Mallory's Camera

I read approximately 2 million pages of tax code yesterday. Only 998 million pages to go!

Truth be told, I don't want to read tax code! I don't want to do anything but sit on my fainting couch with my eyes slightly unfocused, thinking strange, dreamy thoughts. It's not as though this coming week is real time anyway, right? The week between Christmas and New Year's is an interstice, kinda like the one between the last chime of midnight & the beginning of a new calendar day. A portal, in other words.

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Also, played a bit with the Work in Progress. I am writing now about a hospital during the COVID pandemic. I wasn't a nurse during the COVID pandemic, so this is something I know very little about. My imagination is getting a workout. And it's flabby!

Simultaneously, I'm trying to sneak in the Jesus cult. And when I say "sneak," I mean position it under the radar so that when Grazia joins, the reader is surprised—even though all the evidence is there.

Next scene is a telephone call between Neal & Grazia. Of course, they have to banter amusingly. It's surprisingly difficult to write amusing banter off the top of one's head. The call has to include some Mimi backstory, too. Mimi's narrative is breadcrumbs strewn throughout the rest of the novel; she is not one of the main characters. But in the third part of the book (Flavia's POV), Mimi is going to try to kill herself, and that needs to be set up.

Christmas was the Big Fun.

Being completely neurotic, I had to talk myself into not canceling: Basically, I wanted to lie in bed for two days with the covers pulled up over my head since my client was never gonna pay me, and that meant this was the last Christmas I was even gonna have a bed, right? Next year, it was gonna be a couple of pieces of soggy cardboard in the Refrigerator Box Under the Bridge. Enjoy it while you can!

Plus, there would be Nazis. I wasn't sure how the Nazis were going to work their way in there, but I was sure they would.

Don't be ridiculous, I chided myself.

And drove to Poughkeepsie to hop the train.

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The City was.... the City.

It is the environment that shaped me, and it is such an odd environment, sui generis, you know, so visiting is always a homecoming: It is the only place I 1,000% feel like I belong.

A good omen! When I got off the shuttle at Times Square, a Peruvian shaman was performing in front of my grandfather's mural!



(No, I mean the guy in the red tie is not my grandfather. I doubt very much the mural artist knew my grandfather. It just happens to look exactly like my grandfather.)

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Real-life Flavia is very, very wealthy. She lives in a townhouse in the West Village on a meandering street that predates the grid that NYC planners imposed in 1811 when the city's population began to explode. Nearly two centuries later, a bunch of LA producers decided to lodge the fictional Phoebe from Friends on this street, though even in 2004, there is no way a waitress could ever have afforded it.

Real-life Flavia has simple tastes, so the townhouse does not scream ostentation. But the details are all the best—an incredible kitchen island of orange marble, wonderful art on the walls, exquisite appliances.

She has no supernatural beliefs about her own exceptionalism, either. Later on, while we were out tromping—I have been one acquainted with the night: oh, how I miss walking around cities at night!—she remarked out of nowhere, "I know how incredibly fortunate I am. And I wonder about it." A throwaway line: She wasn't being defensive, and I hadn't asked.

I shrugged. "Well, it's not as though your life has been bereft of tragedies." I listed a few. "But it's true. You are never going to go mad for a week after invoicing a client, wondering if they will pay."

"No," she said. "I never will."

"But then, I'm never going to have my home in Gaza City destroyed by IDF bombs," I said. "Prosperity is relative. Still, if you don't feel odd talking about it, I have a weird request."

"What?" she asked.

"Well, you know, I'm writing a novel. About Brian. And the fictionalized protagonists are me, you, & Daria. Alternating first-person POVs. And your first-person section is the last first-person section. I'd love to delve down deep with you some time about what it feels like to be rich."

"Sure," she said.

###

I'd carted along Mexican food from a place in Hyde Park—the best Mexican food I've found in the Mid-Hudson Valley, which, of course, is not saying much—so we ate and afterwards repaired to the media room to watch my very favorite Christmas movie of all times: 12 Monkeys. (Yes, boys & girls! Technically, 12 Monkeys is a Christmas movie.)

"Only good movie Terry Gilliam ever made," I said. "But what a movie."

