Movie Winter vs. the Red Explosion
Philip Brunetti
1. It hadn’t been a movie winter. Not for a long time. And we were dying the whole time anyway—from the heat. The intermittent heat that came in February, March, all the way back to November. It was hot in the room too. The radiator didn’t know it wasn’t cold enough outside. The building’s thermostat was defective and the heat came up regardless. Even when unneeded, which had become the norm.
I sat in the living room and waited for Lyla. Maybe she’d gone down to the beach in Coney Island. I heard you could go there in February even. Certain days. She was probably drinking at the shoreline, waiting for the red explosion. Some vision or dream she kept having—looking out at the horizon. There’d be an infernal red explosion, a flash of utter destruction. Whales would moan, for a last millisecond, and become disintegrated into silence.
Lyla was waiting for this. She was toasting it—or untoasting it. It’d gotten hard to tell because she, Lyla, had hardened. Quite a good deal. She might end up on a long tree limb with a long rope, tying and knotting it. Her cellphone in her waistband, then in her freehand. But she wouldn’t call me…she wouldn’t say a word. She’d just stare out blankly from her perch—and dare herself.
2. But there were no neck snappings. Not yet, at least. And besides, Lyla wasn’t really up the tree, she was on the beach. She’d brought her cooler frost and gin bottle, limes and nickel tumbler. She’d parked her low-slung beach chair on the shoreline so she could dip her toes. Once in a while the water might rush up past her chair—but she’d enjoy the misty surge. Its smack of effervescence. And with her shades on, no one would suspect her of insanity. Not even me.
But I was a broken man. I’d been longing for movie winter, the way it’d been before the spectral red explosion had taken over. Back then I’d take Lyla out in the cold—when it was cold. We’d rush hither and thither, but it was all part of my plan. I’d wear her out with physical excesses. We’d make love all pre-fatigue morning, then go rushing about town. By 3PM we’d plop down in our cinema seats. I’d rub my fingers along Lyla’s nyloned inner thighs. She’d open them slightly so there’d be just enough slit access—if I wanted it. Sometimes I’d reach a finger down into her warm interior…but often I was tired. And so I just wanted to watch the movie, have her lean on me, and sense that we were watching another kind of course for salvation.
3. “Don’t ask me to be reasonable or verbal or articulate,” Lyla said.
“Don’t worry, I won’t.”
“Don’t!”
We were in the living room arguing. It was a minor argument. I didn’t really care. I was glad Lyla was back but I wanted to return to movie winter. It wasn’t possible. Lyla couldn’t stand the heat unless she was at the beach. Otherwise there was no venturing out for her—even if the movie theater was overly air-conditioned, as used to be the case. More recently the air-conditioning was busted. The theaters would still open but they’d gotten ratty and dank. The upholstery had more and more tears in it, the floors were extra gummy. Other disrepairs but of little consequence. I accepted all the recent declines as the new status quo. The world was sinking with Lyla. What was driving her to the edge had taken possession of the rest—in its own particular way. I was having the visions too. I was seeing the red explosion but I wasn’t apt to seek it out like Lyla. She knew it would happen on the horizon, on every horizon. She wanted to be there for our own, witness it. Then she might break into song or poem in an attempt to share it. Even if with a look of raw terror. At best there’d be a desperate kiss, a kiss that’d turn cold…a cold kiss. But not the cold of movie winter.
4. It was in the way that Lyla sat on the couch that I knew the explosions were coming. They were almost here. She had her feet pulled up close to her on the couch. She wore a sheer-white shirt and shorts against the heat. Her sandals rested on the throw-rug’s border. Her toenails were painted blue and she was shivering slightly. But it was a fearful—not a cold spell—shiver. The room was 90 degrees or more. The electricity had been turned off. We couldn’t run the AC—neither unit. There were no lights, no TV, no air. Lyla sipped a gin-and-tonic. It was her third or fourth of the afternoon. Initially she’d been in good spirits—then the dejection set in. She looked inward and couldn’t see herself. There was just the picture inside her of the drastic violence that was beginning to rip through the world and the explosions aimed at an interminable number of horizons. All of them transfiguring from a pretty girl’s face to a monster’s death mask.
