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  There had to be another sentence in my head somewhere. I looked at the doorway. Improbably, Mom still hadn’t glanced at the television. How was that possible?

  “I’m doing some donor outreach.”

  Her face did not change.

  “You know, outreaching to various donors . . .”

  Ordinarily, she would have eaten this silly lie alive, but she seemed distracted tonight. She nodded, and swept her blond bangs out of her eyes. She pointed to a corner of my room.

  “Those study guides are gathering dust.”

  Truthfully, I had forgotten all about the guides until she pointed them out. I hadn’t read them before I bombed the SATs and I hadn’t read them after I bombed the SATs. According to a pact I’d made, I was supposed to be retaking the tests sometime in the indeterminate future. Mom was right, though. The pile of guides was indeed covered in a thick film of particulate matter.

  “What if I want to show movies for the rest of my life? Where’s the standardized test for that?”

  “You’re barely being paid,” she said, which, unfortunately, was true. I hadn’t cut myself a check in weeks.

  “Mom,” I said. “Do you know who Henri Langlois was?”

  I butchered the French pronunciation, but I’m not sure it mattered. She sighed. I could smell the dinner she’d cooked through the door now. Something with a lot of cumin. Probably her Moroccan stew, which I had grown to love after I realized food could actually have spice and flavor. A tough sell in the Midwest.

  “You wanted to be a lawyer,” she said out of nowhere.

  “What?” I laughed. “No I didn’t.”

  She shook her head.

  “When you were ten, your father showed you Inherit the Wind, that movie about the Scopes trial, and you wanted to be a defense attorney just like Spencer Tracy’s character. You walked around the living room for weeks holding us in contempt of court.”

  “I was just acting out the movie. I did that all the time. Remember my pirate phase? I wore your eyeliner every day for a month.”

  She wasn’t really listening to me now.

  “Your junior high science teacher, Mrs. Geyer, said you were the best student she ever had. She said your lab reports were immaculate. That’s the word she used. Immaculate.”

  “Mom, that woman only liked me because I didn’t use the Bunsen burners for lighting joints like Aaron Jorgenson.”

  “You can deny it all you want,” said Mom, “but ever since you were a kid, we always heard the same thing. Ethan is so bright. Ethan is so curious. Ethan is going places. And that doesn’t mean you need to be a Nobel winner, but I can’t believe it’s intellectually satisfying for you to shovel popcorn and watch the same movies over and over again in that sad place.”

  “We’re showing art,” I said. “These films are major contributions to the human experience!”

  “I see,” she said. “Could you tell me what exactly the giant ass on your television is contributing to the human experience?”

  I felt myself blushing. I picked up the remote and hit stop, and the butt went away.

  “Granted,” I said. “This isn’t Bertolucci’s finest film, but . . .”

  “Look, Ethan,” she said, “you needed time. We both did. I gave you some time. And the truth is I can’t force you to do anything anymore. But I want you to think about why you’re really spending so much time in that place, and ask yourself if it’s really healthy.”

  I felt the pulse of anger before I could control it.

  “At least I’m not lying to myself,” I said.

  My mom had been calm so far, but now I could see her cheeks getting red.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “What?”

  I sat up straighter on the bed.

  “It’s great that you’ve managed to reinvent your life,” I said. “But it’s not the same as it was. You know it’s not. And you can’t cook and knit your way past it all. You think you’ve moved on, but you’ve just come up with a bunch of ways to ignore everything. Well, guess what? So have I. I do the things that make me happy, and I’m sorry they don’t meet your approval. But why don’t you ask yourself why me hanging around the Green Street makes you so uncomfortable. Is it really because I’m underachieving? Or is it because it makes you think about Dad?”

  She just stood there for a moment, taking it all in. When she spoke again, it sounded like she was on the verge of tears.

  “Well, this has been pleasant,” she said. “But I have to go now.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “I have a date,” she said.

  I stared at her. It had been a long time since she’d been on a date, at least that I knew about. I was starting to think she had given up on that part of her life.

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  My voice was soft, but I know she heard me. She looked up at the ceiling and then back down again.

  “Internet guy,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “It’s still hard,” she said. “Of course it is, Ethan. Goddamnit. Do you really think he doesn’t cross my mind every day?”

  I wanted to respond to this, but she started speaking again.

  “But I knew your dad pretty well, and he wouldn’t want us to just stay frozen in time. He never stayed still a moment in his life. If he were here, he’d be the one telling us to get off our asses and do something.”

  “What would he think of Internet guy?” I asked.

  I regretted it the instant I said it, but I said it nonetheless.

  “Really?” she said. “That’s the way it’s going to be?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I . . .”

  She just looked at me for a moment then she shut the door and left me alone in my silent bedroom. I looked at all the flyers around me, some folded, some not. The envelopes were addressed to all the regulars I could find, some of whom I’m not sure were still living. I had no idea if any of them would care enough to join us in our march. It didn’t seem promising.

