EMMA FUCHS / TROMPE L’OEIL
The real reason people dream about New York is that the city is caught in an infinite feedback loop. The city is pop music, basement jazz, static and TV glow blue, articulate grime, rooftop dreamscape, and horns that rip through the sheen of night as yellow as the taxi cabs, as sharp as the headlights. The city quivers and steams as the metro pulses through. She turns tauntingly, so our gaze only glances over her good side. (All our faces are asymmetrical, why would the city be any better?) The real reason people dream about New York is that the city is always on camera.
Sophie knew this—in college she studied Discrepancies. The year before she arrived on campus, the faculty had developed a new and veiny field that strived to address the ways digital medias bleed into humanities bleed into the human experience bleed into experience bleed into medias. And maybe it would have been a success if every thesis hadn’t had the same conclusion: nothing adds up. Sophie had defended her position for hours, in a stuffy sterile classroom that overlooked a clean green campus, and the whole time, her advisor sat nervously outside the door. His pleated tweed pants leg made soft crinkling sounds as his knee bounced up and down and his hearing aid picked it up, dialed up to the max with hopes that he could overhear the defense too. Every time he caught the mumble of “I don’t—” his heart paused in an anticipation of the little deadly word, “know.” But then he would sigh as the sentences evolved into “I don’t believe,” and then some well-worded argument to talk the panel down. Sophie suspected the professor was outside the room, but as she elaborated, she imagined her words only clung to the panel before her, her role models sipping sparkling water from crystal glasses, propped up on elbows on the wide oak table that separated her from them. On this side: professors, on that side: academic plebes. In the end, she was awarded her diploma as a formality.
There was another man who watched the defense. An IT guy, maybe named Will or Bill, so zitty and interchangeable with the rest of the tech department that Sophie trusted him wholeheartedly. He monitored the camera and recorded the defenses perfectly. He kept the shot steady, bagged the good arguments and made sure the trash stayed out of frame. The sparkling water bottles, for example, that had been emptied into glitzy decanters. Then, when the Brains left the room, he adjusted the tripod and pivoted the camera. The crumpled paper, bottle labels, nervous waste twisted between sweaty fingers all disappeared with one wide sweep around the room.
*
Sophie knew the canon—that students who split off into the world with the dream of single-handedly running a more equitable show end up with more quittable jobs. And like all of them, she thought she could avoid the pitfalls. She believed herself inspired enough to be unique. She arrived on a bus in the afternoon with a backpack, a camcorder, and a Ziploc bag of spare batteries and memory devices. She carried her bags on one shoulder so she could tuck them under her arm like a momma bird shields her chick.
Halfway to her new apartment, she dipped into a cafe. Behind glittering glass, the sandwiches were all premade and labeled on tiny chalkboards. Chicken craisin croissant, goat cheese walnut arugula. The woman behind the counter shrugged at whatever she said, so Sophie pointed to one wrapped tightly in wax paper with a toothpick stabbed through the center. Her eyes wander to the city outside. Glistening! Gleaming! Splendidly shiny, straight from the movies!
“Want a bag for that, Hon?”
Sophie shook her head distractedly, and the woman quit trying to peel a plastic bag away from the staticky pile. Sophie took the wrap in one hand, and bumped the door open with her hip, back out into her reverie. She ate as she walked, bouncing with self-satisfaction despite the summer humidity. Sauce dripped down her chin, and she shrugged her shoulder to wipe the mess away. At her new doorstep, she fumbled and juggled her lunch, bumbled into the empty room waiting for her.
The apartment had been in the backdrop of Hallmark film after Hallmark film, and even though the movies weren’t her style, Sophie was just enough of a romantic to fall for it. She had a built-in shelf, and hardwood floors, a sink, and a stovetop. Somebody had left behind a half-full trash bag and a milk crate in the corner of the studio.
Her bags dropped to the floor with a soft thud and rattle of plastics. Most of the SD cards and thumb drives in her sandwich bag were empty, hungry, but a few held the scattered drafts of projects Sophie had attempted in college. She rummaged for a blank one, and popped it into her old camcorder, once silver, now tarnished and grey. In her fist, she crumpled the waste from her lunch and her receipt and her ticket stub and tossed them into the trash bag. Then she twisted open the monitor on her camcorder, pressed record, and turned the lens towards the rubbish.
The trash blurred, seemed to fade slightly under her gaze. Then, as Sophie pulled the trash into sharp focus, it vanished from the room. She clicked the camera shut again, and began to unpack, arranging her meager things on her shelf in what she would later call minimalist or poetic in a letter home to her mom.
