Smash Cut *Looking for Feedback; should I finish this project? Sorry, long*

Hi. This is a project close to my heart but I feel as if I may have misfired here. It's only an excerpt of a longer story. What do you all think of the writing so far? 

Smash Cut; or Fammi Impazzire; or A Bevy of Acceptable Fricatives; or The Ledger of Recorded Omens and Blue Junk Spotted Along a Series of American Highways

The first inkling Cosimo gets that he cannot control the weather is at age ten, one June noon on a Cape town main street outside of a penny candy store. After that day – hot and fuzzy like the Saab’s chrome grill – he will be only sixty-three percent sure he can control the weather; the kind of odds that make poker players’ eyebrows twitch behind mirrored shades and their barbwire tattoos anticipatorily wriggle across biceps. Twelve years pass, a thousand inside straights and dead-eyed bluffs fail to pan out before Cosimo reaches the Utah desert, where he is, for good and all, dissuaded.

Absolute power over the weather is one honey of a skill in beach town – especially for a ten-year-old, chubby kid without a friend in a hundred mile radius. He wakes up early and eats a cinnamon roll on the front porch, watches the fog thick-hung over the marsh across the street, a mosquito-ridden fairyscape. Cosimo puts his feet up on the railing, on the fluorescent beach towels, forgotten the evening before and left to collect dew all night; he thinks about how he feels that morning.

Hot, cold, or medium.

It is the same process for each: pucker that precious, glazed mouth and blow at the marsh. He cuts the mist like codfish.

If he blows hard the day will be hot, a wicked New England scorcher that everybody loves to complain about. A beach day. Cosimo suffers the indignity of sunscreen. His mother makes sure to slather the delicate skin behind the ears and knees; she, a tall, light-haired woman from the distant land of California, puts salami sandwiches in clear plastic baggies: sourdough, yellow mustard, cheddar. While his sister and mother lay out in the sun, reading paperbacks and drinking iced tea, Cosimo strikes out for Europe. He never makes it past the sandbar a few hundred feet off the shoreline. He is a bald otter, slick and blubbery, the ocean is a forgiving home. He splashes around the sandbar where the water is clear and hunts spider crabs. Sometimes he looks back towards the beach, sees the people like paper dolls, stiff and awkward in the dry air.

Medium days are good too. Cool, a few clouds boiling over the trees, into a sky that will one day remind Cosimo of paintings by Dutch masters in which a squadron of angels scrambles around God’s little finger. He rides bikes on those days. Pumping his teeny-weeny legs like the mad bastard he is, then shooting down a hill, never once touching the brakes, until his cheeks ripple or he hits a stick in the road, flying off onto concrete or gravel or pile of wood chips. Helmets are for cowards, bruised ribs and cheesegrated knees for heroes.

Cosimo, on the porch with the sopping beach towels and his father’s yellowed cigarette butts, hardly blows at all when he wants a cold day – more of an exhalation than a purposeful puff, so that the fog above the marsh just swirls a little differently, acknowledging his will. Cold days are good for being read to on the couch. He cocoons himself in a fleece blanket and listens to his mother tell tales of mice and badgers who drink dandelion tea and hold hands wherever they go. Or they (the humans) play Monopoly. The games always end with Cosimo’s sister getting frustrated and storming out, vowing to hoist vengeance on all the cheaters she is related to.

No matter the weather, Cosimo’s father drinks beer and vodka from early until late. Neither he nor his truck is around much. But they don’t talk about that. In New England families, some undercurrents aren’t discussed, but instead form barren sandbars right bellow the surface.

The particular noon in June when Cosimo starts to think he might not be the god of weather patterns is supposed to be Cold. Except it is hot. Really freaking hot. Too hot to go to the beach, his mother says.

“You’ll fry,” she tells to his sister, “Look at your shoulders. Another minute in the sun and I’ll be able to peel you like a banana.”

“Mom, this is unfair, the A.C. is busted and I don’t want to be around my stupid brother in this house for another minute.” Little brothers get used to abuse pretty fast from their teenage sisters. Cosimo never understood her hostility towards him, but is sure that he has done something to deserve it. “Can we go downtown?” she says.

Their mother looks towards the driveway where there was only one car, and no shiny black pickup truck, and sighs. She bites at the frayed cuticles of her left hand. “Put your shoes on, Cosimo, and grab a hat, you already look like one big freckle.”

The main drag of the little Cape town shimmers between a puritan colony and a gift shop. Bleached out church steeples, pink pastel awnings over the jewelry store, wrought iron water pumps without a spot of rust, old white people in salmon shorts and dress socks.

Cosimo and company slide down the street like pads of butter on a hot frying pan. The boy is mad at himself for frigging up the weather. Tomorrow, he promises himself, he will concentrate and threaten the weather, if that doesn’t work he will plead.

