Zack Finch
AFTER BEFORE SUNRISE
An American man and a Parisian woman are on a train between Budapest and Vienna. He’s reading All I Need Is Love by the actor Klaus Kinski; she’s reading something by Bataille. They look up when a German couple begins arguing a few rows ahead, and their eyes meet. It’s just a momentary glance, but now they remember their bodies. Bored with reading, they talk a little. It’s 1995, an era when Americans traveled abroad with earnestness and impunity. A few minutes later they are walking down the aisle to the lunch car.
Plot summary is boring. Fortunately, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise is an ode to the plotless eros of conversation, the unpredictable pas de deux of talk, the beautiful badminton. In the lunch car, Jesse talks about seeing the ghost of his dead grandmother when he was three, through the spray of a garden hose. He explains his fanciful idea for a new TV show: 365 people around the world will agree to record their lives, twenty-four hours a day—the poetry of real life, you know—though the part he can’t quite figure out is how to get all those tapes to play simultaneously.
Another idea comes to him as the train slows for Vienna. What if she gets off with him and they explore the city together all night until sunrise? Just hear me out. Imagine it’s twenty years from now, and you’re married, and your marriage is in a tailspin, and you start remembering all the people you briefly flirted with, those random charmers you might have taken up with, but didn’t. Well, get off the train now, and discover how disappointing we really are. Prove to your future self that you didn’t miss out on anything. Then you can renew your vows to your spouse and live happily ever after.
I fell in love for the first time while living “abroad” in the late nineties. Inside my turquoise two-person tent, above the shores of Lake Malawi. We were two white people backpacking across the African continent after doing six months of “volunteer work” with a Scandinavian NGO in Zimbabwe, a neocolonialist enterprise. We were so oblivious to our surroundings that the cabbie who drove us from the Giza pyramids to our hotel cursed us for caressing and kissing in the backseat. She went back to the States a week later, we disentangled in the Cairo airport, and I took a tearful bus ride at sunrise through the Sinai Desert toward Jerusalem. A few hours after I disembarked, the Mahane Yehuda marketplace was bombed, sixteen people dead. My friend Danny met me just inside the walls of the old city, by the tower of David, holding a cell phone, the first I’d ever seen.
Nostalgia: phones don’t exist in Before Sunrise, or they exist only the way tin cans do for children. In one late-night scene in a café booth, Céline takes out an imaginary phone (pinkie to mouth, index to ear) and makes Jesse play the part of her best friend. What, you got off the train with a total stranger, he asks? Just because of his blue eyes, she says, and his greasy hair. Later they “take a picture” of each other on their way to the Westbahnhof train station, by gazing into each other’s eyes, etching the instant into their brains. Importantly, they decide against exchanging phone numbers and addresses. Calling or writing, that would only pervert the nature of their bond. There must be no substitute for the intimacy of physical coincidence, for the mystery of being in the same place at the same time. Instead, they agree to meet each other in exactly six months, at six p.m., right here, on Track Nine. Richard Linklater’s film is so precious, such an apotheosis of fin de siècle American innocence that you either fall for it or you hate it, it’s such the diametric negative of something like Hiroshima, Mon Amour, in which to escape from history, into a stranger’s arms, is simply unfathomable.
I once met someone in a restaurant in Guilford, Connecticut, the town where I was house-sitting for six months. I was the only customer there. Toward the end of my lunch, the waitress knelt down beside me and asked if I knew of any English classes being taught in the area. I didn’t, but agreed to take her number and would call if I found anything.
In the house where I was sitting there was a shelf full of old children’s books. Over the next few months, we practiced reading Beatrix Potter volumes, I recall The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies especially, then would go for a walk in the woods, or along the Long Island Sound. There was no logic to our having met, except that she was nine thousand miles away from home and I was living in a town where I knew not a soul. Later, we moved to Brooklyn together, a tiny sublet in Gowanus, two little rooms stacked on top of one another, connected by a narrow black spiral staircase. We spent the summer traipsing through New York City. Nobody knew who we were or cared what we were about. We had been thrown together by circumstances so cryptic and unsponsored, nothing could explain her head leaning against my shoulder on the subway. We went with it, all summer, until her visa ran out after six months. We said goodbye one night at JFK.
If there’s any magic in this world, “it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something,” says Céline. Nothing should exist except this little hourglass between us.
Jesse and Céline resemble those frozen figures on Keats’s Grecian urn, the moment before their lips touch. Yes, they are like children from a fairy tale who have vanished from their parents. Their arms swing loosely from their shoulders—they have no baggage—it’s June 16th, Bloomsday. But unlike the jostling subjectivities of Joyce’s Dublin, their Vienna is an empty homeostasis. When other people appear, they cross the sidewalks and piazzas singly, silently, like figures in an architectural sketch. Vienna protects this young couple; it’s their open city. Vienna furnishes only harmless, furtive stimuli to this couple without a past—a fortune teller reads their palms, a bohemian beggar writes them a poem, a bartender donates a bottle of wine. Neither nature nor history exists—no rainstorms, no demonstrations. It’s a hollow world comprised of two people in a globe without snow, in a world without suffering, without history or death.