*
The Official Industry Statement is that cinema cleans the world. Sophie watched the mission statements pour from the mouths of directors of The Golden Globes, the director of Cannes, the Spirit Awards, the BAFTAs. One after the other insisting that the future is in film. We’ve always tidied up our environments for a good shot, they said, and it was true. Thousands of films erase the rats from the subway until they need a rat, plenty of cities flood the streets to wash away the cigarette butts, pick up the litter, rake out the gardens just for one good scene that only includes the Necessary. The Romantic. The Communicative. That was the discrepancy—the world before and after the camera, in front of and behind, the blurring lines of realistic representation. The plan, the directors said, was to keep up the good work. Only with more intentionality, more integrity. Instead of tidying and restacking the junk, the debris, the city flotsam, they would clean it up. Their tones said permanence, but Sophie was a skeptic.
She made a montage, and it was her first big project. At the gateway to studying bottomlessness, Sophie crouched in front of her screen late into the night cutting from newsreels and press releases, splicing together clips about the potential of film. She projected it onto a white board in a lecture hall and her friends nodded performatively, scratched their chins or tugged at their sleeves, and said but how is it a critique? First, Sophie gawked at them and then she vowed to make her work more transparent. Finding speech patterns of empty promises, buzz words, and hot commodities wasn’t enough. In the next iteration, her roommate joked that she would be a hunchback soon, posture dissolved into the careful work of crossfading scenes of waste management centers. To Sophie, her goal was flawlessly clear, but her friends still played skeptic with deadpan so whats? She made it funkier, more experimental. Twisted colors out of proportion, revved up the contrast and exposure, dug into history. She bootleg downloaded the first five minutes of Le Mépris, old decaying Cinecitta at the heart of it—Sophie was never subtle, but she imagined she was subtly saying see, cinema has always been wasteful and riddled with abandonment. On screen, the directors promised elaborate official plots to clean the cities, plans to develop a system. But the politics were complicated here and spurred cinematic arguments—do we produce films in alphabetical order by city, or by the promise of an enthralling story, or by population distribution, or by critical environmental statuses?
*
Sophie, in a sleeping bag on the floor, was illuminated by the light of her phone, and practically buzzing with the noise of the city. On Tinder, romancers held red solo cups on the beach. Their chins were dented with endearing scars of dimples from hockey and football games past. In the dark, Sophie crafted dream dates. They meet at a bar, or walk through Central Park, or go to the movies. He, whoever he will be, is polite; he is interested in her. He even has a hobby or two that isn’t a contact sport. He offers to pick up the tab. Sophie’s mother’s voice chides her about stranger danger, so, in her foggy closeness to sleep, Sophie strings together phony phrases to vanquish her enemies, or at least keep the boys at bay. Scenario: he gets too handsy, so she calls him trashy. She trains her camera on his hands and he dissolves into pixels. She calls him a waste of time and seals his fate. He vanishes from the frame, and she finishes her drink or walk or movie on her own. Yes, maybe that would be her next production.
*
The second wave of inspiration came with the innovators, inventors, and listless influencers. An Instagram filter that filtered out waste from the background of photos suggested one of two solutions—imagine the beauty of the natural world or adopt an out of sight, out of mind philosophy. Then the millionaires tuned in to the fad and said, y’know what? We can do better. And money poured into reinventing the camera.
There must be some AI involved, that was the rumor, but most folks didn’t care how the machine worked. The cinema industry could film garbage and, in its wake, leave a sparkling gutter, a freshly mown lawn, a beautified riverbed where candy wrappers and bottle tabs once refused to decay.
*
Sophie knew LA and NYC, the abbreviatable cities, were the root problems in the first wave. They were awe-inspiring, so they were filmed again and again and the communities that asked for their fifteen minutes of fame, their Hollywood sponsored clean up, were ignored. Of course, there were small towns that gleamed with charm and were scrubbed down for small-town love stories. Revitalizing genres like Swashbuckling Pirate or Classic Cowboy pushed the clean up of deserts and small stakes of ocean. But it was never enough, and there were always, are always, invisible cities.
Secretly, Sophie considered herself a pioneer, or at least dreamed of being one. Even though she’d analyzed the towns and genres and environments that needed her and her little camcorder most, she desperately wanted the big city life. So, she set out for the street corners that escaped New York City glamorizations. She thought she would tackle one overpass at a time, one back-alley dumpster.