I stood off to the side and tried to ignore Lyla. She’d become lost in her own internal zone. It was a zone of visionary horrors, anticipatory horrors. I tried to stay connected to present reality, bad as it was. I played a little craps in my pocket. I had a pair of dice used by a blind man—ones with deeper indentations. I rolled from the upper to the lower pocket. I turned my back on Lyla, fingered the indents, and rolled again. I was hoping to keep doing what I was doing—rolling the dice. I was hoping not to crap out on movie winter.
5. This was all happening in a lunar landscape. I hadn’t noticed at first or for many months after. We’d turned the calendar page 12 or 13 times and another year had begun. But it still wasn’t movie winter. Movie winter was an old memory that was fading fast. In the meantime the city had become more and more deserted and so had the rural areas. People were succumbing to the heat. The average temperature topped 120 degrees in the summertime and the winter wasn’t much different. There weren’t seasons anymore but just the names of the months on the calendar. The months that used to make up movie winter were just an extension of the ongoing and never-ending summertime. But even summertime wasn’t summertime—it was an unnatural and discombobulating heat. It was the kind of heat that belonged to other planets, dead planets, or planets coming into the range of death. Of deadness. What was the lunar landscape? It was the deficiency of greenery and vegetation. The death of flowers. And the vacancy and stillness of the empty buildings. More and more buildings had been emptied of their occupants. Lyla and I were staying on but we hadn’t meant to. We just got stuck. We missed our opportunity to move to northern lands. The passport exchanges had come and gone. We’d gotten stuck with a sense of delay. Partly it was my fault, partly Lyla’s. I’d been yearning still, like the silliest schoolboy, for movie winter. And Lyla crept around the tattered rug like a cat with its tail cut off. She didn’t have the exact or precise balance. And she lost her desire. She wasn’t having me or engaging me sexually anymore with her mouth or vagina. There was a stale silence to our sex life. It faded away. It’d become utterly unnecessary. As long as we had bottles and binoculars. We’d taken to drinking morning, noon and night. And spying—spying at every horizon for the explosion. The red explosion that’d preempted every trace…of movie winter.
6. Lyla was often weeping now. And I was sweating through my shirts and so going shirtless. Even in the depths of January and February. The coldest months had reversed and simply disappeared. There was just a blank screen of heat now. That was the only weather, the only continuous climate. We’d grown farther away than ever from movie winter.
The trick was not to run out of sanity. But I was close to running out of it. I couldn’t tell anymore what Lyla’s exact state of mind was. Every time I looked at her she threw her hands up in front of her face—as if seeing me was seeing a painful vision. Her hands had become arthritic and stiffened into craggy claws. Somehow she could still slip a cigarette in between her calcified, crooked fingers. And she could also grip a liquor glass, though with less and less adeptness. When she held me in the night now—and she rarely held me—there was a vulture-like touch to her hands. I felt like she was scavenging me or would scavenge me if I passed before her. If I couldn’t search for food…The supermarkets were mostly closed now. There were underground markets for foods and staples. But the prices were astronomical. And hardly anyone had a proper job anymore—or a bank account. Sometimes you could barter. But New York was no longer New York. It was merely an abandoned urban territory. So much of the population was gone. The cinema houses had all but shuttered. For a while there’d been one or two movies a month. Then one every six months. Then never.
We were living in the time of never. I could barely remember anymore when things had been good—when things had been almost perfect…with Lyla snuggled up close against me…in the time of movie winter.
