[Reader discretion advised: This story contains mature themes, explicit language and moments of raw introspection that some may find unsettling. And it also contains a spoiler for Star Wars: Episode 4 — A New Hope, in case you have not seen that movie yet. If you would like to invest in her film, or otherwise contact Kalyee about it, comment below or email her at KalyeeSrithnam@gmail.com.]

I have not seen you for a while, you know, my intermittent old friend. I wonder where you are. I wonder whether I miss you. Maybe I am finally writing my movie, and sending it to you, because I am afraid you are gone, and I hope that you will reply and prove me wrong. Or maybe because I am happy you might be gone, and I want to prove that it is true, that you are really gone for good. 

You will have a cameo in my movie, as you will see if you continue reading, and maybe looking for your cameo is what will keep you reading. Your ego, your narcissism. But it will just be a cameo, like the way you exist in my life, those sudden cameos of yours, like Bob Hope wandering onto “Carson,” interrupting everything. 

(That’s an analogy you would understand. I don’t understand it. I don’t know who or what “Carson” is or was, because I am too young and beautiful to know such a thing. But when I googled “annoying cameo by an asshole,” this is what came up, “Bob Hope wandering onto Carson.”) 

Since the movie is about me, you will have only a cameo, but still your presence will hang over everything, like a shadow. Or like the sun. I can’t decide whether, in my life, you are like a shadow or like the sun.

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FOR THE FIRST SCENE OF MY MOVIE, picture me in a coffee place, on a busy street corner. The kind of place you really hate. I know you pretty well by now, old friend, and I know what you hate. I’m not so sure what you like, though. But I know what you hate. 

You would hate this coffee place, definitely: warm, earthy tones, shelves of potted plants beside shitty old books that no one will ever read, art from local artists. The hum of conversation blends with jazz that plays in the background. A large bay window lets sunlight stream in, a welcoming and tranquil “atmosphere.” That kind of fucking place. People relax, catch up with friends, watch the world go by, maybe sit by themselves, each behind a fucking laptop, pretending to work on something. Creative types, students, professionals, excellent coffee, laid-back “vibe.” The baristas know some of their customers by name, which pisses off the rest of us. 

I’m in the coffee place, but I’m just at the periphery of the scene, the camera catches me after just a few seconds, older than I am now, twelve years older than I am now, in my mid-thirties. 

I look the way I hope I will really look in twelve years. Even more radiant and confident than I look now. (LMFAO.) My skin has a healthy glow from all the vegan food and self-care than I imagine I will start indulging in very soon, and that I imagine I will continue indulging in consistently for the next twelve years, and from the near-complete absence of all the booze that I swear I will very soon stop drinking. 

My eyes are the same deep brown but with a hint of “wisdom and experience.” My hair is a little longer, in a loose wavy style, and I’m probably having some fun with some different colors. And of course, I have a few laugh lines around my eyes, which only add to my charm and likability. Because I’m charming and likable. Or, at least, in the movie I will be represented as charming and likable. When we pitch the movie to execs, we’ll describe me in the pitch as “Kalyee, a charming and likable young woman,” and then after they read the pitch, the movie execs will say, Hmmm. I LIKE that character! Let’s make the movie.

I say it this way and then add LMFAO, but I’m not really LMFAO, that’s faux modesty, because this is the way I really picture myself in twelve years. I look like a woman who has never given birth, never gone through the pain of childbirth and the agony of having a spawn running around. There’ll be a certain relief in my eyes from not being a mom. I’ve got nothing against moms, I would love to add here, except that you know I hate moms, and I won’t be one.

This whole first-scene setup is a little complicated, so I want to be sure that you see what I’m getting at, the whole setup of this ambiguous scene.

In this coffee place, I’m with some guy, someone I’ve been romantically involved with for some time, a few years, not many years. Maybe less than a year. The sheen is off, I’m bored, but I still have some hope, or at least I did have some hope till just moments ago. You can see that by the way I am looking at him, there was some hope, but now there is suddenly much less hope. In this scene, as I describe it to you, I’ll call him “Chet,” even though his name will never be mentioned in the film. Chet serves a kind of a cinematic function, but he’s not exactly a person. 

I’m wearing a flowy ankle-length dress in a soft, earthy tone, a cardigan and some stylish, low-heeled boots. I’m wearing minimal makeup. I’m wearing a delicate gold necklace and a few bracelets on my wrist. It’s all elegant but comfortable. Who am I wearing it for? For this guy, Chet? Or someone else, someone who might see me? Anyway, it’s a pretty nice necklace, and tbh I’m wearing it for no reason at all. You know that I don’t really have a problem with money. You know why, but it’s not important to talk about now. 

My boyfriend, Chet, goes up to the counter to buy our coffee. At the counter, he is talking to a woman, someone, a woman he doesn’t really know, but you can see there are sparks. I can see there are sparks. I don’t care, really. Let him spark. Honestly, I’m over it, I’m over Chet and the whole Chet thing, you can see this on my face. My face says, Oh, sure. Whatever. Spark with another woman. Whatever.

I’m waiting for my coffee, talking to another guy. His name is Alexéin, although you don’t know it yet. Tousled brown hair, five o’clock shadow, piercing blue eyes that seem to sparkle with creativity and intelligence, even though that’s deceptive, it just gives us, the movie audience, an excuse to love him. Well-worn denim jacket, buttoned t-shirt, dark-wash jeans, a seemingly nonchalant aura, but it all makes us suspicious, don’t you see? He’s got that whole I’m deep, but not really vibe going on. God, I hope that’s what he’s really like! you think, but of course he isn’t. Still, we (the movie audience) will love him, before we know it. Maybe we’re starting to love him already. Maybe we love the lie already. 

The camera angle shifts, and now you can see me through a window of the coffee place, so you can see me talking but you can’t hear what I’m saying. Probably, it seems like there is some history there, some history between me and the guy, Alexéin. I’m ignoring Chet, I’m focusing on Alexéin. I’m full of kind of this low-level regret, it’s in my eyes. Regret, but low-level. 

Get it? I’m at the coffee place with Chet, my boyfriend whom I do not love or care about at all, and there is another guy there, Alexéin, who seems to stir up some kind of feelings, good or bad, who knows? You cannot hear what I am saying, and so you don’t really know. 

Then, from a distance, maybe an overhead crane shot, you see me and Chet leave the coffee shop. Maybe it’s a crane shot, maybe it’s a drone shot. I think drone shots are overused these days. They used to be cool, but I would prefer a crane shot. But either way, crane shot or drone shot, Chet and I leave the coffee place. 

Chet and I, we’re both holding coffee. Fuck, I hate this. Leaving a coffee place, holding a stupid cup of coffee with that drippy plastic lid that is going to kill us when it disintegrates in a landfill, that stupid cardboard coffee sleeve that doesn’t even keep the coffee from burning your fingers, not if the coffee is black, which is how everyone should drink coffee, if the coffee is any good at all.

The nonchalant guy, Alexéin, is nowhere to be seen. I can barely look at my boyfriend, Chet. I’m visibly shaken, but low-key. Chet is such a clueless idiot, he doesn’t even notice that I am shaken, and that something has just changed between him and me, that my life with Chet, which was ending gradually, has now ended all of a sudden. 

If you have the budget, maybe the camera zooms up into the sky, past the Earth’s atmosphere, and we see the stars aligned the way they would be aligned exactly eleven years into the future, because some people think everything is written in the stars. An astronomer or an astrologer would be able to tell exactly when this scene takes place, if we do it right. 

If you don’t have the money for these special effects, then we will feel that they are there, the stars aligned just-so outside the Earth’s atmosphere, we will feel them, like the sprawling prison camp in Nagisa Oshima’s Furyo, which he built but never filmed, and which you can feel there in the film, even though you cannot see it. 

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THEN I WAKE UP, it’s just a smash cut mid-crane, not even a dissolve, an abrupt cut from the cosmic grandeur and skyward motion into a shot of me waking up, which will be a jarring contrast. Maybe there was even some soundtrack music playing in the first scene, that stupid jazz in the coffee shop got louder till it was soundtrack music, and it got obnoxiously loud because it was such fucking stupid coffee shop inoffensive jazz, and now it just ends suddenly. I’m in bed and I wake up gasping, next to a gorgeous naked guy. 

I look younger than I did in the first scene, I look the way I really do now, or anyway last year when these events really took place. You know how I look, but I’ve described it in the screenplay for people who do not know me the way you do, my black bangs, my sometimes-skinny sometimes less-skinny body, my small tits. I wear clothes pretty well when I feel like it, but other times I look like shit. 

In the screenplay, I write, “Naked, she is vulnerability and strength.” Is that stupid? I’m placing a vision in their heads, these movie execs, whoever they are. If they want someone strong, I’m their girl. If they want someone vulnerable, I’m their girl. If they want someone naked, then there it is. Whatever they are looking for, that’s what I can give them. 

And also this: “Kalyee is a likeable, young, pretty woman….” 

“Likeable” is apparently the most important word in the whole script. “Pretty” is the second most important word in the script, which is why I put it in there, even though I am not pretty, I am just someone who pretends to be pretty sometimes and can sometimes be convincing at it. 

And the word “young” rounds out the top three. 

The naked guy who is in my bed when I wake up gasping from a nightmare is not my boyfriend from the coffee place, and he’s not the other guy in the coffee place. He’s someone completely different. His name is Elias, this is actually his real name IRL, and he’s not really a character in the movie. But he will serve a theosophical purpose throughout, as well as being eye-candy. So he’s important and not important at the same time, two things at once, like wave-particle duality. 

I’m gasping for air. 

A title on the screen now reads, Last year.

So you think, when you see this, that I’ve just had a dream about a coffee shop, and about these two other guys, whoever they are, and maybe about being older, if you’re super-observant and noticed the laugh lines around my lovely eyes in the first scene. 

You think it’s a dream, it’s fakery. Only later, only at the very end of the movie, do you realize that this opening scene is a “flash-forward” to something that will happen twelve years in the future, at the very end of the movie. 

What do I actually dream, which makes me wake up gasping? 

Maybe something that doesn’t matter. Some scary dream, chased by a giant spider, something I won’t remember even later that morning when I have my morning coffee with Elias, the gorgeous naked guy. 

Or maybe I didn’t dream anything at all. 

Maybe I woke up because I suddenly realized that nobody loves me. Not this guy in my bed, not anyone. And that I will die unloved. It’s bleak, if things continue as they have been. This stupid life of buying coffee, with that plastic sip-top lid. 

I won’t live forever, after all. When I wake up gasping, I can see a quarter of a century speeding towards me on the highway, a few seconds from a head-on collision. I won’t live forever. It has been almost very nearly close to a quarter of a century, and no one has ever really loved me, not fully. Soon, if you stay with this story, someone will kind of love me, but to love me, he will have to think I am someone else, not me at all. He will love me only because he thinks I am someone else. 

No one who knows me can love me. 

Not even you. You love me because you think I am something special, because you cannot see that I am just a slob. When I smile, you see the smile. When I wear nice clothes and look nice, you see the clothes. You don’t look past the appearance and my surface style to see that I am a lout and a sluggard, in my heart. 

So you love me, but you don’t love me. 

And maybe you, even you, are gone forever.

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I’VE BEEN MEANING TO WRITE YOU for the last week, because the last time we saw each other, or the time before that, you said you would fund a low-budget film for me to star in, if I could just come up with an idea. I think you’d had one too many when you made that offer — I think this, because you’ve always had one too many, you fucking piece of shit wino — but some of the best ideas are drunk ideas, and you didn’t take it back the next day, so I think you meant it. 

You have enough money to fund a little low-budget movie for me to star in, even if it doesn’t make any profit, even if it never gets distribution, it’ll still be something that you can watch and that will help you remember me years from now, after everyone has stopped mourning my tragic early death, and only you still think about me. 

Because this story just happened to me, the film is set in the present day, in the city where I live, but I’d like to muddy that for the film, blot out modern technology and blur identifiable landmarks. It will still look like “last year” when audiences watch it today, but it will not date as the years pass. It will always take place “last year.” Anyone who watches it will think it’s happening one year before whenever they happen to watch it. Like some novels, it takes place just a little while before today, whenever “today” happens to be. 

I’m halfway through writing the screenplay, but I wanted to get all my thoughts down on paper and just send them off to you, because after all you are the one funding it, because you promised.

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THIS DOCUMENT is a note to you, but it is also what a “producer” would call a “treatment.” I add here unnecessarily that a common friend of ours once wrote, in his novel, “I am unsure why someone who does nothing all day but yell at people on the telephone — a bastard who does not grow fruits or vegetables, and does not actually make anything — has the brass balls to call himself a ‘producer.’ ” And whenever I think about my “treatment,” I think about massages and facials, and there’s someplace I’d rather be. 

I remember that when you made the offer to fund a film in which I would star, you said, joking (I think), that you would double the budget if I would write myself a nude scene. Instead, I have written myself four nude scenes, and so I would expect that you will duly quadruple the budget. It’s basic mathematics. 

In my actual life, I am naked with some frequency. I shower, I change my clothes. I fuck, every once in a while, less and less as life goes on and as I get jaded and less romantic and more hopeless. 

But still, every once in a while. Like, yesterday. I’ll tell you about it. A rabbi. Kind of an ex-rabbi, since he renounced his religion but, still, he has the degree and the ordination, so I contend that yesterday I fucked a rabbi. I mean, I’m not happy that he renounced Judaism, because there are a couple of things I like about that religion. For example, they say If not now, when? which makes some sense. And their Torah says, “And also much cattle?” which is pretty profound. Like, this, this, this and this, and also much cattle. There is always something more to regret whenever you make the wrong decision and fuck up, it never ever ends. I’m upset about all the shit you’d expect me to be upset about. And also, geez, fuck, did you hear about the mishigas with the fucking cattle? That too! Also, mishigas is my second-favorite word, after kerfuffle. So that’s another thing I like about Judaism, and even though he renounced Judaism, he’s still got a bit of mishigas in him, the rabbi sleeping in my bed right now. 

So, still, I fuck from time to time. And I shower. I change my clothes. I look at myself in the mirror. 

So I am naked every single day, multiple times a day, really almost constantly naked. Like everyone. Like you, like Cèléste. 

But in my movie, I will be naked only four times. This will seem like a lot of nudity to moviegoers or streamers, but it is actually not much at all, compared to real life. 

I hope this movie will make you some money, and that we will have a chance to work together on it.

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HOW DOES THAT OPENING SCENE STRIKE YOU? This is what I am going for: you think you’re seeing one thing, and in fact you’re seeing something else, but it takes you a long time to realize it. Maybe not till you see my movie a second time. So it’s a movie about how we walk around thinking we see something, but in fact we’re really seeing something else. Agnes Varda called this “la rupture,” Stanley Kubrick called it “visual deception,” and Robert Bresson called it “le trompe-l’œil.” They were talking about movies. But it happens in life, too. 

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AFTER I WAKE UP GASPING, Elias, the naked guy in my bed, says, “Did you have a nightmare?” and I say, “Sometimes I realize the enormity of an eternity of oblivion, at two in the morning.” I look sorry that I woke him, but I don’t say sorry that I woke you.

Then there’s a flashback to the night before. A subtitle says, Last Night. 

