Devyn Defoe — Excerpt from the novel Burnside

The man, September told me at the start of it, was not all there in the head, had a screw loose, a shifty disposition, not unlike the feral children in the outskirts beyond the outskirts who had no grandparents or conception of death. Those cynical lunar beings who would think, when happening upon a corpse, that it was asleep, and dreaming of almonds, though September had to admit he displayed none of the confidence typical to their usual schemes. The feral children, those that were no longer children but couldn’t shake the name, were always trying to trick something out of you: looking innocent enough in their flapping clothes, billowing shirts that slipped off the shoulder, cuffs dragging behind their heels, acting as if they had jobs or could read above a fifth grade level, always pointing at something slippery in the sky that wasn’t there, if you were stupid enough to turn your head. They thought nothing of their damage, or the wounds done to them that they, in turn, inflicted outwards, ruining evenings and thick nights with their rudeness, their vicious clairvoyance, saying anything for a reaction, claiming in every word a truth that flipped around to be a lie or a diversion while they dove for your loose pockets. By then we were inured to their wily displays and thought little of them, beyond the weak pride at the outset of recognizing a scam for a scam, the jolt of self-preservation, knowing their tricks wouldn’t work on us—we were not so easily duped anymore. Our tactics were simple: we were mean, too busy to pause, suspicious, judgmental, inclined to leave people alone to their private insanities. We kept our acquaintances tight and our purses sealed, and typically any unusually conversant stranger would sense these ephemeral tensions and seek easier marks elsewhere. There was no real concern, then, apart from his physical closeness, which would not have been suspicious had the fish shop at that time been packed, all other chairs occupied, but it was near close and the two were the only customers—if September, waiting on her boyfriend to finish his shift, could even be called a customer. She was not paying for her drinks. She went to places where, as an unspoken rule, she wouldn’t have to pay for drinks, either through her connections or her looks or the pure benevolence of strangers, which was the best way to get a free drink, though also the rarest. The man beside her also was not paying for his drinks, though this was not for benevolence or any reason. He had no drink at all. The counter in front of him was bare, except for a beaten and brutalized book, a wallet someone might have fished from a storm drain. September didn’t volunteer the title of the book, and when I asked her what it was (I always want to know what people are reading, if in fact they are) she didn’t know, the cover was obscured by thick boot prints, as if it had been stomped on repeatedly and for good measure tossed in the barreling path of an eighteen-wheeler. He had a look about him like he might rob a bank or rip a soft animal apart to drink the marrow from the bone. Nothing else was memorable about his appearance, and when I asked for more details, September was entirely at a loss, as if she had met nobody after all.

This was how September said it happened: an upward fling of her arm. A gesture so thoughtless she couldn’t immediately delineate its purpose, even though she was the person behind it. (It was a reflex toward a lock of hair that had fallen into her face; she meant to tuck it behind her ear.) Her arm cast a long shadow across the counter like an upswung scythe cutting toward his possessions. There was no time between moments. No sooner was her arm in the air than his hand shot to meet it. He snatched her wrist. His grip was tight. His skin was damp, grimed with slick particulates, and there was a warm sludge under his fingernails, a buildup of scum, impossible to say exactly what it was because it was a dust of everything he’d touched throughout the day, a crust of filth deposited into his nails, which were long, and jagged, parts of them peeling apart in strips to form shivs. They sliced in the vio lence of movement, scratching three rickety lines across her arm, deep enough in some places to bleed, in others, barely a line. September, at this part, would show me the scar. It faded over the days, invisible after a week, but at the start, the gash was disconcerting: shocking pink welts, barbed and disturbed, resembling those red tattoos we saw sometimes around the bowl on the collarbones of girls we knew, spiky sigils that looked like bleeding plants, or bundles of tossed sticks, or crumpled up wads of chicken wire, said to be good for spiritual protection against exterior ailments. You could feel the mounds if you traced over them, one par tic u lar trail of shallow scabs where a hooked segment of his index nail broke through the surface, small beads where blood fled her skin in the direction of revulsion. She let out a sound, a little animal yelp, a cry of desperation; she cradled her arm to her chest—she had pulled it back very fast, winding herself—she had to remind herself to breathe; her lungs were in a race with her throbbing heart, while next to her he was talking, this frantic man, as if he was running out of words, or flinging them meaninglessly to see what would stick. Sorry, she heard him say, among some sounds that were like words, but September couldn’t make sense out of them, and it wouldn’t matter anyway because nothing this man said mattered. It was all bunk. She had determined, after our extensive postgame analy sis, that he was a psycho, though she felt unqualified guessing at a diagnosis for his apparent mental ailments. The injury embedded itself into her, even after showering off the nerves at a later segment of night, slathering ointment on the wound, scouring forums for a sense of whether to visit the pharmacy for a tetanus shot. She could feel it into existence anytime she wanted, following the lines that had embedded into touch and shivered ever so slightly to the left. She ruminated over the destabilizing fact that she had no idea what she would have done without her tattered boyfriend, her embarrassing savior, once he caught up with the momentum of the event: He pushed out the interloper, first with words and then, when words failed to convey anything said by anyone, by raising two evenly injured arms, each sheathed in a protective plaster cast holding together the shards of his bones, mangled by the motorcycle accident that had nearly taken his life. Temporarily incapacitated, a sort of clunking clown, he was no big threat to the situation, really, and yet by shaking his arms—an effort that pained him greatly—he exhibited a maverick power you’d be unwise to pit yourself against. It was alarming enough to inspire the man off his stool and out the door into the street.

