You’ve been here too long, and the toddy’s wrecking your prose. You thought it would be all right, thought the flow and form would hold consistent, but the sensations now introducing themselves, stomach to intestines, stomach to esophageal tract, tell a tale vastly different than one orifice would give if it were asked. An argument between mouth and asshole; you should really be hashing this out in private. But the man reading Guns N Ammo is more intent on keeping you there, wants you to understand that a trigger lock only means that the smarter kids are the ones to die; he’s got no trouble with thinning the herd, so long as it served to enhance the percentages in the gene pool. “But this… I mean, if your kid who already figured out all the other safety locks and can bypass all the blocks on your computer and lock you out of your machine because he changed all the passwords to barney666, then this trigger lock is just gonna give him a challenge he can’t pass up. You see what I’m saying?”
      And maybe you see his point; the first orifice wondering to him if maybe it doesn’t matter, since the kids in question, intelligent as they may or may not be, would in time become reflections of those parents that did or did not have the trigger locks in the first place.
      And then he says your point’s not valid and you want to argue, but the other argument’s heating up and you’re able now to get away from the table—you’ll never get it back, the man’s friends are now converging and your seat’s already gone; “Mind if I share this table?” he said, and you motioned a sure-why-not to him, since he had his magazine, and you had Daedalus: the two seemed incompatible and you thought the magazines’ incompatibility and lack of correspondence to each other gave a signal to silence that you understood. But implicit or explicit it was all lost on him as his Guns N Ammo misinterpreted Daedalus’ Leave Me Alone as an invitation for its holder to hold forth. “It says,” the magazine said to the man, “you should talk to him; it has nothing to say to me…” And so the man obliged the magazine—but now you and Daedalus are waiting in line at the door to the bathroom and you think you hear from your place in line an argument of another kind coming from within. Two mouths.
      Two mouths, but from where you stand, your own internal argument wishing for intervention and resolution, it may as well be two assholes in the room. Hurry up, you mutter, what is so difficult about the process that you both must engage in discourse on the minutiae of form?
      “Hey, I thought,” it’s the Guns N Ammo man, alone, the magazine not present for moral support, “we could go shooting sometime?” And you almost give up your hold on your position in the argument, almost concede to what would undoubtedly serve to sever the connection between you and the man, but probably with you and this place as well and so the standoff is maintained. But the other end of the argument, having sensed this weakness, gives with renewed strength. But you have hope, you suspect that intellect will win out over brute force, even if in your case the two are so closely linked. You’re just staring at the man, your mouth just moving, give some air through the tracts to it and you’d be saying something like “Ohh-ah-ah-oh-ah…” but you’re not letting anything out. Your certainty in regard to mind over matter proves wrong and your head bobs up, then down, up, down, a warm sickness crawling down your left thigh.
      Guns N Ammo man’s elated, you’re running out the door and he’s yelling at you to wait but you’re halfway to your car already; left hand pushing the belt apart, you reach with your right and disrupt the center of gravity and drop to the ground and roll. Something in your mind tells you to go with it, just roll, and you feel your momentum carrying you over and you sense your feet going down and head coming up. Tuck and wait, now spring, straighten the legs. Left forward and you’re at the car.
      The short-legged slug sitting on the hood of your car, all denim except the stripes up his chest and engineer boots, tosses his cup and fixes you with one eye. “Were you a ballerina?”
      What?
      “Your movements are so fluid.”
      Keys out, key in, turn and open the door. You kick off your shoes; they land in the passenger seat. You start the car and you’re backing out before the slug can move. He rolls off and lands gelatinous on the gravel lot. Your personal revulsion momentarily forgotten, you stare and know the terrain, intuiting the relief map of his belly and face, this vast, soft asteroid pocked by so many spills previous. And then your right hand and left foot in concert to first and the slug finds himself in another storm. One quick right turn and stepping hard on the brakes, you’re behind the store next to the café, parallel to the dumpster. E-brake on and the car in neutral, you throw the door open and reach to the seat next to you and grab whatever papers you can. Standing outside the car, your pants drop, dragging shit all the way down to your socks. You remove those too and try to clean yourself as much as possible with the… with your book. And you laugh, a little, at the idea of being your own harshest critic and hear yourself saying, It’s really not that bad. And now, naked from the waist down, you spread chapter three on the seat for the rest of the drive.
 