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IN THIS FLASHBACK, we’re in the bedroom, that awkward moment when we’ve just come back from wherever we were, me and that guy, Elias. This is the only time in the whole movie that Elias has clothes on. He looks at this screen on my desk and this big machine, and he says, “What’s this?” I tell him it’s a vintage TRS-80, and he asks what that is for, and I say, “I use it as a telephone. Like, the year that the TRS-80 came out, this was what everyone thought the future would look like, this is what our phones would be like in the future, so I can pretend I’m living in the future.” He doesn’t really know what to say to that — he should say, “Ah, yeah, retrofuturism,” but he doesn’t. So instead, just to fill the silence, he kisses me, which is pretty awkward, and we hear a car horn out on the street. I slowly unbutton his shirt, feeling the warmth of his skin beneath my fingers. Each button undone is like a small revelation, not to me, really, but to the movie audience. His breath quickens as I push the shirt off his shoulders, letting it fall to the floor. I trace the lines of his chest with my fingertips. Unbuckle his belt, take off his pants. Palpable intimacy, anticipation, hesitation, hesitant anticipation, anticipatory hesitation. I take off his underpants, and he’s now standing completely naked in front of me, but more importantly, he’s now standing completely naked in front of you, in front of everyone who will ever watch this movie from now until the sun engulfs the Earth, vulnerable and exposed, confident. You (the movie audience) see his dick and everything, not even in shadows, right out there, but still wholesome, because he’s wholesome, Elias is wholesome. I remain clothed, the fabric of my dress rustles against my skin, a barrier between us that intensifies the connection, like it conducts electricity, like if my clothes were woven out of silver threads (because silver threads conduct electricity). Our lips, my hands, his bare skin and my clothed body, we move together. The soundtrack music is “Breathe” by Télépopmusik. 

We kind of sink under the camera frame, or the camera rises up and over our heads, and then when the song starts getting poppier — I don’t know if you know the song, if you know that part of the song, when the song starts getting poppier — that’s when the camera flies out the window into the night cityscape alive with shimmering lights as the music swells. The frame lingers on the lights, then a subtle L-cut with visual dissolve into the soft glow of the morning kitchen. The music continues faintly, bridging the transition, then fades. He and I are sitting at a little table in the kitchen, drinking coffee and eating toast. There’s a bottle of instant coffee on the table. 

I have a pretty big kitchen. Light from the window is flowing in. It looks really cool, really cinematic. 

I’m wearing a robe, or I’m dressed for the day, and he’s naked. We get our first real direct sunlight look at him now, he’s really a catch, and a few years younger than me. 

I’m not paying any attention to him, I’m flipping through a magazine or notebook. I still read magazines now, I still write in notebooks, this is all accurate. Maybe we don’t want to show a magazine, who knows how long they’ll still be around? 

He picks up the jar of instant coffee and puts it back into the cupboard, and we really get a good look at his body when he turns around and comes back to the table and sits down. The instant coffee is Taster’s Choice, so it’s a reference to all those romantic TV ads for Taster’s Choice from the ‘80s that you can watch on YouTube, this detail tells the viewers that everything about me and this guy is a corny piece of shit that will last only thirty seconds (like those Taster’s Choice ads), but still kind of beautiful, like those Taster’s Choice ads. 

It’s important that he’s naked in this scene and that the movie audience sees everything, because if this movie is going to have female nudity, then it should also have male nudity. Also, this is the way it really happened in real life, he really got up to put away the coffee, and I think he did it to show off. 

The camera should look at him longingly and sadly, the way I did, sad that this would end soon, like a romantic Taster’s Choice commercial. 

And another thing: he looks really wholesome. This isn’t smutty or porny, it’s cute and wholesome. 

He says, “I’ll call you later today?” like a question and a statement all in one, and I don’t look at him and I reply, “Not really,” even though that’s not exactly an appropriate reply, dialectically. It’s not “responsive,” it will ring oddly. 

So he says he’ll call me later in the week and I say no way because I’m getting a pedicure later in the week. 

So he smiles a little sadly and asks quietly if I want to tell him something, and I look at him and I’m kind of coy and humorous, and I say that it’s not him it’s me, just like I’m saying something clichéd to leaven the moment. 

He laughs, this is really ok with him, and he says, “Anything else,” like a statement, not a question, and I say, “I like you as a friend,” still looking in his eyes, now joking around. 

I’m not really worried about it, because I don’t think I mean all that fucking much to him, I don’t think this will really bother him all that much, ten minutes from now. 

I’ve told him not to call me, and then I’ve told him that I like him as a friend, which he finds logically inconsistent, so he says quietly, “Your friends can’t call you?”

 “I like you as a friend,” I say. “You’re not actually a friend. I like you as though you were a friend, which you aren’t. If you were a friend, this is how I would feel and think about you. You would be, to me, someone I’m not going to sleep with again. Because of, you know, because of me, not you. And because if you were a friend, which you’re not, I wouldn’t want to ruin the friendship.”

Then two other women come into the kitchen in an out-of-focus blur in the background, and they say “hey,” and there’s a closeup on his face looking like he’s having one humiliation piled on top of another, and while the camera remains focused in closeup on his face, I say, from off-camera, “Did I mention I have roommates?” 

I introduce him, I’m like, “This is Elias,” and, while the camera is still focused on his face, the roommates say greetings like, “Hey,” and “Nice to meet you,” both of them talking at once, and he nods and looks down at the table. 

These are my roommates, Reeley and Meya. 

Meya is outgoing and wears bold colors; she is an “inciting character,” or “catalyst character,” in my film. 

Reeley is more introspective and, if this were the 1970s, one would say “mousy,” kind of attractive but doesn’t know it, like a kind of Bailey-WKRP woman, and she will be the star of my subplot, since my screenwriting manual says I have to have a fucking subplot. 

In my film, in every scene in which she appears, Reeley will wear something that Jan Smithers wore on WKRPas Baily Quarters, just to see if anyone notices, any of the Jan Smithers/Bailey Quarters-obsessed geek-guys out there, because I’m sure they exist. 

Like in one scene, Reeley is wearing the brown plaid blazer with beige blouse that Bailey wore in the WKRP episode that aired on February 7, 1980, which was directed by Jay Sandrich. 

Reeley and Meya — they’re both likable, by the way. 

It may seem as though having Reeley and Meya walk into the kitchen when Elias is naked is an unnecessary cringe-comedy thing to do, but it really happened to me on the day this whole story started, so I want to tell it the way it happened. 

I’ve heard that truth is no excuse, but, also, you always tell me that I am lovable despite the unlikable things that I do, so I want to try to see if I can pull that off as an actress in a film, whether audiences will accept me as I am, the way you accept me as I am. Because letting this humiliation happen to him was pretty unlikable. Because obviously I let it happen, I could have prevented it, but I didn’t. 

I’m wondering if we can find this guy Elias again and get him to play himself in the movie. I don’t think he’s angry with me. Elias is out there somewhere. I don’t think this dissolution matters all that much to him, the dissolution of his brief relationship with me, and I think he’d probably like to be in a movie.

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ONE OTHER THING about Elias: I think he had a lot of good insights about me, some really candid and correct observations about me and about life generally, so we should flash back to that evening with Elias at unexpected moments during the movie. He and I talked a lot, late into the night and morning, and he said a lot of profound fucking shit, and then I fell asleep briefly and woke up gasping, so tbh it was honestly kind of surreal. 

Here is my suggestion: film our entire date, that entire ill-fated but charming date between me and Elias, almost like a short film. Then match-cut scenes from my date with Elias into the film, every time something kind of revealing happens, match-cut in a scene from that date with associative editing, like the bone-to-spaceship transition in 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

When we meet, he says, “Kalyee” and I say, “Yes.” It’s a blind date, we never explain it, but it seems to be going well and then the whole thing is over. Once he says to me, “You think you’re such a magician, Kalyee. But the more you hide, the more you give away. People see the sleight of hand.” Another time, he says, “Life isn’t about control, Kalyee. It’s about letting go at the right moments.” One time, he’s like You suffer wounds that most people don’t even notice, then another time he was like, Love is chaos, then, like, We live in moments, not days. Like our date could be a short film itself, just film it like a short, then splice it up into snippets and paste it into the longer film with match cuts wherever it could illuminate and elucidate who I am, all of my terrible blindnesses and illusions and flaws and assholery. 

Maybe suddenly a brief image of me lying naked on the bed beside him, which could be my first nude scene in the film, or maybe my second, just a surprise shock image for the audience, totally not expecting any naked skin, and then there it is, maybe even a little idle digitus stimulatio. Like, me naked, him touching me, saying, “Love is chaos,” and this startling digitus stimulatio. That’s what Agnes Varda called la rupture. 

We’ll know when we screen the rough cut exactly where we should put each of these things. I mean, the director will know, or I’ll know if I am the director. 

Then if there’s a Blu-ray, we can add the short film as an extra, or it can be an extra on Netflix. 

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THIS IS A MELODRAMATIC ROMANTIC TRAGICOMEDY, which has caused me a lot of pain. I used to fuck a lot at the drop of a hat, but I didn’t fuck this guy for the longest time, the male “lead” of our film, because I couldn’t find the character, I couldn’t reach what Kurosawa called the “seishin” of the girl I was pretending to be whenever he was around. I’m 23-years-old now, almost a quarter of a century, and it feels as though I will never get over it, so maybe audiences will also feel some of this emotion, if we do it right. A dead romance in a movie can feel as wrenching as a dead body.  

I mentioned this movie idea very vaguely to you, one time when you and Cèléste visited me. I had no ending, really, so I didn’t think it would make a good movie, since every movie needs an ending. Way back when, I was a little girl, and my mother used to watch shitty movies on TV and afterwards, she would say, “That movie was great. It really had a beginning, a middle and an end.” I thought that was bullshit. I think a movie might not need to have an end. Like Limbo, directed by John Sayles, or L’Avventura, from Antonioni. But then there’s Star Wars: A New Hope where you know the movie is over because — spoiler alert! — the Death Star blows up and everyone gets a medal, and more movies are like Star Wars: A New Hope than like L’Avventura. The best movies have no end, but the movies that most people like the most all have an end. 

So I figured my story better have an end, but my story had no end. 

For a long time, I had a beginning and a middle, with no end. 

But I’ve now come up with a fictional ending set ten years from now, eleven years from the action of the film. Other than the scene set in the future, the story is otherwise mostly true. 

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THERE ARE ONLY FOUR THINGS in the screenplay that aren’t true. 

One: that scene set in the future, which I just mentioned. It could be true, but probably not. It hasn’t happened yet, so it isn’t true yet, even if it someday will be true. 

This raises a philosophical question: is something that turns out to be true in the future true at the time that it is said? 

Can something be retroactively true? 

Is it like superposition, the way a particle exists in multiple states till it’s observed, so it’s something that’s not true till it actually happens and you see it with your own eyes? Then does its trueness fly backwards through time? 

Are conjectures “true” because they later turn out to have come true? 

I don’t know, and I guess it’s not important to this movie “treatment.” 

But since we’re friends, and you purport to love me, I thought I would tell you about my laxities relating to truth and accuracy as they relate to Time Travel.

Two (the second thing in the screenplay that isn’t true): I don’t have a TRS-80. 

Showing a TRS-80 on my desk in my bedroom in the film is accurate, but not “true.”

Accuracy refers to the closeness of a measured value to a standard or known value. It’s about how well the measurement aligns with the accepted reference point. 

The TRS-80 on my desk in my room shows that I’m kind of a geek. A neo-geek, if you know what that means. So showing a TRS-80 on my desk in my bedroom is accurate to a high degree, with respect to the precision and reliability of the measurement in relation to the established standard (i.e., that I am a neo-geek). But it’s not true.

Three: in my screenplay, you will be portrayed as very handsome. 

You are not very handsome. You are not even a little bit handsome. You are compelling, but your kind of compellingness is too subtle for this film, or tbh any film, so in the film you will be handsome. But there are other things that have drawn you and me together over the years, and that maybe still draw us together, if you are still a part of my life. 

Four: David Hasselhoff never recorded an LP of songs from The Sound of Music.

From now on, I’m going to stop telling you that some part of the movie really happened, because everything really happened, except for the part that happens ten years from now, and the “Sound of Music” LP, and the part about the TRS-80, and the part about you being handsome.

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STILL IN THE KITCHEN, I look at the calendar hanging on the door of the cupboard, and there is an address written there, with the time next to it, which says 10 am. The actual address was 451 Lexington Avenue, and I think it might be funny to use the actual address. 

Then there is a smash cut with rhythmic transition, and I’m riding a bike through city traffic, without a helmet, not very carefully, and I am smoking a reefer, feeling just like Euphoria Van Der Grass (whom I will discuss later). 

The music playing on the soundtrack is “Elbows” by Drye and Drye. They’re a sax and trombone duo, a dad and his son, and this song would work well in this scene, because its rough, unpredictable sound mirrors the chaotic energy of the city and my reckless ride through it. Also, you and I have a common friend whose mom was listening to “Elbows” by Drye and Drye and she died right in the middle of the song, which I thought was funny, because it’s such a bouncy song. Like, did she enter the afterlife bouncing up and down, all happy, because of the song she was listening to when she died? 

Then there is a scene in an apartment. When I come into the apartment, there’s a youngish guy standing there, holding a camera, a big professional camera. A chaperone comes into the apartment with me. I point to the chaperone and I say, “Chaperone.” I’m still smoking the reefer. (This is not polite.) The chaperone looks strong, he probably has a tank top on that reveals his strong arms. 

The guy with the camera seems really gentle and nice, nicer and more gentle than I seem. 

He brings me a binder and says, “You wanted to see this, for ideas.”

He sits next to me on the couch and flips through this portfolio of photographs and it’s all really beautiful, and some of the people in the photos are nude, so this is where the men watching the film think there’s going to get to see me. When the guy in my apartment is so naked, they begin to worry that this was all that the Netflix “graphic nudity” warning meant, so they think this is where they are going to see me naked, but maybe they won’t. But maybe they will. 

I tell the photographer that the photos are beautiful, and he says they’re all superimposed against these exotic artificial backgrounds, and he asks me if this is my full-time job, modeling, and I say I’m not a model, that I am a “photographic subject.” He asks what the difference is, and I say that a model is a three-dimensional representation of a person or thing or of a proposed structure, typically on a smaller scale than the original, in other words, an imitation of something, a fake thing. A “subject,” on the other hand, is something represented in a work of art, something real that is made artistic. A model is, like, just a prop, you know? But a subject — I’m real. I’m the art.

I pause to let this fucking pretentious shit penetrate, then I say, “Anyway, no, this isn’t my full-time job, I nearly forgot that I put myself down for this listing.” 

The photographer is a GWC, maybe. I’m not sure how legitimate he is. But he is a guy taking ok-looking pictures, and he’s paying. He’s young and cute, he’s wearing blue-jeans and a long-sleeve t-shirt with a logo I don’t recognize, this scene isn’t terrifying and threatening, even if he’s not an especially serious individual, even if he’s going to take the pictures and then jerk off later and call it a good day’s work. So long as he doesn’t jerk off in front of me, or tell me about it later. 

“I don’t work much at all, on anything.” I say, explaining myself more, for him and also for the movie audience. “I live in an apartment my parents bought years ago.”

He says, “Are they dead or something? Your parents?” and I say, “Wow.”

Since this is a film, I won’t say what happened to my parents. The movie audience will debate it after the closing credits. Did they die? Or maybe they live in another city. Maybe there has been some kind of emotional rift. Maybe Kalyee did something terrible and her parents are no longer talking to her. Maybe her parents are the ones who are terrible. 

There is no correct answer. In my life, there is, of course, as you know, a correct answer, but in the movie, there is not. You know the story with my parents, my mom and also my dad, but the movie audience does not. There are so many things I will not mention in this movie. You know about my marriage, when I was twenty, that fucking catastrophe. This is important, I suppose. It explains a lot about me, doesn’t it? I never thought about it, but I guess it explains a lot. Everyone has some explanation buried deep inside that explains everything shitty about herself, and that no one ever talks about, like my catastrophe of a marriage, and since no one ever talks about it, it won’t be in my movie. 

