American Dream Machine by Matthew Specktor Page B

paranoid.Maybe she was crazier than he was. Maybe she was jealous. Once a month he came and visited, crawling around on the floor of her brownstone apartment like a wildebeest, exotic and particular and large. The children adored him. Severin attacked with his tummy, just charged and screamed and started smacking Beau’s head with his own belly the moment his father knelt down to greet him. Was this why Rachel was pissed? Because Beau’s son resembled him after all? He’d walk around the Village with one twin over each arm, both of them black-haired, green-eyed, and lovely. These were the moments the world belonged to him, and he to it. Even as a child, Sev had the purest whiff of teenage disarray, his untucked Mickey Mouse T-shirt torn and slovenly; Kate fanned out into alien beauty, her hair cut straight along her jaw like her mother’s. They’d just turned four. With their father they sat in a booth and drank milkshakes, all three inclining their heads in a way that told everyone they were a family.
    It’s healthy for them .
    Healthy? I don’t want them eating sugar .
    The last time he was out, he and Rachel really went at it. You’re a fitness freak now?
    That’s not what I meant —
    I know what you meant . Standing there in the vestibule, because more and more she didn’t want him in the house. Are you taking your drugs?
    My—he’d begun laughing inappropriately. I haven’t had anything happen in a year and a half. They’re just anxiety. My . . .
    What should he call them? Episodes? Fits? But the sight of a man in his late twenties, some bearded Christ-y type who looked like a tranquilized Manson looming into view behind her only made him laugh harder. That’s your boyfriend, Rach? Jesus, no wonder all this macrobiotic blather and stuff about her “karma,” questioning whether she even wanted to sell books.
    “Where do you go, Rosers?”
    “Huh?”
    Beau stared, as Bryce interrupted him. The look of a man whose real life, as vivid as it was, stayed trapped in the confines of his head. “I’m right here.” He scratched his cheek. “Just thinking things over.”
    “Right. Think on this. We get a green light, this movie will change our lives.”
    “This movie is 183 pages long. It’s written on a bunch of paper place mats, and it doesn’t have an ending.”
    “This movie is forward-thinking. Progressive.”
    “Or a beginning. Now that you mention it—”
    “It will win us Academy Awards.”
    “—this movie is a fucking boil, an open sore on the ass of humanity.”
    Bryce looked at him. That cliff-like stare that was never quite handsome enough, those yellowy eyes. His face was too upper-crust, too haughty, too volatile, too something. The gun sat over on the counter.
    “Like that ever stopped anyone before, Rosers. Come on.”
    He laughed. They both did. Their lives were like this gun in a way, adjusted to harmlessness no matter how voluble.
    “We gotta do something. I’m running out of fuckin’ money.”
    “Me too,” Bryce said. “I get it. Melody sweats me the same way.”
    Melody, his ex-wife. They’d met years ago, when Bryce did an episode of F Troop . Their son was the same age as the twins, himself a rare visitor.
    “So what do we do?”
    “We do what we’ve always planned to do.” Bryce stood up and stretched, his concave runner’s torso arching forward. “We make this fucking film.”
    “You gonna take a meeting like that?” Beau nodded at his naked friend’s crotch. “Enough of the noble savage bullshit.”
    “It isn’t bullshit. It isn’t the savagery in people that’s noble, either, it’s the nobility that’s savage. That’s an important distinction.”
    Beau watched his friend’s eyes widen as the actor began to get high off the hash oil that was in his eggs. “All right, fine. We still need to hire a writer.”
    “We don’t need a writer. We can be the writer. We can be the movie if we just let it happen.”
    Poor Bryce, with his faith in these