CHAPTER 116 - Don’t You (Forget About Me) (2)

At some point, Valorie Sanders had placed her head on Eppie’s shoulder and never left. She must have cried at some point as well, because her friend’s shoulders were wet.

On screen, Josie had stumbled into the social club.

It was no longer a mess, but it was hardly in one piece. Lorenzo had evidently been waiting for her. His eyes were sullen, and his lips were split. He looked at the girl with the plant in her lap and a face covered in the juices from week-old trash, and he poured her a coffee.

“What did he ask last time? Do you recall?” he demanded of the girl.

“School,” she answered.

Behind Lorenzo, the camera’s depth of field had been set to wide so that the audience could see the photographs Hollis had scattered back on the wall. Lorenzo’s younger daughter, bright and beautiful, in a school uniform.

“There is a school, up the Hudson. A good one, for music, for theatre, for creating things,” he said. “My Angela is there. The girls there wear a beautiful uniform. They learn the piano, the violin, the paintbrush, the stage. I will get you your documents.”

He gave her the uniforms, he gave her the ledger, and he gave her the money. He was a mobster by trade, but he was a family man first. A brother to Marcel, who was father to Josie. A critic might have scoffed at this romanticisation of the Sicilian connection, but Valorie ate it up like wood-fired pizza.

Cut.

The last four minutes hit Valorie harder than anybody else in the room. Her Eppie was going to an arts academy to be enrolled. For the first time since the film began, they left the city.

Was it symbolic of renewal?

Of leaving behind the past?

The gate wasn’t hidden like in LAPA. It was old and enormous, made out of red bricks formed by the hands of master masons. The sign on top read Saint Cecilia’s, and an expensive lady in a pencil skirt and half-glasses processed Josie’s admission with a smile and a welcome.

Having lived a whole life in California, Valorie had no idea where this place was. Even so, she found parallels in the long corridors with a gaggle of girls on the far end, laughing just out of focus, wearing the same uniform that Josie now wore. It was in a corridor like this that she had walked with William and thought herself on top of the world. And it was in a corridor like this that she had rediscovered Euphemia, back from the dead, to set her world ablaze.

Beneath her cheeks, her friend’s body was warm but bony.

On the screen, Josie Novak found her dorm, every step weighed down by the events of two weeks where she had lost a family that didn’t care, and found one that did, then lost it all again.

She carried Marcel’s plant. Valorie felt the symbolism was too sentimental, too romantic, even for her. She wondered if Eppie noticed as well the softness of it, how it seemed to disconnect from the rest of the film, which had a perfect cyclical script.

Should she tell her friend?

Would the critics find the epilogue disagreeable?

With great ceremony, Josie deposited the plant with a trowel in her new garden, pressing the soil down around it before sitting back on her Mary Janes and staring at it with dazed recollection. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a card, and the camera shifted over her shoulder so that the audience could read what Josie was reading.

JOSIE GELASHVILI

A few people in the cinema made a sound that sounded like, “Oh!” Ashamedly, Valorie did not know why. She had cried too many times through the film.

Eppie leaned in. “That’s the name on the ledger. That’s Marcel’s last name, the one they didn’t get time to write when she taught him how to write.”

Oh…

And there it was, the circle once more conjoined. Eppie’s scriptwriter, whoever she was, had given them the clue and allowed them to find the answer themselves.

On the screen, Josie, with her pale limbs turned golden by the sun, went to the door of the dormitory. She rested her hand on it for exactly two seconds, clean and wholesome. A student with a future.

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And then she went in.

She had entered the film through a door that she had dashed open in a panic.

And now the film closed through a door where she would live out what Marcel never had.

Valorie looked down.

This time it was Eppie who held her hand.

There was no budget left for the credits, which Eppie knew the critics would find amusing.

Despite the film’s sterling storytelling, the credits were plain white type, Arial, size 24 over black, and the timing was off-beat by about half a second.

“Right, everyone,” Ferroni’s voice cut across the row. “Get ready for the walk of shame—though I dare say, for us at least, it’s a walk of triumph.”

The applause came as a single clap, then two, then spontaneously it grew into a roar. Like an undulating wave, it moved from the left of the theatre to the right, from the aft to the bow. It shook the space of the converted high school in Utah as the lights slowly came on, thunderous like a mountain storm.

The Pro’s crew remained seated for the moment. Beside her, Valorie, who knew her place, stood with the audience and clapped with her eyes red and makeup aesthetically smudged.

+ Karmic Causality

+ Karmic Causality

+ Karmic Causality

+ Karmic Causality

+ Karmic Causality

Rémy Aubert was the first to get up, and he reached out to her and reached out to Ferroni, and he pulled both of them up while the audience continued their thunderous roar of approval.

They made their way down through the applause.

It took them a minute to reach the bottom, and the applause continued. When she passed Paramount, she noticed that they too were clapping, albeit out of politeness.

At the bottom, in the second minute of applause, they waited for the announcer.

At the third minute, while their faces were red and they had no idea what to do with themselves, the MC arrived.

He did not speak, but allowed the first-timers to soak in the adoration of the Sundance Film Festival, because it was entirely possible that this would be the only reception of its kind in their entire filmmaking lives.

Four minutes, then finally, the sound began to fade.

Upon that august high school stage in January, they were four:

Euphemia Fontaine.

Jack Ferroni.

Rémy Aubert.

Kelvin Grant.

Yet, four was not a number Eppie was willing to accept.

In a huff, in her daffodil Conti dress and her four-inch Chanel, Eppie leapt down from the stage to the wonder of the audience, and powered up the aisles until she found the missing members of their entourage.

She bodily dragged, with her [Strength] of [21], Bernadette “Bebe” Blau and Francisco Norbert from their hiding places. The light found her, as it always did, and the crowd roared.

She only wished that Doctor Cooper were here, though that could be arranged for their next film festival.

On the stage, before Ferroni himself could speak, she told everyone that Bebe was the woman responsible for fixing the script and making the film tenable.

She told them that Norbert was the wizard who had singularly sat in a room and made Ferroni’s vision watchable.

Her [Vocality] was more powerful than the murmurs, than the sound system itself.

The applause began again, only for a minute, but it was enough for Bebe and Norbert.

The announcer then began the interview, asking canned questions to satiate the audience’s curiosity.

As for Eppie, she was no longer looking at the crowd.

Smiling into the middle distance, she was looking at an enormous box that had just appeared. It needed no light from the strobes, and it hovered in her field of vision without the need for digital projection.

Quest Completed

[The Thief of Joy]

You have reaped a [Karmic Parasite], a lesser Usurper. You have given the [Parasite] the joy of artistic potential and taught him the wonder of pursuing creation. You have shown him the immensity of wonder that is the joy his art may bring to others.

He is no longer a budding Parasite, but a seed of creation.

The [Usurper] has successfully reaped the Parasite through [Noblesse Oblige].

You have gained immense [Causality].

You have gained additional [Dasein].

With a wave of a hand, the box faded, and Euphemia Fontaine stood at the centre of the stage beside her friends at the Eccles Centre in Park City, Utah, her baby blues reflecting the merciless wattage from above.

She knew now, with cosmic confidence, that she had done good.