“And so this time he’s out for a couple more hours, right? And while he’s been out, bandits have come along and taken his stuff, his like sandals and his coin purse and his leather wristbands and what-have-you, and rolled him into a ditch. But then, when he wakes up, and even though he’s robbed and isn’t able to walk—he can barely even crawl, and everything is hurting, when he breathes it’s like he’s spearing himself, and he’s blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, plus like blisters on sunburn on bruises on fractures—still his first thought is, ‘Lord Jesus has asked for me,’ and he drags himself out of the ditch, up the road, to the foot of the hill, and Jesus goes, ‘Peter? Peter? My beloved disciple?’ ‘Yes, Lord, I’ve returned.’ ‘Praise be unto my almighty Father, faithful Peter has returned,’ Jesus says. ‘Peter,’ says Jesus, ‘come here. Come closer, Peter.’ ‘Yes, Lord,’ Peter says. ‘What is it, Lord?’ he says, and he approaches the cross, really slowly now, just so exhausted and wrecked and like crawling on his belly, dragging himself inch by inch by inch by inch, just waiting to get beaten again, probably to death, but this time, though: lucky Peter, okay? cause there’s a different centurion.
“The centurion from before—his shift just ended. He’s off to the tavern or the brothel or whatever, and his replacement’s much friendlier. He’s a guy called Longinus—same one who’s gonna spear Jesus in the side in just a couple more hours, maybe to more mercifully, speedily finish him off, maybe just to make sure he’s already really dead, no one’s in agreement about that, but he’s a good guy, Longinus, a kind centurion, and not the type to beat an already beaten man, not some kind of sadist—a saint, in fact. Not yet. But he will be. A saint I mean. Saint Longinus. Anyway, Peter, he approaches the cross, and Longinus…lets him.
“And so he’s at the foot of the cross, Peter, and he says to Jesus, ‘Lord, I’m here,’ and Jesus says, ‘Peter, good Peter, faithful Peter, raise yourself a little higher, come a little closer,’ and Peter, even though the effort and the pain of it seems like it’ll kill him, he gets himself up, onto one knee, the unbroken knee, and he’s leaning on the cross, and Jesus, he’s like, ‘Closer, Peter, can you come any closer?’ and Peter says, ‘Yes, Lord,’ and leans harder on the cross, kind of almost sorta climbs it, straightening out the unbroken knee, and he says to Jesus, ‘Lord, I am here,’ and Jesus says, ‘You’re here. Peter, you’re here. Praise be unto my almighty Father, you’re here at last. Now can you see that, Peter? Do you see what I see?’
“ ‘What is it you see, Lord?’ Peter says to Jesus.
“ ‘Down there,’ Jesus says, ‘That’s your mom’s house, right? I think that’s your mom’s house.’ ”
* * *
Trip’s production house had once been his father’s leisure house—the only house in the compound that I’d visited before. Back in 1988, I’d helped select the T-shirt’s slapped fatman image from eight or nine drawings Jonboat had spread across the carambole table in the first floor’s game room. In the second floor’s game room, playing foosball and darts, we’d opined about hyphens, commas, and gaylord, then gone to the kitchen to get some refreshments to bring to the chill-out room down in the basement, where we talked over color schemes, cotton weight, and fonts while lying on hammocks, sipping Jolt under blacklight.
The house had since been radically remodeled. Walls knocked out. Windows walled over.
The vast majority of the first floor was missing, its remains little more than a U-shaped hallway. In the U’s west arm was a long kitchenette and a door that led out to the side of the house (the door through which we’d entered), and the U’s east arm contained a half-bathroom, set between a pair of stairway landings. The projection booth for the screening room below occupied the section bridging the arms (the bottom of the U? the shoulders of the U? I don’t know what to call it), as did the house’s small front foyer.
The screening room, then—the whole basement was the screening room—was two stories high, except along the edges the first floor ceilinged. Its seating—nine double-wide, reclining chairs arrayed in two rows (four behind five)—was under the projection booth. The slightly curving screen on the opposite wall must have spanned twenty feet, been roughly half as high, and was mounted at least three feet off the floor, yet the sightlines from the chairs were wholly unobstructed. There wasn’t a load-bearing pillar in evidence. That didn’t seem possible. I said so to Trip. He said something beyond me, something about “special alloys and joists” which, even given how little I knew about architecture, sounded made-up.
Fon, who’d called to check on our meals’ ETA, informed us we’d have to wait another few minutes. Trip didn’t want the servers to interrupt our viewing, and Fon suggested that, rather than just sitting around in the basement, he show me his workspace to kill the time until the food arrived.
Trip liked the idea if I liked the idea. Did I like the idea?
I said it sounded good.
I followed him back up the stairs to his workspace. I’d assumed that Fon would come along, too, and she followed us, initially, but then she peeled away to “splash some water on [her] face” in the first-floor bathroom. After that, I guess she just returned to the basement.
The second floor contained a second bathroom—a full one—but other than that it was entirely open, and because it had windows and vaulted ceilings, it felt even larger than the screening room had. In the middle of it stretched a banquet table supporting what Trip called his editing suite: two computers in front of a jumbo TV, a multichannel mixing board, analog-to-digital transfer machines, a pair of tiny speakers, a pair of larger speakers, stacks of hard drives, a trio of binders, a zip-tied cable bunch thicker than a firelog. The built-in shelves, which covered two walls, held discs and tapes and reels of film arranged by format and date of acquisition. The binders on the conference table, Trip explained, cataloged the videos, clip by clip. The entries in the blue one were organized by content (e.g. “Laboratory footage,” “News footage,” “Home Video footage,” “Advertisement footage”); the entries in the black one according to date of initial viewing (by Trip), with dates of subsequent viewings also noted; and the entries in the red binder according to the moods the various clips provoked (in Trip). “Eventually, I’m hoping I’ll find some patterns,” he said, “and be able to kinda map my historical responses to the clips onto my intellectual and emotional development so I can better understand what exactly inspires me and how I could use that to inspire others. Once I’m finished with the red binder—probably sometime next year, I only started it in June—I want to make a fourth binder cross-referencing the first three. That’s where I’m thinking I’ll find the patterns. It might be the biggest waste of time ever, but I like the process. Remembering the feelings, you know? Feeling the feelings if I rewatch the clips. Seeing how I’ve grown or matured or— Yes!”