We were, by and large, mistrustful and cold people. We didn’t want our heads touched by anyone’s errant thoughts, not even our friends’. When we passed one another on the street we kept our eyes down, no smiles here, no hellos, no anything. It was our way of saying, I want nothing of your life, and you can have nothing of mine. And we avoided confrontations like the plague. Best to ignore a commotion unless you wanted to be whipped into its orbit, swung around, tossed to the side with the rest of the debris. Over the days, she searched for signs of him, for crimes that might bear a jittery signature, of what, she didn’t know, checking the newspapers and the message boards for the outskirts without newspapers, and all she gleaned was that the typical deaths remained solidly central, in the usual place by the river. All was the product of an unearthed mind, a drifting consciousness. You could call it wind if it had any temperature. Drug-induced psychosis was the likely culprit, she determined—not that that eased our minds. A couple weeks prior, a tweaker in Poverty Ridge beat a man waiting for the ratbus with a hammer and had no memory of doing so, or any idea of why he might have been inspired to such. The whole thing was a big mystery. The bludgeoned man died and I found the case bizarrely prescient, like a sonogram.

The fear that she might see him again struck her for the first time at the funeral for the cinephile. We had just parked outside Landlady Dorothy’s old boarding house when the thought fumed up like the dead.

What if he’s here? she asked.

I tried to be sympathetic to her predicament, as I knew September desired, but truthfully, I felt she was most likely making a whole big deal out of nothing. The man, if he was a stalker, as she had started to claim—an accusation I had difficulty attributing to the singular occurrence and assumed was based more on September’s lived history of enduring poorly behaved men in public places—would not be the first stalker either of us had dealt with in one way or another, usually by ducking inside a bar and convincing the bouncer we were in danger. It also wasn’t unusual for September to receive inordinate attention for her looks. She had always been magnetic, and effortlessly so, though now she was putting in effort on top of her effortlessness and often women disliked her for it and men openly gaped. She worked at a cowgirl-themed breastaurant where she had to wear a tiny, knotted denim shirt and tinier leather riding chaps, and the effort was deployed so she could make more money in tips. Before the breastaurant she worked at an organic juice shop owned by a local feminist where she made minimum wage. At first September had liked working for the feminist because, as a feminist, she prioritized hiring women to work the juice counter and the juice-bottling shifts, and these women tended to be in their twenties and generally possessed the same cultural touchstones September and I relied on in most of our interactions. Her coworkers were fun, or if not fun, deeply strange enough to be entertaining, and they were allowed to play whatever music they wanted within the shoegaze genre. But then she realized she wasn’t making enough money. Minimum wage didn’t stretch far enough to cover our rent. We figured out how to break our water pipes so that it would look natu ral and not suspicious and endured mild floods to have our rent discounted some months, until our landlord, who sometimes made lewd comments about September when she was out the door to work, caught on to our schemes. September and most of her coworkers were on EBT and squeezed down to one meal a day. The feminist had received thirty thousand in seed money from her parents, who owned a correctional fa cil i ty in the central valley, to start her own business and couldn’t raise wages. The organic certification was expensive; the organic produce for the juices was expensive; the juices were expensive and always slightly warm, and no one bought them; the store wasn’t making a profit; there was a cheaper cold-pressed juice shop on the R Street Corridor.