The photographer asks the obvious question, how I manage financially.

“My roommates pay rent,” I say, “which covers the maintenance. I do some this-and-that for walking around money. Like letting dudes like you take my picture. If I want to stop doing some this-and-that, I will just raise the rent. You know what I mean, ‘walking around money’? People used to say that a long time ago. I read it once in an old book, and I like it, so I say it.”

This is the way I talk, I’m always explaining myself. 

He asks me if I ever think about the future. I shrug and say, “The big, dark void that I’m too afraid to look into? No, I don’t think about it.”

Now a straight cut into a scene where I’m posing for him, I am fully dressed. Music is playing in the photostudio. The chaperone looks bored. There’s suspense in this scene for half the audience. Will you see me naked? 

That would be too obvious. Or would it be just obvious enough? Like so obvious that’s not obvious at all? 

Either way, the scene will déjoue les attentes, like in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s movie, Les Diaboliques, upend expectations. 

When it comes time for me to take off my clothes — when he says, “Now, Kalyee, reveal only what feels comfortable and natural to you,” in this gentle voice that may seem scary to you or may seem really reassuring — I begin to undress, and the camera shifts focus solely to my face, the subtle shifts in my expression — from determination to a fleeting faux-vulnerability, then steely reserve; you know, my excellent acting! — the nudity implied, my emotional state preserved as the focal point of the scene. We tease the men in the audience. Maybe a bare shoulder, an ankle. 

“Thank you for your trust,” the photographer says, in that voice. “Allow yourself to feel free and fully present in this moment, Kalyee. This is about capturing the essence of your confidence and beauty, your strength. Feel that passion and love in every gesture — this is a celebration of you.” 

When the movie is over, half the female viewers will think the photographer is an absolute creep, half will think he’s a poet, a dreamboat. All the men will hate him. 

The clicking of the camera clatters away while he is talking. 

In the very corner of the movie screen, there is a mirror, and it is almost in focus, and you can see me in the mirror, if you’re really alert. There it is, suddenly. My first nude scene. There it is. But you don’t even really see it, just a distant reflection of a reflection, but it is cause for hope. 

We’re talking while I’m posing, the photographer and me. He says, “Let a gentle smile appear, it’s your joy in being seen, the strength you embody, the depth of your spirit and the confidence that radiates….” 

I smile and I say, “Like this?” and I do something radiant, which you can see in the mirror, a little more clearly now. 

He says, “With one hand, trace a line along your collarbone,” and I what he says and he takes some photos, and he says, “Then let your hand fall gracefully at your side. Then….” 

And he’s lost in his sentence.

He stops talking and walks over to me, and the chaperone perks up a little, looks a little sideways, quizzical. 

“Here’s the thing,” the photographer says, standing right next to me. “Come back here again, soon. I play guitar too, I write a little music. You know, you should sing backup in my band. Help me write my songs. Be my muse.” 

Now the camera frames me standing with the photographer. I’m standing there naked, not covering myself, just talking to him. He’s the one who is sheepish, I am not. Like we’re at the bus stop in the rain, I’m standing under an umbrella, he’s not. If you are a dude who has been squinting at the screen for the last couple of minutes, looking at the mirror in the corner of the frame, hoping to catch a glimpse of my body, maybe you take a breath now, because now you have seen me, and the cinematography will make me look really good, better than I really look in real life. 

Why is this scene not gratuitous? Why is it “absolutely essential to the plot,” as the starlet said to Carson in 1974? (That’s probably something you’d remember, starlets on Carson saying that. As I’ve mentioned, I don’t actually know who or what “Carson” is, or was, but this is something that I read, that starlets used to go on “Carson” [that was the expression, “go on Carson”] and say shit like that.)

Here is one of the three reasons why the scene is not gratuitous: It hints that someone could see me as magical; at just the right moment, in just the right mood, under just the right light, someone might mistake me for a muse, a goddess, an ageless, immortal daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne. 

Really, there is nothing magical about me, anyone who sees me in this deceptive light will inevitably be disappointed, once the light is gone, to discover my utter lack of magic. But someone might well initially see me as magical, which is important to the story, and so this scene is not gratuitous. 

He says some poetic stuff that will just make you cringe, so maybe we won’t use it in the script. I put it in the script, but just as a placesaver, in brackets. 

I laugh, and I smile. Look at that smile! 

We will make sure that my smile in this scene is enchanting. 

He says he will pay me, he can pay me. He asks if I really have enough this-and-that lined up for walking around money, couldn’t I use a little more? 

I still smile at him, a little bit of a different kind of smile. 

“I dare you to understand me,” I whisper, standing there naked. 

I should feel at a disadvantage, but I realize that I am not, me naked, the photographer wearing jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt with a logo I don’t recognize, talking.

He pauses, he smiles, he is piteous. 

“Here’s the thing,” I say back to him. 

I have all the power, all the strength. Emotionally, of course, because he has become smitten — not romantically smitten, he’s too awed for that, but inspired, that kind of smitten —, and I have not become smitten. 

But I also have the advantage physically. Just look at me. I can beat him up if I want to, it would not even be a contest. It is purely situational strength; I am naked and he is not. He is weak in the knees. In a boxing ring, he would win a fair fight. Here, I would win. 

Now you see another reason this scene isn’t gratuitous: it reveals the power I wield over him, and over the gaze of anyone who will see these photos, power I understand. I pretend this is just an appointment on my calendar, a quick errand I barely remember scheduling. But is that really true? 

Because look at me here — I’m exposed, in control, my image is both shield and weapon.

Others see only what I permit. I seem indifferent, dismissive. Will anyone look deeper, beneath the surface? 

Is there anything beneath the surface? I display what looks like bravery, vulnerability, but I reveal nothing, while revealing everything. I cannot achieve any connection this way. I hide behind a façade of courage, behind a shroud of false intimacy. 

Doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about me?

“Here’s the thing,” I say again. “I am already a muse for pay, once or twice a week. And I don’t care for it, the muse-biz.” 

The third and final reason this scene is not gratuitous: it allows us to segue into what my manual on screenwriting describes as “introducing the protagonist and their goals” (which is essential, and thus not gratuitous). I don’t really have any goals, which the screenwriting manual says is a problem, because I will “seem passive,” which I am not. I am not passive; I just don’t have any goals. But I do have odd jobs, which are kind of like goals. Anyway, they’ve all I’ve got, so they’ll have to do. 

As I describe what I do for money, you hear my voiceover with an image of each job. I do these naked photos because it’s funny when one shows up on the web and all the boys say crazy stuff about me, make all kinds of “remarks.” Not often, because I don’t do this much. I mention in the voiceover that the author Alon Preiss is writing a science fiction graphic novel, and this is where I’ve gotten the bulk of my professional muse experience, he draws pictures of me in tiny 1920s sci-fi outfits that show my belly, battling alien monsters and slaying sci-fi soldiers and all covered with blood looking ferocious. The story is kind of cool because it’s a story within a story, about a washed-up cartoonist in 1924 writing a comic strip set around a hundred years in the future. This would be pretty exciting except that Preiss is in his sixties and it’s a little creepy the way he draws all these kinky pictures of me and pretends that it’s really just a double-ironic statement about the character in his story, even though I think it’s pretty clear that it’s not just a double-ironic statement. 

I also dog walk, not for the money, which is crap, but to walk around the neighborhood with a gaggle of truly idiotic-looking dogs. 

Sometimes I make jewelry and sell it on the street, but only in the wintertime, because in the snow, I look waifish all bundled up, with my face chapped and my wool cap and heavy coat, and someone who buys my jewelry will have a kind of Dickensian/Hollywood image in mind when they wear the jewelry I make, or when they see it on someone they love. When I have tried to sell jewelry in the summertime I don’t make nearly as much money, because the image is not nearly so dramatic, so now I sell it only in the wintertime. 

And sometimes I look after kids, and this revelation is accompanied by the kind of scene you can imagine, me chasing some brat around a house, then a closeup of me looking all frazzled, blowing a hair out of my face. 

Then back to the photography session. 

With the camera closeup on my face, or maybe with the camera lovingly caressing my naked body, I add: And I do bicycle deliveries, that’s the job I do most of all, just because I like how it makes my legs look. 

While I say that, my voice is narrating a scene of me picking up a package from some insidious-looking motherfucker, which cannot be a good thing, then a match cut to me pedaling furiously, with some rhythmic editing so that on the soundtrack we hear a reprise of “Elbows” by Drye and Drye, which is a song full of youthful energy even though it’s a song recorded by this middle-aged geezer and his geriatric geezer father. But that’s something you won’t know if you’re watching the movie, how old the musicians are, because the song sounds young. 

You know, I’m pedaling along, and maybe at some point I even get sucked under a truck and dodge all the tires, bouncing around, pulling my head out of the way and then my legs out of the way, and then miraculously I slide out the back of the truck and pop back on the bike and keep going, which really happened to me once, though not on this particular day. Still, it was lowkey savage, and I’d do it again for the movie, I would do my own stunts just like Jackie Chan.

Eventually I get to some huge luxury apartment building, beautiful but remote, not in the middle of fancyville but on the outskirts, like this is a settlor-colonist outpost from fancyville. The street address is 674, which I note interestedly, because that’s Newton’s gravitational constant, which is a number that, I don’t have to tell you, ties every single thing in the universe together. I go in and there’s this immense lobby with a waterfall, and gigantic hungry koi goldfish in the pool at the bottom of the waterfall, and I say to the doorman that I have a delivery for apartment 42–e from the Fucking Fucker Delivery Deliverers Company, or whatever. I remember the apartment number still, because “e” is Euler’s number, which governs exponential growth and decay and, because it is a horizontal asymptote, never touches zero, it never stops or ends. Something faint always remains of a horizontal asymptote. Most people wish that they were horizontal asymptotes, although they don’t express it that way. And forty-two, of course, is self-explanatory. 

The doorman makes a call with his white-gloved fingers and then he tells me to go on up. 

I ride up in the elevator which has elevator music playing, so for seven and a half seconds you see me riding the luxurious elevator in my shitty bike delivery girl clothes, my little shorts and my sweaty bare legs and my sweaty t-shirt, listening to elevator music, looking out of place. 

Then there’s a smash cut to me in an apartment with this completely panicked fucker in mid-yell, and maybe if you have a good eye, you’ll see that he’s the same guy from the beginning of the movie, the nonchalant tousled guy. But maybe you won’t recognize him when you see him in this scene in the movie, because he’s not at all nonchalant or tousled. He’s dressed in some kind of American Psycho suit (from the movie, not the book), and he’s straight-up batshit, opening up the box, yelling words that I don’t even understand (I mean, I don’t know what he said, I couldn’t understand him, but let’s have the character scream, “Ka tu padarei, šventieji žmones?! Šitas bjaurus daiktas yra uždraustas! Aš tave nužudysiu, jei kas nors sužinos!”), and then he turns to me and he says, “Did you talk to Vaargot? Did you even fucking talk to Vaargot?”

I say that I didn’t talk to Vaargot, and he screams at me about why didn’t I fucking talk to Vaargot, and I say that I’m just the bicycle delivery girl, I don’t know who Vaargot is, and I’m all calm-like, as though I’m explaining quantum entanglement or like he just bought a pack of gum with a five dollar bill and I’m giving him change. 

So he calls me all these crazy things, he calls me a moldy-celery-cunt, which I don’t understand, but I remember it, so he accomplished his purpose. Does celery get moldy? I think it just gets wobbly. Now that would be an insult! 

He calls me rotten maggot trash heap. That’s mean, but less creative, so I feel almost disappointed when he says it. 

This is what the screenwriting manual calls “the inciting incident that sets the story in motion,” but when you’re watching the movie, you might think it’s just another part of my episodic life, if you haven’t already read about the movie and what the plot is. 

The camera L-cuts to a moment when I first meet Elias at a dimly lit restaurant. He looks at me, his gaze piercing yet curious. “Kalyee?” he asks, almost as if he’s unsure if this is the right person. I nod. “There’s something different about you in person,” he says. A brief scene, just a few seconds, to key up my dynamic with this crazy guy in his fancy apartment.

Back in the present timeline, the asshole keeps looking in the box and cursing, and I slink out, and then I’m on the street pedaling along, smoking a massive blunt, and there’s “Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill playing on the soundtrack. You know, like this: 

That girl thinks she’s the queen of the neighborhood
She’s got the hottest trike in town
That girl, she holds her head up so high
I think I wanna be her best friend, yeah

Rebel girl, rebel girl
Rebel girl you are the queen of my world
Rebel girl, rebel girl
I think I wanna take you home
I wanna try on your clothes, uh

When she walks, the revolution’s comin’
In her hips, there’s revolution
When she talks, I hear the revolution
In her kiss, I taste the revolution

Because I have the best trike, and people do see me and think, I wanna be her best friend, yeah. Not always. But enough of the time, I hope, for you to make your money back on this movie. I sometimes pretend that I don’t think I’m the queen of the neighborhood, but I do, at least sometimes. If I didn’t, why would I send you this movie treatment, which would star me, a movie that has me in almost every single scene? That’s pretty narcissistic, you have to admit. I may be more narcissistic than even you. 

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THE AUDIENCE needs, now, a little breather, so we’ll have a few random scenes from my life over the next few days, which you could film kind of in an Altman style, filtered through the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice directed by Joe Wright but channeling Altman, almost random dialogue. I come home, Reeley says what’s up, I throw my helmet across the room, she says, “Shit,” then I’m trying to calm down, there are a few scenes in a row. I’m with Preiss, I’m wearing this crazy 1920s-style sci-fi costume, he’s drawing me, he says, Now act like you’re crushing a guy’s head, a really bad like guy from Saturn and I do a grrrr thing with my mouth, and Preiss says, “You don’t look like a fierce galactic warrior, my dear; you just seem annoyed, at most pissed off,” and I shrug and try to grrrr even better and like crush a guy’s head (maybe even here we could insert a few seconds of Preiss’s comic book, animated, me crushing a guy’s head on an alien planet), then I’m walking in the park with a guy, and he says, “I think you’ll find that I’ve sanded off all the rough edges,” and I say, “Look, I don’t even know why I’m here, it was just suddenly in my calendar and I don’t remember putting it there and there wasn’t time to cancel,” and he says, “but I think you will find —” and I look at my watch and I say, “Fuck! The dogs.” I apologize to him, half-heartedly, because I’m late for my dog-walking, then the next scene is me walking down the street with a dozen of the stupidest-looking dogs, a Brussels Griffo and a Borzoi, and then one that’s a cross between a Brussels Griffo and a Borzoi, the freakiest mutt you ever saw, and then nine others, these raggedy-looking dogs that might once have qualified for the National Dog Show that you’d see on Thanksgiving, but that have been neglected by their lawyer and finance owners and look like shit. 

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NOW: according to my how-to-write-a-screenplay manual, I am meant to add a “subplot,” which should be introduced fifteen percent to twenty percent of the way into the movie, and this “subplot” should take up ten percent to fifteen percent of Act 1. All I really care about is me and my story, and I know that you feel the same, but rules are rules, and I always follow rules, except for the ones I don’t follow. 

So I think I’ll add a story about something that happened to Reeley. 

While various mishigas is going on with me, Reeley starts connecting with Jordan, a mysterious and androgynous figure who lives down the hallway from us. Their interactions are brief, and Reeley becomes increasingly intrigued and drawn to Jordan, but she has no idea if Jordan is a man or a woman, and this ambiguity begins to fuel her fascination. 