Hello?
      “Hey, I got you—it is you, isn’t it?”
      You say that you guess it depends on who you’re supposed to be, but you suppose that regardless of all else, you probably are. The early morning—a look at the clock: 5:30 AM, early early morning—light catches on a line of saliva between your chin and the mouthpiece, your head having just risen from a pool of drool on the pillow. I hate that, you think, and then the phone starts in on you again.
      “I mean, are you the guy from the coffee shop the other day?”
      You recognize his voice. How did you get this number?
      He tells you the girl at the café gave him your name and he called information. Only twenty-three people in this town have your name, you are informed, and so it’s only taken him twelve minutes to hit on the right one.
      You stammer at him, something about him calling twenty-three people at five in the morning, and he tells you, “No, it was only eighteen.”
      Oh, you say. Only eighteen.
      “Yeah… so you just ran out the other night.”
      Yeah.
      “You’re kinda funny. I wasn’t gonna call, figuring you wouldn’t be right for it, but then I looked at a copy of that magazine you were reading and realized that you’re one of those intellectual/writer/arty types. I mean, they’re all into being all unpredictable and going where their minds lead them. And I thought, hell, you know, I could probably do with some unpredictability, so I just up and left, not a word to nobody. But little Bobby got all mad about it and drove by my house later and threw beer cans at my truck. I guess not everyone’s fit to be one of those intellectual types, but you know, people got their ways.”
      Right for what? you ask him. Intellectual/writer type… you stare at your pillow, your drool refuting his assertion.
      “You know, you said you wanted to go shooting sometime. I got time now.”
      Oh, yeah… that guy. You ask him if he still feels so strongly about trigger locks. He grunts, not to be distracted. You tell him you’re busy but ask him for his phone number to call him when you do have time.
      “Uh, yeah. Sure.” He gives it and you don’t write it down, though the numbers do implant securely in your mind—in no particular order—you beg off, citing the time. And Guns N Ammo man doesn’t understand so you tell him you always do your writing at 5:30 in the morning, so if you want to get some good work in you’ve got to get started.
      “Yeah? I’d pegged you for a night owl, but what do I know about that, right?”
      You’re remembering Barton. You’re feeling the scene and remembering the progression. This must have been an early draft, you think. Your face back in the puddle on the pillow, you remember to place the phone back on the hook. And then, pillow flipped over, you dream him, Goodman, sprinting light-speed across the walls of your apartment, screaming something about trigger locks for brains. He fixes you with one eye. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
 
