Rated X for Projection
The fluorescent tube above Anderson's chair cast the kind of light that made everyone look three days dead. Six metal chairs in a semicircle. Six notepads, college-ruled. Someone had left a bran muffin on the folding table, and it sat there all evening like a seventh committee member, dry and mute, contributing about as much as Stevens.
Johnson uncapped her Montblanc the way other people cross themselves before entering a church. She set the cap beside her notepad, aligned it, the way a priest sets the chalice down after communion.
Edwards squared her notepad to the table's edge, laid the pen perpendicular, folded her reading glasses and placed them in the corner closest to her right hand.
Anderson sat with his tie loosened and his sleeves cuffed to the elbow, the posture of a man who once built things and now sat on committees about things other people built. Stevens wore headphones slung around his neck, the cord wrapped twice around his fist. He'd already written the date on a fresh page and underlined it.
I opened my laptop. The screen threw blue light across the folding table, caught the muffin's crumbled edge, the dust on Johnson's pen cap, the scratch marks in the linoleum where six chairs had carved the same arcs every week for years. The projector bulb had been cooking dust all day, and the room tasted like it.
The projectionist pressed play and left without looking at us.
The lights died. The projector's beam cut through the dark, and the dust motes drifting inside it each trailed a shadow too small to see.
The film opened on clouds. Soft cumulus over a meadow, the kind of sky they mount on dentist's ceilings to calm you while someone roots around in your mouth. We wrote nothing for two full minutes. By our standards, this qualified as generosity.
Then Johnson leaned forward. The Montblanc hovered above her notepad, trembling.
"That one." Her voice barely carried. "Second from the left. Do you see the shape?"
Five necks rotated in near-unison, like barn owls tracking a mouse across a field.
The cloud hung long and bulbous, lit copper at the edges by the last of the sun. A shape. The kind you'd find in a Rorschach blot, or in the frost on a windshield, or in the grain of a bathroom door you've stared at too long in a house gone quiet.
Someone laughed. The laugh died fast, strangled by the room's acoustics.
"This can't be accidental," Anderson said. He pressed his pen into his notebook until the page dimpled. "A metaphor. For carnal unity."
His voice dropped to a register I'd heard only once, when he'd described to Edwards the load-bearing capacity of a cathedral arch. The hush of a man unveiling something sacred.
Stevens wrote:
shadow = sex???
He stared at what he'd written, scratched out two of the question marks, and left the third standing alone. Stevens treated punctuation as a moral stance.
We pressed play. The cloud dissolved into a cobblestone street, a man walking a terrier past half-timbered houses, their shadows pooling long in the afternoon light. Johnson had already filled a quarter page. Anderson worked his tie down another inch, the knot riding lower on his chest, as if the material required a looser relationship with his own throat. Edwards underlined three words so hard the paper tore.
At 22:40, the film introduced doughnuts.
A baker's dozen on a wire rack in a kitchen flooded with morning light. Powder-sugared. Cream-filled. The camera lingered on them the way cameras linger on faces in perfume ads.
Children entered the frame. Three of them, laughing, reaching with small sticky hands. Sugar dust rose from the rack, each grain suspended and turning in the light.
Edwards sat forward so fast her chair shrieked against the linoleum, and the sound bounced off the cinder-block walls and came back flattened.
"The boy's tongue," she said. "Watch the boy's tongue on the glaze."
We rewound. We watched. A boy of seven or eight licked a doughnut. Sugar crystals caught the light on his upper lip. He grinned. Bit down. A ribbon of cream curled from the center.
"Sick," Stevens said. He wrote the word on his notepad and circled it.
Nobody spoke. The circle on Stevens's notepad sat there the way the muffin sat there, a small hard shape the rest of us could see and none of us touched. We wrote it down. All of us. Pens moving in the dark like insects tracing patterns on glass.
The children's laughter came through the speakers, bright and loose, the kind that starts in the belly and hasn't yet learned where it isn't welcome. I watched Edwards watching the screen, her pen cutting short violent strokes across the page, her throat working, swallowing against something. Her grid had gone crooked. The notepad sat at an angle to the table's edge, the pen no longer perpendicular, the glasses nudged from their corner. In eleven years of Tuesdays, the grid had never broken.
I wrote:
22:40 — children / doughnuts / cream — requires further review.
The air in the room had thickened, tasted metallic and close, the way air tastes before a storm or after someone has said the thing that can't unsay itself. Anderson's pen hovered without touching down. Johnson had capped the Montblanc and laid it flat on the table, which, for Johnson, carried the weight of a soldier grounding arms.
We pressed play.
At 47:18, a grandmother filled the screen.
She sat in a wingback chair by a fireplace, knitting. Burgundy yarn. Aluminum needles, size eight, catching the firelight each time they surfaced from the wool.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
"The rhythm," Jones said. He'd sat silent for twenty minutes, filling his pages in dense cramped shorthand. Now he traced a finger across the screen.
"Phallic," he said. "The insertion angle."
"Vaginal," Anderson said. "The receiving loop."
"Both," Edwards said.
