Two Spectators - Short Fiction Story by Ranju

 

Two Spectators

(Short Fiction)

 

 

Written by

Ranju

 

When the cloudy sky thundered and poured heavily, electricity went out at home. Theodore and Jasmine were watching a film on their laptop, a routine they habituated lately to quell the moments of despair of staying at home during the lockdown in the pandemic-hit city. They sprang out from their cosy cinematic slumber and swam around moving their arms like two octopuses in love, trying to escape from drowning in a pool of emptiness.

Theodore struggled to peep through the stifling silence which formed a sea of darkness around, making Jasmine, sitting at an arm’s length, fade out as in a film noir classic. Jasmine felt the same when she gazed back at Theodore as if both were trying to rediscover themselves unintentionally in a dark room on a Sunday evening.

 They sat inert staring at each other and forced upon themselves an animated conversation, which slowly percolated into their tattered lifeworld.

“Theo, is there an end to cinema?”  queried Jasmine.

“End…?!”  Theodore seemed perplexed.

“Yes, the end. Tell me, is it going to be real or reel?  she insisted.

“Jas, why do you fear the end?”

He echoed an apparent wisdom, which she refused to recognise and taunted him in return: “Don’t you?”

Theo’s eyes bulged out, tensed and perturbed. Jas missed it downright.   

  “Theo, is there an end to spectatorship?”

A definitive despair fumbled out of her slender lips. Theo could not hide the angst in his voice: “End?!  Everything awaits an end!”

Stranded inside at home with unending film screenings, they glued onto a couch and imagined unknown ends to cinema, spectatorship, life… 

“Jas, why don’t you light a candle?” Theo mumbled.

“Why don’t you?” Jas retorted.

Theo was an old man in his late 50s and Jas, a young woman in her late 20s. And they lived together in a lovely apartment decked with indoor and outdoor plants. While Theo painted and read books the whole day, Jas went out looking for the possibility of immigrating to South Korea, a place none would have, perhaps, ever thought about moving on to in their lifetime!

On her way back, she visited the nursery and picked plants for their home. Deeply obsessed with Korean culture, she dreamt of settling down in its colourful geography. It was the only wish that she wanted to fulfil in her life along with Theo, her teenage crush and life partner.

She was in the process of penning down a long fiction, a tragic love story of a couple which resembled strangely to her own love life with Theo, but with a bloody touch of a Korean slasher thriller. She literally lived the sub-genre of a revenge themed horror thriller and quite often, experienced a psychic bout with an aggravated borderline personality disorder. Quite often, she resembled a postmodern Chinese dragon, ebullient and desperately argumentative. Believe it or not, a torrent of fire emanated from her mouth!       

She loved Theo for his meaningful paintings. There was an astounding vividness in those variegated brush strokes and visual structures which evoked a deep sense of pleasure in her otherwise morose self, forcing a passionate romantic outburst and an unexpected domestic civil union with Theo.    

Theo had many followers, both young and old, men and women, cis and queer. Besides, he looked younger for his age and never wore a decrepit attitude commonly seen among older men. He excelled in various martial art forms and stayed fit like a Zen monk. She bloomed like a chrysanthemum in spring and it brought in him a new enthusiasm, a meaning to his splendid, but monotonous life.

In between lived moments of desperation in staying together sans a conjugal bonding, bound by an eternal angst for love and care, they watched films and argued like two sceptical spectators at a film festival. Stuck inside home, it became unbearable for them to look at each other and an unknown hatred infested their hearts like a virus.

They watched one or two films every day from their digital collection, stored in an external hard drive. Sometimes, it went up to four or five and continued till midnight.

Like a patriarch, Theo preferred to select the film for the day. He would have it in his mind even before she asked, “what shall we watch today?”

“Let’s watch Tarkovsky…,” he may suggest. He loved Tarkovsky, though hid a passion for an obsolete Soviet realism.

“There comes Tarkovsky…,” she used to make fun of him while scampering in search of snacks to the kitchen.

“Hi old man, feed me well. I’m hungry!” she complained.

There is an easy solution to hunger if one lived in the heart of a metropolitan city and Apps provided food at the tender touch on a smart phone.

She loved Chinese food. And they usually ordered Sapo rice or Chop Suey and his favourite steamed chicken dumplings from a Chinese restaurant of her choice.