His mother and sister are ten-ish feet behind him, bickering about curfews (“Diana gets to stay out until ten-thirty on Fridays”/”That’s fine, I just want to know where you’ll be. Have I met everyone you’ll be with? Are you lying?” etc.) when Cosimo steps out into the middle of the street – tributary to main street - without looking both ways, lost in thought as he is about Earth’s tilted axis and the waxing nights of late summer. He hears his mother yell, “Cosimo!” before a black Saab convertible, with a shiny-ass chrome grill, hits and kills him.

Beat.

Then he is back on the curb. And the Saab with its top down and polished black body, rolls on past him. The driver has gray hair going black at the temples, oil-dark sunglasses, and teeth like seventeenth-century tombstones. Cosimo sees his own pudgy reflection in the Saab’s door panel: an O mouth and a pair of O eyeballs.

Just what in the good gosh darn has happened. He is dead. Had died. Has felt the heat of the engine as it would feel inches away from his flesh, so that the barely-there hair on his thighs twist and shrivel. And then a moment of blackness. And then back to the curb.

Is Cosimo immortal? Does the world around him exist only for him? Are his mother, sister, father, and the man with the tombstone teeth only props and figments in a world where he – Cosimo – is the only real person? Was he, perhaps, road-splattered in one version of Earth, then instantly dumped into an alternate dimension where everything looked the same but might, in some fundamental way, not be the same?

His mother, who had not screamed his name, he knows, takes his hand. They looked both ways before crossing the street and get ice cream. His sister gets a scoop of cotton candy, his mother a coffee frappe, and Cosimo a cone of something dyed blue, full of chocolate swirls, and malt balls.

* * *

Smash cut. Twelve years later. Cosimo has grown pubic hair, gone through high school, lost friends to time or heroin, wept in front of a woman he at one time loved in the clumsy youthful, tempest sort of way. Because of George W. Bush and the second Gulf War, Cosimo will never hear the word ‘coalition’ without connecting it to the phrase ‘of the willing.’ In the twelve years after his first death he laughed from his belly, threw punches in anger, read sentences in books that made him happy for weeks after, drank so much that when he vomited thin yellow strands leaked out of his nose, put cigarettes out on his tongue, popped pills, and spent a lot of time alone listening and watching the world he found himself in; he was lied to, fucked, cheated on, laughed at, disdained, applauded, confronted, rewarded, condescended to, arrested, loved and hated by the same people.

He is a sad young man who only identifies with other sad people. Which is how Cosimo finds himself in the Illinois Room, on the second floor of the Iowa Memorial Union Building, at the introductory meeting of the feature film he and his undergrad comrades plan to make over spring break. They’re in the midst of both midterms and winter, a dehydrated pit of time that seems endless, as they wake before sunrise and return to bed well-after sunset. Spring and sunlight are rumors, not promises.

PANASONIC. At the front of the room, buzzing bluely in the light of the overhead projector as it boots up, Siegfried French and Riley Adams (AKA Counselor Rybot, AKA C.R.) bicker over a clutch of papers. They are the writers, producers (C.R. is the executive producer due to ‘mad spreadsheet and timetable skills’) directors, cameramen, and cinematographers – holders of the sacred plot and Cosimo’s friends.

Cosimo (sound guy) sits, legs up on the front row of Formica tables, next to Ollie Sands (actor, comic relief) discussing caffeine headaches. Behind them, Wesley Smith (lead actor) has his nose inches away from his notebook, doodling small gopher-like creatures stampeding away from a figure not yet drawn. Off by her/himself worrying her/his nails – on the hand without nail polish – is the frustratingly non-binary Sam/Jo Bernardino (actor, wise exposition pipeline).

“I just need this next week to be over,” says Ollie, “Two papers due on Wednesday, a midterm in Chinese that I have not studied for – tonal languages are messed up, dude.” He yawns like he wants to swallow an ostrich egg whole.

“Feel you, Ollie,” Cosimo says, “I’ve been beerbonging pints of coffee since, like, last month. My adrenaline glands must look like prunes.”

“Dude, forget your glands, what about your throat?” Wesley says, still drawing, his nose speckled with blue ink. “That must burn like shit.”

“No way. I make a pot the day before, then put it in a pitcher in the refrigerator. It’s what my mom always did. What are we waiting for here, anyways, Siegfried?”

“Leading lady, she was at work but will be here in a minute. I’ll have you tucked in and snoozing shortly, Cosimo, don’t you worry.”

“She cute?” Ollie says.

“Yeah.” Wesley puts his pen down and flexes his wrist. The whole room hears the snap. The figure in the doodle that the gopher-like creatures are fleeing from is a colossal Friedrich Nietzsche – the give away is his mustache. “I take theater classes with her. She’s good.”

Siegfried, his long thin arms on his long thin hips, tilts his head and speaks through his beard. “None of you filthy animals even think about it. She has a boyfriend, and I don’t need any of y’all’s drama interfering with my production.”

“Yessir, co-director, sir.” Ollie snaps off a salute.

