The Film Notebook

At two o'clock in the morning the warehouse on Delancey Road was lit like an aquarium, and Daniel Kessler drove the forklift down aisle nineteen with a pallet of canned tomatoes lifted six feet above his head.

He had done it so many times that his hands knew the route without him. Left at the pillar painted yellow, right at the long steel shelf where someone had scratched a smiley face into the paint, and then the slow beeping reverse to the dock, with the mast creaking and the forks tilting by degrees until the pallet touched down on the concrete with a soft ordinary thump. He climbed off, checked the label against his clipboard, and wiped the dust from his palms onto his vest. It was thirty-one degrees outside. In here it was fifty-five, and the cold came up through his boots and settled in the arches of his feet, where it would stay until morning.

He was thirty-six years old, with a broad pleasant face, brown hair going thin at the crown, and the kind of soft, stooped, patient build of a man who spends most of his life sitting. He had a good laugh, though few people had heard it lately, and he had a habit of tucking his chin whenever someone spoke to him, as if bracing to catch a ball.

"Kessler. Hey, Kessler."

It was Big Moe from loading, coming down the aisle with a coffee in each hand and a toothpick in his mouth. He held one of the cups out.

"Thanks," said Daniel.

"What are you doing this weekend? Some of us are going to the lake. Fishing, beer, nothing fancy. Hank's got a cabin."

"I think I'll stay in."

"You always stay in." Moe looked at him with an expression that was not unkind. "What do you do, anyway, on all these weekends?"

"Watch movies."

"What kind?"

"Oh." Daniel looked at the coffee, which was too hot, and blew on it. "You know. Old stuff. Different stuff."

"Sure," said Moe, and he shrugged, and clapped him once on the back, and went on down the aisle with the toothpick bobbing. Daniel stood where he was a moment longer, holding the cup in both hands. He was not hurt. He had long ago learned how a question of that kind was shaped, and how to leave the door a little open without letting anybody in.

…

He stopped at the diner on the corner of Delancey and Fifth, as he did every morning at the end of his shift, because it was the only place in the neighborhood open at that hour and because the woman behind the counter knew what he wanted.

"Two over easy, rye toast, no butter," said Gladys, before he had reached the stool. She was sixty, with a gray bun skewered by a pencil and forearms like a baker's, and she poured his coffee without looking at the cup. "You look like death warmed over, honey."

"It was a long one."

"They're all long ones. Eat."

She set down the plate. She leaned on the counter on her elbows, as she did when the diner was empty, and told him about her sister's knee and about a customer who had left a three-dollar tip in nickels, and Daniel nodded at the right places with his mouth full of toast. He liked the sound of her voice. He liked that she did not ask him anything that required more than a nod. When he got up to go she pushed the bill across the counter and then, before he could pay, took it back and wrote something on the paper napkin and slid that across instead.

On the house. Call your mother.

He stood there with the napkin in his hand and his chin tucked, and was so grateful that he could not speak, and so he nodded, and went out into the cold.

He got home at ten minutes past six, with the sky going the color of dishwater behind the water tower.

The apartment was a single room on the third floor of a brick building above a shuttered dry cleaner's, with a bed in one corner and a kitchenette in the other and a long sagging shelf along the whole of the opposite wall. On the shelf stood his discs. There were hundreds of them, in plastic cases, in alphabetical order, with the cracked spines turned outward and each title written on a strip of masking tape in his own small square capitals. He had never owned a television that he did not feel to be inadequate, and the one he had now was a secondhand thing the size of a bread box, and he loved it.

He took off his boots. He put the kettle on, and while it came to the boil he took down, from the shelf above the bed, a green clothbound notebook with a rubber band around it.

It was the fourth of its kind. The first three were in a box under the bed, and in the first one, in a boy's rounded hand, was a list that began Halloween (1978) and went on. He opened the new one to the last page and ran his finger down the column of titles, each with a date and a little mark beside it. A circle for good, two for very good, a small flat line for the ones that had let him down. He did not write reviews. He wrote only a number and a title, because he had found that a thing written out in sentences tended to disappear.

