Memento Mori

This ex-projectionist still dreams of the intermittent gear pulling the film though the gate, start/stop start/stop, in unison with the lamphouse shutter, click click click blurring into continuous hum. The audience plunges into darkness between every frame, unaware, tricked by persistence of vision. Mundus vult decipi. In the booth my dreaming self waits forever for the changeover while cigarette smoke drifts through the green light of carbon arc fire filtered through glass dark as night.

The Green Light

The projectionist’s younger self appears on the screen unannounced, walking beneath the low gray clouds of a long-gone spring morning, library-bound, books in hand, lost in a Byronic adolescent melancholy. Turning a downtown corner he sees a girl, books clasped before her, impossible sadness in her eyes as she approaches. Something in his soul clicks like a gear grasping a film sprocket as they pass. Too shy to speak, he enters the library and places his books on the return counter, then turns on his heel in a sudden inspiration, back out the heavy glass doors, determined to meet her. Running now, he retraces his steps to the bus stop and scans the long broad way, east and west, but she is gone.

Saddened by this scene, the projectionist steps away from his machines. On the workbench a cracked and scarred filter of thick red glass awaits a poison sacrament of coarse white powder, a ritual of inhalation, a false renewal of body and mind. Nostrils burning, the projectionist returns to his post and checks focus. The scene shifts again. The boy and girl, now met, plan a puppet show at school, but Punch is lost to Judy, all his brutal blows feigned, his rage an act, the show an excuse to learn her true name. The stage is a cardboard box, the puppets crude papier-mâché, the performance rushed and amateur. Everything is perfect. After the show, the boy balks, sitting beside the girl in the cardboard box. The moment passes, his courage fails: no gesture, no fumbling kiss, no words of affection. The boy on the screen curses his failure, but the projectionist smiles at this regained memory, rendered sweet by the mercies of time.

The projectionist draws on his cigarette, still smiling, and blinks. His smile evaporates as he sees his future self sitting down for breakfast, coffee and the morning paper before him, half distracted, idly turning newsprint pages, relaxed and bemused until his eye catches her name, her name on the wrong page, her name on the wrong page….

A cruel montage erupts on screen, a vicious catalog of loss, her name the first but not the last. He stands beside his grandmother’s coffin, unable to speak. He gazes down at his father, sleeping without breath on his bed, empty and still. One friend reaches for a rope, another willfully embraces an oncoming truck, a third is betrayed by gravity and swept away by foaming waters. The projectionist’s throat constricts; he wants to shout his grief to the world, but this would ruin the show. “Time to bury my dead,” he whispers. “Time to bury my dead.”

The projectionist finds himself at the bottom of the projection booth stairs, unlit cigarette in hand, watching the audience file in for the show while the previews play. He lowers his head to light the cigarette. The girl, now grown, dashes through the lobby. He watches in silence. She pauses at the auditorium door and turns to face him, eyes still blazing with life, smiles her still-sardonic smile, and says “Hello, Dan.”

He nods and smiles. She passes through the door and into darkness. He knows he will never see her again. He knows she will always be saying “Hello.” He savors the moment and the cigarette. He turns to ascend the stairs just as the changeover bell begins to ring. As he climbs, the bell begins to fade, receding beyond all hearing. The light at the top of the stairs dims and dies. The stairs melt away beneath his feet, leaving him to float in an almost infinite night. For a moment, he is lost. For a moment, he despairs. Then he sees, in the distance, a familiar flickering green light. Shifting his body in the void, he moves toward it, and wonders what rebirth it will bring.

Copyright © 2010 by Dan Whitworth. All rights reserved.