perfect in ways. Accidents are better than the best laid plans. I think that's a saying, maybe, probably. It's something about timing. How it's no good to meet the right person at the wrong time or the wrong person at the right time. People discount how important timing and chance are. But, me, they're all I've ever been able to rely on and they're all that give me hope, that allowed me to survive. I look at my past, at all the lucky breaks, how certain things happened at just the right time or in such a way that they led me to a perfect conclusion. My whole life, really, led to him, Sebastian. Leaving home, running from so many things but heading west because of the ghosts, finding the library, Gorecki teaching me things I never knew but somehow always felt, that librarian caring too much, the films at the next library, and then, there I was, in bed with the man I had accidentally or unconsciously been running to my entire life.
It wasn't him that started it. He never even said a word to me, just held me, his hand on my stomach, my ass against his hips. I rolled and kissed him, kissed his neck, unzipped his pants, felt the heat before it was even in my hands, and I knew it was too big, he was too much but I knew he had to be, had to be too much for me or what was the point. So I dove in, took him, squirmed out of my pants, guided his hands to my breasts, to my vagina, let him feel how wet I was, taste it on his fingers, but I slowed him, made him take his time, my cries of anguish kept stopping him till I screamed to go. So deep, so far that I thought he'd come out the otherside, there couldn't be more and then there was and I dug into his back, tears in my eyes, but I wanted it, needed it, needed to be full of something, of not just the images and stories he created so long ago, but to be full of something tangible, that I could grab onto, hold onto with more than just my memories, so I took all of him, as much of him as there was, though I thought it would kill me, my vision blacking at the edges, my heart racing, my breath shuttering, and I came and came and came and there was always more.