Also no one tipped, despite the beckoning tip jar on the counter. And men would come in and flirt with the organic juice girls who had to be polite to them due to the nature of their job, and these men wouldn’t tip. Sometimes they didn’t buy anything. Once a man filmed September in the process of making an organic salad without her permission. She was in her effortless phase and she watched him do it out of the corner of her eye, and he left without buying anything or tipping. Later that night we looked through the profiles of our friends, friends of friends, trying to find the video. The thought that September’s image could be out in the world but out of reach, out of her control, felt to us as exploitative as a workplace that spent more on organic vegetables than it spent on its employees. In fact, maybe such a workplace wasn’t as feminist as we thought. As a thought experiment, we wondered: What would happen if September got pregnant? Of course there were no health benefits. And what if September, with a new baby, and with the way her boyfriend was often unreliable, couldn’t one day find childcare during one of her shifts? We had an inkling the feminist owner would have a prob lem with that. Would September lose her job? There were vague laws barring this from happening; we distantly knew about them, but were they ever enforced? And who bore the burden of proof? What if September was fired under a pseudonymous reason like profit margins, like budget cuts, with the secret reason being the pregnancy or newborn baby—what would be her legal recourse then?

So September quit and got hired at the breastaurant, where she made more money, enough to pay rent and pay for the efforts praised by the breastaurant management and patrons: gel nails, eyelash extensions, unnatural red hair, spray tans, thirty-day passes to yoga studios, which were all things she liked to have, irrespective of the breastaurant. She loved the job when she didn’t hate it. The guests at the breastaurant were universally more respectful, appreciative, and complimentary than the customers at the feminist juice shop. Her coworkers adored her. She was fi nally paid for the assets people valued but hadn’t properly compensated. She felt like a new woman in some ways, but the seeds of her old self were always inside and flared to life when we received news of the cinephile’s death; the cinephile in our memories winked like a nerve.

The funeral wasn’t a real funeral. The cinephile’s body had already been laid to rest during a service September and I were invited to but didn’t attend. Our absence wasn’t in protest, as some thought—we’d learned through Simp Carl that the cinephile’s religious parents, the quiet, peripheral ghosts in our childhoods, always making sure we held hands when crossing a dangerous street, had refused an autopsy, insisting their daughter’s body not be further violated before her impending meeting with their god—but because neither September nor I had any interest in mingling with the cinephile’s family, who we hadn’t seen in over ten years. The second funeral was at the dingy hovel where Simp Carl and his network of spiritual seekers lived, a house built for four people but sheltering anywhere from seven to eighteen at a time; the door was revolving, the depressing mystics came and went with the tides of seasonal jobs and psychotic breaks. Its pre sent occupants were Simp Carl and Simp Carl’s audio engineer and a number of hairstylists who previously lived in the Ware house Artist Lofts, one of whom was Nadia, September’s sister, whose car we borrowed to drive to school. Picking up the car had been an ordeal when the cinephile was alive, for usually she’d be there when we dropped by, drooped over Simp Carl on the ratty couch, their laziness displaying the grotesque abandon of devotion, and we had to be polite to her out of convention, and she was polite back out of her sick, misguided goodness to all; there was a strange calm I felt walking up those rickety steps, knowing this time she wouldn’t be inside.

We found Nadia in the kitchen, surrounded by a halo of men. She was sitting on the counter with her foot propped up; we could see blood streaming from the gap between the big and index toes. A tall man was wiping iodine on the gash. She waved us over and explained that she stepped on some glass, and that if we were wearing open-toed shoes or were somehow inspired to remove our shoes to be careful walking across the floor, where the glass was. All of the men surrounding her had artfully barbered hair, and many had beards concealing their jaws. None seemed too concerned about the hazard on the floor, distracted by the way Nadia’s dress gaped open with her foot propped up on the counter; it occurred to no one to clean it up.

The mood inside was decidedly not somber. I wondered if others felt as unmoved as we did. Looking down the hall, I realized the turnout mostly consisted of the Anthroposophists, who shared the cinephile’s deeply held and vacillating beliefs. Of the Anthroposophists, only Simp Carl seemed remotely affected; we spotted him in the living room, with the stars of tears in his eyes. Comforting him were Claudia Thursday and the man who skimmed garbage from the rivers and Sid Julius lurking at the edge of them, listening with his clown ears, fidgeting the nails off his fin gers.

To her sister, September asked if anyone weird had arrived that we should watch out for.

What do you mean, weird? Every one here’s a lunatic.

