Imaginary Insects

On a freezing cold Presidents' Day I drove across the state to the old whaling city of New London. Several inches of snow had fallen the night before, and that plus Nixon's holiday had left the highways of Connecticut empty, a forbidden land. Everything was absence as I trespassed beneath the still, snow-covered trees in frigid silence, the evergreens standing sentinel for their sleeping young cousins and watching my car scoot below like a shiny crab. Somewhere within their splintery memories they thought back on their own founding fathers, probably, ancient pioneering arboreal species who laid down the law in seedlings and took no days off.

After a lot of fruitless searching through the ordinary channels, I had finally scored Tonhoe's address from a film geek acquaintance in Moodus; the cinephile had spotted the director in a Sports Authority last April and had stolen a peek at the information the man had provided to get his '04 fishing license. Now I was almost there, and his street turned out to be a narrow road sidling off from the city to moon along the banks of the river. I drove past frozen beaches, boatworks, slips, clam shanties and ramshackle restaurants of the sea before finally spotting the house number I was looking for. The problem was that the building was not a residence but a bait shop; I cupped my hands and pressed my face against the glass, but all I could see were rows of featureless shelves and the silhouettes of unsold fishing rods pointing into the air like the spines of a beached monster. I backed away. It was a bum lead. A dud. No Trent Tonhoe or anyone else inside. Of course. It would have been all too easy. What was I thinking?

It was then that I noticed a chain-link gate to the left, and turning the corner I saw beyond it an open wooden stairway leading up the outside of the powder-blue building. An apartment above...from the outside the accommodations looked to be modest, to put it politely, but still....

I rounded up the various scraps of courage within me, opened the gate and quietly climbed the steps. A single door faced the landing. I knocked hard on the wood.

With a pop the catch sprung and the door slowly swung open onto a small, dark kitchen littered with mismatched glassware, abundant evidence of past preparations of coffee, and unwashed cooking machinery of unfamiliar purpose. At the far end of the small space was a shuttered bar, slightly open, and beyond it I could just see the top of a man's head.

"Ah...er," I stammered, "I'm sorry, but the door just opened by itself...I didn't mean to..."

One dark eye came to view over the top of the bar.

"...intrude..."

"No matter," said a rough voice. "Come in out of the cold, kid."

I did as was suggested and cautiously entered the main room of the apartment. There was a grim but homey gloom to the place; the cold light shining in through the large picture window overlooking the bobbing masts and the river beyond seemed to be held at bay by old cigarette smoke and floating dust, and warm darkness had managed to make itself comfortable in every corner. The space was furnished haphazardly with castoff furniture and grey milk crates, and every flat surface was littered with papers and other debris. Texts and sketches were everywhere; in particular there were plies of charcoal drawings on large sheets of paper, the subjects seeming to be either fish, birds, or some mix of the two. I sat down cautiously on a nappy couch piled with European cycling magazines and trout stocking reports. On the table before me sat a small toy frog attached to a squeeze bulb. The fish and birds were in force here too, as well as pages of illegible, scrabbled writing which may have been film scripts or recipes for chowder.

The man at the table was, by my best guess, black Irish crossed with something exotic—Albanian blood, or maybe Turkish. A mop of thick black hair was becoming shot with white, as were the outrageous mutton chops that broadened an already wide face. On a sharp triangular nose sat a pair of tinted spectacles, and the man squinted through them in anxious concentration at a machine which looked something like a science fiction zap gun, except that tied to the tip like a weensy Fay Wray was a tiny pile of black fluff. String, feathers, and deer tails littered the rest of the table.

It was, unquestionably, Trent Tonhoe. I recognized him from the famous photograph from the set of Divine Wind in which he is handing a loaded rifle to Emmanuelle Clewert.

Abruptly the director bent his face down to the machine and bit off the last dangling bit of black thread with his teeth. He then sat up and turned to me. "Does that look like any bug you've ever seen?"

I squinted at the smidge on the table. It was an odd, complicated knot of red and black thread, with squibbled loops representing wings and long burrs suggesting filthy insect appendages. There was a hint of iridescence about the tiny monstrosity, with scarlet tufts and carmine swirls churning through the black furze to make a peppered illusion of depth and anatomical purpose. I shuddered. "I guess I'd have to say no."

Tonhoe did not seem displeased with this answer. "Verisimilitude is a conceit," he announced with a nod. "The funny thing about tying flies is that the right fiction will catch more fish than a good forgery. A perfect arrangement of color and shape can tweak sunken memories of extinct predators and dream-prey. Or maybe that's putting too fine a point on it? Let's just say that it hits them in just the right way, it touches the right electrical trigger point; it's not what the fish sees to be real, it's what the fish knows to be real. Two completely different things." Tonhoe touched the various half-empty mugs that were scattered about him, found one that presumably was fresher or warmer than the others, and took a long drink. Fidgeting, I gingerly touched the squeeze bulb of the frog. It hopped.

"So, what can I do for you?"

My brain had been threatening to knot itself up like Tonhoe's twine insect the moment I had climbed the first step of the stairs, and now an invisible hand pulled the end of the string tight. Whatever it was that I had planned to say had disappeared, and my blindly groping thoughts found only a strange, irregular object whose function was unclear.

"I'm making a film," I said.

Tonhoe leaned back and shook a cigarette out of a mostly empty pack. I could see now that he had an older man's frame, spare but heavy. He was wearing grey running sneakers and a fishing vest. A match sparked.

"I wrote the script, there's a production company, but I need a director. A real director. There's not a lot of money in it, but it's good, I know it's good. I...I don't know what your time, I mean your schedule is like...."

"Time!" A thunderhead of smoke rolled across the room. "Time is a nasty bitch, mostly because you never know if you're supposed to hump her or not, and she makes you feel guilty about it either way. I stay as far away from that stuff as possible. What's the title of this particular epic?"

"Uh, 'Night of the Lobster'."

"Night of the Lobster." repeated Tonhoe. He leaned back in his chair and blew curlicues of smoke at the ceiling. "Night of the Lobster?" He gave me a dubious glance. His gaze then wandered out the window, or else inward. After several minutes of silence, he spoke. "Have you ever seen the Dr. Mabuse movies?"

Well, I had. We talked about film for a couple of hours, with mostly Tonhoe doing the talking, and while only half of his comments made sense to me, everything he said had strange resonance, the deep ring of a bell that has tolled many hours. When the light outside began to fail, my host deftly maneuvered me out of his pied-a-mer. We had not discussed my project, but in between a diatribe against zoom shots and a detailed description of the creation of three-dimensional space in a Griffith short the director told me to mail the script to his post office box. We parted ways at the bottom of the steps. It was only then that the subject of Divine Wind came up.

"Yes, the scene with the centurion...everyone loves that scene. I guess I do too. It was fun to do. Italy is beautiful. They had good pasta in the valley below. Fresh tomatoes, goose liver. Clive was still in the Roman getup, shoveling in salad and wine. The people loved it. He was a celebrity...not as an actor, you understand, but as a man from the past, the glorious past, come to visit, to see if the vino was still good in that part of the world two thousand years later. They practically asked him what it was like to know Caesar. It was lovely."