7. We went to the beach in Coney Island almost every day now. Lyla was a sullen woman except when she’d bathe in the ocean. A spark of life would return to her face but fade as she tracked back up the sand. She needed to live in water now. Except the ocean was also the enemy because it flattened out into the eventual horizon. A horizon that straightened in each direction but with an enveloping hole at its center, a hole to be filled by the red explosion—annihilating all hope for movie winter.
But anyway, back at the apartment in the evening, out of bottles and nearly out of food—starving to death slowly in the new reality, I wanted to take Lyla…take her to a final film. It’d be better to die there, in the cinema’s solace—if there could be such a thing once more. A last gasp, or gaze, of movie winter.
One night I trekked out and searched far and wide. But all the Brooklyn movie houses were locked and gated. On my way back I stumbled upon a bag of hamburgers, discarded from a shuttered fast-food restaurant. I carried the bag home and wrapped a catatonic Lyla in a cool damp sheet. Her eyes snapped open.
“It’s okay,” I said. “There’s a movie…”
I loaded Lyla and the bag of burgers into an ancient wood-panel station wagon that’d been parked on a nearby street. It was one of the last cars left in the neighborhood. I jumped the ignition and drove us into the city. I had a memory of an old movie theater downtown: the Thalia Soho. It’d closed down long ago but I’d lost my bearings—my mental acumen and abilities waning. But before getting lost in the nowhere world of the past, and cut-up memories, I crashed the car into the Film Forum on West Houston Street…Lyla was barely alive. But not from the crash. From the elements. I fed her the crust of a burger bun, but she couldn’t swallow it. I tossed her over my shoulder and kicked in the theater doors. Still wrapped in her sheet, I sat Lyla in the second row of the main theater. She was cocooned in her cool wrap like the last living mummy. I fed her a crumb of burger and ate two full burgers myself, cold and stale. Soon I made it up to the projection room. I worked whatever equipment was left—loading a reel, turning knobs, and flipping switches—until the projector’s blue beam floated out over the audience of one: Lyla. Eventually I joined her.
And so the red explosions were mere backdrops now—backdrops for the new and nuclear movie winter.
Philip Brunetti
1. It hadn’t been a movie winter. Not for a long time. And we were dying the whole time anyway—from the heat. The intermittent heat that came in February, March, all the way back to November. It was hot in the room too. The radiator didn’t know it wasn’t cold enough outside. The building’s thermostat was defective and the heat came up regardless. Even when unneeded, which had become the norm.
I sat in the living room and waited for Lyla. Maybe she’d gone down to the beach in Coney Island. I heard you could go there in February even. Certain days. She was probably drinking at the shoreline, waiting for the red explosion. Some vision or dream she kept having—looking out at the horizon. There’d be an infernal red explosion, a flash of utter destruction. Whales would moan, for a last millisecond, and become disintegrated into silence.
Lyla was waiting for this. She was toasting it—or untoasting it. It’d gotten hard to tell because she, Lyla, had hardened. Quite a good deal. She might end up on a long tree limb with a long rope, tying and knotting it. Her cellphone in her waistband, then in her freehand. But she wouldn’t call me…she wouldn’t say a word. She’d just stare out blankly from her perch—and dare herself.
2. But there were no neck snappings. Not yet, at least. And besides, Lyla wasn’t really up the tree, she was on the beach. She’d brought her cooler frost and gin bottle, limes and nickel tumbler. She’d parked her low-slung beach chair on the shoreline so she could dip her toes. Once in a while the water might rush up past her chair—but she’d enjoy the misty surge. Its smack of effervescence. And with her shades on, no one would suspect her of insanity. Not even me.
But I was a broken man. I’d been longing for movie winter, the way it’d been before the spectral red explosion had taken over. Back then I’d take Lyla out in the cold—when it was cold. We’d rush hither and thither, but it was all part of my plan. I’d wear her out with physical excesses. We’d make love all pre-fatigue morning, then go rushing about town. By 3PM we’d plop down in our cinema seats. I’d rub my fingers along Lyla’s nyloned inner thighs. She’d open them slightly so there’d be just enough slit access—if I wanted it. Sometimes I’d reach a finger down into her warm interior…but often I was tired. And so I just wanted to watch the movie, have her lean on me, and sense that we were watching another kind of course for salvation.
