The Strange French Movie

It was 1:00 AM on a Tuesday, and the only other living souls awake on that stretch of Galena Road were about two hundred hogs, and even they had the sense to stop squealing for a few hours. At fifteen years old, tucked into the well-worn black-and-beige plaid-woven couch our family seemed reluctant to discard, I laid very still, like a stowaway hiding out in a hold, bathed in the flickering, radioactive glow of the spare black-and-white TV. The family was dead to the world in their bedrooms—my parents buried under the weight of quilts, careers, bills, ever-wilding teenagers and a brand of being busy that made my existence feel like a commercial they had seen too many times and decided to mute to maintain a level of sanity.

On the TV a scene unfolded. A nurse pushed a man in a wheelchair into a stark, vast solarium and then left him there alone for a long time before returning and silently rolling him away.

There was no dialog during several iterations of this scene as its mundaneness began to grate, until the man in the wheelchair uttered some unintelligible words spoken with great effort and strain. The nurse obviously didn't understand him, patted him on the arm and exited the solarium yet again where he sat in silence, unmoving for uncomfortable minutes.

I'm just about to get up and twist the channel selector knob on the old TV when it changes, this time showing two nurses rolling two different wheelchair-bound men into the solarium. This arrangement stuck for several scene cycles without anything else happening, almost drawing me off of the couch to angrily twist the TV's knob to something more action packed.

Then the two men began talking to each other in their unintelligible gibberish, at first hesitantly, then more vigorously as they realized they understood each other perfectly fine.

In subsequent scenes their conversations became more animated but still unintelligible. At times they seemed to be in total disagreement with each other over some subject or other, and in total, delighted agreement during other talking scenes, all spoken in total gibberish.

One day they pantomimed to a nurse, requesting pencil and paper, and composed a short note to her. She read it, expressed surprise and excitement, and the next scenes played out with the men as roommates working furiously on some mysterious project only they knew of.

Then the nurses began speaking intelligibly in the movie, but in French. Luckily, though, English subtitles appeared as their conversations, while still vague about what was going on, were at least not the gibberish being pumped out constantly by the collaborating roomies.

So I was watching this French movie in the wee hours of the morning, alone in the upstairs room on the old couch—at least I think it was French, the subtitles are crawling across the bottom of the screen like ants at a picnic—and it was one of the strangest movies I’ve ever watched. First there was the old guy in a wheelchair being parked each day alone in a room so big and empty it looked like the inside of a whale’s ribcage. A nurse in a uniform so white it actually hurt my eyes wheeled him in, left him, shutting the door as she departed. And then? Nothing. For like, ten minutes. Just him there all alone, motionless, staring at nothing in particular with a face that looked like a crumpled-up paper sack. No soundtrack. No noise.

He tried infrequently to talk to the nurse, and good grief, it was like watching a man try to lift a tractor with his vocal cords. He’d strain, his face turning a deep, angry plum color, pushing out short, jagged little sounds that didn't mean a thing to her. She just nodded and wheeled him in and out of the room like he was a piece of furniture that needed daily airing out. And suddenly, I wasn't not in Bristol, Illinois anymore. I was sitting on a porch in Kingston, Oklahoma, many summers ago, watching my great uncle Orville who liked to be called Nub.

I called him Brother as his sister, my grandmother, always did.

Brother lived in a world where every word was a heavyweight wrestling match. He’d look at you, eyes wide and desperate, and you could see the words queuing up in his head, but by the time they hit the air, they were mangled—short, one-word bursts that felt like they’d been dragged over broken glass. Except, of course, when he got mad. If he dropped a fork or spoon, or he stubbed his toe, he’d let out a string of curses so clear and poetic you’d think he’d spent his life on an x-rated Shakespearean stage. It was like his anger was the only key that could unlock the circuit connecting his brain to his vocal cords. A real cuss-o-rama.

Seeing this old guy on the TV, I realized that’s exactly what Brother must have felt all of his years living behind a wall of static-laden signals, and how I was feeling then, being fifteen, vibrating with thoughts about girls, and purpose, and the fact that in three years, I would very likely be handed an M16 and trained to shoot it while running in a crouch through kneedeep rice paddy water, on a one-way, deadly junket skirting a Vietnam jungle. I remember trying to tell my dad about the tunnel vision I'd get when thinking about the draft, how the future felt like a narrowing hallway, and he would just tell me to make sure to do my chores. I’m jabbering in a language he don't know the frequency for tuning into.

Then, the movie shifted. Another nurse brings in the second man in a wheelchair. They sat there in their wheelchairs in a silence that felt a mile deep and had me eyeballing the TV knob until—boom—they started talking. To the nurses, it’s just more noise. But to these two guys? They were practically singing. They were sharing notes, scribbling on paper like their lives depended on it. The nurses watched and talked in French about it without knowing much more than I did of what mysterious project the yikyakking roommates were working on.

Then the final scene of the movie appeared on screen, suddenly and without ample warning. The two wheelchair-bound, gibberjabbering men were dressed to the nines in formalwear at an awards event which looked suspiciously like a Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. Medals were being draped around their necks while the audience, also decked out, clapped very politely.

The movie ended, the National Anthem started to play, the screen faded to a snowy hiss. Stunned, I rose from the old couch, gently pressed the TV's off button, crept through the dark house, its old floorboards groaning under my feet, and crawled into bed just as the clock ticked to 3:00 AM. As I drifted off, the hog farm faded away. I wasn't a draftee-to-be; I was in a tuxedo, in a wheelchair next to Brother, and we were on that stage together. He wasn't straining anymore. He was leaning over, whispering a string of elloquently-delivered curse words into my ear in crystal-clear English, and I was listening intently, grinning broadly.