You watch too many films is one of the great modern sentences. It has in it a hint of understanding regarding what we were before and what we have become. Of few people has it been more true than Alex-Li Tandem, Autograph Man extraordinaire. And therefore suitably, rightfully, his first thought was: They’re dead. That’s it. They’re dead.. That idead (though it passed through him quicker than the sentence can be said) hollowed him out. It wrestled him and won. And then in the next second: No, no, of course they’re not. Parents will know this feeling, the before and the after. The horror, the climb-down from horror. But after this, at least for Alex, there is the extension. The extension is lethal. It understands that this is just a time lapse. Because there was nothing wrong with that diagnosis except time.
They were not.
But they would be.
All his people, all his loves.
The dead walk. He was with them on the train. He had drunk with them, this evening. They carried him home; he was looking at them now. On the walls in black and white, but also in this bed, in full Technicolor. A child knows this, and is told to get over it. A famous Irishman knew it and made peace with it and said all that needs to be said on the matter. He was having trouble with it, basic as is may be. Ten years ago, Sarah’s sister had visited with her young children and Alex’s cousin Naomi refused to sleep in this room because she was scared of the dead ones on the walls. Everybody laughed, over breakfast. He had laughed. Everybody had laughed. Because it is wrong, says everyone, to take it so personally – and so he hadn’t, he was a grown man (this is probably what everybody means, he thought, by this stupid phrase; they mean Don’t take it personally, don’t take growing personally, being grown). He hadn’t taken it personally, not for years. He took it cinematically, or televisually – if he took it all.
grifos meus sobre The Autograph Man, da Zadie Smith.