*
Her first weeks in the city blurred into one humid fever dream. Sophie ate oatmeal in the morning, waiting out the commuter rush before stalking out into the world. She imagined how by the end of summer she would be tanned—a pale stripe where the little canvas loop hugs her hand to the body of her camcorder. Behind apartment buildings, she filmed her feet and the concrete sea beneath them. With her viewfinder, she cleared paths through swathes of crushed bottle glass seconds before her foot landed on top. She giggled as she brought her view out of focus into focus, and plastic bags tangled in tree limbs looked briefly like clouds before vanishing clean from the trees. She chopped and bleached her hair, and sipped lavender, elderberry, or lemongrass cocktails while waiting for someone to tell her she looked like Andy Warhol. She donated her braids to a company that would tangle them with millions of other braids until they eventually became oil booms to send to one gulf or another. Sophie, buzzed on postgrad freedom, at the end of each night or beginning of each morning stumbled into her studio with the pride that she did good.
One night at the bar, the bouncer looked like Andy Warhol too, and on his break, he slipped over to the table where Sophie was storyboarding. He gestured at the empty chair, and she nodded. He raised his voice over the music and chatter. “Are you a film student too?” He asked.
Sophie shook her head, smiling wryly, “You don’t have to go to film school to be a filmmaker.”
“What’s it about?” He gestured to the notebook as Sophie closed it.
“Trash.”
The boy looked at her skeptically. “Trash and what?”
“Just trash.” Sophie said.
Now the boy shook his head. “First thing they’ll tell you in film school is that if you don’t have a plot, you’ll never sell.”
“I don’t need to sell. I don’t want to be a sellout.”
He leaned back casually, surveying her. “Oh, I see. You’re an avant-garde, aren’t you? Or an experimental filmmaker? That’s cute.”
She watched him unflinchingly. “What do you make, hm?”
The bouncer broke into a grin, “I thought you’d never ask. I make rom-coms.” He winked. “Listen, I work here on weeknights and in the quiet moments, I think up stories. Tell me how this one is.” He unspooled the story slowly and gently, and Sophie twirled the straw in her drink absently, waiting to find herself appear in the story. But the boy was genuine, and he had a true plot and some suburban setting, and a crew of friends on board.
Sophie glanced at her watch, and he said, “Yeah, you’re right, my break is probably up. But we’re shooting some scenes tomorrow. Come check it out.” And he wrote an address on a napkin before sauntering away.
In the morning, Sophie ate her oatmeal and tapped the address into her GPS. The shoot would be across the river in New Jersey, and she figured she could still meet her clean up quota, even if it was across state lines. She barely hesitated, then descended into the subway. As she waited for her train, she paced the length of the platform along the yellow line and swept her camera’s gaze along the third rail, zapping away cigarette filters, dropped reading glasses and snack wrappers. She hugged her bag with her camcorder to her chest as she watched the city out the train window, disappearing with the slowness of eyes absorbing distance.
She found the crew doubled over with peals of laughter in a parking lot, and the bouncer boy waved at her energetically as she approached. “One of our sound guys dipped on us today, think you can handle the boom?”
Sophie nodded slowly—she would have been baffled by the boy’s quick trust of her if only he wasn’t so transparent, watching her face, winking, stepping close to show her how to hold the mic before she shrugged him away with an “I know.”
The strange thing, Sophie thought, was that when a spare receipt danced in the wind it didn’t dissolve. Instead, it got stuck on a car’s wiper blades. When a soda can blew across the asphalt, rattling unevenly, the director yelled cut, and they reset the scene and the sound.
The audio call and response was starting, when Sophie interjected, interrupting sound rolling with her question: “why doesn’t it just disappear?”
The crew looked at her curiously, and the bouncer responded. “We don’t mind the world looking like the world in our shorts. We only reset when something really gets in the way.”
“But you’re filming digital.”
The boy shook his head: “Sure, but we don’t mess with the new tech anyways. It’s expensive, and it’s not all it’s chalked up to be.” Before Sophie could rebut, the boy leaned towards his tripod and called out, “Camera rolling!”
They filmed inside a pharmacy, in the park, in a residential neighborhood. Sophie’s arms started to ache with the second location change, but she held the boom for each and watched the crew dance around each other unabashedly. When finally, they called it a wrap, and the golden light of streetlamps started to flicker on, they boy walked up to her. He talked about new angles he wanted to try out at the next shoot, and she waited patiently as they walked toward the train station, for him to ask her out for dinner or a drink. But when they reached the platform, he handed her another piece of paper with an address scrawled on it. “Look, I’m headed outbound tonight, but you should check out this location soon. I think it’ll give you something for your movie.”
Once again, Sophie didn’t hesitate to follow her GPS blindly across the river and over the state lines. She had been calling her NYC expeditions field work, but now out in the industrial suburbs, this was field work.
