The suggestion shocked him. “Why would I do that?” he said. “The truth is right there.”
“Isn’t it always?”
The argument crescendoed, then cut off. The front door shut decisively, and the removal of children’s voices to outdoors left a vacuum inside the house. Car doors opened, closed. Alfred pictured Jack watching their departure through the small rectangular windows in his front door.
After a while, Jack reemerged with three more Old Styles. The grin flashed, and he eased himself onto the chair and took a long drink. The sun had dropped, leaving the sky a worn-out pink. A moon was already up, soft and translucent as a sea turtle egg.
“Sunsets are weird here,” Jack said half-heartedly. “Compared to the lakes.”
“Nothing is really like the lakes,” Alfred rejoined with energy.
“What are they like? The lakes of Upstate New York?” Kristen asked, and turned her hungry bird’s-beak eyes upon Jack.
He took another long sip, as if mustering the will to respond. “Well, the sky is bright,” he said at last, “but there’s this ring of dark trees around each lake. So even at night, you’re looking up from inside that darker ring at a lighter sky.”
“And the geese,” Alfred said.
“Oh, the geese!” Jack said. “Christ, those geese.”
“I made a film about geese,” Alfred said.
Jack turned to him, alert to bluffing. “You did not.”
“It’s called The Migratory Patterns of North American Geese.”
Jack began to laugh. “Come on.”
“I spent five years on it,” Alfred said. “But it didn’t really work. I see that now.”
The disclosure had a revivifying effect upon Jack. He leaned forward in his folding chair. “Okay: Act One, Scene One,” he said. “Walk me through.”
“？‘Strange as it may seem to humans,’？” Alfred recited from memory, “？‘for whom performance has become an essential part of everyday life, animals are focused entirely on survival.’？”
“You haven’t got the tone right,” Kristen said. “Too much expression.”
“She’s right,” Alfred said. Assuming a robotic monotone, he went on, “？‘To a human, a goose’s wish to return to its Canadian home may seem sentimental, but “wish” and “home” don’t mean to a goose what they mean to a human.’？”
Jack convulsed with laughter. “Was it all like that?”
“Three hours and seven minutes,” Kristen said.
Alfred went on narrating without inflection until Jack wiped his eyes and begged him to pause. “Gotta take a—you know,” he said, and went inside.
Alfred had been trying, impulsively, to cheer Jack up. But when Jack returned with a whole cooler full of Old Styles and Alfred resumed his parody, it felt different. He proceeded with a sense of perilous intention, as if he were dismantling The Migratory Patterns of North American Geese and setting it afire for Jack to warm himself.
It was then, in the act of parodying his life’s work, Alfred told me later, that he decided to contact me. Maybe he’d known he would; he’d kept my card in his wallet for the year since we’d met. Now that he was junking and repurposing failed endeavors, why not offer up his screaming project for “some phony academic bullshit,” after all? For that, he needed me.
But I needed him, too. Why study authenticity if not to seek it—try to wring some last truth from that word before it’s so leached of meaning that it becomes a word casing: a shell without a bullet; a term that can be used only inside quotation marks? I needed Alfred to help me avoid writing some phony academic bullshit. This collaborative chapter, hybrid and unorthodox as it may seem in an academic context, represents that attempt.