Not in the Anthroposophist way, September clarified. She showed Nadia the scar on her arm. Going on two days, the lines had withered further, but the scabs had acquired luminous, brown shells, bouncing the light from any source. September briefly described the ordeal at the fish shop, though by the time she was done, it was clear the effort was useless; Nadia, concerned at first, lost the thread, distracted by male laughter in a nearby conversation, and the encounter dispersed like fog; every one was substantively out of their minds, no one was listening, or knew who she meant, or knew what to say. One of the nearby men, indistinguishable from all the others except by his T-shirt proclaiming himself to be an antifascist, overheard some of September’s story, and offered to walk around with us, like a bodyguard of sorts, in an effort to make her feel safer, but we turned him down—even September admitted her assailant’s presence was unlikely, though she maintained once the antifascist was out of earshot that you never knew who would show up at Carl’s. Her nerves had calmed in the act of voicing her anx i eties and finding in them nothing real; we’d pay our re spects to Simp Carl and leave and absolve ourselves of the cinephile once and for all.

The cinephile had started dating Simp Carl after one of his noise shows and fell in with the Anthroposophists, who all, like Simp Carl, worked tiring days at nothing jobs and undertook creative pursuits by night—music and art and aspirations that failed to break beyond the plateau of middling local success—who spent too many hours awake and saw in their delirium the thinning veil of the world behind each mundane task that was theirs to bear, and beyond it an objective spiritual real ity. I often saw them buying esoteric lit er a ture from the dollar bins at the rare bookstore and wondered how they didn’t seem to realize that their picks skewed Ouspenskian, that they were not adherents to Steiner at all, that the hollow ideology they purported to boast once inspired the Nazis, that they didn’t know what they thought about anything, really, maybe due to sleep deprivation. Talking to any of the Anthroposophists was the only way I’d found, within the limits of human existence, to undergo the sort of heat death that might one day smooth the universe to disrepair: their ideas didn’t link to the next, their sentences distended, floated off, they forgot every thing they said minutes before, every thing in the now was warbling and new, their voices dimmed when they realized they didn’t know who you were, even if you’d met them many times, or who they were, even though they were themselves. They stumbled along the ray of creation that shot through all things, they were bogged down by laws, they thought the moon was a prison and eating us alive, that our greatest worth as organic life-forms was to be food for the hungry moon; they said these things with the heaviest bags under their eyes, with the happiness of the stupidest babies.

They refused to take any personal responsibility, by and large, the Anthroposophists. Case in point the cinephile, who had been dead to us for a while now. The three of us had grown up together and mostly lost touch when the cinephile transferred to the Catholic school over the bridge, but before that we had been inseparable, sharing our childhood years locked up in classrooms and spending summers at the public pool where possums liked to drown, where the air near the sandpits smelled like piss and the lounge chairs were always taken, and where we first experienced the cinephile’s infamous fainting spells, spread out on the hot cement, letting our fin gers fry like eggs, watching the cinephile’s eyes spin upwards, god-looking, not at the sky but some spot thick on the horizon, until September splashed possum water on the cinephile’s face to wake her up. These flights from consciousness, while a touchy subject for the cinephile, who would never give us a straight answer when we asked her where she’d gone—nowhere, she’d say in a tone, like she was mad at us for asking—made the cinephile the perfect sponge for Catholic delusions and the commercial mysticisms of East Los Angeles, where she lived for a time in college, and fi nally the confused Anthroposophists with their day jobs and stubborn passions. We could only presume how hard it was to keep a firm grip on the world when one was being constantly pulled away from it, when the tangible world was insufficient evidence of real ity, when life as portrayed in a movie appeared as real as anything that could happen, and the feelings that actors felt spurred a true sensation in her heart; there was hardly any difference between movies and the world, the world and movies: both were screens that could flicker off in a power outage.