3. “Don’t ask me to be reasonable or verbal or articulate,” Lyla said.
“Don’t worry, I won’t.”
“Don’t!”
We were in the living room arguing. It was a minor argument. I didn’t really care. I was glad Lyla was back but I wanted to return to movie winter. It wasn’t possible. Lyla couldn’t stand the heat unless she was at the beach. Otherwise there was no venturing out for her—even if the movie theater was overly air-conditioned, as used to be the case. More recently the air-conditioning was busted. The theaters would still open but they’d gotten ratty and dank. The upholstery had more and more tears in it, the floors were extra gummy. Other disrepairs but of little consequence. I accepted all the recent declines as the new status quo. The world was sinking with Lyla. What was driving her to the edge had taken possession of the rest—in its own particular way. I was having the visions too. I was seeing the red explosion but I wasn’t apt to seek it out like Lyla. She knew it would happen on the horizon, on every horizon. She wanted to be there for our own, witness it. Then she might break into song or poem in an attempt to share it. Even if with a look of raw terror. At best there’d be a desperate kiss, a kiss that’d turn cold…a cold kiss. But not the cold of movie winter.
4. It was in the way that Lyla sat on the couch that I knew the explosions were coming. They were almost here. She had her feet pulled up close to her on the couch. She wore a sheer-white shirt and shorts against the heat. Her sandals rested on the throw-rug’s border. Her toenails were painted blue and she was shivering slightly. But it was a fearful—not a cold spell—shiver. The room was 90 degrees or more. The electricity had been turned off. We couldn’t run the AC—neither unit. There were no lights, no TV, no air. Lyla sipped a gin-and-tonic. It was her third or fourth of the afternoon. Initially she’d been in good spirits—then the dejection set in. She looked inward and couldn’t see herself. There was just the picture inside her of the drastic violence that was beginning to rip through the world and the explosions aimed at an interminable number of horizons. All of them transfiguring from a pretty girl’s face to a monster’s death mask.
I stood off to the side and tried to ignore Lyla. She’d become lost in her own internal zone. It was a zone of visionary horrors, anticipatory horrors. I tried to stay connected to present reality, bad as it was. I played a little craps in my pocket. I had a pair of dice used by a blind man—ones with deeper indentations. I rolled from the upper to the lower pocket. I turned my back on Lyla, fingered the indents, and rolled again. I was hoping to keep doing what I was doing—rolling the dice. I was hoping not to crap out on movie winter.
5. This was all happening in a lunar landscape. I hadn’t noticed at first or for many months after. We’d turned the calendar page 12 or 13 times and another year had begun. But it still wasn’t movie winter. Movie winter was an old memory that was fading fast. In the meantime the city had become more and more deserted and so had the rural areas. People were succumbing to the heat. The average temperature topped 120 degrees in the summertime and the winter wasn’t much different. There weren’t seasons anymore but just the names of the months on the calendar. The months that used to make up movie winter were just an extension of the ongoing and never-ending summertime. But even summertime wasn’t summertime—it was an unnatural and discombobulating heat. It was the kind of heat that belonged to other planets, dead planets, or planets coming into the range of death. Of deadness. What was the lunar landscape? It was the deficiency of greenery and vegetation. The death of flowers. And the vacancy and stillness of the empty buildings. More and more buildings had been emptied of their occupants. Lyla and I were staying on but we hadn’t meant to. We just got stuck. We missed our opportunity to move to northern lands. The passport exchanges had come and gone. We’d gotten stuck with a sense of delay. Partly it was my fault, partly Lyla’s. I’d been yearning still, like the silliest schoolboy, for movie winter. And Lyla crept around the tattered rug like a cat with its tail cut off. She didn’t have the exact or precise balance. And she lost her desire. She wasn’t having me or engaging me sexually anymore with her mouth or vagina. There was a stale silence to our sex life. It faded away. It’d become utterly unnecessary. As long as we had bottles and binoculars. We’d taken to drinking morning, noon and night. And spying—spying at every horizon for the explosion. The red explosion that’d preempted every trace…of movie winter.
