MEMOIRS OF THE UNREALISTIC CHAPTER 2

As I reveal in the biography, Flicky and I met while attending a mo-tainment presentation at the Snerd Sensorium, an event called "WOO-MO-MANIA." It was a rare retrospective of student works by the three giants of the Woo mo-tainment dynasty, presented in the original media peculiar to each generation of the artistic clan.

The patriarch John Woo's art school mo-tainment product was displayed on a classic "silvered" screen. It consisted of images cast by light passing through a transparent, gray-toned, sprocketed membrane, in the classical tradition.

To a mo-tainment connoisseur such as myself, if I may be allowed a modest display of self-esteem, it was the usual pretentious student tripe: camera panning across actors straining to appear motionless, then abruptly fainting for no rhyme or reason. I found it somehow comforting to note that even a mo-tainment god of Woo's stature had begun his career as just another navel-gazing poseur. Even the rest of the audience, inveterate snobs versed in the art of feigning deep appreciation for shallow nonsense, could not watch it without snickering.

The next piece, by Woo's grandson, Yassir Zappa-Woo, was projected in its original cineplasma format. I must admit to a prejudice here. Cineplasmographic mo-tainment never fails to nauseate me. Perhaps it's the sense memory of the seasickness I succumbed to while watching the opening scene of the plasma re-engineered version of Woody Allen's masterpiece from the classical celluloid repertoire, Husbands and Wives, with the pitches and sweeps of its "handheld" technique. Still, I don’t think I’m alone in considering Zappa-Woo's an unremarkable work, and at this showing a gelatinous quiver caused by a rickety old compressor rendered it all but intolerable. Its sole saving grace was its brevity.

The third piece was what I'd really come to see. More than likely, so had most of the crowd. It's justly esteemed a masterpiece of the third-gen pellunculas. Directed by Woo's great-granddaughter, Chastity Minelli-Zappa-Woo, arguably the best artist of the Woo dynasty – you really must see it, if you haven't already – it's a short pocket called, "All the Puppets Know Pinocchio." The plot, such as it is, is worth recounting, as it bears more than a little symbolic relevance to my story. The pelluncula begins by extruding the viewer's consciousness through six dimensions into the seventh-through-ninth-dimensional pocket environment of a deserted carnival on the Mediterranean coast:

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We are an overweight, middle-aged Italian businessman wearing a cream-colored suit and a narrow black tie. This is Pinocchio, all grown up. His tie flaps in the wind. He smokes a cigarette as he treads gravely through the abandoned seaside fairgrounds. The smoking of this cigarette is giving him no satisfaction. We feel his sadness, his loneliness, his vague, numb despair.

The world, in return, understands itself as the barren thing Pinocchio perceives it to be: an environment empty of joy. The sea throws itself upon the shore in sacrificial angst. Now we are the sea, wave after wave of salt sea, collapsing in abject apology, falling on our faces in the wet sand, again and again, stumbling over one another in impotent, penitential abandon.

Pinocchio's wandering takes him to the old puppet theater where he used to work. The jolly paint on the plywood façade is aged and peeling. The door hangs on one hinge, revealing a velvet black that sways heavily in the wind. He throws his cigarette away. Far off, gulls cry. Pinocchio pushes the black aside and enters.

We are the darkness within.

We are the theater's darkness hovering near as Pinocchio enters the melancholy space. He wanders to the stage, sits on the lip, and lights another cigarette. He blows smoke up into the lighting grid. The folding chairs on the plywood risers are all empty. Pinocchio climbs the riser stairs and wanders among the vacant seats. Finally, he sits, facing the darkened void of the stage.

Then a Fresnel above the stage comes on with a warm hum, revealing a set: a seedy tavern. Pinocchio stares at it awhile. All at once he is possessed by the sardonic impulse to inhabit that dramatic space. He rises from his seat, and his heels knock dull echoes on the plywood steps down from the risers and up to the stage. He walks to the lone table on the set, entering the cone of warm light. His cigarette smoke curls upward, high up into the flies, joining a swarm of motes swirling just in front of the hot, yellow lamp lens.

We are a silent darkness, observing.

A marionette barmaid comes to his table. It's Signora Rosaura, looking as sad as cracked paint on a weathered carousel horse. She recognizes him. "You're … Pinocchio, right? That puppet who got his wish to be a real boy? How did that work out?"

Pinocchio takes a world-weary drag of his smoke. "Not too badly."

Rosaura takes Pinocchio's drink order and marionettes away into the darkness, her wooden limbs clacking softly together, like bamboo chimes in a breeze.

Other marionettes emerge, taking seats along the bar. They are old puppet drunks, small timers and whores.

