The Animators(86)

—

Our project pulls itself together and begins to stagger around. It seems to happen quickly, though we both know it’s the product of hours banked and material shorn, a million births and deaths.

We trim, weed, liposuction, force the thing onto a treadmill to run its belly off, knowing we’ll have to do it all again. It’s only the initial draft, but in Louisville, we get our first minutes—our project becomes a living thing with reflexes and breath, an animal, our cipher. It takes over. Always sitting in the room with us, refusing to leave until we finish its business. It eats and drinks and sleeps with us. It interrupts our sentences. It makes itself everything’s point.

Around the first deep freeze, we start to pull twelve-hour work blocks, sketching and inbetweening. Fingers stronger, I join in: take upon take until it is the best it can be.

We bring Ryan and Tatum on as runners, drink fetchers, pencil sharpeners, careful not to let them see too much of the product until we’re ready to bring it out into the world. Eventually we let them sketch a little for us. They’re good. We’re surprised at how good they are. It’s only been the two of us for so long, we almost don’t know how to handle the help.

We set up the laptop projector against a white sheet one night and watch the first ten minutes in silence, the room darkened. The storm scene, the throwing of the ottoman. We’ve been through it a thousand times, but I’m still struck by how profoundly creepy it is, how I can still feel it next to me after I’ve stopped watching. I mention it to Mel.

“Yeah, it’ll do that,” she says. She’s chewing her lip in the shadows of the carriage house, thinking. “It’s still the beginning. But it’s there. It’s on the highway. You know?”

“You think soon?”

“Yeah. Soon.”

—

It’s two days before Christmas.

Teddy, true to form, has produced his holiday accessories. A vintage train set, a small, taxidermied reindeer. At some point, I find myself thinking that this might become grating: his attachment to the antique, to the quaint, to the rusted and enchanted. But for now, I’m still charmed by the brandies he’s made for us, the little potbellied stove in the corner in which he’s built a fire, wrapping a big block of coal in newspapers and feeding dried sticks into the flames. The sky purples at six now, going full dark by seven. It is snowing.

I clench and unclench my hands at the fire, wincing. My joints glisten large and red. “I had to draw myself all day today. It was weird.”

He’s at his desk, shopping for the store. He’s been haggling with his favorite retailer, a guy in Berlin who sells what he calls “antique pleasure films” on Region 2 bootlegs. He shifts, looks up at me. “Won’t hear many people say that about their day.”

“Well, try and find as many people who are as self-absorbed as me.” I turn, waggle my butt at him.

“Oh, you hush.” He swipes at me. “Most people wouldn’t be able to do that. I don’t see how you can.”

“Very uneasily. With lots of fuckups. It’s hard to have that kind of outer perspective you need when it’s, you know, your face. We’ve come up with lots of versions. It’s just that Mel’s not happy with any of them.”

He turns back to the laptop, the glow filling his lenses with light. “Mel is a hard person to please.”

“She’s a perfectionist. It helps that she’s right a lot. She doesn’t believe in being dodgy. She doesn’t believe in being afraid.”

“Oh, she has her fears,” he says, tapping at the laptop. It’s irritating, the way he’s so focused on the screen. I want him to look at me. “A person that given to acting out definitely finds fear to be a major motivator.”

I leave the fire and stand beside the desk. “What do you mean by that?”

He shrugs. “I’ve known Mels. I mean, don’t get me wrong, she’s great. Amazing at what she does. But she’s obviously got some issues. That really calculated flaying out of yourself?” He grimaces slightly, then says, bright and brittle, like he wants to change the subject, “It’s complicated.”

I flex my hand again, looking at the knuckles. Christ Almighty, they’re huge. “You say that like you don’t necessarily approve of what we’re doing.”

“No no,” he says. “It’s not that. It’s just— Look. That sort of thing is really powerful. Writing about your own life? I have tried to write about stuff that happened to me. Stuff about Dad. The trial.”

I think about the night we met again, talking in the dark. The way he focused on something in the distance while telling his story. “I didn’t know that.”

“Well, I did. None of it was very good. But I did it enough to make myself sick. I mean, my hair was falling out. I had insane IBS. I put myself through real hell, and it was because I was trying to scene these moments. You relive all this stuff when you do that. It’s kind of like going into the wiring of your brain and twiddling around, you know? And it can change your memories. I mean, I actually changed what I remembered. I understand this urge, Sharon. You set out to eat the bear, but maybe the bear eats you. And I don’t think Mel’s the kind of person who acknowledges risk and acts anyway. I think she’s the kind of person who ignores risk. And that is a dangerous, slightly self-involved thing to do.”