Beaten Down by the Squares

To those who are searching for news items about the feature film Night of the Lobster, I apologize for the lack of activity on this page, but the sad fact is that there has been very little to report. Some weeks ago Flaming Guerilla Productions became infected with a strange kind of systemic entropy; all at once progress on various parts of the project sputtered out, and the underlying causes Darren Truett ascribed to budgetary, legal and technical difficulties, all of a somewhat abstruse nature. Permits were lacking, funding had been misplaced, and vicious gremlins had invaded every unguarded piece of equipment from the cameras to the coffeepot to the new gas chromatograph. At one point the very company itself seemed to be in danger when Darren was threatened with a statutory rape suit by a would-be actress, but this turned out to be more of an embarrassing annoyance than a crisis. One look at the offended party's head shot made it clear that the days of the budding young starlet's minority had long since passed and that any youth, corrupted or not, was merely a pleasant fiction in her own mind.

On speaking with one of the various unpaid production assistants regarding the problem, I learned that this dissipation of forward movement was not really circumstantial but was in fact a chronic illness of Flaming Guerilla; once every few months momentum would suddenly come to a screeching halt, and a fortnight would be spent in an extended argument over a soundtrack or in futile attempts at the repair of a secondhand piece of outdated sound equipment. It was all some sort of strangely exaggerated collective biorhythm, and among those working in the company there seemed to be both a frank recognition of the condition and not; it was as if everyone was intimately familiar with the state of affairs but a symptom inherent to the malady was the belief that this time it would be only a momentary hiccup, a frail bond which would be snapped by the energetic force of will that was due to arrive at any moment.

One particular member of the team was more affected than the rest, and he had moved beyond lethargic frittering to outright mania. I wandered into Art Director and Vice President of Production Cole Stangle's office hoping for a game of chess only to find him staring off into space with a look of black dread.

"Hey Cole," I said.

He glanced at me with terror. "Sixteen!" he gasped.

It was no secret around the office that Cole was obsessed with the number sixteen. It appeared in every script and on every set. Apartment numbers were invariably 16. Sixteen extras were hired for crowd scenes, and if one was a no-show he would don a floppy hat and raincoat and fill in the missing anonym himself. It almost goes without saying that he could often be heard humming "Sixteen Tons" under his breath.

"Sixteen what, Cole?"

For a moment he seemed reassured that I did not know the significance of what he was saying, as though one case of innocence might be enough to save the world from damnation. Then he shook his head, moved to the wall, and removed a framed photograph of a grey steamship. On the wall behind it was painted in red letters:

ZIGGURAT 16

It was clear that the man had inscribed these words himself; the plastic bottle of poster paint was on his desk, open and with the business end of the brush still submerged within it. Cole looked at me expectantly, saw that I did not understand, and began explaining.

"Think of a pyramid: powerful, hard to destroy. The base is wide, the top narrow, the center of gravity deep within. You cannot push it over without a supreme effort. And notice: from the top down each row of blocks is wider than the last: one, three, five, seven. Do you know what that adds up to? Sixteen. And, as if that isn't a sufficiently pure expression of power, think on this: the explosion of geometric progression: two times two times two, times two: sixteen. The square of a square. Do I even have to go on?

"And so what of the pyramid, you ask? Why significant? Well, forget the headstones of the Egyptians. That's vanity. That's the philistinism of the nouveau riche, the Romans aping the Greeks. Where did the pyramid come from? Mesopotamia. The ziggurats of Mesopotamia: understand, now, that these weren't merely the mausoleums of the oligarchy, they were thrumming dynamos. They were at once the temples of religion and the cranking generators of secular power. The gods beamed down through the tip and exploded into the land, in the form of the force of kings. Or did they? Here's the terrible part: did the god come first or the power?" Cole was standing now, and he grabbed my arm. "All around was war and struggle, but the ziggurat was inviolate, mysterious, and only the initiates knew its secrets. No windows. Who knows what happened inside? In the depths? Was it communion, or was it conspiracy?" His voice had raised in pitch and intensity, to the point of a scream, but now he whispered. "Did power come first?"