6. Lyla was often weeping now. And I was sweating through my shirts and so going shirtless. Even in the depths of January and February. The coldest months had reversed and simply disappeared. There was just a blank screen of heat now. That was the only weather, the only continuous climate. We’d grown farther away than ever from movie winter.
The trick was not to run out of sanity. But I was close to running out of it. I couldn’t tell anymore what Lyla’s exact state of mind was. Every time I looked at her she threw her hands up in front of her face—as if seeing me was seeing a painful vision. Her hands had become arthritic and stiffened into craggy claws. Somehow she could still slip a cigarette in between her calcified, crooked fingers. And she could also grip a liquor glass, though with less and less adeptness. When she held me in the night now—and she rarely held me—there was a vulture-like touch to her hands. I felt like she was scavenging me or would scavenge me if I passed before her. If I couldn’t search for food…The supermarkets were mostly closed now. There were underground markets for foods and staples. But the prices were astronomical. And hardly anyone had a proper job anymore—or a bank account. Sometimes you could barter. But New York was no longer New York. It was merely an abandoned urban territory. So much of the population was gone. The cinema houses had all but shuttered. For a while there’d been one or two movies a month. Then one every six months. Then never.
We were living in the time of never. I could barely remember anymore when things had been good—when things had been almost perfect…with Lyla snuggled up close against me…in the time of movie winter.
7. We went to the beach in Coney Island almost every day now. Lyla was a sullen woman except when she’d bathe in the ocean. A spark of life would return to her face but fade as she tracked back up the sand. She needed to live in water now. Except the ocean was also the enemy because it flattened out into the eventual horizon. A horizon that straightened in each direction but with an enveloping hole at its center, a hole to be filled by the red explosion—annihilating all hope for movie winter.
But anyway, back at the apartment in the evening, out of bottles and nearly out of food—starving to death slowly in the new reality, I wanted to take Lyla…take her to a final film. It’d be better to die there, in the cinema’s solace—if there could be such a thing once more. A last gasp, or gaze, of movie winter.
One night I trekked out and searched far and wide. But all the Brooklyn movie houses were locked and gated. On my way back I stumbled upon a bag of hamburgers, discarded from a shuttered fast-food restaurant. I carried the bag home and wrapped a catatonic Lyla in a cool damp sheet. Her eyes snapped open.
“It’s okay,” I said. “There’s a movie…”
I loaded Lyla and the bag of burgers into an ancient wood-panel station wagon that’d been parked on a nearby street. It was one of the last cars left in the neighborhood. I jumped the ignition and drove us into the city. I had a memory of an old movie theater downtown: the Thalia Soho. It’d closed down long ago but I’d lost my bearings—my mental acumen and abilities waning. But before getting lost in the nowhere world of the past, and cut-up memories, I crashed the car into the Film Forum on West Houston Street…Lyla was barely alive. But not from the crash. From the elements. I fed her the crust of a burger bun, but she couldn’t swallow it. I tossed her over my shoulder and kicked in the theater doors. Still wrapped in her sheet, I sat Lyla in the second row of the main theater. She was cocooned in her cool wrap like the last living mummy. I fed her a crumb of burger and ate two full burgers myself, cold and stale. Soon I made it up to the projection room. I worked whatever equipment was left—loading a reel, turning knobs, and flipping switches—until the projector’s blue beam floated out over the audience of one: Lyla. Eventually I joined her.
And so the red explosions were mere backdrops now—backdrops for the new and nuclear movie winter.