The last line on the page was number four hundred and twelve, a film he had watched on his break two weeks before, on a phone no bigger than a cracker, and beneath it the ruled line for the next one stood empty, as it had stood for a fortnight. He had not found anything worth writing there. He held the ballpoint over it for a while and put the pen down again.

He looked at the empty line for a long time.

People thought, if they thought at all, that the films were about blood. That was what Moe would have said, and the people in the break room, and his mother, who still believed that her son had a phase. But it had never been that. It was the quiet in the middle of them, the part where the music stopped and a door stood open at the end of a hallway, and everyone in the theater leaned forward at once. In that second the whole room was one thing. Nobody was alone in it. He had never found anything else that could do it, not a friend or a lover or a church, and he had never been able to say so to anyone without watching their face change.

The phone buzzed on the shelf beside the kettle.

Mom: Did you eat? Call me when you wake up. Don't forget Sunday.

He read it. The kettle clicked off. He stood with the phone in his hand and the steam rising behind him, and he thought of the house in the suburbs and the kitchen with the plastic grapes in a bowl, and the way she would look at him across the table on Sunday, with her hopeful, frightened, worried face, asking about the job and the neighborhood and whether he had made any friends. He had not told her he was gay. He had not told her about the notebooks. He put the phone face down on the shelf, gently, as one lays down something asleep, and made his tea.

He would answer her tomorrow. He always meant to.

…

He slept until three in the afternoon, and when he woke the room was full of a late yellow light.

He ate cereal for dinner at the little table by the window. He washed the bowl and dried it. At seven he sat down at the laptop, which he kept on a stack of old film magazines so that the screen was at the level of his eyes, and opened the forum, and went to the corner of the thread where his name was.

There were forty-one new comments under his introduction. He had not expected any. He had written it at this table, in one burst, and posted it before he could think, and gone to work with his stomach in knots. Now he scrolled through them slowly with his chin tucked, and some of them made him smile, and one, from a person called A_Cole_Case, made him wince, and then smile again in spite of himself, because it was so very earnest.

Are you a lawyer or something? he had written. It was only a joke. He hoped it had not landed badly.

He was not a fool, and he knew it. He knew the long answer from the white mask, the one at the top of his introduction, had been written by someone who understood what a lonely person wanted to hear, because he had read a hundred such answers in the old days, on other sites, written by men who wanted something. He had weighed it for a day and a night. The difference was that this one asked for nothing. It had not asked for a photograph, or a number, or a promise. It had only told him that his notebook was a fine thing to keep.

And so he had decided, with his eyes open, to believe it. A person was allowed to choose that, he thought. A person who had not been spoken to kindly in a long time was allowed to take it where it was offered, and look at the rest later.

He did not scroll for long, because he knew what he was looking for, and it was at the top.

Exterminators had written to him privately. The message was only three words long, and there was nothing in it at all, and it was timestamped four minutes past six, which was the very hour he had been climbing his stairs.

Have you eaten?

Daniel sat back in his chair.

He read it again. He did not know why it had taken the breath out of him. He had been asked the question that morning, by his mother, and he had left it unanswered, and here it was again, from a stranger, an adult, a person he knew only as a small white mask, with no sign of a purpose, and no sign of an angle. It was just a man asking, in the middle of the evening, whether another man had had his dinner.

His eyes stung. He laughed at himself, and wiped them with the heel of his hand.

Cereal, he typed. I know. It isn't dinner.

It is a start, wrote Exterminators. Eat something with a vegetable in it tomorrow. You work hard.

How do you know I work hard?

You work nights. You told us. Nobody who works nights is lazy.

He smiled so wide that his cheeks hurt. He had, he realized, not smiled like that in a week, and perhaps longer, and the feeling in his chest was so unfamiliar that he did not at first know what to call it. It was a kind of warmth. It was a hand laid flat on his back. He typed, slowly, with his chin tucked, and his fingers were not quite steady.

Nobody has asked me that in a really long time.

The answer came after a pause of just a few seconds. It was calm and short and plain, like everything the man wrote, and Daniel read it twice, as one reads a thing that one intends to keep.

Then from now on, I will ask.