Today, Jesse and Celine would be texting updates to their friends. Everyone today is so busy searching for each other, the doomsayers say, we seldom look up from our devices. They say the human art of talk is atrophying. So, too, solitude, empathy, boredom. The aura that formerly surrounded the other person’s body is decaying, they say, in our attempts to bring everything closer to use. Aura: “the unique phenomena of a distance, however close you may be,” Walter Benjamin describes it. “If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”
She had taken off her heels, I had taken off my tie. We had met twelve hours before at my cousin’s wedding—she was a bridesmaid, I had read an ode by Neruda. Now we were sitting in the grass, outside the hotel where she was staying, which we didn’t want to enter, for that would spell the end of the night, even though the sky was starting to whiten above the buildings in midtown Atlanta. She was engaged to a computer programmer in Athens, I was living at the tip of Cape Cod. A few months later a letter came to my parents’ address, containing several slides of her art, wildly phallic ceramic sculptures—enormous, mushroomy, dream-spawned penises. I held them to the light. Later I wrote back. Eventually we spent five years together, fed by the potential energy of that single night, that conversation we would strive and finally fail to live up to. This is the impossible romance of Jesse and Céline’s adventure: their vow that this will be their only night together. No claims, no fictions. After sunrise, they’ll shove off into their separate worlds. They seal this commitment, not with a kiss, whose heat would unseal it, but by clasping their palms across the table, four hands forming a Heraclitean cairn, a hilt of skin and bone. No sequels. Nothing lasts. “I love the way the people seem to be dissolving into the background,” she whispers, bending to look closer at the reproduction of a pointillist painting by Seurat on a poster for an exhibition they will never see. “It’s like the environment is stronger than the people.”
The environment is stronger than the people. The spring of 1993 when I was studying in Lyon (the years are getting muddled now), my grandfather died of a sudden coronary. I had spoken to him from a phone booth in Arles just a few days before. Before we could say goodbye, we got disconnected, and since I was out of coins, and because there was a long line of people waiting for the booth, I told myself I’d call him back in a few days, which I never did. He had met my grandmother forty-nine years before, when his bunkmate at an army base in Biloxi, Mississippi, gave him the address of someone he knew—all the other soldiers had someone to write to but him. They wrote religiously for six months, until one day he boarded a train, got off at Penn Station, got engaged a few days later, and stayed married for half a century. After he died, my grandmother spoke mainly bitterly about him, and I would remember the twin beds they slept in, separately.
Jesse and Céline end up living together, too, violating their romantic vows. Sequels ensue. Great suffering ensues. By the end of the third film, Before Midnight, they have been together for eight years, they have twin daughters, and they more or less disgust each other.
I’m writing this at the blunted end of my own marriage. The way we met was through an internet dating service. Browsing, we saw each other’s profiles—me placed strategically on a sofa between my nephew and niece, to indicate my suitability as a future father; she was holding a trombone and gazing into the middle distance, to indicate some private vision. We corresponded for a few weeks, then met up in town. The coffee shop where we’d agreed to meet was closed, so we walked around instead, sat on park benches, circled the road around Occom Pond. We walked all day and into the evening. Even though I knew that we weren’t the best match, we tied the knot the following year. The problem, as I told our therapist through years of weekly talks, was that I wanted to converse deeply and broadly with her, like Jesse and Céline. I wanted honest talk, I wanted daily encounters on the bridge of flowers, I wanted us to remain sufficiently strange to one another so that we’d be continually piqued, pierced, spurred, driven to touch the other person’s secrecy, their pit, to brush the flesh that protects their solitude. I wanted the warp and weft of language to abridge us, but it felt like playing tennis with someone who didn’t get what the racket was for, which explained the hundreds of yellow balls lying unreturned against the fence behind her, so I thought. And she felt acute loneliness as well; she felt withered and neglected, like a dying flower, because I was always on the other side, waiting or demanding something she couldn’t provide. She wanted me to walk around the net, and embrace her, and love her beyond words.
And so we walked off the court and will never come back. I’ve been delivered here, to my solitude. It’s very wide.
Inside, I can rummage around. I have a yellow suitcase, an old one without wheels. Inside there are hundreds of cassette tapes. Some are mixes I made as a kid; others harbor voices from the past. I take one out and lay it in the bed of the stereo; it’s an audio letter recorded by my first partner the summer she lived in Ecuador, in the rain forest, where she was tracking hummingbirds with a conservancy group. And the thing about this tape is that she hardly says a word. You hear just the hiss of morning rain, the squawk of birds in the canopy. You hear the whirring of the tape itself, like the high-pitched whine of the body’s nervous system, the rain forest static like the sound of listening itself, the wow and flutter of sound pressed into echo. I hear her cough once, so I know she’s sitting there beside the recorder, listening too. She recorded these sounds to share them with me, across the phenomena of space and time, that little hourglass of silence. I remember being disappointed when I first received it in the mail, now twenty years ago; I had wanted her to speak to me, to renew our vows. But now, I get it. This transmission reveals the sizzling microwave radiance of the cosmos itself. The sound of time, of distance, of rain falling softly on leaves, is better than any voice, is truer than any admission, confession, or avowal. We are speeding away from each other at the speed of light. Space is steadily expanding. We can turn our heads for a moment, look back toward our beginnings, remember the days when we seemed to live and travel freely, go to bars, strike up talk with strangers. We can recall all the contingencies that got us this far. But there’s no use in trying to restore anything. The past? I’ve been there. It’s endless stars all the way down.
ZACK FINCH is the author of essays recently published in The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, New England Review, and Socrates on the Beach. He teaches writing and literature at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, Massachusetts.