Cosimo has a girlfriend, sort of. In Iowa, where vast tracks of cornfields allow the wind to split the horizon, winters are brutal affairs. And although Cosimo hates to think of Her this way – She is a very sweet girl – he considers Her a placeholder, a warm body to share the Martian night. He does not wonder if She thinks of him this way; Cosimo assumes nothing about her, including the place he might hold in her life, he simply attempts to minimize the pain of any given moment, and fan the sparks of joy. That there are sparks of joy is something he tells Her, the girlfriend, often as university bills, coursework and the season bury her. Cosimo remains cheerful for Her, would wish her no ill, holds Her when She needs holding, but little more.

At the head of the room C.R. clears his throat, opens his mouth to speak but before he can the door to the Illinois room slaps open. There is Frances Le Frances (actress, ingénue).

“Sorry, guys, my boss is doofus who can’t figure out scheduling. I brought a pizza from work, though, best in Iowa City.”

“Better than that place on Dubuque?” says C.R..

“If I was on death row I would ask for one large Flying Tomato Taco Deluxe –

sub chicken for the ground beef, hot sauce, no sour cream – as my last meal.” Frances sets the box on the table at the front of the room, scattering the stacks of informational packets and plot summaries that Siegfried and C.R. have lain out at ninety-degree angles.

“I can’t eat pizza because of a gluten allergy,” Siegfried says, “but thank you, Frances Le Frances, you’re a hero. I also don’t think you’d last very long in a prison setting. Now can everybody sit down and shut the fuck up so we can get on with it.”

Cosimo uses his new packet for a plate; tomato sauce and grease smears the schedule break down on the first leaf. Cosimo takes note of this, considering it an omen. A good one: pizza is delicious, especially when it is free. A bad one: some stains don’t wash out, ruining shirts and obscuring whole passages of text.

C.R. hits a button somewhere and a Google map of the western half of the United States shoots out of the projector, onto the wall behind them.

“Welcome to Napa Nuptials, a comedic feature length film about family, deceit, delusion, and, as a function of setting, road trips, I guess you could call it a journey of self-discovery disguised as a trip out west.” C.R. Adjusts his glasses and smiled as wide as he can at his cast and crew. “We’re going shoot this puppy in eight days, two cars, four-ish states, and one desert. Now, actors, you’ll be playing characters with your same names with very similar personalities to your actual selves. This is to create a sense of realism and real reactions to what will be going on.”

Wesley raises his hand.

“Let me get through this spiel and then we’ll open the floor. I bet I’m about to answer your question right now.” Wesley put his hand down. “OK, in addition to playing characters that are, in large part, you, a lot of the dialogue will be improvised –“

Frances raises her hand, “Say what?”

“Improvised. We’re hoping for natural responses to natural conversation. Don’t worry we’ll have specific, written lines to keep you all on track and moving the plot forward. We have a plan; don’t worry.”

Ollie raises his hand.

“We’re not taking questions right now. Put the hand down.” Siegfried rubs his hands together like he needs a cigarette. Cosimo knows how many hours he’s spent planning this project out with C.R., how much money C.R. had already dropped on motel rooms, campsite and rented film equipment.

Siegfried didn’t usually have money for anything but a few key vices. Often, towards the end of month, his cellphone service would be discontinued for lack of payment. He worked two or three jobs at a time but never seemed to get anywhere. And, while he often gushed with ideas for screenplays, essays, and TV pilots, in the nearly four years that Cosimo had know him, Siegfried hadn’t completed a single creative project for himself. But now that he’d financially burdened C.R. and conscripted a cast and crew by the force of his own enthusiasm, the pressure to produce a film worthy of their efforts both motivated Siegfried and scared him shitless. Cracks in his shining self-assurance he’d shown only days earlier had started to alter the topography of his shoulders – crushing them, pinning him in place under the weight of expectations.

“Right,” C.R. pushes on and points to the project map, their route, a red squiggle, “So, a lot of the scenes will take place in a car or at roadside attractions along the way. Monday morning we’ll do some scenes in Iowa, then down to Missouri so we can buy a shitload of cigarettes on the cheap, then into Kansas, spend the night in Topeka, check out any roadside attractions that we want B roll of, then drive to Colorado where we’ll stay with Ollie’s dad where we can pick up a few extra sleeping bags – right? Right. – then into Utah where we’ll sleep at a motel for one night, then we camp in the desert, Canyonlands State Park, for two nights, then we’re on our way back, more shooting, a lot of driving, yadda yadda yadda.” C.R. pauses for breath. “Questions?”

There are questions. Sam/Jo asks about the actual plot. Siegfried explains that only the individual characters should know their actual reasons for going west, that the characters would learn each other’s motivations naturally.

“But Wesley, our main character, in a general sort of way, is going to California for his estranged sister’s wedding and has to deal with his anxiety about seeing her and his wacky family after years and years and what it means to be ‘family’ and all that shit, which will slowly build throughout the film.” Siegfried’s hands were shaking.