You wake up and feel them, their touch, the Coens, that they’ve ordered the world, your day. Unwilling to swim a sea of reference, you go back to sleep. You dream Buscemi. He’s sitting next to you in your bed, stroking your long auburn hair, “We can cross-reference it for you. It doesn’t just have to be Coen.” You tell him you don’t have long auburn hair, that you’re going to cut it, and he tells you he likes you best like this. It’s a stupid conversation. You wake yourself up.
      The conversation with Guns N Ammo man comes back and you remember your pants left in the dumpster behind the café, and you’re sad to have let them go. But you remember your reasons, flinch at the imagined exchange that would take place at the cleaners:
      It’s coffee. Turkish coffee.
      “Are you sure, sir?”
      Yes, damn it. Coffee. Turkish coffee.
      “But how did you get it inside your pants?”
      It’s shit, all right? You’d have to tell the girl. This time she’d be pretty. Not just pretty. The girl holding your pants, nose wrinkled, eyebrows touching each other impossibly across damagingly deep furrows as her mouth continues to open, she wouldn’t just be pretty, she’d be fucking gorgeous. The one the aliens made in the early 90’s when they thought all earth people were beautiful because the entirety of their knowledge of us came from Victoria’s Secret catalogs. She’d be that one, and she’d be at every cleaners. Two hundred dollars is a small price to pay to save yourself from it. Next time, you swear, you’ll buy Dickies.
      In the shower, scrubbing your thighs raw for the fourth time, you decide you may as well make next time this time and this time today. You remember hearing they’re cheapest at the surplus store, but not as cheap as Wal-Mart, but you’re not going there, are you, so it doesn’t count. And so at the café you grab iced cappuccino to go instead of hot to stay, almost spilling it in your crotch when the radio sings Burwell’s score at you, and you forcibly—as forcibly as it is possible—eject the cd from the player.
      And then in the surplus store you discover why the pants are so cheap. They’re sized and colored for surplus people. You finish the thought and find yourself uncharacteristically ashamed. Must be the place.
      You’re sifting through approximations, and then a voice behind you: “Melp You? Looking for anything specific?”
      Holding a 48/26 in one hand and without looking up you ask the voice if he ever wondered… if life seemed to him more a montage of situationally applicable films, and less a life. That all existence pours itself from the doors of the dollar theaters and we’re stuck in an endless summer of reruns…
      “I don’t know what you mean, but if you’re making a Deliverance joke, I’m gonna have to ask you to step outside.”
      You tell him you’ve never seen Deliverance.
      “Piece of crap, you ask me. Got it all wrong.”
      You hold up the pants to ask him maybe do they have closer to your size and your eyes meet and he says:
      “Hey, fancy that. It’s the intellectual.”
      Yeah, fancy that.
      “You look—ah… 33/33. You want black? Hold on a second, I’ll go in back.” He returns a minute later with black and green. He shows you to a dressing room and the Dickies fit. He talks to you through the door and you’re actually admiring the cut of the pants and wondering was your butt always this good? He’s talking about this place he likes to go shooting and when you give him a call he’ll take you there.
      You tell him you don’t know anything about guns. You’re lying.
      “Well, that’s all right, nothing to it.”
      You step out, Dickies laid over your arm. He’s standing with the “Well?” face and you nod to him and look over toward the shoes, right next to the guns. He takes the pants from you and follows. You think of your man Greg at I. Magnin and block the disturbing parallels. Not really parallel, you think: these pants already fit. You get to take them home today, no waiting for finishing. You think it says something about you if you’re able to wait until your clothes are ready, that you can still move about, that you still interact in the seamless flow of referentiality that forms your existence. It says something else if you need the pants now, something you maybe don’t want said. Maybe that you shit yourself at the café.
      And you make your purchases, he gives you a discount and comments on stereotypes. “I wouldn’t figured you to come in here. But in all this you could pass without no one knowing the better.”
      You dissent, saying that identity, however farcical, is not that fluid; even if our existence is comprised of elements stolen from fictions we observe throughout our lives, still the selection of fictions does pigeonhole us into our entirely valid stereotypes… you tell him that you are who you are and that’s the end of it; neither you nor he nor anyone are successful chameleons. You want to continue, but you want to stop talking. He’s not getting it. Dress me up any way you want, you conclude, I’m still your unpredictable intellectual/writer type.
      Guns N Ammo man notices you’ve stopped talking and hands you your change. “I’m going shooting tomorrow… if you’re free.”
      He did give you a break on the duds. You say sure. You’ll meet him here. Tomorrow at…?
      “12:30?”
      Yeah. 12:30.
 