The tension in the microcosm of the room had reached a snapping point, and my arm was starting to hurt, but in the midst of dread I was struck with a translucid thought. "You've got it all wrong, Cole," I said, picking up the paint and brush. "You're coming at this all backwards." I was thinking about a book that I had read which featured a demon arguing with a fairy. "God is always an odd number. It's the devil that's even." I crossed out the sixteen, and filled in:

ZIGGURAT 16 25

I held up my hand, palm outward and fingers outstretched. "Five levels. One, three, five, seven, nine: twenty-five. Five times itself: twenty-five. The square of a prime. God is odd. God came first." It was sheer stupidity, but it seemed to be what was called for.

Cole collapsed into his chair. "Oh my god," he muttered, staring at the writing on the wall. "Ziggurat 25."

Unfortunately I was being chased by a devil of my own, and it was not so easily dispelled. I had been incautious enough to show my script to a somewhat literal-minded friend, a lanky bookkeeper with blue-veined temples, and his reaction was not so much disapproving as insulted. "Lobsters cannot live for extended periods of time out of salt water," he protested in all seriousness, angered as though I were authoring his superfluity by taking liberties with the reality in which he resided.

At first I found the objection amusing. The living quarters of actual lobsters were completely beside the point. It was as obvious as whack and blight that this was no ordinary lobster we were talking about but a super-lobster, a lobster that embodied and magnified in all actualities the evils that lie dormant in lobster hearts. My friend's reaction was nonsensical under the circumstances. Strangely, though, he persisted. "Lobsters cannot live for extended periods of time out of salt water," he would say argumentatively. "They just can't." On and on this went.

Repetition is an evil thing. If, for example, an acquaintance or coworker were to say in a accusatory fashion, "hemmershlemmer," one would hardly take offense because the word is gibberish. It is not at all clear what a hemmershlemmer is or why being one would be a bad thing. However, if this behavior persisted for days, weeks, a month even, soon one's attitude would change. The victim begins having an inner monologue in which he defends himself from the accusation, coming up with reasons why he couldn't be a hemmershlemmer, why it was a logical impossibility. Soon the threat of ruthless, empty-faced hemmershlemmers would be inspring his doubts and haunting his dreams, like gyspies at the edge of a wood. Following that as night follows day would eventually come the unavoidable raging hate of all the shadowy and ill-defined hemmershlemmers of the world and the deep conviction that the first one that presented itself would receive a roundhouse punch on the nose just on principle.

So it was with me. The insistent foolishness that I was being dunned with began to irritate, and then grate, and then infuriate. It was not enough: the moment my acquaintance saw that his objection was working its way into my nerves, the argument expanded into new and manifold areas. I was informed that lobsters did not have the necessary vocal cords with which to speak English (the notion that they scream when submerged in boiling water is a fallacy; the sound is steam escaping from the shell). I was told that the formation of their claws made it impossible for them to fire a pistol. One day I discovered that the buffoon had acquired a small library of literature about lobster anatomy and lifestyle, amassed for the sole purpose of criticizing my screenplay. I vowed not to visit him any longer, but resistance was futile: on the slimmest of pretexts my persecutor would find cause to call me on the phone, and in a matter of minutes the conversation would segue into the physics of crustacean mobility on land or the question of whether their nervous systems are capable of abstract thought.

The end of it all was the maiming of my answering machine with a flathead screwdriver and the relocation of the phone to underneath the bed. I cut myself off from all outside contact for a time, staying close to home, speaking to no one, and continuing to ignore the utility bills. It was the rare occasion that I would remove my bathrobe, to say nothing of my pajamas.

This stupefying idyll was broken one day by the insistent ringing of the submerged telephone. Nine times in one morning the thing exploded into sound. Initially I marveled at the determination of my persecutor to pass on whatever tidbit of biological information he had unearthed--that lobsters were physically incapable of steering a motorcar, or that their small size would prevent them from singing baritone--but in the end it occurred to me that even my misguided bore of a friend could not possibly be this persistent. He did have a job, after all. The only people I knew who did not really have jobs were the staff at Flaming Guerilla Studios.

With extreme difficulty I squeezed myself under the bed to answer the noxious machine, and there, in the dark, with dust weasels in my hair and a collapsible exercise machine jammed into my ribs, I picked up the receiver. "For God's sake, what is it?"

"It's Darren. Your friend Trent Tonhoe called the office yesterday. He's going to do the movie."