“If this film had a subtitle – like, Napa Nuptials semicolon blank –” asks Wesley, “what would it be?”

Cosimo sits back, figuring that sound guys are all about listening rather than speaking up. The others ask about logistics and artistic vision, available trunk space and camera lenses. He lets the words rush into him, happy to get out of Iowa for a few days, see a more varied landscape, do drugs in the dessert, produce something beautiful. Siegfried is the one he worries about, his friend has a habit of taking too much on himself – whether it be semester hours or unpaid side-projects for friends – and when his repsonsities build to a critical point he shuts down, losing whole days in bed, or, worse still, triggering a manic episode. Back when he was an R.A. he didn’t go to classes for weeks on end, but always greeted his freshman wards with a smile and a handful of condoms.

C.R. sooths the actors with an activity counselor’s charm. “This trip is going to be a lot of work, but it’s also going to be a lot of fun. You’re free to bring any drugs you want – Colorado has legal weed so you might want to wait to pick up – but please keep it safe, and keep it in the trunk of my car while we’re driving: it’s separate space from the rest of the car so if we get pulled over it should be cool.”

Frances asks if his lawyer had told him that. Cosimo laughs, a single tar bubble pop of laughter. The pizza, detailed road maps, and descriptions of the Seven Wonders of Kansas have reassured everybody. Like the Iowa plains, smoothed and made fertile by continental ice sheets, beauty takes time and overwhelming pressure.

This is going to be fun, Cosimo thinks, everybody is either going to be in love at the end of this or never speak to each other again.

“It’s all about the human reality and conflicts, so finish midterms strong, and bring your war faces.”

“Also, keep in mind,” Siegfried says, fumbling for his lighter and pack, “it’s a comedy.”

* * *

Smash cut. Sam/Jo cracks the driverside window to toss a cigarette butt; Cosimo snaps the glove compartment open and shut in rhythm with the radio. Travelers on Midwestern highways do what ever they can to prove to themselves that they exist, so they make a bubble of sound and smoke and drive thru hamburgers as they hurdle along grasslands that do not care about them.

Sam/Jo’s character isn’t in the early scenes of Napa Nuptials; the rest of the cast – in the world of the movie – lived in the immediate Iowa City area, Sam/Jo is a traveling musician (“Harmonica, Cosimo, I think of it as an aluminum-steel sandwich and I am a robot who hasn’t seen an oil can since I achieved A.I. in the last war of mechanical independence”) who responds to a Craigslist rideshare post. They and Cosimo – who has been temporarily relieved by a chipper C.R. of any sound guy duties for “just this once” – could sleep in, driving Ollie’s mom’s car to Colfax, Iowa, where the two groups will merge for lunch and a status report. The other group is thirty minutes behind. Cosimo Checks his phone.

“Ollie says they’re just leaving I.C. now.”

Sam/Jo checks their phone too. “Siegfried won’t respond to me. He either lost his phone again or is ready to give up already.”

“Equally likely. Looks like we have time to kill.”

“Let’s stop at that gas station,” Sam/Jo says, “I want to take a picture of that van.”

“Thank God, dude.” Cosimo had had to piss for the last thirty miles or so, the seatbelt cutting into his distended bladder. He tests himself, seeing how long he can keep his sphincters tight, assuming that discomfort meant improvement, that he is training his excretory system for the long days ahead.

“No need to be a hero or nothing: we’ve got time for bathroom breaks. All we’ve got is fucking time.” They park Mom Car around the side of the gas station, next to a junked out minivan painted to look like Scooby and Shaggy’s trusty Mystery Machine: aquamarine base splashed with sea-grass green accents. Seventies cartoon cool abandoned at the edge of Colfax by the propane tanks and overflowing dumpsters. Cellophane scraps tumble in the wind but there is no direct sunlight to make them shine or glitter. An overcast day and nobody will text them back.

Despite his wicked need to piss, Cosimo watches Sam/Jo take a few pictures. They only use film cameras. Cosimo asks why they did that, if there is, like, some objective benefit to film over digital cameras.

“No, it’s not that the picture is any better – although a lot of people say it is. Digital is instant and that’s what I don’t like.” Sam/Jo crouches onto their heels, combat boots scrape against the concrete.

“You don’t like instantly seeing how the picture is? What if you fuck up? What if the light is wrong or you missed something shocking in the background?”

Sam/Jo pauses and turns a sly eye toward Cosimo. “What could be so shocking in the background?”

Cosimo scans the horizon for a worthy specimen. “Well, what if there’s a pack of wild dogs taking down a deer.”

“Then my picture just became more interesting by a factor of twelve.”

“Granted,” says Cosimo, “bad example. By why not know if it’s good or not right away? Seems like a usefully digital perk.”