Their connection grows deeper despite the uncertainty, and Reeley — a diehard hetero — starts to question her own feelings and the nature of attraction. 

Is she attracted to Jordan because Jordan seems male, or because Jordan seems female, or because she doesn’t know? 

There’s your fucking subplot. 

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EVENTUALLY, I have a scene with Meya, who tells me that she needs to “populate the event” with “beautiful people,” and she asks me if I can be there. 

If this were a short story, or if I were just telling you something that happened, I’d need to explain what Meya does for a living, and what this “event” is, and especially if I were telling you the story, I couldn’t say that Meya invited me because she needs beautiful people, because that would tag me as narcissistic beyond anything socially appropriate. 

But because this is a movie, I don’t need to explain what Meya does for a living, or what this event is, which is good, because I don’t know what Meya does for a living, and I don’t know what the event was. 

You see? It’s because I don’t care what she does for a living. I guess I asked when she applied to be my apartment-mate, but then I suppose I forgot, because I don’t care. I kind of care about myself, but not about anyone else. Is that unlikable? Will that hurt the funding of our film? 

Since I don’t worry about money, and I don’t really care that much about people or what they think of me, I just drift around through life. Sometimes people say stuff like what Meya said, I need to populate the event with beautiful people, and I just go where they tell me to go. I put shit on my calendar and then I look at my calendar and go wherever it says to go. It’s good that I won’t have to explain any of that in this movie, because then the audience will say, I didn’t like her. She was unlikable.

But you understand me. You and I are the same. You are maybe the only one who understands me. And if you help make my movie, the audience will also understand me, just a little bit.

This “event,” I don’t know what it was, but I remember there was a pretty view from the windows and the terrace, and pretty lights, and gorgeous people, a lot of snack ninjas serving food and champagne and wine to nibblerati, and I was all by myself. You’ll have some movie wardrobe person make sure I look gorgeous, I guess. You see what I mean? It’s this stunning place filled with people, and I am gorgeous, but I am all alone. There’s this combination of dark-blue and light, just a painterly pallet that everyone will think is really fucking cinematic, and it makes me look gorgeous and alone, and like I don’t care that I am sad. 

Meya sees me and air-kisses me, and then she’s gone. 

I’m talking to people, not really engaged, the soundtrack just picks up random bits of Altmanesque dialogue, and then, while I am talking, I see him, the asshole from the delivery kerfuffle, the tousled guy, but looking way more polished and sophisticated than before. 

Still, it’s him. 

The fucking asshole has a well-groomed short beard and mustache, one of those things that looks like he couldn’t actually bother to shave today, but you know he thought about it, maybe he even planned it in advance. There is a tiny diamond stud in his ear.  His hair is dark, thick and styled back more neatly than before. 

His eyes are focused and intense, his face is a pleasing mosaic of chiseled jaw, sharp angles and gentle slopes. He wears a dark coat, the light is blue and moody and ambient, so there is this whole sense of mystery and depth around him. 

Can you see it, in your head? It’s fucking beautiful. 

He stands in the corner, talking to someone, and I stare a little too long, till I know he sees me. 

Did I do that on purpose? 

Even now, I still don’t know. 

Our eyes meet for a brief moment, I look a little started, and I look away.

Then there is a quick shot of a beautiful woman standing in the front of the room, and she says into a microphone, Thank you all for being here, we all know why we are all here, but for the life of me, I cannot remember, and I look a little perplexed, and maybe this will get a laugh, or at least a titter. Did I ever tell you the joke my dad used to tell, about the titter running through the courtroom? Remind me to tell you that joke, the next time you’re in town.

So there is a quick cut, and I’m standing by myself at the window, or on the terrace, looking out at the city lights at night, it’s begun to rain just a little bit, just mist in the light-freckled city night, which is beautiful. I think about leaving, but before I can, he’s standing in front of me, the asshole. Here’s something crazy: from the way I described him, you would think he is absolutely bathed in cologne, but he isn’t. No cologne at all. 

He says, “I think you caught my eye, or I caught your eye, I don’t know,” and he laughs, because he’s screwed up, maybe on purpose to make himself seem accessible and human. “I’m Alexéin,” he says, and I say, “Alexéin means ‘defender of mankind’ in Greek, and that means that someone with that name is all about nobility, courage and protection,” and he says, “How do you know that?” and I tell him that I went to college, which comes off as really rude, which is how I intended it, but he likes that, my rudeness. 

I’m smart in only a few areas, really just ancient Greek, the Late Bronze Age Collapse, surface-level physics, especially the helium atom, with a smattering of epistemic logic, and that’s it. But that’s enough to seem like a showoff smart asshole at a party. 

I learned a few things so I could tell myself I am smart, and to convince other people that I am smart. They don’t realize that it’s all I know, they think if I know these assorted obscure things, I must be really smart and know lotsof other stuff too, that the smart things I say when we first meet must be just the tip of the iceberg, but they’re wrong, I’ve memorized a few things and I’m stupid as a doorknob. Maybe stupider than a doorknob, because a doorknob understands its purpose in life and does it well. I don’t know what my purpose in life is, and I suck at everything. 

So, I’m much stupider than a doorknob. 

“Also the Greek goddess Athena,” I say, still pretending to be smart, “patroness of wisdom, war and crafts. The male side of your personality is wise. Your female side is violent.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m a paradox.”

 I say that it’s like the way electrons can exhibit both wavelike and particle-like properties — really being a fucking asshole now — and then I go on and I’m all like since particles can behave differently depending on how we observe them, our understanding of reality can be influenced by our perspective.

“Really?” he asks. Then he asks some stupid question about what I just said. He wouldn’t otherwise care, but in this scene of the movie, I look gorgeous, so I guess he cares because the lighting and cinematography make me look gorgeous. 

“You know,” I say, kind of replying to him but not really, “nonlocality blurs the lines between space and time.”

“You don’t need to tell me about nonlocality. Or reality.”

“What is reality?” I say. 

“It’s a product of our perceptions, right? Our minds playing tricks on us.”

So then I tell him, basically, that if reality isn’t fixed, it opens up new perspectives on perspective and interpretation. Particles can exist in multiple states simultaneously; you know, superposition. And maybe quantum foam casts doubt on our traditional understanding of space-time, so if space-time is made up of tiny grainy fluctuations, rather than being smooth and continuous, that would make it harder to define what constitutes reality. Then I mention my specialty, which is the helium atom: it has two electrons that are bound in such a way that their exact positions can never be known until they’re observed. These electrons are locked in a complex interplay of quantum entanglement, which reinforces the uncertainty of what we call “reality.” 

“So it doesn’t exist,” I conclude pompously. “Reality. Not really.”

“I guess not.” So for some fucking reason he’s charmed by this fuckstorm, and he says, “What’s your name,” like a statement, not like a question, which a lot of men do when talking to women, I don’t know if you’ve noticed. It’s like a way of taking the voluntary part out of a question, making a question more like a command. He’s saying, Tell me your name, but phrasing it as though it were a question, as though I have a choice, except without the little lift at the end of the sentence that would make it optional rather than mandatory. 

I hate him even more, now, so I say that it pisses me off that he doesn’t remember meeting me. 

I’m thinking that maybe he will now suddenly remember that I was the delivery girl that he berated, but he starts guessing, he starts mentioning parties thrown by people he knows, and it becomes clear that he’s been to a lot of parties, and finally he says, I know! and he starts talking about this event that only the fancy-shmanciest fuckers could ever get to attend, like the Met Gala only more fancy-fucking-shmancy and exclusive, and I say that yes that is exactly where we met, and he seems to remember, and I say again that it pisses me off that he doesn’t remember my name, and I can see him really thinking. 

Finally, he says, “What was it. Séraphina? Nora? Zora?” 

I say, “Yes! Exactly!” 

He says, “What?” 

I’m like, “What you said.” 

He says, “Zora? Nora? Séraphina?” and I’m like, “Yes!” 

You can see the look on my face that I like the idea of having a name like Zora-Nora Séraphina, and that I like imagining the thoughts that are running through his head. He’s wondering, Is her first name “Zora” and her middle name “Nora”? Is it just one name (ZoraNora), or a hyphenate, and will I have to call her Zora-Nora all the time? He looks kind of troubled, but then he relaxes because no one ever said he’d have to spend any time with me at all, and he smiles and says, “Zora-Nora, I like that. Zora-Nora.”

We talk for a while and then he asks what I do, and I’m all surprised that he doesn’t remember. He must remember!

And he says he doesn’t think he does remember, and I say that I bet it’s in his mind somewhere and that if he just tries, he’ll probably remember unconsciously, and so he says, “If I had to place you, I would say that you are a tarot card reader,” and I smile and I say, “And what else?” and he says, “And an astrologer? A seer?” and I smile, as though I’m really satisfied that he remembered. 

Then there is an L-cut with overlay, a voiceover of me telling Reeley about this evening. You see what I was doing? I say to her. I was letting him create his dream woman. Anything he imagined that I was, that was who I would be. So that it will be even more devastating when I abandon him, and you see me and Reeley sitting together in our kitchen drinking cocoa, before a straight cut back to me at the party, where he says that maybe this is kind of sudden, but could he get my contact info and get in touch and maybe continue the conversation? Are you reachable electronically? and I say I am not reachable electronically at all, and he asks why, and I shrug.  I almost say that it’s because people talk shit about me out in the electronic ether, like, they say I look bad naked, they go into the electronic ether and shit talk my tits, but this sounds too much like Kalyee and not enough like Zora-Nora, whoever she will turn out to be, so I make a note to change my behavior, to adjust to this new persona, and I hold my tongue, I don’t say anything, I just let a charming shrug do all the talking, which is classic Zora-Nora. 

So he asks how he can reach me, and I say, “I haven’t decided if I like you,” (which is a lie, because he’s an asshole and I already know that I don’t like him) and that I will get in touch if I feel like it, and I say it kind of charmingly so that I don’t scare him off, so that I can still have my retribution, and so he’s charmed, even though I’ve just told him what I think of him. And he wonders aloud why I would ever think anything negative about him, and I say that we met before, and he almost didn’t even remember that, and in fact nothing about our first meeting inspired him to want to see me again. He didn’t care if he ever saw me again. Why was that? What was it about that first meeting that made him so convinced that he never wanted to see me again?

So he’s thinking about it, trying to remember. 

I tell him that if he wants to see me again, everything must be based on truth. No lies, no half-truths. Nothing will be hidden. 

“Truth,” I emphasize. “Not accuracy.”

He wonders what the difference is, and I say, “Accuracy refers to the closeness of a measured value to a standard or known value. So something that is 80% ‘accurate’ is a high degree of accuracy. But something that is 80% true is hemialetheies.”

Just speaking ancient Greek in casual conversation, pretending it’s normal. My whole pretending-to-be-smartthing.

“We wouldn’t want any of that, any hemialetheies,” and I ask him if he knows what that is, and he says he doesn’t. “Aristotelian half-truths,” I tell him, and then he tells me that he’s kind of in the hemialetheies business. And I realize that every time he says it, hemialetheies, he pronounces it perfectly.

“So then what is it about me that so repelled you when we first met. Don’t say that you were intimidated.”

“No,” he replies. “Full honesty. I don’t really get intimidated by beautiful women.”

“Right,” I reply. A casual observer would think that he just called me beautiful, but read it again: he didn’t. It doesn’t mean that he thinks I am beautiful. It just means that he said the word. 

“Don’t pretend to be humble,” I add.

“It’s not humble and it’s not not-humble,” he said. “It’s just true.”

I nod, and then I say, “Don’t say you were not sure that I would be interested.”

He again agrees with me. “Women are usually interested in me,” he says. 

“And even if a woman is in a relationship, you can see that this creates some regret, and you kind of enjoy it.”

He nods at this. 

“Five minutes before she met you,” I say, “she was happy that she was in that relationship. Or at least ok with it.” 

“Yes.”

This observation is a foreshadowing of something that will happen in the last scene of the movie, by the way.

“So what was it?” I ask. “Why didn’t I interest you at all?”

We can see that he’s thinking, trying to remember why, trying to recall this thing that never happened but which he’s now convinced did happen. He’s starting to remember things, fake things in his fake memory. 

“I guess I was concerned,” he says finally, “that you would always know what I’m thinking. It’s not just that you are a spiritualist by trade, but I kind of think you are a truth-seer by inclination as well. So I wasn’t intimidated by your beauty, but by this other thing. That you would see everything.” 

So I ask him to tell me everything that he remembers about me, and he just starts talking, because so far, I’ve confirmed everything that his unconscious mind just made up, and I say yes yes exactly to everything that he feels like he’s remembering. 

They’re pretty outlandish, his faux memories. 

He says, for example, “You grew up on a remote island, where your family had a special connection to the sea? I don’t remember exactly.” 

I say that’s exactly right, and I’m sure the rest of it will come back to him eventually, and this is a voice-over of this fake image of me on a remote island, in front of the thundering sea. 

Then he squints and he says, “Fencing? I think you were … a champion fencer?” 

Smash cut to a fantasy image of me standing dramatically on a windswept island shore, waves crashing in the background, stylized, deliberately very fake-looking, and I’m fencing. 

Then a straight cut back to the party, and I’m nodding enthusiastically. 

“Who is my favorite writer?” I ask, and he’s like, “Mark Laporta,” which is weird, because that’s totally true, it’s the only thing he guessed right.

“I remember something with a train?” he says, and he thinks some more and says, “No, like something with an ocean liner, or a big yacht. It was something kind of tragic. Or borderline tragic?” 

He looks at me, and I say, “Yeah, but I don’t really like to dwell on that.” 

He nods, and he’s like, “And because of this you just took off … you just left and traveled, you went to places that no one goes to. Like, you went to … Bhutan?” He hesitates. “Is that even a country? Or is it a town in like Idaho?” 

I tell him, quietly, “Yes, that’s a country. It’s a mountain kingdom.” 

Match-cut to a very fake-looking image of me cross-legged in the courtyard of a Buddhist temple beside a monk, high in the Himalayan mountains, higher even than Tiger’s Nest, like way up in the nosebleeds. The ambient party noise fades into a faint hum of mountain wind, temple bells, distant chanting.

Dissolve with dialogue overlap, back to the party. He says, “That’s where you realized that you were a kind of seer? And now you’re like.…” He can’t remember what he was going to say. Then he smiles, and he says, “And I remember that you light up every room you walk into. You have a certain elusive something.”

The camera needs to kind of dwell on me now, so that when you’re watching the movie, you think, That’s right. She has a certain elusive It, that quality possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force. She can turn the world on with her smile. She can take a nothing day and certainly make it all seem worthwhile.

I’m Mary Tyler Moore and Clara Bow, in case you didn’t catch the references. 

Straight-cut back to the kitchen with Reeley. 

“He was making up a dream girl,” I say. “It was the weirdest thing. Someone who could not possibly exist.”

“Why did you let him go on?” she asks, and she’s kind of amused but you can also see that she feels sorry for Alexéin. 

“It was part of my revenge,” I say. 

“Where does this go from here?”

I don’t really know. I say that I need to learn more about him to fully plan the perfect revenge. 

.