She knew how to assert her rights, but cherished a hidden pleasure in making men dance to her tune. She took pride and never hesitated to assert it.

“A woman should be smart and cunning if wants to survive in this patriarchal world,” she clarified her position when questioned.

Theo loved and lusted her like an old man. He was old enough to be old, and young enough to be young! She teased him a lot, lacing it with mad love. He enjoyed her naughty tantrums, rather, that is what she felt. 

“Hi old man, please stop revisiting your nostalgia… Let’s watch feminist films to experience another possible world!” she prodded.

Theo accepted her challenge. He flew like an unfathomed river that never shied away when confronted with difficult situations and transformed along with every ebb and flow.

She introduced Catherine Breillat and her film ‘Fat Girl’ to him. It was indeed a sight to watch whenever she felt passionate about explaining the films of her interest. Her big eyes turned wider, hands moved like a dancer and torso, that of an actor on stage. In between, she uttered repeatedly, “You know…,” with a bold and intellectual assertion and leaned forward, leaving half open her top, under which brown tinted nipples aroused and moulded into a spear out of sheer excitement. He loved to see her bloom intellectually and found in her a living embodiment of a true radical feminist.  

They watched Breillat’s French film ‘Fat Girl’ and she broke into tears. A teenage girl tethered inside her shrieked. A hidden anger flushed out a bad memory: “I hate my father… He was a child abuser!”

She burst into a sudden angst and turned it on him.

He sat in his wooden chair, engrossed in sketching a teenage girl squatting half-naked hiding in a bush, her dreamy eyes looking up, covered in the shadow of a tall tree. She looked up at his face bewildered like a fat girl.

Next day, they watched another hardcore Breillatean feminist film ‘Romance’ and she whimpered. A young school teacher sought physical love without a trace of romance in every man because of her partner’s apathy and lack of physical intimacy. She explored and encountered violent sex.

Jas quivered in an unknown psychic ecstasy. She climbed on to his body, overpowered and unclothed him. He lied naked and frantic, suffocated by a flesh of perverse ruminations.

“One… two… three…,” she counted.

“Get up, you imbecile and give me pleasure!”

She plunged into his nudity and erupted like a volcano. Leaning onto him, she scratched his thighs and chest with her long nails. Dark red blood formed new stretch marks on his body. Horrified, he went into a trauma, which lasted for weeks.               

There was a new found psychic pleasure in her aggression. A memory of her abusive childhood crept in, and it transformed her into a fiendish goddess of misandry, a revengeful witch, howling and squandering in every violent psychic outburst.

After it became a daily affair of unending trauma, he tried, in vain, to escape into his oblivious past and curled himself lying on the couch whole day like a loyal dog. He resembled a weeping monster in a fairy tale, left alone in this unkind and wild world.

That day, they watched the film ‘Hiroshima Mon Amor’. She mixed turmeric in organic honey and applied it on his wounds. She apologised and kissed on his wrinkled cheeks. His grey beard tickled her tender lips and pierced the nostril. She sneezed. An eternal angst entered her brain.

The film offered an abounding surreal feel. Two human bodies, embraced in love, moved slowly and rhythmically, buds of sweat sprouted in gasping. A man and a woman. They were making out. The moment a spectator could comprehend it, documented pictures of nuclear violence in Hiroshima formed an affective montage on the screen.      

Theo’s excitement knew no bounds and he wanted to deliver an imaginary speech. Jas noticed it as she turned studious and unpretentious.

“Theo, you should not have quit teaching… We hardly find intellectuals like you in universities these days,” she reminded.

Theo had taken voluntary retirement from professorship and focused on his true passion-- painting! He loved to visit the galleries in the city and shared his knowledge on art and art history with the spectators.  It was one such evening that they met for the first time over a glass of high tea. And it changed their life forever.     

Once, she picked the Akira Kurosawa film ‘Dreams’, thinking he might like it because of the sub-plot on Van Gogh. But Theo suggested an alternative: “I like Kurosawa, but let’s watch Ozu for a change!”

The Japanese filmmaker Yazujiro Ozu was known only to those who wandered in and around film festivals. They watched his last film ‘An Autumn Afternoon’ and Theo told her that Ozu passed away after making the film on the day he turned 60.