*
It looked like a beach town, with sandy white grains accumulating in the sparse boulevards, in the cracks in the sidewalk, on the edges of steps leading up to apartments. But the architecture wasn’t pastel pinks or blues, and nobody strolled through the streets in bikinis or cover ups. The passersby wore business suits, blouses, sometimes tired jeans like the pedestrians of any other nondescript suburb. Plus, though Sofie, the map didn’t show her being near any body of water. The GPS was leading her through a neighborhood and beyond, and the further she went, the grainier the streets got.
At a busy corner, she watched a woman sweeping her front steps as she waited for the light to change. She watched her straw broom scratch rhythmically over the concrete steps, and when the woman looked up, they made eye contact. Instead of looking quickly away, Sophie gave a slight wave and greeted the woman.
The woman didn’t wave back, and she said, “What’re you lookin’ at?” She spoke like it was an accusation more than a question.
“I’m looking for the management center, ma’am. Am I going the right way?”
The woman scoffed and swept the grit with enough force, that the grains stippled Sophie’s legs and scattered across her feet. Her mouth parted, surprised, and the women said brusquely, “Just follow the dunes, Princess,” gesturing further down the road. Sophie kept on, and the heaps grew taller by the block.
Eventually, she came to a dead end, marked by a chain draped between two posts and a small aluminum sign that read “No trespassing.” It did look like a sand dune, though the grains were too coarse and grey here to be sand. And it didn’t feel like sand either, Sophie thought, as she stepped over the chain and began squabbling up the dune for a better view.
She could see the refinery from the crest, and below her, a handful of jumpsuited workers shoveling at the edge of a parking lot. Too close and too curious to turn back, Sophie slipped down the other side of the hill towards them.
“Hey!” She called out, and the nearest worker turned towards her. He was tan, and grimacing. He coughed in response.
“What is all this?”
“Waste,” he said. “From the management center.” He gestured towards a big plume of steam snaking up from a concrete smokestack. It hung thick over the refinery, waiting for a breeze to carry it off.
“Waste?” she echoed, and when the man nodded, she pulled out her camera. She focused it at the pile the man had been shoveling, and it seemed to fade a bit. She focused her camera, and the mass lightened slowly, becoming transparent enough to see the tarmac through the blur, before it finally disappeared. But the instant it did, a breeze caught up, and the steam cloud shifted towards Sophie. White grain sifted down from the sky like flour.
Her eyes were starting to sting, and Sophie rubbed frantically. She blinked back reflex tears. She’d never seen anything so stubborn and resistant to her camera before. She was stumbling over her thoughts, rushing to find words. “I’ve got a film crew! We could come in tomorrow and start the clean up. You don’t need to shovel—look, I can even start today.”
The man chuckled. “Turn that nonsense off, you’re only purifying it.”
Her footage was still rolling, eating a small hole into the dune like a pinprick of sunlight concentrated through a magnifying glass. The falling grains were starting to resemble hail now. They gathered in her hair, and she shielded her eyes as if from a dusty wind.
“What kind of waste could it be?”
“Kid, this is waste waste. It ain’t sand or snow, those’re pixels you’ve got in your eyes.”
A sharp whistle cut through the air, and the shovelers stopped. It sounded like an old tornado alarm, or something to call a volunteer firefighting team from the far edges of town. Her eyes watered against the grains, like she’d been struck by a full season’s load of pollen. “Every single SD card I filled—”
The whistle sounded again, and the man gestured at Sophie, “Come on inside, kid, we’re about to have a white out.” He pulled a pair of scratched sunglasses from his pocket and slipped them on, then guided her with a gentle but firm hand on her upper arm. “And this isn’t you, not really. It’s probably an action movie, one of those Keanu Reeves kinds. Industry.” He wasn’t in a rush, but he didn’t waste a second either, marching towards shelter. Sophie’s camcorder slipped from her limp hands, and though she twisted around to pick it up, her efforts were meek. The pixels were falling heavier, and the man kept leading her towards the Management Center door.
Inside, he handed her a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a paper packet of synthetic sugar. Out the window, the world faded white with pixels, and the camcorder was slowly buried in the drift.
Emma Fuchs (rhymes with books) is a poet, printmaker, and aspiring filmmaker. Emma has many homes but she currently lives in New York City and dreams of endless summer. She is a poetry reader for TriQuarterly and the winner of Foundlings Press’ 2022 Ralph Angel Poetry Prize. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Figure 1, perhappened mag, Pidgeonholes, and Neon Door.