ON A COOL, CRISP EVENING, Alexéin arrives in a sleek black car to pick me up. He steps out, his dark hair ruffled with precision. The apartment building where I am pretending that I live is at 137 East 66th Street, one of those high-end places with a gleaming lobby and a uniformed doorman standing guard. I’m pretty impressed by the building itself, but I am even more impressed with the street address, because it’s on East 66^th street, and we’re sixty-six million light years away from the weirdest supernova event ever recorded to date, which exploded out of a beautiful and massive luminous blue variable star, right in the middle of the constellation Piscis Austrinus; and because 137 is the fine-structure constant, a dimensionless constant that characterizes the strength of electromagnetic interactions. 137 is one of the most really poetic and even magical numbers in physics. Piscis Austrinus is the fish that drank the water poured by Aquarius, which saved the world from a great flood. And so living at 137 East 66th Street is a pretty big deal. 

As I step out into the night, the doorman tips his hat and says with a practiced smile, “Good night, Ms. Séraphina.” His voice is smooth, as though he’s said this a hundred times before, every time I go into this building and every time I leave this building, my home, never questioning the name I’ve given him.

As we make our way to the car, I hear a group of young people loitering outside, laughing and smoking. One of them suddenly shouts, “Zora-Nora! We love you!” I glance over, and they wave enthusiastically, but I quickly look away. I force a smile, slipping into the passenger seat of the car.

Meya arranged all of it, which I thought was a little bit much. Maybe we don’t really need to explain how this happened. It’s well-planned, my retribution. 

.

AT DINNER, Alexéin is charming, maybe effortlessly charming, but who knows really how much effort he puts into it? I just know it’s not the real him, I know he’s not relaxed, he’s not chill. He’s boiling up inside, but we can’t see it now. He knows the right things to say without seeming rehearsed. We’re seated at a dimly lit corner table in an upscale restaurant with a piano guy playing in the background, the kind of place where every dish is a work of art, and as the waiter brings out each part of the meal, it will make you laugh, because it’s so exquisite. I feel like I’m the only person in the room, he makes me feel like I’m the only person who has ever said anything interesting to him. The music the piano guy is playing is the same music, note for note, that we hear in the background of the coffee place in the first scene of the movie, the flash-forward. 

He tells me a story about a time he got lost and then injured with a broken leg and a broken arm in a small village in Romania, and how the locals, despite the language barrier, insisted on feeding him until he could barely move. 

When he asks about me, his questions are gentle. It’s easy to open up to him, but everything I say is a lie, except one thing, when I tell him that I don’t drink wine, I drink The Vesper. 

“Not ‘a’ Vesper,” he says. “ ‘The’ Vesper.” 

Because he knows what that is. Most people don’t know what that is. It is a drink that is all about love and betrayal. 

I laugh at his jokes, and even though I know I shouldn’t, I’m starting to enjoy his company, even though I hate it. His charm is disarming, and for a moment, I forget the real reason I’m here. Why am I here? What was the point of revenge, anyway? It all seems so petty, suddenly. 

I can’t tell him what I really thought of him when I met him, how much I really hated him, I have to pretend to like him, and all of that pretending kind of lightens the mood and I guess my defenses are down. It’s like how when you’re sad, you put a pencil in your mouth, it gives you a fake smile, and suddenly you’re happy. That’s what was happening to me, there in the restaurant with Alexéin. 

You know this scene, you’ve seen it before in other movies. He’s funny, he’s cute, he’s lovable. I look great. He looks great. The scene is charming. Our conversation is adorable. The lighting and the candle-flames are just right there, it’s all just perfect. 

He says something; I momentarily forget who I am, and I say something revealing, something that might blow my cover. He questions what I have just said. The audience gasps; holds its collective breath. I explain my remark with an explanation that is on-its-face obvious bullshit. The audience laughs, but not much, because we have all seen this before. Alexéin nods. He looks perplexed. He shrugs it away. 

He says, “I’m sorry, I have to cut the evening short. I have to leave the country in two hours. I’m sorry.” After a beat, he says, “It’s true! I’m sorry.”

He sounds too apologetic, as though this development — the revelation that I won’t get to suck his dick tonight — will really disappoint me, so I smile that charming Zora-Nora smile and I laugh and I’m like, “Don’t flatter yourself, Buster,” and it’s cute, and he laughs too. Kalyee would have said, “Don’t flatter yourself, fucker,” in that voice of mine when I’m pissed off, because really, who does he think he is? But Zora-Nora is cute about it. 

.

THIS EMOTIONAL BULLSHIT then leads to an even-more-bullshitty montage of rapid cuts with rhythmic editing, because this would be an excellent time for a montage, you’re really expecting and yearning for it by now, without even knowing that you’re yearning for it. Some kind of pop song, of course, like the scenes from Tootsie, set to “It Might Be You,” which is a really awful song. For ironic effect, I thought maybe that we could use that same song, but people my age and younger in the audience might not get the irony, they might just think that we’re into that song for real. So maybe we could use “Tongue Tied” by Grouplove. 

We do the kind of usual things that people do in these kinds of movies, Alexéin and I: The montage unfolds like a whirlwind of playful moments between us, which captures our growing connection despite my internal conflict. 

Dynamic match cut to an amusement park, we laugh on the Ferris wheel, our faces lit up by the colorful lights of the rides below. 

L-cut drops us on a bustling city street at night, our hands brushing as we weave through the crowd. 

A straight cut shows us in a vintage record store, flipping through vinyl records — he holds up an album called “David Hasselhoff Sings Songs from ‘The Sound of Music’ ” and grins, while I pretend to scrutinize it before shaking my head.

Dissolve to a bookstore, where we sit side by side on the floor, thumbing through old books. I catch him watching me as I get lost in a book, and we share a quiet smile. I’m reading the Voynich Manuscript. You see what that means? That I’m reading the Voynich Manuscript? 

Jump cut into a thrift store, where we try out ridiculous hats, jump cut from hat to hat for comic effect, we laugh at each other’s absurd choices. Which actually happened, if you can fucking believe it. I know I told you that all of this happened, but I just wanted to reemphasize it with respect to the montage sequence. 

Finally, slow fade to the beach at sunset, we walk barefoot along the shore. The light is golden, waves lap at our feet as we talk and laugh, serenity. Sad inevitability, inevitable sadness, but only I know it. 

The montage ends with us sitting on a park bench under a canopy of trees, the leaves rustling in the breeze. Quiet contentment. The camera lingers on our faces. I realize I’m falling for him. Or, you know, that I have fallen for him. In love with him. I love him. 

This is important, the montage is a blend-mélange of images, of fountains stars lights water ocean fish stars explosions streets feet-stomping, like the camera is itself drunk, like in Rumble Fish. Because I was crazy drunk the whole time, drunk with The Vesper and drunk with dawning love, and the world whirled and swooned around me. The camera needs to capture that so that the audience will be dizzy and understand how I felt, what it is like to fall in love with a fucking asshole who I fucking hate so much. 

We’re in the middle of some kind of giddiness, we’re running, we’re out of breath. We’re up against a wall, we’ve just been running and laughing, and the music is still playing, he kisses me, and he’s a little drunk, and at a quiet part in the montage music he whispers “It’s like I’m falling in love with Zora-Nora” — like two steps away from a real admission, three steps away from I love you, and I know what he means, he means what the fuck, I’m getting so fucking fond of this weird character with a weird name and such a fucking weird backstory, so he didn’t tell me that he loves me, but still he turns fucking ashen like he just farted really fucking loudly and he’s like “I am so sorry, I don’t know why I said that,” and I’m like pretty sure I know why he said that, and he gets more ashen and kisses me like he’s my brother. And he says he has to go away again, and I’m like so you’ll be back when? and he’s all like unsure when he’ll be back, all of a sudden. Alexéin’s face kind of falls even more, because that was a stupid apathetic thing to say, and he looks at his watch absently, and then he looks away from me, his eyes just grow vacant and distant, looking off into the distance at nothing, and not at me. 

Then the music stops and the scene cuts to black. 

.

A DOOR OPENS, and you and Cèléste come into my apartment. You know the way to do that? The film cuts to black, it’s like the emotional darkness of the awful unfunny cringy moment that Alexéin and I just shared, and then a door opens in the blackness, a light slices through the darkness in a kind of jolting graphic match cut. And it’s you! 

You hand me a bottle of wine and charge by as though it’s your own apartment. I was polite, you know, about the wine, but you really should know how to choose better wine. Even when you spend a lot of money on wine, you just spend a lot of money, you don’t wind up with good wine. So I look at the wine, and I turn away and look askance, so the audience sees it, but you don’t. Cèléste is silent, and you are yapping about a failed business deal. Remember, that deal that as usual turned out to be nothing? 

“So, picture this,” you say, and your voice drips with frustration. “We had everything lined up — investors ready, contracts in hand. All that hard work, all those meetings, and then —boom! It all falls apart because one of the investors forgot to get his wife’s permission. Can you believe it?”

Cèléste quietly sets the wine on the counter, her expression neutral. She’s silent, as always, and you are loud. 

“I spent weeks on this — hours, phone calls, endless back-and-forths — and all because someone didn’t tell the old lady. Unbelievable.”

You finally pause, taking a deep breath, while Cèléste silently pours the wine into glasses.

“It’s because you are a shitty businessman,” I say. 

You shrug. You remember that? 

You know how shitty you are. 

It’s good when your deals fall apart, you’re so shitty. 

Cèléste hands you a glass of wine, her movements calm and deliberate, a quiet counterpoint to your frenetic energy. She doesn’t say a word, just gives me a brief, understanding look before turning her attention to the view outside the window, leaving your words hanging in the air.

If one of your business deals actually happened, that would be the real disaster. It’s better that you lose only your wasted time chasing a deal that never happens. God forbid you ever run a company, you’re so incompetent and moronic. 

We won’t have you play yourself, or anyone who looks like you play yourself, because I don’t want people in the theater puking in the aisles, like when The Exorcist came out. Film cannot capture your charisma, darling. 

You and Cèléste are in this movie for a couple of reasons, and the first is to make everyone really uncomfortable about me, but not too uncomfortable, so there is a lot we will leave out. 

You sit down on the couch, you pour me some wine, and you reminisce a little, bittersweetly, the way you do, the way you did that night, those ambiguous and strange things you say that sweep me back to our whole erratic fitful history, which itself could be a movie (but a bad movie that no one would want to see). 

“I still think about your movie sometimes,” you say. “We just need a story and a screenplay. We have an enchanting leading lady” — and here the camera focuses on me, and I seem kind of ironically enchanting — “we just need everything else.” You glance at Celeste. “I wonder if you would write a role for Celeste. I imagine her as a silent warrior. Impaling a man on her sword, and his entrails leak out, intestines, liver, spleen and stomach spill onto the floor, glisten unnervingly in the dim light. Or shooting a man, the bullets pin him to the wall, and she shoots him long after he has died, he’s just standing there against the wall kind of eerily, standing there still because of the force of the bullets.” You kind of smile, thinking about this. “So I can see Celeste’s perfect role. She’s Ruby Rose in John Wick Chapter 2and Uma Thurman in Kill Bill Volume 2. But you, Kalyee, who are you on the screen? — Audrey Hepburn, Anna May Wong, Tilda Swinton, Louise Brooks, Jenna Ortega, Anita Mui. All of them and none of them. You see? ” 

You take a sip of the wine, and you say, “Funny how some things are easier to swallow when you pretend they’re worth the taste.” You smile. “Like that night in Tangier.” The audience wonders: Did you and I spend a night in Tangier? Did we meet in Tangier? Or are you kidding? 

Oh, you know what happens next, I don’t need to describe it here. You know, maybe you kiss me, and then Cèléste kisses me. 

Then a jump cut.

You and me, we fall to the bed — I mean, you know, me and the more-handsome-than-you guy portraying you in the film — and Cèléste sits by the edge of the bed, just staring at us, and then she picks up a novel and starts reading it from the middle. The novel is Being and Time, by Martin Heidegger, just like it was in real life. The movie won’t ever explain this, it’ll just seem odd, the audience will be thinking, What’s going on there? Only you and I and Cèléste will really understand this part of the movie. Just like you’re the only one who understands me, and you and I are the only ones who understand our silent Cèléste. Cèléste has a mind that outruns the universe, maybe that’s why she never talks. Her mouth cannot keep up with her mind. 

The screen bursts with light — for just maybe three seconds, a sweeping, disorienting shot of a foreign coastline, waves crash, the image means escape or adventure, or isolation. The sunlight cuts out suddenly, blackness, silence, the faint sound of breath or a heartbeat (or both breath and a heartbeat), then in dim light, the curve of my bare back, intimate, inaccessible, the dim light traces down my spine, our lips meet in a flash of red light, an almost claustrophobic close-up, a textured, tactile shot of your tie, which brushes softly between my naked tits, your face under a fedora hat that shades your eyes from the noonday sun in Morocco, my face a beacon of an expression of tragic near-ecstasy in a near-darkness lit only by streetlights through the window. I stand in the window, in that robe, and you come over to me and touch my arm, and I say, “I’m seeing someone now.” We don’t see your reaction, we just see your hand on my arm and, a little out of focus behind us, Cèléste staring sideways a little blankly, reading Heidegger. 

Here is the second reason for you to be in this film: you are the only person who I can actually confide in, and this shows that I’m beginning to feel almost ready to acknowledge that Alexéin means something, that he’s someone that I should tell people about, someone I am seeing “now.” 

But are those reasons enough to put you in the film? Should you just have an executive producer credit to reward you for giving me four times the money needed to make the movie? 

You see, I am just not sure whether we can really talk about you and me and Cèléste in this movie and not lose the entire audience. It feels like no honest movie about me could possibly omit you, but I don’t want to explain us and what we are all about, which is a whole new level of mishigas, something that no one needs to know. But if we show some of our dynamic and don’t explain it, they’ll be repelled. They’ll just wonder and fill in the blanks. I don’t want people to judge what we have, and they will never understand what we have. Or, I suppose, what we had, if you are really gone. 

Maybe, instead of even including you in the movie at all, there’s a straight cut to a scene of Elias entering the apartment with the wine, like as though I am imagining that he is still in my life, giving me good advice, listening to my problems, then smash-cut to a scene of me and Elias, just fucking like crazy that night we were together, just at the very height of the whole thing, which happened at 2:57 am. And then I can stand by the window in that robe and Elias touches my arm and I tell Elias that I’m seeing someone, like I break reality and confide to someone who isn’t even in my life, and there’s a slow dissolve where he kind of fades away and his voice gets quieter, until he is invisible and the scene is silent, I’m alone in bed, so that the movie audience will know it isn’t real. 

Either way, there’s another quick cut to a static frame of me all alone in the shower, or just standing naked against the window, or lying naked on the couch with the camera spying me from above, and I’m crying, almost total silence, just water droplets, the hum of the city, or the creak of furniture, which are louder than my quiet crying. This is what the screenplay books call “a moment of realization or decision for the protagonist,” and it should be really sad and vulnerable, and also my third nude scene.

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THEN, ALSO, some more development of my “subplot,” because my screenplay guide says that in Act 2, I need to give the subplot 15% of the total screen time. So in this Act 2, Reeley starts sharing more about her feelings with me and Meya. She’s confused and intrigued — how can she be falling for someone without even knowing their gender? It’s as if Jordan exists in a state of perpetual ambiguity, and that uncertainty becomes intoxicating for Reeley. She starts to wonder if it’s the mystery she’s in love with, rather than Jordan themself.

As Reeley’s feelings grow stronger, she tries to learn more about Jordan, but every time she thinks she’s getting closer, Jordan slips away. It’s like trying to grasp smoke. This frustrates Reeley, but also tantalizes her even more. 

Their conversations are brief, but they’re really beautiful. Kind of ethereal, you know? These little pearls here and there. Jordan says them with such a beautiful voice, with a tone of voice that is just right there, right in-between, a beautiful voice, not something you could call “ambiguous,” because beauty is never ambiguous, it’s just beauty, like the smell of vanilla. The smell of vanilla is never ambiguous, even though the smell of vanilla is neither male nor female. 