Spotting the cinephile at a religion shop in the months before her disappearance, September witnessed what she had become in the shadow of Simp Carl’s misty love. Initially, there had been the joy of reunion, of providence setting the other in their path. September ordered a latte and joined the cinephile at her table; they unearthed the past from its premature grave, swapped nostalgias. There’d been no bad blood between them, and the cinephile awakened parts of September she hadn’t realized had been closed; no one is replaceable, not one friend for another. I couldn’t give September whatever she might have missed of the cinephile and vice versa, nor could the cinephile be either one of us. The grip of their ancient alliance was as simple to fall into as the cinephile’s easy sleep. The cinephile talked about Simp Carl in a dreamy tone, and September told her nothing of Simp Carl’s online indignities, his habit of messaging every woman who looked remotely pretty in a photo, pretending his interest was nonchalant and strictly intellectual. Instead, September talked about the DJ, whom by then she had been dating for a year and who at the time still had working use of his arms; life was good, good things were pos si ble, old pains were tightly locked away, unreachable until the simple question came out of the cinephile’s mouth: what happened with that other guy, how is he?—asking September about the man we never spoke of anymore except on spare occasion, whenever September’s memory of the time came whirling back: a man constantly plagued by thought, who at times in the past when September knew him, could never free himself from the constancy of his thoughts, thought after thought, any repetition a torture as well as an insanity, who in the past had badly hurt September, had done to her terrible things, unspeakable acts that we spoke of strictly between ourselves, discussing the details in order to drain catharsis from the horror, invoking every thing except his name, as was our practice of rescinding from our speech the names of the people who had ever harmed us, this thinking man a prime example, as was the cinephile now, who listened to September tell it all at the religion shop: the darkest of the thinking man’s manipulations, the words September had fallen into without a ladder out, the semblance of love that was not love, rows of fun house mirrors guiding her into the pit of a false heart, and what he’d done to her then, and the cinephile had listened and expressed, the whole time, her sympathy, her horror at the ordeal, her understanding as a woman herself, and September believed every thing she said and left thinking their reunion had been overall a positive experience, only to later that week catch sight of the cinephile through the win dow of a wine bar recently opened by the thinking man himself, sipping something orange, fidgeting with the quartz necklace she never removed out of a hazy belief in powers beyond her, supporting his business, it seemed to us, out of spite, for there was no lack of wine bars in the bowl for the purposes of wasting an after noon.

It meant nothing, we realized, the cinephile’s friendship, the ways she claimed to care; of course she couldn’t conceive of the real ity of others when she couldn’t even conceive of her own. The world she lived in was a mute world, all horizons, each day brought the bliss of a fresh lobotomy. Nothing mattered if she didn’t think of it; no one was truly evil; she could do what she pleased and keep the com pany she kept, and it meant nothing, as she was her own arbiter of what was true and what was irrelevant. We felt little when we heard that she had died, and justified our apathy as equal to how much she’d cared about us when she’d had the time to. After we got drinks from the kitchen and extracted ourselves from Nadia’s circle we went to join Simp Carl, though by then Claudia Thursday and the garbage skimmer had dis appeared to somewhere else and Sid Julius was hovering in a lost way in the spot where they’d been.

We told Simp Carl how sorry we were for his loss, how it was our loss too, though it couldn’t possibly measure up to his, that we hoped the great ray had beamed her along toward the absolute and not the prison on the moon, and by the end of our sympathies there were tears in his eyes; he was greatly moved. It would have meant the world to her that you’re here, he said. And from Simp Carl we learned that all those times we’d dropped by to borrow the car, afterwards the cinephile would say nothing but nice things about us, how impor tant we’d been to her still, how she’d wished for us only the best, how she would bring up moments our presence reminded her of: the possum pool, the mafia movies she made us watch on weekends, the time the three of us watched the bodies rise from the back of Landlady Dorothy’s yard from the barbecue restaurant across the street, that great exhumation when it was suspected that Landlady Dorothy was killing her el derly tenants for their social security checks, Landlady Dorothy who looked too frail to walk up stairs, who was not the first killer to wreak their secret havoc through the bowl, nor the second, nor the third, nor the last, whose backyard we watched crack open before us like a hole to hell while we stuffed our faces with grits and ribs. The cinephile didn’t need our presence for that reminder, as Simp Carl’s hovel was just across the street from the site of judgment. It was always bubbling to her mind, a desperate acid, that’s where we watched the bodies rise up, that’s where Landlady Dorothy stood, acting like she was nothing and no one, Simp Carl was telling us, that’s what she would say, as if it had been some great angelic reveal, a tilting justice, though the cinephile thought as much about death as she did about life. To her, it was all the same long day.

Simp Carl had no way of knowing these were the same memories that had ossified in our own minds, how we could find ourselves back there too easily, watching the unfolding geology as a ghost might. The cops had looked like weird bats, wearing tactical vests to signify their authority. In my memory, they were bats, and they were swooping over the expanse of Landlady Dorothy’s backyard, which had stretched into a sweeping cemetery for all those unfortunate enough to live and die in the bowl, this insular place that went on past where it went on, from the city grid to the suburbs on the outskirts to the outskirts beyond the outskirts, beyond which outskirts died and came to life, blooming out of their own ruins.

