Experimental Film

I thought about that for a minute. “Well, going by what we have here,” I began, finally, feeling my way through the thesis out loud, “it looks like someone made a movie out of ‘Lady Midday,’ probably shortly after the story was published. And since there’s no way it was widely known, given it was published privately, then that person . . . might have been Mrs. Whitcomb herself. Which would be kind of a deal.”

“And you’re gonna ask Barney about that?”

“Where he got the clips, at least, and maybe not directly. I don’t think I need to talk about Mrs. Whitcomb per se.”

“Wait and see if he brings it up?” I nodded. “Okay, but what if he doesn’t? You still need to prove the link, obviously, to get people on board. . . .”

“Obviously, yeah.”

“So how?”

“Noooo fuckin’ idea.”

He nodded slightly, and we sat there again for a moment or two in companionable silence. Simon and I had known each other for a good seven years before we ever hooked up. Part of the appeal was that friendship; though people always claim it’s good to be “best friends” with your significant other, it does tend to reduce your circle of acquaintanceship pretty severely, especially once you have kids. Especially if said kids are like Clark, and looking back, how could they have not been?

People still ask me sometimes what I think “happened,” like they’re asking me to place blame, to point to something I did or something that was done to me—to identify what exactly was the glitch that fashioned Clark, made him who/what he is, so they can avoid it. Was it vaccination, pollution, too much electricity in the air? The only thing that has ever made sense to me is a theory put forward by Sacha Baron Cohen’s brother (also Simon, hilariously), who attributes it to simple genetics: the fact that for at least fifty years now, people have been choosing their mates by affinity rather than economic considerations, allowing geeks who test a few points off the spectrum like me and Simon to fumble our way toward each other. A double payload of geekery, therefore, and you get Clark, the über-geek, so subsumed inside his own enthusiasms that on a bad day he can barely acknowledge the outside world—though even on a good day, seemingly, there’s little to nothing beyond the circle of hi

s own skull appealing enough to distract him for long.

Simon is good at math, loves role-playing games and puzzles, and calculates point scores for fun. His father is a deacon and his uncle a priest—the same priest who married us—so it shouldn’t be surprising that his thought patterns register as Jesuitical, or maybe Thomistic; he used to like to argue for fun, once upon a time, though these days he finds it wearing. He can put on a better social face than I can, but he bruises easily; his emotions are closer to the surface than mine, or possibly just less ground down, less disconnected. On the other hand, he’s really good for bouncing things off of, because he thinks logically, not metaphorically. We’re both pattern makers, albeit of very different types.

“You better go,” he said, finally. “Mind if I think about this for a while, on my own? I might be able to come up with something.”

“Please. I’ll take all the help I can get.”

He smiled. “Excellent! See ya later, then. Love.”

“Love,” I replied, kissing him goodbye.

Ten years plus since Toronto went smoke-free in bars, as well as workplaces and restaurants, Sneaky Dee’s is the kind of place that still smells like the inside of an ashtray—dark-painted walls inside and graffiti mural on stucco out, all cartoon cow skulls, cacti, and cowboy hats outlined in blacklight-sensitive DayGlo paint. Weekends, they hold Eighties Music Night meet-and-greets; weeknights, it’s a rotating roster of local nu-punk, black metal, and ghost house bands, cut with the occasional white suburban rap crew. I texted Wrob as the cab pulled up, then fought my way upstairs where I found him crammed into a booth near the back, all long limbs, tousled greaser-black hair, and deep-set glazed, glinting eyes, as far from the stage as possible. He was studying tonight’s flyer and working on his second beer. “Tonight: Prolapse,” he said, shoving it toward me. “Ever heard of ’em? I think they used to be Prolapsed Something, and if so, they really suck. But I’m just not sure.”

I looked at the logo, shook my head. “That’s the same font Fudgetongue used to use, but other than that, couldn’t tell you.”

“Fudgetongue? Jesus. They’re the guys with the moog that sounds like a kazoo, right?”

“I think that’s Fudge Tunnel.”

“Well, one way or the other, we probably should get this over with quick.” He raised his hands, semaphore-ing the waiter. “Yo, Lloyd! Two more beers!”

“Not for me, thanks, I’m wheat-sensitive.”

“Make that one beer, and whatever your best girly drink is!”

Wasn’t often anybody called me girly, parts aside, so I decided to take that as a compliment. “Mind if I record this?” I asked, sliding in beside him. “Alexander does a podcast sometimes, but don’t worry, if I can’t clean the sound-file up enough for hosting standards I’ll go transcript instead—I always back my interviews up with notes.”

Wrob leered. “Oh, not a problem! Makes me feel infamous.”

I threw in for the next round, then the next, and let him talk. Wasn’t hard. He was his own favourite subject, after all.

Leonard Warsame, Wrob’s then-partner and assistant, once told me that Wrob “had this thing he used to do, whenever he was interviewed—he’d take it as a license to tell these outrageous . . . not sure if I’d call them lies, since I think they usually contained at least some element of the truth, but fibs, let’s say, about his childhood and adolescence, growing up queer and arty in rural Ontario. Called them ‘True Tales of Dourvale.’ I figure he must’ve gotten the idea from Guy Maddin. Back when I first met him, I thought they were true, because I didn’t know that much about Canada to begin with—I moved here from Somalia when I was fifteen, never really left Toronto until I was twenty. But I did some asking around and found out that not only did he not grow up in Dourvale . . . he actually grew up in this other town ten miles away called Overdeere, I think. Dourvale doesn’t even exist.”

“Excuse me?” I asked, taken aback.

“Well, it exists, I guess—physically—but nobody actually lives there. It’s a ghost town. Which is just classic Wrob.”

Afterwards, I went through the Dragon Dictation app recording of the interview, cross-checking it with my notes for anything that seemed like it needed to be corrected. The conversation ended up looking a lot like this:

WROB: So, read your review. You really liked Untitled 13, huh?