“Just for that reason. Because it takes three weeks to get these photos developed. All that instant gratification bullshit sucks all the fun out of it: delete and reshoot until you get exactly what you want.” Sam/Jo stands up, lets their camera rest on their chest on its strap, and pulls a pack of Parliaments out of their jacket pocket. Empty. “Shit. Did I take a bad picture? Maybe. I like waiting and finding out. Good or bad, these photos will be the only memory I have of this particular Mystery Machine no matter what, and that makes them all good, in a way.”

“I can dig that. Not good or bad, just different.” Cosimo and Sam/Jo watch a motorcycle pull up to the number three pump. The driver, all-black denim everything, has a full-faced helmet on, strange for Iowa. A five-pointed star caught in circle, the words ‘U.I. Partial Marshals est. 1847’ stitched onto her jacket.

“Exactly, well, sort of. Not good or bad at all, just the way it was or is. Not curated and bullshitty. Hey, do you know that girl? Is she wearing Seven League Boots? Those are fly as fuck. Why does that patch on her jacket look familiar?” Sam/Jo gestured at the biker. She removes her helmet and click clacks across the parking lot into the station with a twenty-dollar bill peeking out from between the fore and middle fingers of her left hand. Sandy hair that just pokes out from under a Jolly Roger dew rag. Cosimo recognizes the boots.

“Sure, that’s Theodora, umm, Weaver. She’s my girlfriend’s friend. Don’t know what the patch is – some student org. I guess. I don’t know her well. Not a huge fan. She’s a little theatrical, I think, like she’s putting on a show and the audience just can’t get enough.”

Cosimo, in fact, made out with Theodora last Halloween, before he and Her, the girlfriend, had met. She, Theodora, didn’t like Cosimo either; that night she was using him to make her ex jealous. Cosimo went to that party dressed as Abel with Ollie as his Caine, he wasn’t sure what Theodora had gone as; he remembers the hike of her skirt, an arterial splash of cornstarch blood across her white blouse, and hydrant-red lipstick creeping beyond the corners of her mouth, but most of all he remembered what her eyes said: I know something you don’t [blink] I am smarter than you [blink] you’re costume is shit [blink] [blink] [blink].

“Like a digital photo, I grok the type: I’ve seen Instagram. Hey, didn’t you need to piss?” Cosimo jumps and fifty ounces of use-to-be coffee jump with him, his bladder, like poor intentions, rushes to the forefront of his mind. He sloshes into the station, B-lining to the bathrooms. Sam/Jo follows him as far as the candy and beef jerky aisle. Cosimo gives a little wave at Theodora as he passes her. He doesn’t think she notices – too busy drumming her fever-orange nails on the Formica counter as the kid working the register makes change –, or else her stiff neck and laser-guided eye-line on the kid’s hands are affects, studies in oblivion.

When Cosimo shakes off and slides back to the parking lot, Sam/Jo sits on the hood of Mom Car, blowing Parliament smoke into a half-drained sports drink bottle then spinning on the cap so the smoke hangs over the liquid like storm clouds.

Cosimo stretches out his quadriceps and spits on the front tire before popping open the passenger door. “That shit is way too blue to be anything but poison.” Sam/Jo removes the cap and drank all that remained. Smoke dribbles from his nostrils. They toss the bottle into a trashcan with a parabolic wrist-flick.

“Kobe, motherfucker. I figure the electrolytes counterbalance the cigarettes. Any word from those goofs in Picture Car?”

“Just that they’re leaving Iowa City now.”

“Man, shooting with these people is always a waiting game. And this time I don’t even know how my character arc ends,” Sam/Jo sighs and shakes their head, “Siegfried has a surprise for me, some big final gag.”

Cosimo looks at his watch, resigns to waiting. Looks at the grayed-out sky, considers turning the day sunny with a strong exhalation, but instead locates the sun by hint and inference, and orients himself on a north-south axis. He clears his throat. Taps his foot. Scrapes dirt from under one nail with the sliver of another, pulls a pen from his pocket and scribbles bluely on the delicate membrane between thumb and forefinger. Sam/Jo whistles real low. “Didju know that the Greeks didn’t have a word for blue? It doesn’t appear once in the Iliad or Odyssey.”

“Oh?” Sam/Jo turns Mom Car on and flicks through the FM stations. Christian electronic dance music, southside tire and automotive care services, classic rock.

“Yeah. Before dyes or anything the only blue things were the sea, kind of, and the sky, sometimes. So no need for the word. They thought the sea was wine-dark. Wild, right?”

“Uh-huh. You know your girlfriend’s friend smokes American Spirits Ultra Lights?”

“So?”

Sam/Jo rolls their eyes and flutters their eyelashes like wind through the pages of a foreign language newspaper on a café patio – the kind of joint that sells more espressos than anything other item and only features clown-related artwork from local artists. “So, my new buddy, that particular brand choice means she’s either a neo-hippie with an addictive personality or a narcissist with no self-regard – with an addictive personality.”

“Isn’t that a contradiction, buddy? What do parliaments say about you, then?”