You know, man, I don’t care about the subplot. But Reeley is a person, and these were feelings that she was feeling. 

So why not appropriate it for my film? 

Appropriation is appropriate because — I didn’t tell you this — Reeley moved out just last week and she owes me two months’ rent, which I’ll never see. She knows there’s nothing I can do, if I were to pursue her legally for two months’ rent it would cost me more in legal fees than I would ever recover, so she’s doing the financially smart thing, I guess, by not paying me, and I am too, by saying fuck it and just forgetting about it. 

That little snub won’t make it into the movie, but just to let you know, I thought Reeley was my friend, but she’s just another fucker.

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SO THEN maybe seasons change a little bit (but maybe we won’t have a budget for a longer shoot) I’m wandering around, by myself, it’s pretty clear I haven’t heard from Alexéin, and then I’m dancing with some guy, some kind of old music, like ballroom dancing in this just spectacular retro ballroom. I’m wearing this little black dress like Jeanne Moreau in Elevator to the Gallows, but shorter, like almost obscenely short, but not quite obscenely short. I don’t really need to describe the guy here, we need to find someone who is ten years older than me and gorgeous in a half-elegant/half-rundown kind of a way. 

The guy says something charming and I laugh, then the next scene he’s in bed, it’s 4 am, I’m sneaking out of his apartment, I’m on the street hailing a cab. The next day I’m walking a dog and walking a kid, the kid’s like three-years-old, and the kid says, Kalyee, you look really sad, and I’m like “This is my happy face, my happy face looks really sad, so whenever I look really sad, you’ll always know I’m happy.” 

Then I ask him how he is, and he says he’s really sad, that whenever he looks sad you always know that he’s really sad. 

I ask what’s making him sad and he rattles off this whole list of crazy shit, pollution, wildfires, global conflict, “antisemiticalism,” and lots of other cute hilarious kid shit, and then he adds, “and nobody loves me.” 

I tell him, eh, don’t worry about that. None of that matters. The dog is just walking beside us, staring at us like it’s interested, all anthropomorphist, which movie audiences really love, and the little boy is like, “None of that matters?” and I’m like, “No, none of that matters, you don’t have to worry about any of that.” 

And he asks, “If none of that matters, then what does matter?” 

This really stumps me, and you can see it in my face, what the fuck does matter? and the dog is all like interested in the fucking answer like the fucking dog is a person, and finally I say, “Candy corn,” and the kid says, “Candy corn?” And I’m like, “Yeah, candy corn. Having enough candy corn matters. Do you have enough candy corn?” He’s like “No, I don’t have any candy corn,” so I give him some candy corn. The dog looks satisfied at this resolution. Then I say, “I’m just kidding. Candy corn doesn’t matter. Your mom and dad love you. Everyone who sees you loves you. It doesn’t always feel that way, because everyone has things on their mind, they’re always thinking about things that worry them, so they don’t always tell you how they feel. But people love you, because look at you. You’re lovable.” He starts crying and I hug him. 

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I’M WALKING by Alexéin’s apartment building, and I ask the doorman if the man in apartment 42–e has been around lately, and he asks if I want him to buzz up, and he asks my name, and I say I just want to know if the man in apartment 42–e has been around, and the doorman says he can’t tell me. I don’t get angry, because that’s what he’s supposed to say. I’d be disappointed tbh if he actually tells me whether Alexéin has around, especially since I don’t really even need to ask. You know and I know and the audience knows that Alexéin has been around, he just hasn’t been with me. 

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I MEET THE GUY from the dance club in the street. He’s kind of like stern and he says, “You really hurt me when you slept with me and then snuck out in the middle of the night,” and I say I know and I’m sorry, but I was going through shit. He says, “You won’t do that again?” And I’m like, “What, sleep with you?” and he says, “No, sneak out in the middle of the night after you sleep with me,” and that’s presumptuous, so I go, like, ok I promise not to sleep with you. 

We’re back on the dance floor in an even bigger and ritzier dance hall, like something from Swing Time. These places really do still exist, but if I show one in my movie it’s an “homage” to Swing Time, even though it’s just a big dance hall that really does exist. 

He says again, “Promise you won’t sneak out again,” and I said, “I absolutely promise you, promise you, promise you that I won’t sneak out again,” and he’s so happy and grateful and excited to hear that, he tosses me in the air and then dips me, right there on the dance floor, and the camera frames it from above and then from below, and it’s breathtaking. 

Then there is a smash cut, it’s three in the morning in his apartment and it’s almost dark with just a little bit of moonlight and city light, and I get out of bed and you see my bare butt, and I sneak out again, you follow me as I tiptoe out of the bedroom and then quietly get dressed in the living room in the dark with only the lights of the city and the moon, then I ride the elevator under the fluorescent lights with a kind of gloomy-guilty look on my face, the sound of the elevator chugging along. 

This is called a “Gilligan Cut Gag,” where a character swears she won’t do something, and then there’s a smash cut and the next shot immediately contradicts her by showing her doing exactly the thing that she swore never to do. It’s the corniest and oldest and cheapest and easiest laugh, and, for the record, Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of Gilligan’s Island, popularized and formalized (and arguably invented) it. Like in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, if Jake says something really categorically, like, “There’s no way I’m going to sing karaoke!” you know that in the next scene he’ll be belting out “I Want It That Way.”

So I will use the Gilligan Cut Gag, not as a cheap laugh, but because it really happened that way in my life. 

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I’M ON THE STREET, and I pass a storefront, I go in, I try on a hat, I exchange a few words with a saleswoman, then I put the hat on my head, and the camera focuses on this hat — you know the one, the one I showed you? — and then it zooms back and it’s sometime later. 

It’s now chilly early Fall, and the biting wind sweeps across a deserted boardwalk, and I’m wearing the hat. I remember it like it’s winter, but it wasn’t really winter. But that’s the way I remember it, so maybe you could give me a little wintery vibe to this scene. The amusement park rides stand eerily still, and the usually vibrant atmosphere is replaced by a quiet beauty. We’re bundled up in sweaters, our breath visible in the cold air. The lights from the distant Ferris wheel cast a faint glow off the wet pavement. Maybe here we could kind of cram scenes of different beach boardwalks into each other, giving this the EveryCity look that we’re going for, even though IRL it was Brighton Beach. 

It’s the third time we’ve been together. In a voiceover, I surmise that maybe the reason we haven’t fucked is that he’s promised not to lie to me, and he doesn’t know how to seduce a woman without lying to her. And then after a bunch of dates without sex — you don’t know how many, but enough for a shitty montage sequence — he vanished for a while, he wasn’t here, he was somewhere else. Or, you know, he wasn’t here with me. 

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MY SCREENWRITING MANUAL says that around page 60, about 60% into the screenplay, comes “a significant event or revelation that changes the direction of the story.” By this point, the audience should be fully immersed in the characters and the dynamics between them, just as everything starts to unravel. It’s here that Alexéin’s true nature begins to surface, and the stakes are raised. The tension that has been building up finally reaches a critical point, leaving both me and the audience wondering how this story will end.

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WE WALK SIDE BY SIDE, the sound of our footsteps the only noise breaking the silence. Alexéin seems more contemplative tonight. We reach the end of the pier, he stops and looks out at the ocean, the waves crash rhythmically, you know the sound, but maybe a little faker, a little off-putting. We go into a little bar, a grungy place that he knows.

“I haven’t been here in … I don’t know,” he says quietly, his voice barely audible over the wind that pummels the windows. 

I glance at him. There’s something to the story. 

“More than a few years ago. This reminds me of a real mess. A mess. A real mess.”

So: a mess, which happened some time ago! I think I get it. 

He hesitates for a moment, then sighs.

And then he tells me. This is what my screenwriting manual calls an “emotional beat.”

Because Alexéin has a story, he has a secret, a tragedy. 

His voice cracks slightly, and he quickly clears his throat, to maintain composure.

“This is something I don’t talk about. But I feel like, you would see it anyway. I’ve been reliving that, every day. Dreams faded into shadows.” He cringes. “That’s the corniest fucking thing I ever said in my life.”

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OKAY, SO PICTURE THIS: Alexéin spilling his guts, right? And we don’t just do some basic sad boy close-up. We go full old-school, silent movie style. Think George O’Brien in Sunrise, where you can literally see the villain’s soul through his eyes because he’s bummed but trying to make it right. No matter what Alexéin ever did in his life, he wasn’t as shitty as George O’Brien in Sunrise, because no one was ever as shitty as George O’Brien in Sunrise. (Google it if you don’t believe me.) Or John Gilbert in The Big Parade — John Gilbert is the greatest actor who ever lived, it’s all in his face, his whole tragic party boy to war hero saga, just vibing through his eyes, where we can see his whole life — the life that the real John Gilbert had already lived in 1925, when the movie came out, and also his future life, drinking himself to death at the age of 38 and dying in Marlene Dietrich’s arms before she was Marlene Dietrich, all of that — just in his eyes, without even hearing his beautiful voice, especially that intense moment when he returns from the war, and his face tells the whole story — battle scars aren’t just physical, you know — his eyes alone show the turmoil and changes he’s endured, the pain of being John Gilbert, the most beautiful man and greatest actor who ever lived. That’s what this scene will be, if we do it right. Alexéin will be John Gilbert. 

So the camera zooms outside, we see the revelation from outside the window, the pain and shock in Alexéin’s eyes, the pain in my eyes as I realize who he really is. So when Alexéin tells his story, we capture it with the same raw, profound silence as John Gilbert in The Big Parade, his lips move but we don’t hear it, we just watch from the other side of the window, just hear the wind pound the ocean and the birds squawk. 

It’s all spelled out on our faces, as though one of those silent film intertitles is up on the screen. 

Just let our eyes do the talking, with some moody music backing it up. No words needed, because I don’t think anyone could even really nail that depth with dialogue. Plus, we’ve seen it before, exactly 60% of the way into a romantic comedy, the blithe hero changes the story by revealing that he’s not really so blithe. Like in Pretty Woman when Richard Gere, as a heartless corporate raider, reveals to Julia Roberts that his father was never proud of him, and that he doesn’t feel like he measures up. Awwww, we think. He’s not a shit. It closes out Act 2 or begins Act 3, every time. 

There’s also one other drawback to saying it out-loud: no movie theater audience would ever believe Alexéin’s revelation, it’s so astonishing that everyone would giggle. But it really happened. I know it really happened because he was so genuine while he told it, but even more than that, I know it really happened because it’s such an outrageous story. If he wanted to make up something sad, he would have made up something less crazy. And so if we were to include a revealing sympathetic story in the film, we’d need to change Alexéin’s story to something that everyone is expecting, like his beloved older brother died of cancer and he’s still not over it. Which would be better, but also not as good, and also a lie. 

I’m taken aback by his honesty, by the pain he’s revealing. The confident, charming, phony-ass man I’ve come to know now seems so much more real, so much more human. I reach out and touch his arm, offering silent comfort. He looks at me, his eyes fill with a mix of grief and gratitude.

For a moment, we sit there in the cold bar, the weight of his words hangs between us. I watch him closely, with a mix of sympathy and fear. He’s let me see a part of him that he usually keeps hidden, but it also confirms what I’ve suspected — that he’s involved in something dangerous. Something that might pull me down with him if I’m not careful.

The sound of the waves crashing against the shore fills the silence between us. 

He’s still holding back, not giving me the full story, but it’s enough to make me see him differently. To make me understand that beneath the charm and the bravado, there’s a man who’s lost. 

Now the movie audience is inside the bar with Alexéin and me. 

Alexéin looks up. 

“Pretty fucked up, right?”

I shrug, I nod. Sympathetically. Sure, that’s fucked up, I agree with my eyes, I’m like, fucked up happens to everyone. This kind of set a Guinness world record for fucked up, though. 

Now you can see what the “significant event” is, which my screenwriting manual says should occur around 60% of the way into the screenplay: he is not so bad. Or, rather, he is terrible. But he is the right kind of terrible for me. I am not so great myself. That is the significant event, I realize this.

Smash cut, the ambient bar noise halts abruptly, and we’re in the backseat of a cab together, just kissing like crazy, and you, the audience, wish that you were me. This is amazing! He’s just revealed that he’s got to be the most fucked-up fucker who ever fucked up, and the next moment, he’s made a brazen advance on me and we’re in a cab going you know where. But I am myself so fucked up that it’s absolutely worked on me, it’s put me in the perfect mood for something brazen.

Quick cut, and Alexéin and I go in the front door of my apartment building — you know, the one that isn’t really my apartment building, the fancy one (yes! I have a key!) — and the doorman says, “Good evening, Ms. Séraphina.”

Then, in this crazily luxurious apartment that supposedly belongs to Zora-Nora, I look around for the scotch, acting cool, pretending I know where everything is.

Drinking, Alexéin says, “It felt good telling you all that. I mean, it felt horrible telling you all that, but now it feels good. I spent a lot of money in psych fees dealing with that.” I nod, like I totally get why someone who has the most fucked-up story I ever heard would need some psych help. He takes a gulp of scotch, and he says, “You ever — ?” and I’m all like shaking my head emphatically, Zora-Nora doesn’t need that, psychological head-shrinking, which is true. Zora-Nora does not need that, because she knows everything there is to know. Kalyee Srithnam on the other hand…. I kind of laugh, and he looks at me, and then the next thing, after a quick cut, we’re in bed together, blue light from the city outside flashing on our naked bodies, a kind of visual reference to the lighting when we first met, “Xtal” by Aphex Twin playing on the soundtrack, and then a match cut: the blue isn’t the blue of the city lights and the sky and the bridges and the taxis and the rivers, but it’s from a glowing nebula that slowly expands across the heavens, swirls with icy blues and silvers, and we spin in the middle of all of it, kind of visually like Planetarium Dance from La La Land, if you can see that in your mind’s eye. 

Then it’s all over, smash cut, the music ends abruptly. 

“Listen,” he says, curled up with me naked in bed. “Come away with me.” There’s some noise on the street, souped up speakers blast too much base from a car that squeals by on the street many stories below. “Monemvasia,” he continues. “This Monday night. I have an extra ticket.” He pauses; why does he have an extra ticket (the unspoken question). “It’s a long story, of course.” He smiles kind of weakly. “But you know most of it now, and so you can imagine or figure out or surmise why I would be going to Monemvasia and why I have a spare ticket. You understand that I’ll need to leave early in the morning, I’ll be away for a few days, and you understand why that’s unavoidable. I’m kind of an open book to you.” He laughs, and he says, “Nothing like a good soul rending to impress a lady. But if all goes well tomorrow, and then the day after tomorrow, then I will be back on Sunday, and then when I come back, maybe you’ll come away with me on Monday. It’ll be something new and good for both of us.” 

I feel terrible. Because I know that I love him completely. And that this realization will change nothing. In this quiet, shared understanding, I realize how much he means to me, and how much it’s going to hurt me when I abandon him.

I nod and tell him that I would love to go away with him. And it’s not a lie; I would love to go away with him. Even though I won’t actually go away with him. 

The next morning I’m lying in bed, watching him in the shower, the curtain is half open and I’m watching him, and he looks really great, and this is the last time I will ever see him. 

After he’s gone, I walk around the apartment, just reliving everything by touching the space that we inhabited during this brief moment that we were in love last night, just like Greta Garbo in Queen Christina, thinking about John Gilbert. 

I walk out the front door and the doorman says, “Good day, Ms. Séraphina,” and I won’t ever see the doorman again, either. 