  I knew Mom had a point about the Green Street. It wasn’t just my enthusiasm for movies that was keeping me there. It was a refuge. There was no secret about that. But safe havens were hard to find in life. You could search for years to find a place where your thoughts didn’t race. A place that just felt right to you. Why was it such a bad thing to cling to your port when you found it?

  I got up from the bed, sending an avalanche of flyers spilling to the floor. I walked over to my closet and pulled out a box from beneath a heap of clothes that no longer fit me, now that I was almost six feet tall. The box was sealed with packing tape, and I used my key to the Green Street to slice through it. The fibers of the packing tape split apart and the flaps popped open. Right on top was one of Dad’s books. The cover had a picture of Robert De Niro from Raging Bull, shadowboxing in the fog. And above his head, was the title I remembered so clearly:

  The Cinema of Revolt.

  16

  Dad had pretty eclectic taste for a film studies professor. He could talk about the Czech New Wave in the same sentence as The Fast and the Furious. And sometimes, I suspected he actually preferred watching terrible action movies on cable to anything else. I never saw Dad happier than stretched out on our old green velour sofa, grinning while Chuck Norris jump kicked somebody off a dusty cliff. But the movies he liked best of all were the ones he’d studied with his mentor in graduate school, the films of the late sixties to the very beginning of the eighties. His first book was about this period, and it was the book I held in my hands now.

  He was writing it when I was born. Literally. Mom said he brought a notebook into the delivery room and scrawled like a madman while she labored for ten hours. He felt the impending doom of his free time, and he knew he needed to finish it if he wanted a teaching job to support his new family. It sold the most copies of anything he ever wrote, and every on
ce in a while the publisher would reprint it with a new cover.

  But I liked this one.

  Just a boxer in the fog, fighting himself while the whole world watches.

  “It’s violent, but it’s also balletic!”

  I could hear Dad’s voice in my head like it was playing from a recording.

  He showed me the movie when I was way too young, of course. He did this with everything. I saw Easy Rider when I was eight and confounded my second-grade friends by talking about bad acid trips on the playground. Last Tango in Paris scarred me when I was a lad of only twelve. I think I was ten when I first watched Raging Bull.

  “His whole character is revealed in the opening titles!” Dad said, pacing around the living room like he was in a lecture hall.

  He was incapable of watching an entire movie sitting down.

  “He’s in the ring, the center of everyone’s attention, but he’s also anonymous. And the ropes cage him like an animal. Like the bull of the title.”

  At that time, Dad had been trying to tame his curls with short haircuts, but on Saturday mornings, when he waited until noon to shower, it frizzed out like he’d been electrocuted. His uniform on those days was an old T-shirt from his pickup basketball team (called the Culture Warriors), and a pair of jeans older than me. He had a bright blue coffee thermos that he used even at home, so the ink-black brew he sipped stayed warm. Dad mimicked De Niro’s moves on the screen, the coffee sloshing in the thermos.

  “Scorsese said he was inspired to make the film because in life, ‘the hardest opponent you face is yourself.’ We’re all just jabbing and sticking ourselves, Ethan! Boom! Boom!”

  He feigned punching himself in the jaw and staggered back onto the couch.

  “Oh no. He decided to be an academic! Why did he do that?”

  He collapsed backward and the old sofa strained under his weight.

  “Now he has a mortgage! The humanity!”

  I watched as he closed his eyes. The university was always cutting things in the humanities, and I knew Dad was worried he’d be on the chopping block someday. He was tight with money, always afraid the end was coming. But, it was okay. I usually knew which buttons to push to get him to splurge. And despite his eccentricities, I was glad I’d been born in this messy house with this particular father. You couldn’t choose your parents, but I’d been given this one. He was so much older than everyone else’s dad, but he also seemed happier. He railed against all the bad music on the radio and the “oligarchs” in power, but I still caught him smiling more often than not.

  “I’m thinking of teaching a class in the fall that’s all credit sequences. Do you think that would be too frustrating?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe not. They’re like little movies, right?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Exactly, Ethan! They are little movies. You should teach the class. You can just wear my tie and glasses. Nobody would know the difference.”

  He was still lying on the couch, staring up at our hideous popcorn ceiling. I walked over and looked down at him. His stubble was dark, and it reached from the bottom of his neck halfway up his cheeks. I ran my palm against the grain.

  “Saturdays,” I said, “are the best.”

  He met my eyes, and made a claw with his hand. He had done this to me when I was a toddler, reaching out with his hands spread wide, saying “THE CLAW!!!!” as I ran from him screaming and laughing at the same time.

  “Agreed,” he said, and his hand stopped just shy of my forehead. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad one.”

  I had already closed my eyes, though, waiting for his thick fingers to clamp down over my head. As a kid, I had actually loved this inevitable part of the game. It felt safe to have his hand there, like he was holding me steady.

  “What’s that bad cinnamon roll place in the mall?” he asked. “I have a craving.”

  I was still waiting for the claw. But a few more seconds passed and it never came. Eventually, I opened my eyes, but all I saw was the couch.

