The brutality of those two men
who broke into her apartment
and murdered her boyfriend,
then, as she stepped from the shower,
shot her, too,
right in the face
so she crumbled over the bathtub,
a little blood leaking from her mouth
onto the white tiles,
has stayed with me,
though it was something
I saw in a film class years ago,
and was fictional.
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What must it be like
for those two men
who, asked to get rid of a federal witness,
actually did it? I don’t mean the actors,
one of whom I recognized
vaguely
from another movie,
but the men
who lived in the mind of the writer
who created that scene?
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I suppose it is like nothing at all to them,
since they have exited
the writer’s mind and now exist
entirely within the conventions of cinema.
Years ago,
my professor explained it this way:
Cinema
is committed to a pact with the audience
that allows for certain unreal elements
to pass as real:
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The camera following those two men
as they pocket their guns and walk toward the door—
whose perspective was that, exactly?
And the fade-out
as we moved forward in time several weeks—
how did that happen
in just an instant?
Those men were inside
a flickering screen
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that the rest of us can’t inhabit.
But let me tell you this:
back when I was taking
that film course
I had a friend named Adam. He was real,
an obsessive cyclist,
studied chemistry,
kept a neat row of Star Wars action figures
on a shelf in his dorm room—
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then, one day,
he died.
He was watching TV in his room,
and then he was not
anymore—
It was my first experience
of the death of someone
I loved.
I was sitting on the porch studying German verbs
when I heard.
The porch tilted entirely
upward
so I couldn’t hold on,
and all of me kept tumbling
sideways, toward the yard—
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He has been eighteen
and unpredictable
for thirty years now.
I have many
anecdotes about him,
which is to say he now exists
within the conventions
of the anecdote—a funny kid
I knew
when I was a serious kid,
a guy I last saw
shirtless and asleep on a sunny Tuesday
on the quad,
making of his yellow frisbee a pillow,
while sunlight filtered through the trees
sending mottled shadows
across his chest.
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For the dead,
death is the entire truth.
What else
could there be?
But like the dead,
those two men waiting in that woman’s
apartment,
screwing silencers onto their handguns,
also exist in the minds
of those who remember them,
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where the fictional and the dead
become, over time, similar.
He was my best friend.
We sat together in film class
quietly making fun
of the professor
who paced back and forth
in the lecture hall
waving her dry erase marker over her head
talking about Scorsese’s
clever manipulation
of the passage of time
in that scene
where the woman bleeds to death
on the tiles.
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Conventions
that make the unreal
real,
the security distance provides—
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It was as if the porch
lifted up completely
and tilted sideways
and all the furniture and I
tumbled over the rail
into the weeds.