Class Novel: Chapter 14 by Timothy Collier

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Again, plot is a tricky thing when I am a fraction of the plotting apparatus.  I tried to think of what kinds of emotional beats could be included at this point in the novel and in Nat's story.  A lot of what I did felt like interpreting what people have already written--about Cody, about Nat and her brother, the town of Unalaska, and finding new ways of exploring and developing those ideas.  Hopefully Nat's relationship with Cody is really becoming a substantial thing with weight and nature of its own.  I have no idea what happens next...but the idea of this movie actually being finished in the space of this novel has hopefully been scrapped by all.

            Nat had low expectations for the Unalaska production of Macbeth, shocking even in its existence.  Cody stood in the lobby of the Grand Aleutian Hotel in a three-button cotton shirt, green and brown, with five-pocket khakis and Timberland boots with streaks of polish around the toes.  Nat exited the stairwell and blushed.  She had decided to wear the one real dress that she had brought to Alaska.  It was slim with broad, horizontal stripes of blue and black.  She carried a light blue, rhinestone pocketbook.

            “Oh, shit, damn it.”

            “What, Nat?”

            “I…probably could have worn something else.”

            “You look great,” Cody said.  “At least, that’s what I’m supposed to say.”

            “Thanks,” Nat sighed.  She meant it.

            The theater was still using the auditorium of Unalaska High School for its performances.  Nat and Cody sat at the end of an aisle of metal folding chairs and silently read through their programs, waiting for the production to begin.  Cody had nothing to learn from the program which was on the front and back of a piece of printer paper.

            Nat’s brother had spent his twenty-third year feeding a brief obsession with the theater.  Most of what she knew came from his impassioned lessons.  He read Shakespeare and Ibsen and Stoppard and the impenetrable literary theorists’ work on the theater: Auerbach, Derrida, Said, Butler, and Eco.  It was his brief venture into intellectualism.  He had told her to always pay close and creative attention to the physical space of the theater—its depths and framing, the curtain’s colors and the height and design of the arch.  This curtain looked like it had been green at some point.  The back wall was grey stone.  A couple that looked to be upwards of eighty years old sat two rows ahead of Nat and Cody and there were two teenaged boys in the front row.  Five people in the audience for Macbeth.

            “This is going to be good,” Cody said.  Nat could not tell if he was being sarcastic.  “Lady Macbeth thinks she has blood on her hands at this one part.  It’s great.”

            “Yeah, I think I’ve heard about that scene.”

            The three witches entered the stage and the house speakers buzzed with thunder and thick rain.  Nat found the dialogue difficult, except for the conversation with Banquo about the weather, which was dull.  All that people in Alaska talked about was the weather.  She audibly gasped at one point and then shrank in embarrassment.  The actor that played King Duncan was a cook at Amelia’s—an old and bearded man with leathery skin.  He stood tall in the center of the stage in regal polyester and his voice boomed and cracked out “Whence camest thou, worthy thane?”

            Duncan’s blood was almost surely ketchup.  Ross and Siward seemed prepubescent.  Cody laughed when the actors stumbled over loose upholstery and their own painted loafers.  He smiled and glanced repeatedly at Nat when Lady Macbeth scrubbed her hands because it looked like the actress had spilled something on her wrist that had stained, and the illusion was undermined.  At one point, the lights went out and Nat grabbed Cody’s arm in a faux-terror and they giggled until the stage lit again and Macbeth’s soliloquy continued with something about his birth by Caesarean section.

            “The end was underwhelming, but it was fun,” Nat said in the linoleum lobby after the performance.  “Supposedly, these things are supposed to have some pity and fear.”

            “Fear?” asked Cody.

            “I don’t know.”

            It had begun to snow fiercely.  The harsh fluorescent light made the outside world look uniformly black, the flakes pounding the glass doors of the auditorium like a million shooting stars.

            “It’s like someone’s shaking a snow globe really hard,” said Cody in a consciously sensitive voice.

            “Or like the sky is falling,” said Nat.

            It was not exactly the opera, but Nat felt a peculiar kind of cultural literacy, like a purveyor of quaint theatrical artifacts, beginning with this production in a high school underneath a snowstorm in Alaska.  Jack would have never gone to something like this.  If he went to the theater, it would be for some trendy conglomerate of yuppies, transparently feigning disinterestedness and meeting afterward for drinks around the corner to talk about the start or the merger that was still under wraps.  The production would be fine and well-executed and tasteful.  It would be safe.  But Nat found something in this just barely put-together Macbeth that still reflected the great danger and hope of Alaska’s jagged mountainsides and weathered fishing vessels, lights piercing the fog in the Dutch Harbor and giant creaking pulleys swinging wildly over the netted mounds of sealife, with names like “Perseverance,” and “Irish Lord.”  It was all so uncalifornian.  The confidence of Macbeth’s great dagger.

            “Let’s run to the car,” said Nat.  “Make a break for it in the wind.”

            She swung open the door and ran into the black sky.  Cody caught up beside her, hands holding the hood of his coat tight around his ears.  The storm’s twisting was a symphony.  Nat kept running in the general direction of Cody’s car.  She could only see for a few feet ahead but the faint sense of asphalt underneath told her she was heading in the right general direction.

            There was a frantic streak of gray to her left and a loud sound like scraping sandpaper.  Cody cried out for a moment.  Nat turned and he was no longer running by her.  She could make out his shape on the asphalt, crumpled over a concrete parking marker, his back twisted and head to the sky, mortared by sharp stripes of snow and ice. Nat ran back against the wind to Cody and kneeled down.  He was holding his side and grimacing in pain.  She lifted him slowly from under his arms and he let out a small scream.

            “Cody, I’m sorry, where are you hurt?”

            “It’s not serious, Nat, it’s not,” Cody said.  “Just my side and hip might be a little bruised.”

            The snow and wind had withdrawn some and the air was clearer.  Nat looked around for help and only saw the shapes of the two boys from the front row walking slowly across the parking lot at a distance, one of them awkwardly turning his head to peer at Nat and Cody and then fixing it straight ahead.

            Cody stood slowly and they walked to his car, Nat’s arm under his.

            “Nat, I can drive.  Don’t worry about it.”

            “I’ll drive,” Nat said.  “I know it’s not too bad, but just in case.”

            In the morning, before the sun had risen, Nat bundled herself in coats and blankets and quietly left the Grand Aleutian Hotel.  She drove her rental car down Airport Beach Road and Salmon Way, her eyelids quivering without the help of caffeine, the wheel drifting and the dim streetlights guiding her off of Expedition Island and over the East Channel.  A silver fog wrapped around the town of Unalaska.  No mountains could be seen—only the shallow marinas and occasional tilting house behind the concrete ramps of the bridge and the tall grass of the valley that wilted in shades of dying green.

            What was Alaska?  Nat’s thoughts came in cloudy clumps that made less sense to her than the clumsy Shakespearean dialogue of the previous night.  The shooting of her film only sharpened the memories of her brother, never assuaging the pain of his loss, only raising questions about her fidelity and respect for him, her competence as a filmmaker, her independence.  Cody was so much like him.

            Nat parked on the side of Broadway Avenue and walked slowly through the slight wind to the white picket fence that enclosed the Church of the Holy Ascension.  She did not notice the light snowfall.  The sun’s glow could be felt and seen barely to the south of the church.  Nat sat and leaned against the white fence, facing the tall bell tower with the jade onion dome.  The faint green of the hills to the South began to distinguish itself in the growing light.  White and red surfaces of Holy Ascension blushed in the freezing morning.  Nat sat noiseless and still against the fence for some time.