  He was gone.

  ETHAN’S GLOSSARY OF FILM TERMS

  ENTRY #27

  AERIAL SHOT

  Usually filmed from a helicopter—or these days a drone—showing a view from high in the air.

  I like to think of it as the God’s-eye shot. They’re often used to show a tiny character in a huge landscape.

  When I’m going through an important moment in my life, sometimes I picture myself this way. A quick cut, and then me, just a little ant in the landscape.

  There goes Ethan.

  Look how significant he thinks this is.

  17

  Before the one I organized, I had only attended one protest. It was with my mom when legislators were threatening to defund Planned Parenthood, and I just went so I could write a social studies report about it. But it turned out to be much better than I would have guessed. There were signs like a cartoon uterus screaming, “Why are you so obsessed with me?” and a young mom with one that read, “If you take away my birth control, I’ll just make more feminists.” The women were fiery and cheery at the same time, storming down to the capital to give their local representatives hell.

  I was into it.

  My protest started off a bit differently. On the day of the event, I waited in front of the Green Street, dressed in all black, holding a handmade sign that said, SAVE OUR THEATER. We were all supposed to meet at noon, but it wasn’t until twelve fifteen that a few people actually started to trickle in. Lucas showed up looking bored, with his phone panning around the scene. Sweet Lou came next, there for moral support before we left. Next came a few regulars. One tall, bearded collector-type who looked like a New Age Paul Bunyan. The cheese-monger from the Veggie Co-op down the road.

  There were a few college hepcats who couldn’t quite decide if they were waiting with us or not. They stood at the fringes, vaping and eyeing us with suspicion. I was beginning to think that this was going to be the whole crew when I heard some classical music off in the distance. As the sound got closer, I recognized it as “Ride of the Valkyries.” The song was coming from a boom box, which was mounted on the basket of a Rascal scooter. And on the scooter was Griffin, looking determined, waving to Lou in self-satisfied triumph.

  He rolled up to us and put on the brakes.

  “Where did you get that?” I asked.

  The music was still blaring.

  “WHAT?” he said.

  “THE SCOOTER,” I said. “WHERE DID YOU GET IT?”

  He put a finger to his lips and then yelled, “THE LESS YOU KNOW THE BETTER.”

  I stared at him.

  “FINE, COSTCO!” he screamed.

  He glanced over at Lou, who had a look on her face I hadn’t seen before. A kind of lightness. She seemed at a rare loss for words. Griffin walked toward her.

  “You actually got me one,” she said.

  “Now you can march with us,” he said. “Like you wanted to.”

  Sweet Lou examined him. And for a second I thought she was going to throw her arms around him. But she pulled herself together at the last minute.

  “You’re not nearly as dumb as you pretend to be,” she said.

  “I know,” said Griffin.

  And then she walked toward the scooter, sizing it up. All around us passing students and the daily lunch crowd were starting to take notice. I don’t think they read my sign, though. They were just watching to see what would happen next in this odd tableau before them. What happened next was that Lou pressed a yellow switch by the handlebars and the contraption jolted forward.

  “Now we’re talking,” she said.

  She got on and turned off the music. There was an actual twinkle in her eye. She held down the accelerator, and zoomed away at an impressive speed. Griffin immediately took off running behind her.

  “NOT TOO FAST, LOU!�
�� he yelled. “I HAVE TO RETURN THAT!”

  I turned to face the small (okay, really small) crowd behind me. They did not seem to understand what they had just seen. That morning in the shower, I had practiced a rousing speech all about the state of cinema in our times, and how the Green Street was the last bastion of intellectual freedom in this college neighborhood that was becoming more and more like a giant shopping mall. But with half of my crew disappearing in front of me, I simply waved the rest of them forward and said:

  “So . . . everyone, the march has started.”

  And when they didn’t move:

  “You guys should probably walk behind me now.”

  Then I began to speed-walk down Washington Avenue in hot pursuit of my rogue employees. Marches I saw elsewhere were a little slower, but I didn’t want Lou and Griffin to get too far without me. We were supposed to be a united front.

  Despite the distance, and the lack of enthusiasm from my fellow marchers, things actually started off okay. For the first block or so, we were mostly met with puzzled expressions. But there was the occasional polite question.

  “Save what theater?”

  “The Green Street.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “On Green Street.”

  “Oh . . . why does it need to be saved?”

  “Because it’s going to be demolished.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yeah.”

  I’m not sure we were really affecting too many hearts and minds, but we were at least making it known that we existed, so we kept walking. I tried to find solace in the story of that French theater. The movement to save it had grown gradually, and eventually there were thousands of people standing their ground, risking everything for art. Why couldn’t that happen here?

  “This is bad,” said Lucas, beside me.

  He was holding his phone camera in front of him, adjusting the zoom with his fingertips. He had been filming our march from Griffin’s arrival on.

  “No it’s not,” I said. “It’s just the first battle. A revolution takes time to build. You can’t reasonably expect the public to just jump on board with something. . . .”