"I don't like Brazil at all," Flavia said.

"I know, right? And The Fisher King is just this maudlin excercise in sentimentality."

"The Time Bandits is okay."

"You think? But 12 Monkeys is so fucking great—"

And it is!

Is fate predetermined? A man travels backward in time to look for ways to prevent the virus that will decimate humanity and drive it underground.

But it is only because the man traveled backward in time to describe the virus that the mad scientist hatches the plot to release the virus, and the 10-year-old boy who will grow up to be Bruce Willis watches, uncomprehending, his adult self die:



The movie dovetails so exquisitely. The use of wide-angle photography & canted angles to denote the Willis character's inner turmoil. Low-tech single cuts are only used when Willis is time-traveling—complete reversal of the common sci-fi film technique, which is to pull out the heavy special effects artillary when they are time traveling. The dark, dark shooting palette is only relieved by the bright pops of the red Army of the 12 Monkeys logo. The art direction so perfectly underscores the script: The only things that are worth looking at are the things that nobody looks at.

"The movie never changes," Bruce Willis tells Madeleine Stowe. "It can't change. But every time you see it, it seems different, because you're different. You see different things."



The next morning, we hopped the subway to venture forth to deepest, darkest Flushing. Little Beijing!

We rendezvoused with Betsy and then bopped around, staring at many wondrous things. In Little Beijing, Christmas Day is just a day like any other day. The sidewalk vendors were hawking their goods, the stores were crowded, the streets were thronged.









We ended up driving to Kew Gardens for Christmas lunch. Betsy's old nabe, I think she was feeling nostalgic. The restaurant where we ate was one of her old haunts. The people who run it know her, watched her kids grow up, & the kids still come in some time. (For various reasons too complicated to go into here—except to observe that while I like her, she is what you would have to call a Difficult Person—Betsy is completely estranged from her kids, so it was sweet & strange listening to Betsy quiz the waitress: "Natalia came in? What was she wearing?")



Then we went to hang out at this tiny café that had just opened!!! The proprietor was from Paris, and why his life's ambition was to open a café in fuckin' Queens on Christmas day and force his beleagured baristas to wear berets is beyond me, but hey! Why not? The cappucinos were delicious and the mocha slices sublime.



Then Betsy took off and Flavia & I went to see a movie where Hugh Jackman played a Neil Diamond impersonator. Theater was packed. Not a single member of the audience was under 60! Perfect movie to round out Jewish Christmas! Schmaltzy, but undeniably heartwarming.



Subway-ed back to Flavia's casa. The tromp through the West Village took us past a couture shop designed to resemble a thrift store so that $1,000 dresses were strewn on wire hangers along bare metal racks. The City's premier bagel & cheese emporium had constructed this delightful whimsy in its front window:



My heart was so light! I felt so happy!

Even the certain knowledge that the very next evening I would be dealing with awful stuff once again—12 ground inches (ugh!) of Hideous White Stuff From the Sky and life in the Refrigerator Box Under the Bridge—did not quash the sheer joy of the moment. I am alive! I thought. The night is beautiful, and I am alive to see it!

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And whaddiya know? Five miles up the road in Pine Bush, they got 14 inches of snow last night! But we only got six. We dodged the bullet. And in a miraculous display of un-dickish behavior, Icky actually dug my car out for me.

Plus the client paid me.

I'm tempted to qualify that as "the client finally paid me," but the truth is the invoice did not actually take that long to process. It is me who is absolutely insane & neurotic about all of this. If I am going to continue freelancing—& I mean, I am very good at doing the actual work demanded of the role—I have got to think of some way to prevent myself from going all borderline over the billing process.

I do not think I have borderline personality disorder. My mother, though, was a Grade AAA borderline. I was raised by her; it was just the two of us till I was 16 & old enough to escape. And I have what I would characterize as a mimetic personality: Put me in a room with people who have an accent, and within an hour, I'll start channeling their inflections. I don't do it by design! It's an unconscious behavior, a kind of protective mimicry. My personality is porous—which serves me well as a writer but not as a human being. I have weak ego boundaries.

This past week, I was channeling my crazy borderline mother.

And it was not a pleasant feeling.