It thumped back down, sending up a cloud of fresh snow, and shuffled off into the trees. She was not worth the trouble.
She watched it go. She thought it might have been Trout, come to remind her she was still alive.
Barclay was sorry. After her bath she had returned to bed, remained there through the night and into the next day. When he came to her, he drew her out of bed and knelt at her feet, pressing his forehead to her belly, the womb she believed she had locked against him. She stood with her arms at her sides and looked down on his bent head and the upturned soles of his shoes like an indifferent god.
“When can I fly again?” she’d said.
He gazed up at her, beseeching. “Do you forgive me?”
She thought of Jamie begging her to take him away from Missoula. Still, she shook her head.
“You can fly when you forgive me,” he said.
Red Herrings
Thirteen
The assistant director shushed everyone—the whole cast sitting at the big U-shaped table with our scripts and our sharp new pencils like kids on the first day of school, the surrounding scrum of bagel-eating, coffee-drinking production people and studio people and investors—and then Bart Olofsson stood up and peered down into his first-edition hardback copy of Marian’s book （not Carol’s, which he clearly disdained） and read the opening aloud in his faint Icelandic accent.
“？‘Where to begin?’？” he intoned. “？‘At the beginning, of course. But where is the beginning? I don’t know where in the past to insert a marker that says: here. Here is where the flight began. Because the beginning is in memory, not on a map.’？”
He looked up and stared into our faces with grave intensity, almost accusingly, like a priest reminding us that we were sinners. I glanced at Redwood in the scrum. He looked solemn, earnest. It had been a week since the night of the ’shrooms, and I hadn’t heard from him except for when I’d sent him a GIF of two sloths floating in outer space with the text Us on shrooms talking about LA.
He’d responded, Ha!
“Here we find ourselves at a beginning, too,” Bart told us. “We are about to make a movie. But this is not a big bang out of nothing. That moment Marian can’t identify, when her flight began its trajectory toward reality? That was our beginning, too. In life, beginnings are not fixed but ambient. They are happening all the time, without us noticing.” He tapped the book. “In here, Marian wrote, ‘I am already lost to my future.’ Strange words, yes?”
The first line of Carol Feiffer’s novel is, I don’t know it, but I am about to be swallowed by either fire or water. It’s supposed to be Marian narrating as a baby on the sinking ship. Then the story runs straight forward in time until she crashes into the ocean. The cold brings the darkness, and I am lost. But I am not afraid. That last sentence felt tacked-on to me, a wishful, spluttering little protest. After Redwood told me his mother always wanted things to be fine, it made sense. She was trying to reassure herself.
The movie, though, starts at the end, in the airplane, when they’re running out of fuel and there’s nowhere to go. Then it jumps back to the shipwreck and runs forward, with the round-the-world flight broken into parts and slotted in every once in a while, so finally we wind up back in the plane again at the end, when they crash.
“I think about it like this,” Bart said. “We are confined to the present, but this moment we’re living now has, for all of history, been the future. And now, forever more, it will be past. Everything we do sets off unforeseeable, irreversible chain reactions. We are acting within the constraints of an impossibly complex system.” He paused and stared around again. “That system is the past,” he said.
I caught Sir Hugo’s eye. He winked.
Bart says everything like it’s the aha moment of a TED talk, I’d said to Hugo once. It hypnotizes people into thinking he’s a genius.
But his grandiosity lends everything a lovely sense of occasion, don’t you think? Hugo said.
“But,” Bart said, “sometimes, beginnings can be simple. In a film, for example, the beginning is a single frame. Today, let us give ourselves the relief of containment, of limits. Let us begin on page one.”
He gestured to the assistant director, who had clearly been waiting for this cue and leaned into his microphone. “Exterior. Day,” he read from the script. “A two-engine silver plane is flying over whitecapped ocean, no land in sight. A faint trail of leaking fuel streams from under its wing. Marian, voiceover.”