Chapter Text
If Jacques could see, Anthony envisioned, the past four not-hours would have been significantly funnier: a cinematic rendition of the miserable woman running down the hallway, throwing open the heavy doors, stepping into them to find herself in the same damned hallway again.
An endless white hallway leading to an endless white door leading to an endless white hallway leading to an endless white door. 16:9 aspect ratio, 1080p, no, 4K. Slate, corpse-like colour grading, tinged with Slavic winter. New French Extremity cinéma du corps. An adolescent pride in its own shallow attempt at so-called 'depth', some sexploitation, for good measure. Eighty-six minute gratuitous rape scene ending in cannibalism and animal abuse. Real animals, none of that CGI bullshit. Imagine the headlines, the judicious ratings. Directed by Antoni Tarnowski, ensemble cast of one. Imagine the glory, Jacques-Joachim Tuvaché-Emfoi. The cult followings. The angry Christian mothers. The endless Youtube poops.
Knee-jerking, thigh-slapping comedy gold.
It was, really, at meaning-reaching best, barely humour silver. There was the hallway, there was the door, but Jacques refused to bridge them with any bravado. No doors were thrown, only creaked open, and no hallways were barged through, only felt with wings outstretched. Jacques had tried to exit the manor twice the first not-hour: the first as the inevitable preliminary attempt, the second just to make sure the failure of the first wasn't a psychotic fluke.
Third time's the charm, as the English expression goes, but Jacques's English was shit. When she left the building a second time and found herself unleaving, she faced Anthony with a non-committal shrug and lay down on the floor. She stayed there for the three not-hours succeeding, while Anthony made his own inspections.
He looked outside the window. He wasn't sure what he was looking at. He opened the first book he could reach for (The History of the Acquisition of the Council of the Marginals of the Nation of Anselir, Illegal to own, hidden between the fourth and fifth coat jacket in his wardrobe, also Illegal to own). He looked inside the book. He wasn't sure what he was looking at. He walked down the hallway in a nonchalant strut, measuring in his head the timekeeping of the stride, mapping it to the appropriate distance. The echo of his steel-heeled boots was a metronome against the empty, silent, mansion, timed to the sound of his breathing, the beating of his heart.
He threw open the door, threw open, with glorious fanfare, the way he wanted Jacques to have done so. His perceptual range, not reliant on his eyes (or lack thereof), meant he didn't need to do all of this to look outside, he need only project the vision for it. But the ipseitic feeling of phenomenological experience was sustenance for a protagonist. Show, don't tell. He stretched his neck as his head breached the boundary between the doorway and the Neofrenian Court Gardens, the Inside and the Outside, the blood and the heart. Anthony perused it, the Outside. Mise-en-scène: our prophetic protagonist right in the centre, auburn hair against the greyish-blue landscape. Perfectly symmetrical, like a shot from The Grand Budapest Hotel. Equally as vapid, equally as pink.
He wasn't sure what he was looking at.
Jacques, continuing her act of inaniminity, was still catatonic in the parlour by the time Anthony had come back. "I came through and I shall return," he mentioned off-handedly, the first of what will become a myriad references that Jacques was too uncultured to get. "1942, Douglas MacArthur."
"What?"
"World War 2."
"World War 2?"
"World War 2."
"There's going to be a second one?"
The joke was slowing down to a tepid, pointless bronze. There was no winning in this game, not without the rules of what the game even was. Anthony didn't really think all of this through, but he wasn't about to admit that. And besides, who cares? Who needs thought when you have prophecy?
Jacques was trapped in here, with him. The one and only Jacques! And the one and only Anthony! Remind him to take some not-time to carve out their names with a plus between them, contained in a crude heart on the oak wood doors, Jacques on the left and Anthony on the right, so that each attempt to escape would be symbolic heartbreak. He'd be doing it ironically, Anthony would explain. The joke is that in the real world, that's what Anthony would describe it as, In The Real World, it's an act done by little children to describe their puppy lovey crushes. The joke, Jacques, is you're my liddle-widdle puppy dog and you're gonna get fucking crushed.
Well, whatever. Anthony's an expert at playing his part in the High Judge Theatre, so he laughed at her face either way, leaning over her with one hand bitchy on his waist, the other flexing his fingers in casual, anticipatory cruelty. Let the joke rust into a fragile ferrous razor blade, for all Anthony cares. He's all about things being ironic anyway. In the real world, he'd say that, In The Real World, In The End, everything is ironic. Love? Ironic. Vulnerability? Ironic. Even the disproportionate sexual harassment in the latter half of the third act is going to be ironic. Maybe the only good thing about having so many visions at once is that it's hard to parse the horror of any given one until the vision becomes the present, and the sight becomes sound.
So here they are, in a satire of a movie, written by a guy who has watched maybe six or seven whole movies, and starring a girl who doesn't know what a movie is.
"God, ya fuckin' moron. I told'ja there's no getting outta this f'r you."
"Oh."
"The Grand Budapest Hotel wasn't even a good film. It was just, like," Anthony spins the crueler hand in a circle, "pretty. Aesthetic without meaning, symptoms with no memories to explain them."
"Is the Media here with us?" Jacques asked, only her beak moving, and hardly so. The rest of her body stayed in contortion, limbs twisted underneath her. As if she was a doll rejected and discarded to the floor, as if Anthony had tossed her there instead of her putting herself there voluntarily.
Anthony supposed there's some truth to the notion.
"It's just you and me, sweetie, for the rest of forever."
"Oh." Even her ability to vocalise with such minimal motion was impressive, the ventriloquist her own dummy all at once. "And how long is that going to take?"
The span of a second world war, my hyacinth. It's the first of September and Poland's defences are soon to fall.