September indulged him as best she could, for I couldn’t speak (for reasons I didn’t fully understand), matching Simp Carl’s anecdotes with memories of her own, though September’s memories revealed only a superficial understanding of the cinephile; we’d lost too much of her to time and pain, to the point where we had to question if any true friendship had been there at the start. All that remained was the cinephile’s love of movies. September was telling Simp Carl of the cinephile’s obsession with movies about mobsters, how she made us watch the same ones over and over again even when September and I were bored by the dramas of mobs. You want to know what life is about? Watch a mafia movie, the cinephile had been known to say, though not frequently. Maybe she said it once or twice. Or maybe September in ven ted the quote in her retelling; she couldn’t be sure. Perhaps it had just been the vibe the cinephile gave off when watching a mob movie: a rattling incandescence, like a horde of fireflies given power tools, drilling their way out of a jar. Always after a viewing, the cinephile had to discuss with us what we had just watched: the overarching themes, the complex characters, the subtlety of the editing—and mob movies had the subtlest editing, don’t get it twisted—thoughts that came to her sporadic and involuntary, she couldn’t keep them down. What was exciting in the mob movies was that you couldn’t trust anyone; anyone could shoot anyone in the eye or the knees or the heart, and never was this a blip in the plot—mobsters just had no loyalty! And the deaths! The cinephile couldn’t get enough of the deaths. They happened out of nowhere and yet were entirely inevitable. That people could just die in movies, and the movies never stopped for introspection. If you were impor tant in a mob movie—and the only impor tant ones were the mob bosses—you got a funeral, but the rest of the guys? Splat! Goodnight, not sorry, no thank you! Not even a grieving mother or wife for the suckers. Which was the buried truth in every mob movie: some people were destined for irrelevance. What a world! What a sad, stinking life!

Talking about people could bring them back to life, if only momentarily. Simp Carl’s eyes were wet but alive, as if he’d been spat through to the other side of grief. She loved those movies, he said. She couldn’t get enough of them, Simp Carl was saying, it reminded him of the last movie he watched with the cinephile, he told us, a movie about the Irish mob in Boston, after which the cinephile could practically burst; it was hands down her favorite movie, and she wasn’t just saying that, though she definitely did say that. It knocked her previous favorite movie—set in Jersey, about the Italian mafia—down to number two. She’d gone quiet then, which was rare for the cinephile. She didn’t speak the whole drive from the movie theater to the bar in a Mexican restaurant they went to afterwards on Fourth Street, and then at the bar she was quiet too. She sipped her drink slowly. They listened to the mariachi music as if from the bottom of a lake. After a span of time that felt like drowning, but a peaceful drowning, the cinephile finally spoke, saying that she’d like to move to Boston; the movie had made the city seem so idyllic, a city filled with little shops and corner grocery stores with delightful green awnings, where it snowed and the inhabitants wore in ter est ing hats, style and all of this had to be true and not artifice because the director was keen on doing research and even lived in Boston for a time, though in a differ ent era than the Boston movie was set in, which was a postwar Boston, though postwar, if you think about it, encompasses every time after one war and before another war, and even the spatter of war-spanning years are, after the initial war, post a war, post the first and any subsequent wars, meaning either that war is eternal or Boston is, it was just a matter of how you looked at it, and how you look at it is just how the director looks at it, by virtue of the medium, do you know what I mean?

And Simp Carl didn’t; there was no war in the Boston movie, unless you counted the mob war that comprised the central plot which he didn’t; that was just people, going after the money of other people—well, that’s what I mean, the cinephile interjected, the war never ends, it’s all the same war, just enacted on a smaller scale, by differ ent soldiers; it’s conflict involving commerce and any conflict around commerce is necessarily a war, linked to all the other wars by the global economy; it’s nearly impossible to fathom a new, spontaneous war, unlinked to the history of wars, and this is ultimately what the director, the through and through Bostonian, was saying, not overtly but thematically: that the only sure things in life were death and the taxman for the losers; there was nothing you could do about it, so you might as well move to the best vantage point, because war is a business the way dinner theater is a business, you pay to watch while you eat, and she said this all like she couldn’t breathe, like she was talking down from a high altitude or the wind-scarred surface of an exoplanet quivering with alien viruses, and a few weeks later she was dead.

***