The grandmother's hands worked in the firelight, steady as a metronome, the aluminum catching and releasing light with each stitch. She wore a cardigan buttoned to the throat. Wool socks on the ottoman. The camera held her face for eight seconds, and she did nothing more than count stitches, her lips moving without sound.
Stevens pulled his headphones off. Fitted them back on. Pulled them off again. The cord swung and tapped the table.
"She reminds me of my mother," he said.
Nobody answered. Stevens fitted the headphones over his ears and leaned toward the speakers, his whole upper body tipping forward in the metal chair, eyes closed, lips parted. Whatever he heard in that grandmother's knitting, in the tick tick tick of aluminum through wool, it pulled him toward the screen the way a child tilts toward a nightlight.
We muted the film. The silence that followed rang louder than the needles.
My pen rested on the table beside the laptop. My hands sat in my lap, fingers laced. I noticed the stillness the way you notice you've been holding your breath: only after, when the body's quiet becomes louder than the room. The others kept writing. Five pens scratching paper, a sound like mice behind plaster.
Five pens. Mine sat still. We sat like that through the next twelve minutes of coastline and wildflowers and a horse standing alone in a field, none of it worth documenting, until at 1:04 the protagonist stepped to the edge of a cliff. Below, the ocean ground the rocks. A gull crossed the frame, wings spread, riding a thermal that bent the grass along the cliff's edge.
Jones dropped his pen. It rolled under his chair and he let it go.
"The gull's shadow," he said.
The bird passed between the sun and the cliff face, and its shadow swept the grass, a dark shape that stretched and contracted over the uneven ground. Less than a second.
Jones saw a womb. Johnson saw a mouth. Anderson saw the blueprint of something that could never stand. Edwards's pen stopped, and she stared at the screen with an expression I'd seen once, years ago, when she'd arrived at a Tuesday meeting with her grid already laid, her notepad already squared, and a pale band on her ring finger. She'd said nothing then. She said nothing now. Her face did what faces do when the body remembers something the mouth has agreed to forget.
I saw a bird.
I picked up my pen. Set it down. Picked it up. The gull circled back into frame, wings tilted, riding the updraft, and it stayed a bird, white feathers and hollow bones and a brain the size of a walnut scanning the water for fish. It carried no metaphors. It rode the wind because the wind existed and riding it cost nothing.
I wrote:
1:04 — gull / cliff / shadow — phallic silhouette in flight path, vaginal rock formations below waterline.
My handwriting matched the others'. The same cramped institutional shorthand, the same clinical vocabulary stripped of everything that makes language human. I stared at what I'd written, at the way the words sat on the ruled page, neat and definitive, and I felt the projector's heat on my face, the cinder-block walls holding stale air like cupped hands around a dead match.
The credits rolled at 1:22. White text on a black screen. Forty-three people and a terrier had made this film, and none of them had set out to fill a basement with phantoms.
Anderson stood first. He pulled his tie back to his collar, cinching the knot, restoring the formality the evening had loosened.
"They knew what they were doing," Anderson said.
The room received this the way the room received everything: with the scratch of pens and the small nodding motions of people confirming what they'd decided before the lights went down.
I typed the report on the committee laptop, a beige Dell from 2011 with a stuck spacebar that forced a pause between every word. Rated X for Projection, I wrote. The director must address these transgressions. The subliminal content pervades every frame. The committee recommends restricted classification pending full review.
I printed it. The inkjet groaned and delivered a single warm page, ink still wet, smeared where my thumb grazed the margin.
Edwards reached the door first. Her glasses sat folded in their case, her notepad squared inside her bag, the grid restored.
"Same time next week?" she said.
"Same time next week."
She left. Jones followed, his pen still under his chair. Johnson capped the Montblanc and slid it into her breast pocket, left side, and her hand stayed there, pressing the pen against her ribs the way you press a palm to a wound to check if it still bleeds.
Anderson waited until the hall had emptied. He stood at the door, one hand on the light switch, eyes on the blank screen.
"Do you think," he said, and stopped. Cleared his throat. "Do you think anyone actually watches these? After we rate them?"
The question hung in the column of dust still drifting where the projector's beam had been, particles settling now on the folding table, on the muffin, on the chairs where we'd spent ninety minutes finding shapes in light because finding them cost less than asking why we looked.
I said nothing. The question had no address.
He flipped the switch. The fluorescent tube stuttered and went dark.
We walked out through the lot, past Stevens, who sat in his Corolla with the engine off and the window cracked, headphones on, listening to something none of us could hear.
I got in my car. The lot held nothing except Stevens's Corolla and the yellow wash of a security lamp bolted to the building's corner. I fit the key in the ignition and left it there.
Above the lot, past the lamp's halo, the sky had gone to full dark except where clouds caught the city's glow. They drifted slow and pale against the black, lit from below, their edges soft, their centers holding shadow.
That story is one of forty-eight.
Dead Men Talk and Other Stories collects them: husbands who drive past houses they still pay the mortgage on, wives who keep score in carats and silence, committees who find filth in clouds because finding it costs less than asking why they look. No one gets saved. Everyone lives with what they chose.
The book leaves the kind of marks you find in the shower two days later and can't explain.
