The Animators(99)

“You made it,” the doctor says. “You survived a stroke to live a normal life. You should be happy. You should be proud.”

I tell Mel the news as we do a final screen check. “Well, well,” she says, turning to me, face thin and angular, lilac patches under her eyes. In retrospect, I will always wonder how much of the movie was a gift, of sorts—one that she made to me, or we made to each other, as much as anything we made was a gift for one another. She smiles, wide and creased. “Here we are.”

The results are a perfect flow, neon and brazen: a high-color blur riot of growing up, a self that shuttles off into a bright and unknowable future. “Is it my imagination, or are we getting better at this?” I ask.

She turns back to the screen, the smile smaller. The screen reflects off her lenses, obscuring her eyes. “Either that,” she says, “or just getting older.”





THE EUROPEAN TOUR


We try to keep our expectations low for Irrefutable Love. We’re happy with it while admitting how weird it is, how hard it might be to sell. The ultimate fear, Donnie tells us, is that it is inaccessible, apparently the worst thing a movie can be. “Pitching it is going to be a nightmare,” she says. “I mean, I love it. But it’s a love I’m having trouble finding words for. It doesn’t have a hook.”

“It’s not a Hall and Oates song,” Mel says.

Donnie has a point. It’s not hugely accessible. I’m a hard sell, too. The first one to toddle out of parties, drunk and disenchanted, the one most worried about spilling something down the front of her shirt. That’s what Irrefutable Love is about. I don’t like people, goddammit. That’s why I do this for a living.

But weird is our niche market, Donnie assures us. We’ll start small. That’s all. With that, we let it out into the world.

And one day our phone starts ringing.

There’s no accounting for taste. Sometimes the truly unexpected will rise—the book, movie, painting that is the bespectacled boy in the back of the class, clumsy and asexual until he explodes in a flurry of revelatory pussy-wrangling. Irrefutable Love is that dark horse. Donnie sells it as niche but its impact goes further, sinking into the fandom of a certain landscape, a certain, bruised mindset. Mostly women, but some men, too. Those who fixate. It is a small but determined—and productive—group. It becomes the type of film other artists and writers comb the Internet for, looking for clips to send to friends. The kind of cartoon that elicits weird fan mail, naked pictures, phone numbers, letters confessing infidelities and childhood molestations and grand-scale thefts. Some staggering fan art. An Etsy store sells shirts and jewelry emblazoned with a half-opened trunk, an image of doom reclaimed, by the movie’s end, as a power symbol. OPEN YOUR TRUNK.

For us, this is an outpouring. We are touched by it, but there’s something about this kind of blind responsibility to others that scares the bejesus out of me. I’m still asked about the fan mail. What’s it like for people to approach you in public and burst into tears? How does it feel for perfect strangers to tell you their worst secrets? “Weird,” I usually say, and no more. Sometimes I cop out of answering at all. The best part of having a stroke is when others assume you can’t talk.

—

Late spring of the following year, almost a full two years after we started. We do a mini-tour of western Europe to promote Irrefutable Love, releasing it in Berlin and Munich and at the Guggenheim in Venice. Budapest, Vienna, London. Berlin and London are cold as balls, but fun. Lots of meat and beer. Perpetually overcast skies.

We’ve already done the New York stuff, interviews for magazines and podcasts. We sell more DVDs of Nashville Combat. We’re making a little money. A new wardrobe and some dental work for me. A decisive switch from GPCs to Parliaments for Mel. We stay in hotels and rack up frequent-flier miles. I read a lot. Go to hotel gyms. Check my blood pressure. Make a teary visit to a Munich doctor after a bout of violent queasiness turns out to be nerves. Live in a certain amount of fear.

“Dude, relax,” Mel says. “You’re all, like, bundled up. Squeezing together so nothing can escape.”

“I wish we could talk about something without the inclusion of poop metaphors.”

“You,” she says, “are a chronic worrier.” She thumbs through something on her phone, glasses at the end of her nose, chin tilted up. She’s getting ready to go out somewhere with some women from a Swiss art journal she met the day before. “Sure you don’t wanna go out? Be good for you. Find some nebbishy dude from a former socialist zone to straddle.”

“The Mel Vaught itinerary doesn’t much appeal to me.”

“Suit yourself.”

“I’m just glad I don’t have to share a hotel room with you on this trip.”

I eat and drink a lot. I’m happy to let Mel be the life of the party, go out and make friends, pose for overexposed photos yelling into people’s ears or humping statues or being embraced by slender, brightly dressed women, while I go back to the hotel to eat Kinder bars and watch Cheers with German subtitles.

There are moments when I have flashes of the old longing: in a plane taking off from a green countryside, smelling the moist underground of a foreign city’s metro, seeing a man in a Paris subway flick his girlfriend’s ear with his tongue. And there is the loneliness, a damp omission at my center. The movie takes off and I trudge along behind it, and Mel.