“Can I borrow your pen real fast?”
      You hand it over.
      “Can I use some paper?”
      You flip to an empty page. You know he’s going to tear out a strange shape, they always do, wrecking the whole page because they say they only need a corner.
      Large, slow moving. Hawaiian shirt. You think he’ll write slowly. He does. Has to think hard how to handle the pen, has apparent difficulty remembering how to spell his name. Thug archetype, you think. It scrawls S-H-A-W-N then pauses. Then the numbers, near illegible, begin to appear beneath the word. Shawn writes them in no real order, two digits then a dash, one number and then a third to the left of the dash, one left of the third digit written and then with what must constitute a flourish, he tacks the last two numbers on the end. You think he needs different movies.
      He tears an almost square from the page, puts the pen down and extends his hand.
      “I’m Shawn,” he says.
      I know, you say.
      “You do?”
      Yes, you tell him you’re psychic.
      “Wow. What’s your name?”
      You make something up and Shawn tells his friends outside about the psychic.
 
The gang’s all here, all of them except Guns N Ammo man, who goes to bed early. Just think what it would mean if you knew any of them, what it would mean to say The Gang’s All Here. The concept might carry some weight, each letter of every associative trait or character or moniker adding up to some transient, arbitrary sum, not a whole but fragments you suppose you could concatenate to make of them a tertiary or maybe linearly definable mass. And you wonder just what you mean by ‘linearly definable mass’ but you know why the tertiary. And you know anyway since there are no associative figments to factor toward and solve for mass. The weight of no letters, still you hold nothing in your hand and can guess at something. A container, maybe, but you’re not thinking much about it, only seeking to find something to hold the void, defining by absence of the potential and possible weight of combined constituents of Gang.
      You’re rambling, near incoherent because you’re going shooting tomorrow. Well, not because you’re going shooting, but because your references are turning hostile, refusing to form your desired perception. You closed your eyes and eavesdropped, they were talking about you. You’re so free with them, Steve said to John, they’re going to take it to Ethan and tell him just what you’ve been doing. “Gave us such a cursory glance and then went all mosaic with us, overlapping the misunderstandings and attributing the bastardized perception to correspondence with us…” But you thought you were so good, and were so proud to recognize the parallels. They say it’s too individualized; you’re painting the world with yourself. How very natural of you. How proper, but your suppositions and the tenets drawn from them require that it all play out without you.
      You opened your eyes, saying to your book, open, with a pen, Steve and John weren’t themselves, those were your words and the individualized overlay was the accusation of misuse, and not your borrowed depersonalized referentiality. That must be it, you fell victim to a momentary personalization.
      And you can’t bear it so you go home. You’ll show them, you’ll find something to mirror your reality, and you won’t even use Coen. You’ll trade one Steve for another and let Mr. Martin show them how wrong they are. But you’re not sure but you can’t sleep until you know you can argue effectively with them.
      You’re dreaming Martin and he says he’ll have no part of it, that you have to play your stupid game without him. So you tell him he’s not himself, he’s another manifestation of unsettled, unwarranted you, and so you say La la la, your hands over your ears; but you can read his lips: “Ethan wants to talk to you.” It’s stupid. You wake up.
      “Do I have your attention now?” Ethan’s got a goon with a gun. “I thought the Miller’s motif most appropriate,” he shows you the rich greens you’ve never been able to master. You tell him you woke up, so he has to leave, that there’s no cinematic precedent for this. You haven’t seen this scene—is this some secret Director’s Cut?
      “You think you’re safe just because you’ve never seen Deliverance. You’re an idiot.”
      No, you tell him. You say it’s a manifestation of the limited breadth of your repertoire. You threaten to watch French films. Where will you be then, Ethan? Where will you be when I don’t read the subtitles?
      This is still stupid. You wake yourself up.
      Goon With a Gun gives you the butt across the jaw. “You lack focus,” Ethan says.
      This is worse. You go back to sleep.
      “Think about imposed perceptual externality,” Ethan’s hand holding you up by your hair. “I’ve seen Deliverance…”
      Banjo. River. Ethan’s drawling.
      “You just take ‘em right off.”
      Shit. You know that. Revolting Cocks. That club. Multilevel cross-referentiality. Ethan’s got the big guns. You thought you were safe. You fight, you play dirty.
      You go Disney.
      You lock Ethan in the tower, hitch Goon With a Gun to the pumpkin and escape to the ball. But then you’re rooted to the sea floor and morays with Guns are grinning and ducking between Ethan’s eight arms. “That was weak,” he says. “You still want Disney?” And you make your planty show of acquiescence and it’s not your room but the riverbank.
      “Come on now, squeal…”
      Ce n’est pas par hasard que les penseurs d’aujourd’hui parlent plus volontiers de la condition de l’homme que de Sa nature. Par condition ils entendent avec plus ou moins de clarté l’ensemble des limites a priori qui esquissent Sa situation fondamentale dans l’univers. Les situations historiques varient: L’homme peat naître esclave dans une société païenne ou seigneur féodal ou prolétaire. Ce qui ne varie pas, c’est la nécessité pour lui d’être dans le monde… And damned if you didn’t bite your tongue on it.
 