He posed for a second, repeated the dialogue of the protagonist patriarch in the film, “Alone, eh,” and whispered, as an afterthought: “I will turn 60 next year…”

One cloudy day after finishing their evening tea, Theo suggested Kim-Ki-duk for he thought the Korean plot in his films might excite her. She loved it and dwelled into its horrid beauty, imbibing every inch of it into her conscience.

The day news media broke the sad news of the tragic death of Kim due to Covid-19 complications, they had a weird fascination for Hollywood. The Hollywood thriller ‘Gone Girl’, was playing on the laptop. It brought in an extended streak of impending violence from the screen into their bedroom. The streaming woman on screen entered her body, screaming wildly.  She scaled his fragile flesh, sat with her thighs firmly pushing on his neck, suffocated him and howled like a wild dog.

“I’m a woman. Nothing will happen to me. I will teach you a lesson!” she shouted.

He saw a death dance in front of him.

“What do you want…? Why do you make me suffer?” he pleaded.

“You are a man, that’s your fault,” she hissed.

The only occasion they differed on a filmmaker was when Theo decided to revisit the Woody Allen classic ‘Annie Hall’. For him, it made a huge impact on his middle-aged life, when he turned forty a decade ago. Every witty Woody utterance seemed like a statement on his life. He was forty, heart-broken, frustrated, suicidal and yearning for love and peace! And he found solace in the films of Woody Allen.

But Jas hated Woody, for she focussed on things that occurred beyond the screen.

“I will never let you watch Woody… I will never…,” she yelled at him and threw the hard disk away in a fit of anger.  

Theo felt depressed and carried it around, visibly making him a moving human mountain full of sorrow. A broken and dejected monster died every minute in his estranged mind.      

Some neighbours noticed it and made fun of them in their chitchat. Some sympathised with him: “He’s such a nice person. What was the need to fall in love with that nasty woman?”

Some others took her side in defence: “Poor girl, she is trapped in this relationship for sure. Does he wield magical powers to attract young women?”

The day when he dreamt of death and lost his sleep at night, they watched Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’. Theo informed Jas about Alexander Dotty’s queer reading of the film. She did not show any interest as her radical universe foreclosed any possibility of recognising the queer as human.  

“Old faggot, I bet, you better stop daydreaming about homosexuality…,” she threatened him with a knife, swiftly picked up from the kitchen.

She went to the bedroom, shouted abuses and cried the whole night. And it continued for days, weeks and, perhaps, months.

When a strange nauseating stench spread across the street from their home, neighbours became curious. Some brave men mustered the courage and went to their apartment. They rang the bell, knocked on the door, but none responded.  They got suspicious and called the police.

When the police broke opened the door, a curious flock of young and old men barged into their home. Old and unfinished paintings scattered around unkept. Some could smell paint. But a strong stink of a decayed human body led them to the bedroom. Jas was lying down dead. A smelly froth, oozed out from her half-opened mouth, formed desert patterns on her dried lips and darkened cheeks.  

“The dead body may be of a few days or weeks old…,” a policeman murmured, covering his nose with a kerchief.

He switched on the laptop and suddenly, it started playing the climax of the film ‘Psycho’. They did not put any password on the old laptop.

The mother hidden inside the psycho son voiced on the screen: “They will watch, they will say, she wouldn’t even harm a fly…”

While removing the dead body, the police officer queried: “Was she living alone?”

“No, she was living with an old man. He ran away and committed suicide months ago,” one of the neighbours replied.

The sight of Theo’s body floating in the river along with those abandoned dead bodies after the Covid-19 calamity, lingered in his frightening eyes. None dared to look into it.     

People stayed behind closed doors out of fear; quarrelled and abused each other. Streets remained empty for days. As days gone by, people began to loiter around as if nothing happened. Some died, some survived, but none knew what exactly went wrong and even if they discerned, refused to accept it.

Somewhere at the end of the street, someone watched films and felt amazed.      

“Is there an end to all this misery?... An end to cinema?” someone queried.

“End?!” someone posed for a moment to contemplate.

And someone else fumed: “End?... Is there an end?!”

Ranju is a self-taught artist and bilingual writer hailing from Kerala, India. He has published short fiction in English and Malayalam. ‘Taj Mahal’, ‘A Muddy Night’s Dream’ and ‘Stories of Death and Desire’ are some of his works of fiction in English. His collection of critical essays has been published as a book titled ‘The Politics of Media’. He was awarded the Charles Wallace Fellowship for research in 2018.