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WHEN YOU DESCRIBE THIS TO THE MOVIE COMPANY, they’ll suggest the following. “What if,” they will say, “at the very end of the movie, Kalyee needs to be in one place, and Zora-Nora needs to be in another place, at exactly the same time?” They will all laugh and laugh at this! “She has a date with a handsome guy she loves as Kalyee and also a date with Alexéin, at two tables in two different rooms in the same restaurant. She runs back and forth, and she keeps changing from her real identity, as Kalyee, into her Zora-Nora costume! She’s taking off the wig and putting it on and taking it off and putting it on, and running back and forth!” You’ll point out that I look the same, no matter who I am, my real self or Zora-Nora. Only my eyes change, the windows to my soul, because our souls are different, Zora-Nora and me. They’ll say, “Change this. She should wear a disguise. And then run back and forth and back and forth, change her disguise back and forth. And then, one time, when she runs into the room where she is supposed to be Kalyee, she’ll be wearing the Zora-Nora wig, because she forgot to take it off in all the havoc, and so then the guy who knows her as Kalyee says, ‘What is that wig, I love it!’ and she thinks, Oh no, even he is falling for Zora-Nora, everyone loves Zora-Nora more than me. That will be funny.” But we won’t do that, no matter how much they beg. We will tell only the truth, other than as previously disclosed, the TRS-80 and so on. 

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ALSO, in Act 3, the subplot gets resolved. The subplot will take up 5% to 10% of the final Act, and it will be resolved 10% of the way before the movie ends. My movie will be 80 minutes long, so it will be resolved 72 minutes into the movie. 

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I TOLD YOU that Reeley keeps seeing Jordan, who utters these beautiful little aphorisms. Just so beautiful, things that I hope we can market on coffee mugs and dish towels. But these interludes are always brief, there is no time for Reeley to try to ask Jordan out for coffee. Like, one time Jordan couldn’t find their apartment keys and said, “The heart doesn’t seek answers; it dances with the questions.” Like, that’s the essence of losing your apartment keys, right? I’ve got a whole list of this shit, ready for merch. 

This kind of thing seems meaningless although cute, something that someone clever who couldn’t find their keys might say to anyone who happened to walk by in the hallway. But to Reeley, something important and profound passes between them, each time. 

Now, here’s what happens, which turns this into something weird, something that will be haunting, if we make the movie the way it should be made. 

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A WHILE AGO, I was walking around in Brooklyn, and on the street I found a paperback collection of an old comic strip from the 1960s and ‘70s called “The Dropouts,” by Howard Post. The comic strip was about an alternative community that lives on a deserted island, trying to escape from civilization. The joke is that they’ve just brought the shittiest elements of society with them to this island, they’ve just recreated the worst elements of society. Humans can never escape who we are, which is shitty fucking pieces of shit. 

One of the characters is this skirt-chasing shirtless piece of shit named Alf, who can never get laid; another is this low-key-rebellious young woman named Euphoria Van Der Grass, a pot-smoking feminist whose disheveled hair covers her face, who always wears baggy clothes, long sleeves, long pants. She’s working to overthrow the system and y’know create an ideal society where everybody does their own thing, and then to overthrow that new society too, because overthrowing the system is her thing. She wants to bring down the crummy police state and substitute a, y’know, people’s society. Don’t “Euphoria honey” her! You may address her as “Ms. Van der Grass”! Sunsets turn her off — too traditional. She hates men, because she hates losers. 

She and Alf don’t especially get along. Alf doesn’t especially give her a second thought. 

She always has a reefer hanging from her lip. Howard Post, the cartoonist, hated her, but he didn’t understand her. I understand her, and so I love Euphoria Van Der Grass. 

In one Sunday color “Dropouts” comic strip, an absolutely stunning babe in a tiny bikini frolics in the waves. Post draws her body in just loving detail. We’ve never seen her before, this babe, but as she frolics lusciously in the waves, she thinks about Alf, about how much she loves him, all the wonderful traits that he possesses that no one else has ever seen in him; and she wonders why he doesn’t notice her at all, and she wonders why there is no hope.

Then, of course, this beautiful near-naked woman ascends from the waves and dresses, and once again clad in her sloppy uniform, she turns out to be Euphoria.

Alf is incredibly superficial; trapped on an island with a woman who loves him, he cannot see past her messy hair and her externally unwelcoming attitude to look into her eyes. 

But she is also oblivious to her own appeal, or hostile to it. In plenty of movies, the mousy girl becomes beautiful all of a sudden: Talia Shire takes off her glasses in Rocky, Cher dyes her hair in Moonstruck and is suddenly as beautiful as Cher. But some people do not yearn to break out of their shells to become beautiful, they are uncomfortable being beautiful, or do not even want to be beautiful. Alf will never look at Euphoria, and Euphoria won’t become someone else just to convince him to love her. He would love her, she could make him love her so easily, if she were just willing to lose herself. 

I’ve thought a lot about Euphoria since I picked up that book off the street. I know that she is just a comic strip character, but I sort of wonder whatever happened to her. She would be something like 76-years-old today, if she were real. 

Which brings me to Reeley. Desperate to attract Jordan, she spends a half hour with Meya one afternoon — the fateful afternoon, although Reeley doesn’t know it yet — trying to decide what to wear. I lived with Reeley for long enough that I got to know that she could be beautiful if she wanted to be beautiful, or if she wasn’t afraid to be beautiful. Or embarrassed to be beautiful. 

She gives it her best shot, she borrows clothes from Meya, tries on one thing after another, beautiful clothes that are not so flashy that one could not wear them just to walk from the apartment to the drugstore, hoping to see and impress someone special. 

So maybe here, in this next scene, Reeley will be in front of a mirror, with Meya, trying on clothes, becoming more and more beautiful and vulnerable before our eyes. I think it would be nice if she was kind of exposed, maybe partially nude as her clothes come on and off, just a hint of what she wants to show Jordan. I like nudity in movies, because I think it makes movies more like life. 

In the end, she decides to wear a brown plaid blazer with beige blouse (you know, the Jan Smithers outfit from WKRP that I mentioned to you before, the one from 1980). In the end, she decides that she’s Euphoria Van Der Grass, not Julia Roberts. 

So out she goes, just Reeley, consciously not-beautiful, walking to the drug store, wearing a brown plaid blazer with beige blouse. She’s going out to buy something mundane, tampons or that kind of syrup that loosens your mucus, something 100% not romantic. She passes through that little park near our apartment, you know the one. As soon as she enters the park, from the northeast corner, Jordan enters the park from the southwest corner. Reeley walks towards Jordan, Jordan walks towards Reeley. She has expected to see Jordan, she has spent an hour dressing up just because she thought she would see Jordan, and yet when Jordan appears out of the mist, Reeley freezes like a statue carved in ice.

Jordan reaches her, where she stands motionless at the center of the park. Jordan kisses her. 

This could seem really just totally inappropriate, unless we build up each aphorism, one on top of another like each one is a stone in a skyscraper, until there is so much chemistry in the air that the kiss seems not only inevitable but long overdue. 

Jordan says something to her hurriedly, like Let’s change things, let’s change everything. Something like that. 

Before she can react, Jordan is gone, they just dash away. 

Who would behave that way? 

Someone who knows what Reeley wants. 

Reeley wants drama, beautiful scenes. 

This scene, the walk across the park and the kiss, could be scored to something like Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” (but not actually that piece, which is overused in movies), something with violins that evoke longing and brooding, building intensity, harmonies layered on top of harmonies that resonate with melancholy and reflection as Jordan approaches, then swell into hope as Jordan kisses Reeley.

Reeley wants to shout after Jordan, “Let’s change everything, Jordan!” but by the time she gathers her wits, Jordan is not even visible anymore. 

She goes to Jordan’s door when she gets back to our building, but the door is shut, and she knocks but no one opens it. A little later in the movie, the next day or a few days later, people are gathered around Jordan’s apartment, and they’re carrying boxes out. Reeley wants to ask why. Is Jordan moving away? Did Jordan die? She looks at these people. They aren’t crying. So maybe Jordan is alive. But they look a little bit professional, so maybe someone hired them, maybe they don’t even know Jordan, maybe they wouldn’t be sad even if Jordan were dead. So she doesn’t know. She doesn’t ask them anything. No one says a word. “Motion Picture Soundtrack” by Radiohead plays in the background. But whatever Jordan’s story is, this is the end of it, and she never finds the answers she is searching for. 

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SO WHEN EVENTUALLY I sit down with Reeley and Meya, to just hash it all out, at the kitchen counter, Reeley has some news of her own, that her unresolved connection with Jordan has left her questioning everything she thought she knew about love and attraction. She tells me, as we begin to discuss Alexéin, that everything is fake, and that this pervasive fakeness doesn’t matter. Love is all that matters. This conversation goes on for hours, we drink a lot. This is the part of the film in which, according to experts, I am expected to “resolve unanswered questions and tie up loose ends” and “show the protagonist confronting the main obstacle.” And I do!

Reeley thinks I should come clean, the way she wishes that Jordan could have come clean with her, and she is sure that Alexéin will understand. Meya laughs a lot, she thinks the situation is funny, and I alternate between anger and laughing with her. But eventually I come around to a final decision. There’s no hope. I don’t say it like that, but you can see it in my eyes. Honestly, there’s no hope. It’s straight-up doomed. The only man I have ever loved, and I cannot have him, because I cannot tell him the truth. 

Reeley asks me what I am going to do, and I say that I have already set up this big romantic trip with him, the real culmination of everything, and that I will not show, I will desert him. But in addition to deserting Alexéin, Zora-Nora will also vanish from the world. The phone number won’t work anymore, no one will know who Zora-Nora is, and there will be no trace of her in the apartment building where he thinks I live. Zora-Nora will be gone. Alexéin will be anticipating the fling of a lifetime, and instead he will get a void, absolute nothingness, like sitting in a cavern during a landslide, buried alive. Alexéin will leave America, sitting beside an empty seat on the plane. He will feel like Zora-Nora has existed just to humiliate him and break his heart, and now that she has accomplished this mission for which she came into being, Zora-Nora no longer exists. 

Meya laughs, she gets it. I mean, it’s kind of funny. Reeley asks why I will do this to the man I love, and I say, “He’s still the guy who abused a defenseless bicycle delivery girl and couldn’t even bother to remember her face. And about what? Not about a gift for his mother. About something bad. He’s still the same bad guy, it doesn’t matter how I feel.”

“But you love him.”

I shrug. 

“He loves you,” Reeley says.

I say, “He loves the lie.”

Reeley says, “The lie loves him back.”

“But he’s still bad.”

“But he ripped out his heart for you, he told you all his pain.”

“Bad people have feelings,” I argue. “No one ever said bad people don’t have feelings. No one ever said bad people don’t have pain.”

“But you love him,” Reeley says.

“Bad people have people who love them. It doesn’t mean there’s no karma. Eva Braun loved Hitler. Hitler loved Eva Braun.”

“Alexéin isn’t Hitler,” Reeley says

“No. But Alexéin is still bad. He is also bad. More than one person can be bad. It’s not like everyone who isn’t Hitler gets off the hook because he isn’t Hitler.” 

Meya, who really gets how I feel about this, says, “Hitler loved his kids.”

Reeley says, “I’m pretty sure Hitler didn’t have kids,” and Meya says, “Yeah, there are all these Hitlers who live on Long Island who changed their names.”

I’ve heard of these guys, but I seem to remember that they’re like distant cousins who unfortunately shared the same name as the Fuhrer before they changed it, which I mention, but then I add, “But Meya’s point is still valid. Even if Hitler didn’t have kids, some Nazis had kids and loved them a lot. Mosquitoes have babies and protect them and feed them. They feed them our blood. Love isn’t actually evidence of goodness at all. Henry the Eighth really loved Anne Boleyn for a while before he killed her. He loved her a lot. Maybe she loved him back. Bad people love and are loved.”

I think for a second. 

“I wonder if I ever met Alexéin before.” 

“Of course you met him,” Reeley says. “The delivery.”

“No,” I say. “Before that. You know how in daily life you come across assholes with some frequency? You don’t remember their faces. What if they are all the same guy? You would never know. Maybe I met Alexéin over and over again, year over year over year over year. What if he has been tormenting me with his awfulness for almost my whole life.” 

I imagine now that Alexéin is every terrible guy who’s ever been thoughtlessly rude to me, carelessly horrible. 

A title appears on the screen: Two years ago. 

Alexéin cuts in line in front of me. 

Four years ago. Alexéin retrieves his hat and coat from the check girl and doesn’t tip her, and he laughs when he sees her disappointment. I’m standing behind him in line, and he sees my disapproval. “What are you looking at?” he asks me with disgust. 

Five years ago. I hold the door for him, and he walks through without thanking me. 

Three years ago. He holds the door for me when I am walking with a guy and I’m crying, and I don’t see him because my vision is blurry with tears, and Alexéin says, “You’re welcome, cunt,” and he hits the guy in the back of the head. 

Fifteen years ago. I am a young girl, he is a boy, he kicks me into the mud, and he laughs. 

Six years ago. I am dressed up, walking down the street, Alexéin grabs a bucket of paint and throws it in my face.

Alexéin might be every bad person I ever met. Even if he is not, today he is, in my mind. He is as bad as all of those bad people, he is as bad as anyone I’ve ever met. 

Smash cut back to the kitchen. 

Reeley says, “Are you ok?”

Then a straight cut, I’m in my bedroom, just trashing the place, making noise, totally out of control. In a split-screen, Reeley and Meya sit awkwardly in the kitchen, they can hear me shouting incoherently in the next room. The audio focuses on my chaos but softens occasionally to highlight the silence or awkward noises in the kitchen, like the clink of a spoon in a mug. What an asshole I am, how horrible it must be to live in an apartment with me and all my mishigas. 

This retribution isn’t as much fun for me as I had thought it would be. 

.

WELL, I’m supposed to meet him, and this is to be our big night, we’re going to fly away together. 

I stand in my apartment, the screen glowing faintly in the corner, dim blue light scatters across the room. The camera on my TRS-80 is turned on. Alexéin is on the screen; his eyes, look at them, his eyes. In the future, what machines will people use to talk to each other? This is why I decided to make this all happen over a retro TRS-80. Because no matter how many years we get into the future, there will always be geeks who have a TRS-80, and neo-geeks like me, and what could be cooler than to talk to your friends through a TRS-80 screen? 

We’re talking about our vacation. It’s Monday. We’re going to take a cab to a hotel airport in the evening, and then the plane will leave first thing in the morning. We’re going to have dinner in the best airport hotel restaurant money can buy. There is almost nothing more romantic than airports and airport hotels and airport hotel restaurants. 

Then something occurs to me, and I feel like telling you. Maybe the camera could visualize my thoughts, as though I am talking to you the night you came over and I told you I was in love with someone else. I’m thinking that maybe I am Zola-Nola. Maybe she is a little part of me who was always there. Maybe all that brilliance is inside of me, that success, that potential and magic. Like in Tootsie, remember when Jessica Lange tells Dustin Hoffman, I miss Dorothy and he says, You don’t have to. She’s right here. And she misses you. Because Dorothy is still somewhere inside of him. She wasn’t just a role. All the feelings were real. Is Zora-Nora somewhere inside of me? No. She is a costume that covers me like a shroud. Once I shed her, she will be gone. Inside, there is nothing. 

I’m so nervous. Alexéin’s nervous too, which is surprising. See? His eyes. The camera watches everything, the movie camera, the TRS-80 video camera, the camera in Alexéin’s eyes. Alexéin asks what I’m going to wear tonight, and I tell him, and I hold up this dress, which I bought just for this night, just to drive him crazy thinking about it. It’s a deep drunken red that will cling to my body, and it’s too short, I didn’t buy it actually ever to wear it in public, it’s shorter than the black dress that I wore to the dance hall. I imagine how it will look on me, I know he is imagining how it will look on me. 

