Chapter 1: Return to Berkshire
Ominous signs in the city, a surprise letter, an eerie train journey due north.
To echo Eddie Vedder, if it was Eddie Vedder who said it first, the waiting drove me mad. I was living in New York, winding down from the long, exhilarating period surrounding the release of my first film, making notes and sketches for the next one while teaching here and there, but the atmosphere was turning against me. And not only me. Though I couldn’t have said just what it was, I sensed that I wasn’t alone in feeling like things were winding down. Wrapping up. Reaching the place they’d been headed.
There was no longer any need, or any will, to name the menace, because it was well enough agreed upon that something was going wrong, and was likely about to go much wronger. People, when they could, were leaving the city. This was what mattered now, not pinpointing the reasons why. There was the sense that one had better, if one could, leave now.
And there was also the sense that the thing, or things, whatever it was or they were, might have happened already, and we were just now seeing where that left us. Like we’d rushed through the worst of it, desperate to make something of ourselves in our twenties, to have something to show by the time of our tenth reunion, only to look up now, creeping past thirty, and realize it was time to get out, even if that meant relinquishing the footholds we’d fought for in the city.
*****
Nevertheless, I was proud of what I’d done with that time, even if it was borrowed time in a way I hadn’t fully appreciated. The Pale Oaks had made a splash on the international circuit. It had been shown in the kinds of theaters and streaming sites and talked about on the review forums that I’d set my inner hierarchies by, back when those hierarchies were still in flux. The places that boosted and maintained the artists I was jealous of in college, some of whom I could now count as friends. I’d even done a speaking tour of Alamo Drafthouses—much to my own surprise, I turned out to be charming—and I heard my film referenced on a number of weird-art and boutique horror podcasts. It got written about, and talked about, and, for a while, it seemed like the kind of DIY first film that might lead to a second with a professional budget and distributor.
This never materialized, but it did lead to things. I taught all over the city, and I was invited to speak all over the country—South by Southwest, Sundance, Telluride, RISD, and, of course, Berkshire Arts, the declining but still-cool art school I graduated from in 2010, along with, now that I think of it, just about everyone I know. I wanted to accept the invitation, but something kept me from doing so. A conflicting engagement. That’s how busy I was in 2017 and ‘18.
It was a cool time. But now, looking back, I wonder if it was also the time when I missed whatever was happening. Maybe, so long as I was busy with my own hermetic compulsions, I’d managed to keep that thing out. Not just keep from realizing it—I know how solipsistic this sounds—but actually keep it from happening. Let it build up steam outside the narrow circle of reality as I defined it, like an alternate universe encroaching on ours, one that wouldn’t make impact until my attention was ready to admit it was there. Maybe if, instead of taking a victory lap, basking in the new sensation of moderate art-world relevance, I’d plunged immediately into the next work, a deeper, denser, longer film, headier and even harder to process, maybe then none of this would have happened. Maybe I’d be happily at work on it right now.
Or maybe all I mean is that, by the time 2019 became 2020, I’d started to fear for my sanity. Started to wonder if all the time I’d spent inside the Pale Oaks, impersonating Arp while making my film, hadn’t left a trace, lingering in some form that, because I saw so few other people during those years, I might have no means of identifying. Maybe, I even began to think, the same identification with the mad Arp, as he flailed in delirium in the innermost sanctum of the Pale Oaks, as I imagined it on paper, tens or hundreds of thousands of times, had migrated, through the alchemy of animation itself, to my own psyche. Or maybe the rendering of madness that had made me semi-famous on the fringes of the art world had, rather, drawn something up from the bottom of my psyche—not Arp’s—something deranged in my own character that, even as I write this, I am not yet ready to recognize.
At the very least, if this thing I can’t name was still going to happen, maybe I could have done something about it if I’d focused on it sooner. But what? Kept notes? I do keep notes, but I don’t organize them. They’re all around me, interspersed with sketches, overflowing from filing folders, like Burroughs’ Word Horde. Rifling through them now, it’s clear that, from time to time over the past few years, I had the sense that things were being chiseled away, left in tatters, replaced only enough to keep the holes from spurring too much talk. As if, while I was squinting in the glare of my lightbox, chiseling away at The Pale Oaks one cell at a time, parallel forces were doing the same with the city, smudging it, erasing it, revising it until it became a masterpiece entirely antithetical to human flourishing.