“Maybe it is. Wouldn’t you like to know.”

They sit, parked at the gas station, without speaking then. Waiting.

On the radio Credence Clearwater Revival plucks their way through “Have you ever seen the rain?” Cosimo pulls a notebook from under his seat (a slim blue moleskin his mother had given him the last time he was home, months before) to record yet another omen.

Smash cut. Wesley Smith is the kind of cat that prefer to put eyes on you before you put eyes on him, at least six feet off and not moving too much either – an ‘unwelcoming holdover from childhood’ is what he told Cosimo one night at some basement or another all gacked out on his own prescriptions. His mother, a Spanish painter with the oil-based paint staining the walls of veins – her father initiated an entire artistic system of thought, the details of which Wesley failed to remember in that particular basement where the stone walls shed dust-waves from the clash of feet and bass and microphone feedback. It was she that taught Wesley the importance of stepping back, way back to the far wall of her studio far from Barcelona, to let the painting hit your eye in it’s wholeness.

“Especially the frame. That woman loves a good frame. But it, the practice of stepping back, doesn’t translate to people well,” Wesley had said. Cosimo understands the value, though, of keeping a distance from a person before approaching: trust is one slippery sack of shit that cannot, should not, be given or received without a mandatory-type trial period. Poor Cosimo: he thinks you only learn that lesson once, rather than again and again. What Cosimo said at the time, drunk and not wanting to be, was ‘people are weird; what’s up with your dad and their relationship?’ Deflection is an art.

This is why Wesley jumps so fucking high when he and Sam/Jo whipped around the same corner of the same pharmacy in the same adobe building along an unused main street. The brick of the pharmacy’s outer wall is painted white and, stenciled in eight foot black, block letters: DRUGS.

“Welcome to Colfax, gang,” Cosimo says, “run into some shooting snags or are you always this jumpy around lunchtime?” Everyone ignores him. The three actors who are not Sam/Jo – Frances Le Frances, Ollie, and Wesley – are identically grim. Lines around their mouths as deep as they would be decades after college; Frances left eye (like muddled lime in a blueberry cocktail, Cosimo thinks) twitches; Ollie’s orangutan t-shirt is the same color as his hair, bird-belly red; Wesley still has a dollop of shaving cream clutching the external cartilage of his right ear.

“Fuck, Sam/Jo!” Wesley took several steps back, off the curb of the sidewalk and into the street.

“Sorry, dude, next time I’ll wear tap shoes. What took you so long?”

C.R. scratches under his American flag bandana, tied pirate-style. “Well, it took sometime, setting up equipment, costume choices, getting used to the improvisation. First day kinks. That’s all.” He smiles his best camp counselor’s smile: all teeth and arched eyebrows – Aren’t we having fun, Kiddies?

“Frances saw a Mexican restaurant back that way.” Ollie juts his thumb over his shoulder.

The wind kicks Frances’s hair into her face; she spits out the strands that stick to her mouth. “I crave hot sauce when I get in a mood – my boyfriend has gotten real good at making Hunan chicken over the past ten months.”

Cosimo digs his nails into his forearm when he gets ‘in a mood’ or puts cigarettes on his tongue, but he understands the principle. “Salsa verde sounds good to me.”

The streets are empty. In small, dusty towns business rarely booms, no such thing as a lunch rush. The Playa Sabroso is about to close for the afternoon, but the kitchen would stay open if they ordered in the next ten minutes.

Siegfried touches Cosimo’s elbow and spoke for the first time. “Stay out and smoke for a minute.”

Cosimo, Siegfried, and C.R. hang back.

“We’re fucked,” Siegfried says.

“No, we aren’t. We just need to reevaluate certain goals and expectations,” says C.R., “It wasn’t that bad.”

“I swear if Wesley makes another suggestion or fights me on one more goddamn line I’m going to leave him along the highway.”

C.R. looks at Cosimo for help. “Breathe, Sieg.”

Siegfried drags.

“Cosimo. You weren’t there, those clowns blew through ten minutes – what should have been ten minutes – of material in forty-five seconds.”

“They were getting better towards the end there.” C.R.’s hands are on his head like he’s about to be cuffed.

Siegfried bristles. “No riffing. No improvising. No attempt even. They can’t. They can’t. Maybe we should call it off while we’re still in the state.”

“Whoa there,” Cosimo says, “hold your oxen. Like C.R. said, couldn’t it be first day kinks? We’ve committed a lot of time to this. We’re invested. We can’t cut and run without even trying.”

“Thank you, Cosimo, exactly. Not to mention the money I’ve put into this. The camera alone –“

“I know,” Siegfried put a hand up to stop C.R. “I know how much the equipment was, I know how this looks but, man, oh man, why don’t we just give up?”

Cosimo takes Siegfried by the shoulders. Siegfried won’t make eye contact. Cosimo puts in his voice the ocean at low tide. Speaks about trust, faking positivity until it’s the only lens you see through, and adapting to changing circumstances. “The Greeks didn’t have a word for blue until they needed one.”

