There There(7)

    Everyone on the train is looking at their phones. Into them. He smells piss and at first thinks it’s him. He’s always feared he’ll find out that he’s smelled like piss and shit his whole life without knowing it, that everyone’s been afraid to tell him, like Kevin Farley from the fifth grade who ended up killing himself the summer of their junior year in high school when he found out. He looks to his left and sees an old man slumped down in his seat. The old guy comes to and sits up straight, then moves his arms around like he’s checking to make sure all his stuff is still with him, even though there’s nothing there. Dene walks to the next train car. He stands at the doors and looks out the window. The train floats alongside the freeway next to cars. Each of their speeds is different: The speed of the cars is short, disconnected, sporadic. Dene and the train slither along the tracks as one movement and speed. There’s something cinematic about their variable speeds, like a moment in a movie that makes you feel something for reasons you can’t explain. Something too big to feel, underneath, and inside, too familiar to recognize, right there in front of you at all times. Dene puts his headphones on, shuffles the music on his phone, skips several songs and stays on “There There,” by Radiohead. The hook is “Just ’cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.” Before going underground between the Fruitvale and Lake Merritt Stations, Dene looks over and sees the word, that name again, Lens, there on the wall right before he goes under.



* * *



—

He thought up the tag Lens on a bus ride home the day his uncle Lucas came for a visit. When he was almost at his stop, he looked out the window and saw a flash. Someone had taken a picture of him, or the bus, and from out of the flash, the blue-green-purple-pink afterglow, the name came. He wrote Lens on the back of the bus seat with a Sharpie just before his stop. As he got off the bus in the back, he saw the bus driver’s eyes narrow in that wide mirror at the front.

    When he got home, Dene’s mom, Norma, told him that his uncle Lucas was coming for a visit, up from Los Angeles, and that he should help straighten up and get the dinner table set. All Dene could remember about his uncle was the way he used to throw Dene way up in the air and catch him when he was almost gonna hit the ground. Dene didn’t necessarily like or dislike it. But he remembered it viscerally. That tickle in his stomach, that mix of fear and fun. That involuntary burst of midair laughter.

“Where has he been?” Dene said to his mom while setting the table. Norma didn’t answer. Then at the table Dene asked his uncle where he’d been and Norma answered for him.

“He’s been busy making movies,” she said, then looked at Dene with raised eyebrows and finished with “apparently.”

They had their usual: hamburger meat, mashed potatoes, and green beans from the can.

“I don’t know if it’s apparent that I’ve been busy making movies, but it’s apparent your mom thinks I’ve been lying to her all this time,” Lucas said.

“I’m sorry, Dene, if I gave the impression that my brother is less than an honest Injun,” Norma said.

“Dene,” Lucas said, “do you wanna hear about a movie I’m working on?”

“By working on, Dene, he means in his head, he means he’s been thinking about a movie, just so you know,” Norma said.

    “I wanna hear,” Dene said, looking at his uncle.

“It’ll be in the near future. I’m gonna have an alien technology colonize America. We’ll think we made it up. Like it’s ours. Over time we’ll merge with the technology, we’ll become like androids, and we’ll lose the ability to recognize each other. The way we used to look. Our old ways. We won’t even really consider ourselves half-breeds, half aliens, because we’ll think it’s our technology. Then I’m gonna have a half-breed hero rise up, inspire what’s left of the humans to move back to nature. Get away from technology, get our old way of life back. Become human again like we used to be. It’s gonna end in a reverse Kubrick 2001 human-bashing-a-bone sequence in slow motion. Have you seen 2001?”

“No,” Dene said.

“Full Metal Jacket?”

“No?”

“I’ll bring you all my Kubrick next time I come up.”

“What happens at the end?”

“What, in the movie? The alien colonizers win of course. We’ll only think we won by getting back to nature, back to the Stone Age. Anyway, I stopped ‘thinking about it,’?” he said, and put up air quotes, looking toward the kitchen, where Norma had gone when he started in about his movie.

“But have you ever really made any movies?” Dene said.

“I make movies in that I think of them, and sometimes write them down. Or where do you think movies come from? But no, I don’t make movies, Nephew. I’ll probably never make one. What I do is, I help people with little parts of TV shows and movies, I hold a boom mic above the shot, long and steady. Look at these forearms.” Lucas lifted an arm and bent his wrist, looking at his forearm himself. “I don’t keep track of what sets I’m on when I’m working. I don’t remember a lot. I drink too much. D’your mom tell you that?” Lucas said.

    Dene didn’t respond except by eating the rest of what was on his plate, then looking back to his uncle for him to say something else.