I say that I’m going to turn off the camera so I can change into this dress, and he says OK, and then I pretend to turn off the camera, and I say to him, “It’s off, right?” knowing it isn’t, facts. He says that yeah it’s off. I try to act as though I really 100% believe him. So I undress. 

On the computer screen, he is watching. His eyes, they tell everything in this scene. He pretends that he thinks I don’t know, or maybe he really does think I don’t know. Maybe he is recording this. I hope he is recording this. 

Then I am naked. The cinematography massages me, touches me all over. I stand there, exposed, the weight of his gaze, his eyes on the TRS-80 screen. He thinks he’s in control, thinks he’s getting away with something. But the truth is, I’m the one who knows. I’m the one who’s aware of everything. I hope he’s recording, so it’s all he has left of me. I hope he’s recording it, and he’ll watch it every day. 

You see? I want to be sure you see what’s happening in this scene, because this is so important: I say, “I turned off my camera, I think. Is it off?” and he says, “Yeah,” and I say, “Turn off the screen on your side, just to be safe,” and he says, “OK, I turned it off,” but I know he is watching. Because that’s what really happened. I know that Alexéin is watching me, and that he likes what he sees, and that it is a happy moment for Alexéin; but it is sad for me because I know something he doesn’t know, that this is the last he will ever see of me. The first and the last. He thinks this is the beginning of some kind of a new life. But it’s the end of it. My bare ass is the last he will see of me.

.

NOW HERE IS AN IDEA that maybe some of the movie audience will discuss as they walk back home through a rainy night. Is Alexéin pretending that the camera is off because he thinks I’m joking, or because he’s really lying to me? Does this scene reveal that he has for real never discarded his dishonest nature; or does it demonstrate the bond that he thinks has formed between us? Does he think he is getting the better of me, or does he know that I’m in on the joke? 

Anyway, this — this moment — is my final act in a game that’s about to end. And it’s also my fourth nude scene.

.

THIS IS WHERE the movie script people say that I should “provide closure for the main characters and story arcs.” But I don’t have closure, do you? Alexéin and I are through. There is no hope. I’m not going out, I won’t see him, I won’t provide closure. He won’t get a note from me that my narrator voice will read over sad music and visuals of him staring sadly. It’s like he fell into a different reality all of a sudden where I was never born, I’m like Zuzu in It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s not like I exist but don’t know him in this new reality, like Mary in It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s like I was never born, just like Zuzu. 

The script people also say that here I should “end with a memorable final image.” 

How about this? 

The TRS-80 screen flickers off, I am naked in the apartment, because there is no point in getting dressed, is there? Because I am going nowhere. I will just sit on the floor and cry all night in an empty apartment. 

Reeley and Meya are out having fun. 

So this is your fucking memorable final image, I’m naked crying on the floor in an empty apartment at night, and Alexéin is standing in the rain waiting for me, and Reeley and Meya are out having fun. 

There you go. A memorable split image, Alexéin and me, side by side across the split image, but separated forever, and Reeley and Meya having fun, all these different scenes running at one time, like in the original Thomas Crown Affair. He doesn’t understand it, and I understand it too well, and somewhere, someone’s having fun. So I am naked and crying, and he is dressed to the Nines, in the rain, looking at his watch. 

(Did you know that no one knows what “dressed to the Nines” means? The derivation of that crazy expression is lost. It’s something Alexéin might even say in his head, Here I am, dressed to the Nines, and she has disappeared, without knowing why he was saying it, the empty significance of the number “Nine.”)

There is no real closure for me, but I will provide closure for Reeley. In a final scene, while I am still on the screen crying, and Alexéin is sinking into his romantic torment, she finds a note from Jordan, in an elegant, somehow gender-neutral script: “Omnia quae non videmus pulchra sunt. Nothing needs an answer.” Reeley stares at the note. What do her eyes tell you. She loves uncertainty and the unknown. She loves yearning. Is Jordan alive? You will debate this, when the movie is over. I don’t know the IRL answer, it’s a mystery to me, too.

Reeley has closure, so if your movie execs want closure, point to this and tell them, there it is, your fucking closure. 

As for me, there is only fake closure. As the scene fades away from the image of me, naked, juxtaposed with Alexéin, “dressed to the Nines,” and Reeley bittersweetly yearning, yearningly bittersweet, and ready to live her life, I imagine some kind of sad music, nothing with words, maybe something from Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Coda,” when the great man knew or at least suspected that he would soon die. Or maybe from his final album, “12,” but I would prefer it if we could find a good piece from “Coda,” because this “memorable final image” will fade away into what screenwriters call the “coda,” a “final scene or sequence that offers additional insight into the story.” This is that scene in the coffee shop. 

The title reads, Twelve Years Later.

I’m standing next to “Chet,” that shit-for-brains idiot, and you can tell he’s an idiot, and Alexéin is standing in line next to his beautiful wife, and he’s looking over at me, and you know that he recognizes me and that he’s just trying to decide whether to talk to me. 

Finally he kind of clears his throat and looks right at me and he says, “Zora-Nora.” I say, “That’s not my name.” There’s an awkward little silence and you hear some noise in the silence, a cappuccino machine foaming or a baby crying or a car honking, or maybe all three. Then my idiot boyfriend says, “That’s not her name.” So I say, “Hey, idiot, could you get my coffee up there from the other idiots?” and he smiles and goes to the front of the coffee place, and then Alexéin says to his wife, “Could you follow that guy and flirt with him?” and she laughs, and she goes up there too. 

Once they’re gone, he says, “Zora-Nora.” I say, “That’s not my name,” again. 

“You lied to me.” Not looking at me, looking at his fingers. 

“You knew it was a lie.”

“I didn’t.” 

“Zora-Nora Séraphina? You thought that was real? Zora-Nora? For real? You knew that was all BS.” 

“I didn’t know. How did you come up with the name Zora-Nora?”

“I didn’t come up with that name. You came up with it. Remember?”

He’s thinking, and then some realization comes into his eyes, and he gets that he made up all my supposed “lies,” even my stupid name, all I did was nod. I was nothing but a chatbot that he created in an app. 

Alexéin is talking about this ridiculous name that he has believed for years. 

“Alexéin is my real name,” he argues. “It sounds like a lie, like something beautiful I told you to impress you. There is no one else in the world named Alexéin.”

“But there could be someone named Alexéin. And you called yourself that because that’s the way you saw yourself, as something fragile and ancient. But Zora-Nora Séraphina — it’s not even remotely possible that there ever was or ever will be someone named Zora-Nora Séraphina.”

I think about telling him that I fucked a rabbi once and that I told the rabbi this story, and that the rabbi told me that, in Hebrew, Zora-Nora Séraphina means “fiery angel, radiant dawn,” so it was kind of a weird thing for Alexéin to have thought of. But I figure, like, everything means something in some language. You know, we have this friend, he and his wife named their Jewish-Chinese daughter Liana, and they. didn’t even know that in Hebrew it means Gift from God, and in Chinese it means Peace through Strength. In French it means Flowering Vine, but that was less interesting. 

But all of this would take too much explanation, I’d need to clarify that the rabbi was young and hot, not one of those kinds of rabbis he’s probably thinking of, and that the rabbi had become an atheist and had renounced his faith, but that he still had the rabbinic degree so he was technically still a rabbi, but that he was an atheist so I hadn’t tempted him into sin, since “sin” is a religious construct. 

But I digress, as the fellow said. 

“But you should not have just disappeared,” Alexéin says. “I went back to your apartment, and it wasn’t your apartment. I asked everywhere I could about Zora-Nora Séraphina.” He sighs, exasperated. “I did, like, research,” as though that’s this huge thing, research, like he had to lift boulders or walk a thousand miles. “I used face recognition, from the recording” — he admits it! — “but nothing came up.” Now he looks at me, and the camera looks at me. “It’s because you don’t have Zora-Nora’s eyes.” And you realize that this is true, that I even looked different when I was Zora-Nora. 

“I told you,” I say. “We’re not the same person, Zora-Nora and me. You loved the lie.”

And the lie loved you, I don’t say.

“I felt so stupid,” he continues, “trying to find someone with such a crazy name. I tried 299,792 different ways to find you, and nothing worked.” He’s just exaggerating, he didn’t try 299,792 different ways to find me, and, by the way, 299,792 is the speed of light in a vacuum. “And none of my friends had ever met you,” he says, “so I kept talking about this Zora-Nora Séraphina, and they started to think that I had dreamed you up. That I had a delusion. Listen, a few of them did an intervention. They sat me down and demanded that I accept that you were a figment of my imagination.”

“But I was,” I whisper to him. “You did imagine me.” I wait a while for this to sink in, and then I say, “I grew up on a remote island, where my family had this mystical connection with the sea? You believed that?” 

“Yes. Yes, I believed it.”

“You were just writing stories in your head. You were at a party literally making up stories, like you were reading a fairytale to a child.”

“I thought I was remembering things,” he says, his eyes kind of vacant. “None of it was true? None of it? I thought I was remembering it. It all felt like memories.” 

“Two things were true,” I say. “My favorite drink.”

“The Vesper,” he says.

“And,” I add, “about Mark Laporta.”

“Who?” he says, and he doesn’t know who that is, even though he knew back then. How could he have just forgotten Mark Laporta?

I say, “But nothing else was true. I was never a wealthy tarot reader to the stars, and I was never a champion fencer. That’s what you thought, and it was crazy.” 

Then he says this: “You seem like all of that is possible. Zora-Nora, or whatever your name is. That’s what you seem like. This magical creature. A magical creature who can read minds and see the future.”

“Well,” I say. “I’m not magical. I’m just real and average. I’m a lout and a sluggard.”

“Were you just a stranger to me when I saw you at that event?” he asks.

“We’d met before,” I tell him. “When we first met, you were rude. No, not just rude. You were bad. I hated you already by the time I saw you that night. But you didn’t even remember me. You were so bad that I hated you, but me, you didn’t even remember me. Which made me hate you more.” 

He doesn’t ask what he did. He knows who he is. This comes as no surprise to him. He knows he’s bad. 

“You should never have just left me like that,” he says. “After everything we shared.”

“You never would have been happy with me after all the lies,” I say. “You thought I was one thing. You wanted me to be one thing. And in fact, I was something different, something else.”

“Couldn’t you have been two things at once?” he says. “Couldn’t you have been wave-particle duality? Couldn’t you have been hemialetheies, just for me?” And he pronounces it perfectly, hemialetheies. 

I’m like, “I would have been more like an electron in a helium atom. Like superposition, I’m nothing, just imagination, I’m just something you’ve dreamed and concocted, till you for real see/observe my real self for the very first time, and then I am something different, a lout and sluggard you wouldn’t ever ever like or love or care about or even think about or notice, the nothing-girl you met and screamed at and then forgot a second later. Once observed through a microscope with scientific scrutiny, I am for real not your fantasy girl, I am in fact your nothing-girl. And you would never have trusted me again, and so you would never have accepted me.”

And he says, “Shouldn’t that have been my decision to make?” 

And I wonder aloud, “Why should that have been your decision to make? Whether I throw my life away with a guy who would never love or accept or trust me? Why should that have been your decision and not my own decision? Why is my life your decision and not my decision?” Then, after a second, “And hemialetheies is just another word for fucking bullshit. So. No.”

So he sees that this makes sense and he kind of nods. “If anyone ever made a movie about you and me,” he says, “the critics would be like, ‘The director tried to make the movie too many things at once. Melodrama, romcom, physics textbook, Aristotelian philosophical discourse.’ ” Just to avoid my eyes, he glares at his wife and my idiot up at the coffee counter. “I think I married her, someone I don’t love, so that I could be certain that I would never love anyone other than you.” 

“Well,” I say, “that was a fucking stupid waste.”

He nods. I’m right. 

His wife and my boyfriend are obviously flirting. 

He says, “Look at these fucking two.”

“I don’t care,” I say, and he says, “I don’t care either. I tell her to go flirt with another man, she doesn’t see it as vicious and passive-aggressive, she thinks I’m actually telling her I want her to go flirt with another man. And so she does.” He pauses. “We should set them up. Set them up on some kind of a romantic date.” 

.

THEN A SMASH CUT to the same crane shot or drone shot from outside the coffee place that you’ll recognize from the beginning of the movie, the four of us outside. 

As we walk away, two couples heading in opposite directions, Alexéin barely looks at his idiot wife, and I barely look at the idiot guy I’m with, you’re supposed to wonder all the things that I’m wondering right now. Like, how can I live without this guy, this Alexéin, whom I love so much? 

And is there any way that this story could have turned out right, instead of so wrong? Could this movie have been happy instead of sad? You’re rewriting it in your mind as it’s ending. 

For example, you think: What if Kalyee had been honest with Alexéin at Meya’s event, what if Kalyee had admitted who she was right away? 

That would not have worked. That would have meant admitting that I hated him. Also that he hated me. And that his hatred was so dismissive and contemptuous that he didn’t even recognize me. God, what a fucking asshole. So honesty would not have helped. It would have helped avoid all this sadness and regret, but it would not have helped Love Find a Way. 

OK, so then you wonder: What if Kalyee had not made the delivery to Alexéin, earlier in the week? Then Kalyee would not have already hated Alexéin when she met him at Meya’s event. 

Well, you see, there is the kicker, and this is one of the things you will be debating when you leave the theater. If I had not made that delivery to him earlier in the week, if I did not already hate him when I met him at Reeley’s event, he would have been entirely uninteresting to me. He was beautiful and he was charming, but I had just recently summarily expelled the most beautiful and the most charming and the most gorgeously naked wholesome young man from my kitchen. What did I need with more charm and beauty? To reject it all once again, to force myself again to ask what was the matter with me?

If I had not hated him, I would not have shown Alexéin any attention. 

I was not on the mend. 

I was broken, irredeemable, unworthy of love and unable to love. 

The only reason I showed Alexéin any attention, the only reason that I would ever have shown such a man any attention, was because I hated him. 

.

I WISH I had some kind of pithy line to sum everything up for you, to close the deal, make the sale. 

If you take this to a movie studio, they’ll probably say, this “Kalyee” character, she’s not so likable. 

You’ll say, no no, you’ll love her, look, it says right there in the screenplay, she’s very likable. It says so, right on the first page. “Kalyee, a likable young woman.” So, she’s very likable. 

Then they’ll say that they want to change the ending. They will suggest that, after a while, Alexéin will find Kalyee again, maybe in a train station as she’s about to board a train to go home to her still-living parents, or at her wedding to the wrong man (to you, maybe?), or even at that coffee shop eleven years later, and Alexéin’ll make an impassioned public plea for Kalyee’s love, and she will melt into his arms, and all the bystanders will applaud. 

None of the problems will matter, the studio executives will say. 

But that’s not what happened, that’s not something could ever have happened. 

I wind up with someone who doesn’t love me, and so does Alexéin, because we’re a couple of assholes. (But likable assholes.) 

I counted, and it turns out I used the word “beautiful” forty-two times in this treatment (forty-three if you include Latin), like I’m Oscar Wilde and I care about aesthetics. But there’s nothing beautiful about this, about my life, it’s fucking ugly, it’s fugly, it makes me want to take a shower for like ten years. 

That’s my movie, man. 

^^^

Kalyee Srithnam has written for Audere Magazine among other venues. She can be reached at KalyeeSrithnam@gmail.com. She recently quit social media.