“What the shit?”

“It’s only the first six hours of an eight day trip. Let’s finish out the day and readjust when we get to Topeka if we need to.”

Siegfried rasps a hand through his beard and nods.

They enter the restaurant. Tacos and enchiladas and shredded cheese make everyone jocular, a braintrust bent on solving the movie. Siegfried doesn’t say a word.

A bull and matador dance together on the bathroom wall, a drift of flowers at their feet. Both are corded with muscle and shine with the sweat of a challenge.

Smash cut. The kind of Miracle Mile on the edge of any American city. Chain motels, chain restaurants, chain-link fences separating one parking lot from another. Topeka, Topeka.

A motorcycle rips down the yellow seam of the road.

Smash cut. Everyone is in a single motel room at ten at night, even though the actors have their own room next door. Contained chaos.

“Can someone grab me a tissue? I'm sick and feel like a big baby.” Frances Le Frances say ‘baby’ like she is a baby, forcing in foreign syllables.

“Nobody is a baby here,” says Sam/Jo, “we’re all fully formed adults.”

Cosimo puts aside the book he is pretending to read, goes to the bathroom and comes back with six feet of tissue paper. He throws it on Frances. It cascades done over her like spider silk. “Never say that I’ve never done anything for you, baby.” He returns to his book, seeing but not reading, trying to remember the last time he texted his girlfriend.

“She’s not a baby. Don’t take away her agency – even though she gave it up.”

“What agency? I was cast as the only female in a film full of men I don’t know, except for Siegfried,” Frances says. “If Cosimo wants to help me out in my time of need, then he’s that less of a stranger to me.” Frances then promptly ignored Cosimo for the rest of the night.

Ollie lies perpendicularly to the head of one of the two twin beds in the room – bedspreads like tropical smoothies at a middle stage of digestion – listening to Chinese history podcasts, occasionally broadcasting a factoid to the room at large. He isolates himself beneath his massive black headphones.

Siegfried and C.R. listen to Wesley’s ideas about scrapping the feature length film in favor of a short film with the same plot, “or maybe, like, three independent but thematically related shorts –“

“The history of the Shang Dynasty, called the Bamboo Annals, was written around 100 B.C.E.”

C.R. cracks open a plastic liter of whiskey, pours some over ice with the faintest splash of coke.

“We should order a pizza,” Sam/Jo says, “I’ll look up deals.”

Contained chaos. The noise in the room grew. Cosimo doesn’t like noise, it felt indiscreet, like all of Kansas might lodge a noise complaint. Even the sound of Frances blowing her nose with toilet paper is an invitation for ruin.

“The last Shang king was named Shang Zhou. He lost the mandate of heaven like King Jia of Xia Dynasty. His people rebelled when he needed them most.”

Cosimo catches Siegfried’s panicky eye and jerks his head towards the door.

Their rooms are on the second tier of the motel, 201 and 202. Cosimo and Siegfried scoot around the walkway until they find an out of the way flight of stairs to hide in. Siegfried seeks a corner to hide in, where the overhead fluorescents only creep over the lower half of his body, face in shadows. They light cigarettes (Siegfried a Camel Blue 100, Cosimo Marlboro Reds – his first and only brand), like lanterns in the night.

Siegfried draws long shuddering breaths. Even in the shadows Cosimo can tell that his friend’s eyes are cast down to the dusty concrete steps. Shoes full of holes and duct tape at the heel.

Silence for a while. It’s a sound guy’s place to listen even if nobody wants to speak.

Siegfried pushes at the corners of his eyes with thumb and forefinger. Exhales. “I don’t know what to do.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Give up. But I can’t. I dragged you all out here. I told you it would work and it fell apart immediately. And –“

“And?” Cosimo waits. Siegfried quakes, finished his cigarette and starts another one.

Siegfried’s mother wants to have him committed, he says. Not without reason, she thought he was unstable, going to kill himself or get hooked on meth – ‘We already have one methhead in the family, I don’t want another’ – and lose his immortal soul. Grades were shit. No way he’d finish school in four years.

“Visits home now are like going down waterslides with low-grade acid instead of water. I hate waterslides.” Siegfried thinks this is it. This film project, if he can pull it off, will keep him out of a psychiatric hospital, prove to himself, and everybody who he compares himself to that he is capable, sane, sane, sane, sane. “I can feel myself falling,” he said, “Getting bad again I mean. I can’t go back to the hospital.”

Cosimo does all he can. Very little. He puts a hand on his shoulder. Says things like “fuck the opinion of others,” and “we’re just here to have a good time and in the process make a cool flick,” and “your mom doesn’t want you to commit you.” Lies swirl with truth.

“Listen,” Cosimo says, “you’re not alone in this. If the improvised lines don’t work, we’ll write it out. We’re not stupid. It’s only a disaster if we let it be. Let’s get a few hours of sleep then hit it hard in the morning. We’ll pivot if we need to. Adapt. Everything will be alright if we focus and don’t let this shit get to us.”