So, no. Not the best start to your day. Maybe you should rethink your premise.
      An intestinal rumbling hints at another possibility. Real-time replays of non-cinema, non-literary events closing the loop. Self-reference on to infinity. But, coupling one inauspicious beginning with another might not be what you seek, not the loop you want to close. And besides, you’re at the wrong café, a locale of no reference with nothing to name your point. If you were going to close your loop, you would want to retrace to the point of origin, and that’s elsewhere. You don’t have time, you’re meeting Guns N Ammo man in an hour, the forty minutes of transit to and from would hardly leave enough time for calibration, let alone locking into your loop. You’re going to have to go with what you know, keep a tight awareness on the cinematic flux and establish safe boundaries. Disney won’t work, and Coen’s gone hostile. Dig deeper. John Hughes perhaps… no.
      And then it comes, you’re struck dumb with the obvious. A challenging obvious, but one that would most definitely ensure your safety.
      You order a drink. Line them up, you tell the girl, I’m in a hurry.
 
You’re so happy.
      Guns N Ammo man, he’s got this self-made man thing going today. He’s been around; you’re the outsider today, the tourist. He’s taken you under his wing.
      “Little Bobby’s coming along.” Guns N Ammo man introduces Little Bobby. He’s got a camera. And that’s just perfect.
      Charmed, you say. They exchange glances. Guns N Ammo man indicates to Bobby that he should play along. You’re an intellectual, after all.
      You’re smiling, but faltering, the sequence of events is all out of focus. You should have prepared more. You tell them you want to get your hair cut.
      “What?”
      Maybe just some ice cream.
      “Are you coming?” Guns N Ammo man’s opened the door of the truck. You get in. You pretend it’s a Vespa. And then you’re off on your little black and white adventure, rubbernecking all the way out of the city, like you’ve never seen any of this, so confined by your obligations and always in meetings, proffering goodwill gestures and accepting similar shows… a monument of some cultural importance blows by and you imagine yourself enriched… the guys are watching you carefully. Little Bobby makes a secret sign and Guns N Ammo man tries to draw your attention to something.
      “What is it that you do, anyway?” Little Bobby wants to know.
      You reel, you hadn’t counted on that. You run through every scene, trying to remember what you do… you’re lost, you’re…
      I’m a princess, you say.
      And you’re on the side of the dirt road, gravel thrown by the truck pelting your shins. Not the right answer. Your backpack on the ground, just hit now and tilting slowly on its side, thrown, as an afterthought, from the truck. Little Bobby didn’t laugh, Little Bobby stared openmouthed, reaching for the door, an arm shot out in front of your face, then down, and you saw Guns N Ammo man’s leg, you saw the sole of his big black boot coming. The truck slowed, door opened and you weren’t holding anything, weren’t belted in. Your shoulder hit first, you rolled and you think you bounced. You came to rest—no, you slammed into a tree. But not slamming so much, you’d slowed some and then the tree stole your momentum. You saw the word inertia on a page flashing on some lower level thrown forward by impact, the pages then turn and flap, you see entropy and remember a class and realize an innate inability toward self-reference.
      You take a cue from your backpack: it falls on its side. You stop moving; a zipper on the front pocket open and your things spilling on the ground, you close your mouth, close your eyes.
      “Out here in the woods… like some dumb animal…”
      Leave me alone, Ethan, you say.
      “Look in your bag…”
      What bag?
      “There you go again, twisting it in inapplicable ways, mixing my metaphors and you without your hat.”
      You say you don’t wear hats.
      “Maybe that’s your problem.”
      You thought you understood the symbolism there, you had it on good authority just what the hats meant. But you’re not going to tell Ethan. And it’s true, you didn’t wear a hat because you thought it meant something he didn’t say. How sweet if that was the only problem. The sun in your eyes blurring everything, the top of your head burning, Ethan lost in waves. You lunge at him: solid contact. He falls back, hands up, says nothing. You can go. He’ll leave you alone. You make a finger pistol and empty your chambers into Ethan.
 