There were even a few times during these years that 3D-graphics companies contacted me, asking if I’d be interested in learning more about special immersive projects that were supposedly underway at the nexus of VR and IRL, new frontiers in augmented consciousness, a nascent “city within the city,” as discovered in swank apartment offices in SoHo and Chelsea, but, as I’ve said, I was busy.
I’d committed myself to 2D, the monastic calling of pen and ink, ink and paper, cell after cell after cell, visiting Arp in my waking dreams up at the Pale Oaks, on the hill above the Berkshire campus, where he’d been taken for his long and feverish decline, the drafty, haunted stone castle on the hill where, though I could have, I never went to visit him. Where, instead, I imagined him regressing to the drafty Czech or Slovak or Hungarian castle that most of his students, over the thirty-five years during which he directed the Berkshire experimental animation department, imagined he’d grown up in, a rumor that he was all too happy, in his cryptic, smiling way, to encourage.
The Pale Oaks, my 38-minute opus of ritual, repetition, and the spreading, multivalent horror of a genius’s final, fevered decline, was my testament, as a 30-year-old, to the way of all flesh, and, beneath or within that, what I might call not the way of all minds but the way of great minds, as I’m still convinced Arp’s was. Probably the greatest I’ve ever encountered, aside from—I feel beyond all modesty here, given the circumstances—my own.
*****
It was in this frame of mind, in the spring of 2020, that I received a letter from a law firm in Massachusetts informing me that a Mr. Felix Arp, director of such subversive stop-motion classics as Spindle Wilhelm and The Dam in the Danube—featuring the infamous sequence in which two puppets made of felt, wire, and wax slowly strangle a live guinea pig—had passed away and left me, if I’d take it, his house on the southwest extremity of the famously design-centric campus of Berkshire Arts, at one time the premiere art and design college of the northeast, which was, sadly—as I’d read earlier that day, and read again here—in the process of shutting down. They’d pledged to let their current students graduate, but were unable, for budgetary and logistical reasons, to accept any new ones.
So let me get this straight, I thought, as if I were already in the law firm’s office, going over the details, far from the apartment in the city I’d lived in alone since 2015, when I finally found a place with a yearly lease. So, let me get this straight: Arp’s dead, for good this time, and he’s seriously leaving me the house?
Then, as a follow-up question, I added: and Berkshire’s really shutting down, also for good this time?
Both dissolutions had been underway for years, so it both was and wasn’t a surprise to get the news. The lawyer who, in my imagination, was a dashed-off Arp lookalike, wearing one of Arp’s famously cigarette-burned cardigans and gesticulating like a creaky marionette, nodded three times: once, as I pictured it, for each of my questions. That’s right, he said. The old Serb’s done for at last, made his way finally from half-dead to all-dead, and the school’s not far behind. Take the house while it’s still standing, why don’t you?
So I did.
*****
I left the city the next day, or if not the next day, then one day soon thereafter, not entirely certain whether I’d spoken to the lawyer on the phone, or merely impersonated him in one of the stupors I more and more frequently found myself falling into. Another symptom, I couldn’t help but suspect, of the same dimensionless hyper-event that had already sent most of my friends packing, leaving me a kind of urban recluse, holding down a fort that I’d never agreed to hold down.
It seemed to me, as I packed my lightboard, pen collection, notebooks, and as much of the Word Horde as I could stuff in a roller bag—relishing the feeling of packing my gear for college a second time—that the joint death of Arp and of Berkshire was the first, and, at the same time, the final warning I’d receive. Everyone else had already received their warning, and had done what they deemed appropriate in response.
Ruminating on the news of Arp’s death, I found that feelings I’d tried to push down, under my heart, were bobbing back up. It wasn’t the fear that I’d killed him, or not exactly that, but the fear that I had in some way profited off his unraveling. It was the fear that I’d depicted his final passion without his consent and yet, in a sense just beyond reason, not without his knowledge. As if, all those nights I thought I’d spent alone in my apartment, rendering the Pale Oaks on creamy paper cells with a warming mug of dark beer beside me, I hadn’t, in fact, been alone. That I had, rather—and I know I’m again beginning to sound less sane than I’d like to here—been in communion with him, by his side at the Pale Oaks, recording not what was in my soon-to-be-lauded imagination, but rather what was before my watery, bloodshot eyes.