A mosquito – pregnant and slow with someone else’s blood – lands on the tip of Siegfried’s cigarette as he hides his face in his hands and hat brim, and fries itself on the glowing tip. Twenty minutes later, when they return to room 201 for tissue paper and to kick the actors out, Cosimo pulls out his moleskin notebook and scrawled a few lines about the insects and light and hypnotic quality of fire.

Smash cut. Cosimo, C.R., and Siegfried get dressed in the dark. It is an hour before dawn, according to C.R.; he consulted a farmers’ almanac in preparation, charting out the position of the sun, so they might rely on it for lighting scenes and save the batteries on their portable LEDs – “borrowed” from the University of Iowa film club. From one of the coolers, C.R. pulls a garlic and onion bagel. The tubs of cream cheese have hardened in the chill of the coolers, and the plastic knife he sticks in one of these tubs snaps under the pressure of his scoop.

Outside, the air is made of ice and diesel fuel. Across the highway, opposite their motel, is a Starbucks coffee shop, a stable known, a nationwide symbol of corporate synergy, caffeine, and free Wi-Fi. The three young men make their way across the concrete landscape, square buildings rise out of the asphalt, reminding Cosimo of tribal burial grounds – structures built of the earth they rested on, built of the mysterious attitudes and tastes around them also. In the case of Topeka, Kansas, or at least the outskirts, the architecture bends toward brutalism, functionality, and proven reliability.

Except for two middle aged women discussing the flaring remnants of winter with a city police officer and the barista, the Starbucks is empty. The cop and women make it clear that Cosimo and company are out of place in their youth and tank tops. But they take no mind. They have brains to storm and a movie to save. The sun will be up soon, the actors ready to roll, in need of direction.

But they had to wait for coffee. You can’t expect to be in any way productive without coffee. Cosimo couldn’t stitch together a complete sentence without coffee, his saliva glands brew up gallons of spit until that first taste, his body yearning, muscles slack. Fuck the movie, Cosimo thought, I’m trying to not drown in my own fluids over here. Black, cold coffee. Bitter, utilitarian energy.

Then, once they have coffee, a table, and their notebooks laid out before them, Siegfried wants to discuss Wesley. How he needs to have more ideas about his character and less about the project as a whole, they already have two co-directors and a pushy actor could derail the whole project, not to mention Frances’ unwillingness to put herself out there and improvise some lines, but that’s the nature of the film, it takes shape as it is made and everyone just needs to embrace their characters. “Fucking riff!” Siegfried says. He goes on, talking about specific incidents of yesterday’s artistic insubordination, what a disaster it was, while C.R. takes first half of an amphetamine sulfate tablet, using his body to block the cop’s view, then the second half a minute later. It is nearly seven thirty before someone pitches an idea about how to proceed with the rest of the trip.

“What if we maintain the overall plot and structure but reduce it from a ninety minute feature length to a short film?” Cosimo says. C.R. and Siegfried exchange looks.

“I’d rather give up entirely,” Siegfried says.

“We are capable of making creating exactly what we want, I know it.” C.R. says this then goes to the bathroom, the amphetamine is good for a radical colon cleaning, if not creative inspiration.

Siegfried’s head is bowed to he collarbone as he flips the pages of plot summary and what little script they have. There’s maybe thirty sheets of paper. What felt hefty and substantial in their initial meeting, now looks like what it is: an overly ambitious timetable, a uselessly zoomed out map that covers over thirteen hundred of North America and zero discernable landmarks, and scene descriptions left purposefully vague so as to not stifle natural human responses. The document, Cosimo sees, functioned better as a pizza plate than a script.

C.R. returns from the bathroom to suggest an emergency, crash course on the making of unscripted movies. Hunching over his laptop he rushes his fingers over the keys, Googling wiki pages, YouTube tutorials on comedy, the award speeches of famous filmmakers and their inspirations. He’s lost down an internet rabbit hole the way only an optimist on amphetamines can be lost.

By the time C.R. discovers highlight reels of Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand, Siegfried has been silently staring into the creamy-sweet depths of his coffee for longer than Cosimo is comfortable with. The faces of the west have always been too many, a promised birthright from the Anglo God, a hall of ancestral bones stolen from the Native Gods, salvation from the Latter Day Saints’ God, a playground and soundstage that creates new gods just in time for award season, and an impenetrable landscape of the Reality Gods – snow-filled mountains, gold in the earth, fertile valleys, whale skeletons in the desert. Possibilities unfold like railroad tracks, hard, improbable, far of engines making the steel hum. They are paralyzed with both overconfidence and underconfidence –

Until the door whooshes open. it creaks back on springs by slow degrees, footfalls click on tile. Frances Le Frances has arrived, and with her is Theodora Weaver – kick-ass black boots and jacket with the five-pointed star stitched on the back.