Lips dry, eyelids straining against tear-caked lashes—you rub the crust and look around. Still the tree and you’re thirsty. You assume you must be thirsty anyway, it’s the sort of scenario where you would expect a character to list thirst among his various complaints. You do, however, have a first-person account of pain fresh in your mind. Pain in your shoulder, hip, back, cheek, an anatomical litany of sensorial abuse. You don’t think it’s supposed to show. You cry out: Cut To:
 
SIDE OF ROAD: WOODS
 
A few minutes later. you walking slowly toward YOU’S BAG. YOU bends and extend YOU’S left arm to retrieve it.
 
You reaching, still maybe ten feet from the BAG.

ETHAN

YOU

ETHAN

YOU

ETHAN

YOU

ETHAN

No Reference
A screenplay by
Ethan Coen
and
Joel Coen

ETHAN

    INT.SURPLUS STORE

YOU

        It’s just a series of bits of external influence
        replayed to give a semblance of progression rather
        than personal experience serving as the impetus for
        action.
 

YOU

ETHAN

ETHAN

YOU

ETHAN

ETHAN

FLASHBACK:
 
     INT.PSYCHO WARD

DOC HUNT

        You must understand this. Each of us, if you’ll allow
        me to borrow your metaphor, is the director of our own
        movie, that is, our lives are our own to control.

YOU

        No, Doc. I’m just an actor.

ETHAN

YOU

ETHAN

YOU

        You’re wrong.

ETHAN

YOU

ETHAN

     That’s as far as we’ve gotten. But don’t worry. We’ll have more for
     you soon. I’ve got to tell you though, that Roman Holiday bit, that
     was yours, and brilliant too. Joel really liked it. Steve’s asked to be
     Guns N Ammo man and Joel thinks John would be a great Little
     Bobby. Joel’s working on it right now, a whole other story arc
     between him and his princess.

YOU STARES at ETHAN.

ETHAN

YOU

ETHAN

YOU

ETHAN

Your hands are shaking too much to write, but you keep scribbling, the irregularity troubling you less than yesterday when you couldn’t hold the pen at all. The girl behind the counter is grinding to the music, trying to get your attention but you won’t look up from your hands. You stopped taking the medication a week ago, you missed your appointment with Dr. Hunt. You’re not going back. The page in front of you reads, in a near-indecipherable scrawl: I feel like a bag of electric jell-o.
      Little Bobby will be here soon. He’s the one that told you to stop taking the pills. He stayed by your side those three unconscious days, stroking your hair, telling you it would be all right. You smooth the front of your dress, brush your hair out of your face and wonder if you have something to hold it.
      Little Bobby’s here now, easing his bulk behind the narrow table, small eyes twinkling above his full, raw but freshly shaved cheeks. He drops a small, wilting flower on your book and you smile.
      “Hello, Princess.”
      You order him coffee, black. You have a soda.