"So, you're a big man now, aren't you, brother?" sneers one barfly, whom Pinocchio recognizes as his old friend Arlecchino. The puppets have all heard about Pinocchio's success, how he's climbed the corporate ladder at the Fiat division of MSN-Pfizer-Benz. "A big shot he is now." "Big apartment in Rome." "Chalet in the Alps." "Villa in Tuscany." "Pretty ladies. Real ones, anatomically correct." "What's he come back here for, to rub our noses in it?"

Rosaura clatters back with Pinocchio's drink. "Look, at least he didn't waste the freedom he got from the Blue Fairy. He made the most of it. Could any of you have done better? Cut the guy some slack."

"What does he need slack for?" one drunk puppet – Pulccinella – slurs. "He doesn't have any strings." The other puppets snicker at that. They stink of envy and self-pity and alcohol, and their clothes are distressed by puckers and cigarette burns, with permanent wrinkles at the joints of those limbs whose flexibility is so limited. There is an odor of mold, and an overall patina of hopelessness.

Pinocchio takes a sip of his drink, whisky on ice. The puppets all watch him, as do we – we who are the hovering darkness. He drinks. The ice knocks in the glass. He takes a drag of his cigarette.

"Where's old Fire Eater?" Pinocchio asks.

A few wooden heads wag back and forth over their drinks. These are marionette gestures of pity. Arlecchino speaks:

"He got burnt out. Trying to keep up with the trends. We did some expressionist performances here for a while. He was a good expressionist director. We adapted Caligari. Pulccinella played Cesare the somnambulist. Had those harsh angles whittled into his face especially for the part."

"Hmm, I thought you looked thinner," Pinocchio says.

"For all that it matters now," Pulccinella replies with a rueful downing of grappa.

Arlecchino continues: "But no sooner was expressionism in style than it was out again. Now everyone wanted Futurism. Next, absurdism. Then surrealism. Fire Eater went crazy chasing each zeitgeist. We even went through a period where we had no strings – like you, brother. Fire Eater was dabbling in the Japanese puppetry form known as bunraku. He thought, if he could just predict what the next big theatrical movement was going to be, he could stay a step ahead of the market, get on board a trend at the beginning instead of having to play catch-up.

"But we had to reattach our strings when Futurism made a nostalgic return.

"It was when the rage came in for Javanese shadow puppets that he really broke down. Where was he going to find a gamelon orchestra? And none of us had profiles striking enough to cast shadows of the proper intensity. In the end, he raised a lot of money, spent a lot of money, and lost it all. The glowing coals cooled to ash in his eyes. He quit show business and went into data storage. And we turned the theater into our private tavern."

Pinocchio has absorbed the tale. By the end of it, he's shaking. He can't even light another cigarette. He tries to drink and drops his glass. We (the darkness) reach out in vain to catch it; we hear it shatter; we absorb the sound.

Pinocchio breaks down weeping.

Turns out he misses his strings and the proscenium of the theater. He misses the parameters they set. His limits were defined, and he took pleasure in going just beyond them into mischief. He longs for the cycle of ups and downs, crises and reprieves, devilishness and repentance, that once gave his life order. Because now his boundaries are vague. His life is an expanse of potential of which he can only fall short. He even misses the growing nose, erstwhile barometer of truth and lies. These days he's never sure whether he's telling the truth or not. Truth is the most elusive thing of all. Even now, as he bares his soul to the puppets, he has no idea if he isn't perhaps merely acting out a dramatic lie to give a cleaner shape to an awkward situation. The authenticity of his own emotions is in doubt, even to himself.

"You're wrong, Rosaura, I have wasted the Blue Fairy's gift," he weeps. "But there is no way not to waste it. One must be something, and in being something, one inevitably fails to be all other things."

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As the drama ended and the pellunculan pocket collapsed, our consciousnesses retreated, with that familiar squirting sensation, back into our heads. We came to ourselves in four-dimensional spacetime. We were still in the Snerd Sensorium, of course, per the technological requirements of the older mo-tainment formats that had begun the evening. But, you know what? Formats, shmormats, I enjoy the experience of mo-tainment in a theater, with a crowd. It's a communal experience. It's like worship in a temple. Yes, of course, there's no real need for theaters, since the advent of spacetime pockets and consciousness extrusion. One can sit on a park bench and absent oneself into a pocket environment for hours on end, exploring worlds and sensations with enhanced, nearly godlike perception.

But there's still something quaint about a theater. Something friendly. Something human. And, after all, if I hadn't gone to "All the Puppets Know Pinocchio" in the Snerd Sensorium, I never would have met Flicky.

When my mind returned from the micro-dimensional representation of the sad Italian carnival and filled up my skull again, I could still hear the sound of weeping. Was this one of those trick endings, where you only think you're back in your native spacetime? I hoped not. It would have added a cheese factor that would have ruined the piece for me. I looked over to the seat next to mine, from where I'd determined the sound was coming. And there I saw the famous flounder himself.

He had his face in his fins. And he was sobbing, as though he knew exactly the pain and failure of which Pinocchio had spoken.