In short, as I prepared to return to Berkshire, I couldn’t shake the suspicion that a spectral link had grown between Arp and myself, and that I was, thus, returning to the place where I’d been all along, or being summoned back by a part of myself that was there already. Perhaps this is why I’d declined the invitation to speak at Berkshire: not for lack of time, but in hopes of preserving whatever distance still existed between myself and my onetime mentor, as he lay dying in the asylum bed I’d drawn for him. In essence, I’d been hoping to postpone for as long as possible the return I was now preparing to make.
*****
Musing on the nature of this spectral link—I could already see it developing across a profusion of ink drawings, fulminating in an illusory breeze in the opening seconds of the follow-up film I should’ve begun by now—I dragged my supply-stuffed roller bag through the ghost town of Penn Station, boarded a train on which I was the only passenger, as far as I could tell, and watched the city begin to blow away.
Though I tried to minimize the gravity of the moment, I could already tell there was a real chance of my never coming back. I was halfway to New Haven before it occurred to me that I’d left my apartment without calling the landlady, nor even imagining what I might say when she called me, after the third or fourth or fifth of next month came and went. A narcotized calm coursed through my system; I knew I should worry about the apartment, about all the stuff I’d left there, or about the possibility that, despite the letter, there’d be no house waiting for me in Berkshire and that I’d thus be on the next train back to the city, but I couldn’t force myself to. Those problems, or possible problems, seemed already to belong to a character in a different story, a sketch of myself abandoned in a pile of sketches for a film never to be made.
Free of the worry I’d expected to feel, I got up, went to the train bathroom, washed my face with hot, rusty water, and stuffed my phone in the trashcan. Good riddance, I thought, returning to my seat. I felt giddy, high, like someone had injected me with an opiate that was starting to take hold.
I waited there, floating above my seat, until we stopped at New Haven. Then I panicked. I ran to the bathroom, retrieved my phone, washed it in the rusty sink, dried it on my pants, and forced my way onto the platform, where I stood, alone, in the weird heat of a season I could no longer identify. I removed my coat, booted up the phone, and checked it for a signal, though I could think of no one to call. I reread the message from Arp’s lawyer, which I’d photographed, as the conductor stubbed out her cigarette. She looked at me knowingly, like people in my position were common these days. Then she made an “all aboard that’s coming aboard” gesture, and disappeared into the frontmost compartment.
I hesitated a moment longer, looking at the opposite track, confirming that it was empty, weeds growing among the gravel, the info board above it blank. The train rumbled alive and began to tremble and, desperate to rediscover the giddiness I’d felt on the first leg of the journey, I settled back into my old seat, gone cold and prickly.
*****
The sun began to set as the train rolled north, past Hartford, rows of dead factories and Adults Only outlets and used car lots merging into a scrim beyond the tracks, just as they had a decade ago when I took this same train in the opposite direction, down from Berkshire to spend a series of formative weekends in pre-Occupy New York.
I huddled lower in my seat, no longer floating, and focused on telling myself, over and over again, that I was going in the right direction. I set my mind on this loop, closed my eyes, and listened to it play out until, an hour and a half later, we rolled to a stop at Berkshire Station and the conductor came by to nudge me awake.
She waited in the aisle as I gathered my roller bag and rucksack, pulled my coat back on despite the heat, and shuffled onto the platform, patting my back pockets to make sure I hadn’t lost my wallet or my phone.
“Good luck to you,” she said, like a mother dropping her son off at college.
I nodded as I got my balance on the platform, alone but for several indistinct shapes at the far ends, outside the reach of the overhead lights. I tried to make them out, but soon lost even the little I’d seen.
When I looked back at the tracks, the train was gone, as if it’d never been there and I’d returned to Berkshire on foot, slowly fleeing some sinister fate that I began to suspect had been here all along, awaiting my arrival. I could hear the whistle further up the tracks, but it only discomfited me further, as if it indicated the memory of a train from years and years ago, not the one I’d arrived on just now, making its way further north.
As I set off across the wide lot separating the station from the street, I felt Arp’s spirit, if not Arp himself, preparing to welcome me back.