Ray smiled.
"That's the trouble with movies these days, Jake. There's no romance anymore. And I don't mean that boy-meets-girl-and-they-fall-in-love crap, either. Hell, if you ask me, there's too much of that as it is..." he paused.
"No, what I mean is there's no more romance of the Word. Image is everything. It seems as if every movie that comes out is only trying to be gorier than the last one. How much more desensitized can we get? No. Movies have lost sight of language. When's the last time you heard someone say more than three lines in a movie? It just doesn't happen. Take this situation, for example. If this were a movie, we'd be flying along this highway without another car in sight, instead of stuck behind this K-car and its fucking bumper stickers. You'd be at the wheel, silent but strong-like, and I'd be sitting here with a pair of slick shades on, looking all cool and shit; meanwhile there's this catchy tune playing in the background, and the scene would last what, four, maybe five minutes? And what would we say to each other? Nothing. That's my point. We're losing touch with our own language. Every word should be crucial to the film, none of this superficial monosyllabic crap that is fed to us... there should be magic wrapped around every sentence, music in every utterance. Movies should change the way people speak - the audience should stumble numbly out of their seats - not just because they saw some guy get drawn and quartered, but because they just heard some guy pour out his soul to express his love for this woman. There's beauty in words, man - we haven't lost it yet. But we're so close. Every day goes by and another word winks out of being. Every day we progress towards a duller, grayer world... well, maybe not grayer, buy you know what I mean." He paused again. He sighed, poking absent-mindedly at the folds in his jeans.
"I'm losing it. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I want to be impressed by films again, not simply stunned by flashy effects. That's what romance of the word is. You go into a cinema, and come back out with the dialogue echoing inside your brain. Like when you suddenly and inexplicably find yourself with your jaw hanging open as you stare at a beautiful woman. Romance of the word. That raw, burning outburst of emotion that short circuits your body; jolting it back into life. I wonder if that can still happen. I wonder if it's not already too late. I want to sit in some darkened theatre listening - just listening - and see if I can feel those little electric shocks up and down my spine. I want to shiver at the beauty of a sentence, or better yet the at the silence between sentences, that tiny pause in which the meaning of the words you've just heard catches up to you. Then bang - you're off again, trying to understand the complex nuances of the feelings laid bare before you. Maybe that's why it will never happen. I'm stuck here in this purgatory of explosions and severed body parts; this hell of one-liners and inarticulate grunts... that's what this is Jake. We're in a cinematic hell. And you know what makes it all the worse? This damn vision of a cinematic heaven."
Jake glanced over at his friend.
"You talk too much, man," he said as he turned his eyes back to the road and smiled.
"Did I ever tell you about the time I met that woman down in Mexico? I was in this little bar, in some town whose name I can't even remember, and I had been drinking pretty heavily when this absolutely stunning woman sat down beside me. Now, I don't mean she was what you call slack-jaw beautiful, but there was something about her that I just can't explain... some magnetic quality that just made me want to tell her my deepest darkest secrets..." He trailed off, lost in the memory.
"Well, did you? What did you tell her?"
"That's the strange thing. I started telling her about this alarm clock that I used to have. I don't know why, but it just started coming out. I had this alarm clock that had some strange electrical fault with it: it used to show the time my alarm was set for, which was 7:30, or it would sort of flicker and flash gibberish at me when I looked at it. I used to make jokes about how it was aliens trying to contact me, and shit like that. But after a while, it got out of hand - I would wake up suddenly in the middle of the night, roll over, and there it would be: winking at me in the darkness. It was really unnerving. I remember laughing nervously at it, and it seemed to flicker even more at me, and I got the distinct impression that it was laughing right back at me, so I started laughing even harder at the absurdity of it all. Here was this fucked-up clock flashing nonsense at some obscene hour, faced by this even more fucked-up guy laughing his guts out at it. It really was absurd; I'm almost ashamed to bring it up. Anyways, I finish telling the story and bang, this girl is kissing me. Anyway, it turns out that not only did she live in Vancouver, but she lived like twenty minutes away from me, and we ended up getting together for a while. The last night I saw her, I remember asking her why she kissed me that night - I'd been wondering for a while, but I had never brought it up - she looked at me and said ' I'd never kissed a madman before'. We made love that night to the steady red glow of my alarm claock... when I woke up the next morning, she was gone. I went over to her place, but it was like nobody had ever been there; the windows were boarded up and everything. I went back home, looked at my alarm clock, and it was flashing the word 'ODD' over and over again... I can't remember what I did next. But my clock never flashed at me again. It works perfectly to this day... I sometimes wonder if it was all a dream, but I can't kid myself for long; I wonder what would happened if I had just kept my mouth shut. Maybe I would have been picked up by aliens or something..." he smirked.
Ray turned to look out the window again, leaving his friend to his nostalgia.
"Ray?"
"Yeah?"
"When are you gonna take that mask off?"
"I told you, when we get there. Christ."
Ray was sporting a Mexican wrestling mask that some friends had bought for him as a gag birthday gift. It was a particularly splendid mask, with ornate swirling patterns of white leather carefully stitched onto a metallic green lame fabric and a pair of bright blue horns jutting out of it. He had been wearing it ever since Jake had picked him up that morning and had steadfastly refused to offer any explanation for wearing it. Jake had had no problem with the mask or the fact that Ray was wearing it until they had stopped to fill up at a small gas station later on in the day. In fact, it had been pretty funny watching the reactions of other drivers as the caught sight of Ray. Countless double-takes, expressions of shock and dismay, feigned ignorance or bursts of outright laughter had made the drive all the more interesting. Jake hadn't even thought twice about it when Ray asked him if he wanted anything to drink from the store.
Taking in the view, Jake had just stuck the nozzle into the tank when he heard a woman scream from inside the store. Four burly young men sitting on the back of a pickup truck parked around the side of the building all leapt to their feet and ran over to the store, two of them carrying shotguns. From inside, Jake could hear Ray shouting at the screaming woman that it was alright, he only wanted some juice and he was going to pay for it. This was immediately followed by a dull thump as the two unarmed men burst through the door, tackled him and pinned him down. Somehow, they had managed to get out of there without getting a severe beating, but it hadn't seemed they would be so lucky at the time. The men had even apologized for the misunderstanding afterwards, saying that the store had been the target for hold-ups in the past and that they had figured Ray for another robber.
"I said I was sorry."
"I'm not mad about that," Jake said. "Hell, I'm not mad at all. I just can't figure out why you don't take the damn thing off. Did you lose a bet or something?"
"No, I didn't lose a bet or something. Look, it's only for a couple more hours and then you can forget about it, alright? It's not like we have to stop for gas again, anyhow. After we get there, you can wear it if you want."
"No thanks. Not after it's been on your face all day," Jake laughed and flicked on the headlights.
Their final destination was a small cabin in a sleepy little town that had never bothered to think of a name for itself and was known simply as "The Pier on Bear Lake". The pier for which the town was known was hardly even that; a rickety old construction that looked as if a child could tear it apart. The town itself was actually in surprisingly good shape. There were three or four wooden buildings on either side of the pier all nestled into the forest alongside the road, each housing one small business or another. Aside from the standard corner grocery store, Jake was amazed to see that there was a video/DVD rental shop as well as a musician's supply shop with what looked like a sizeable selection of CDs. A little farther down from that was a small coffee shop/cafe with an outdoor patio connecting it to the 'Nurse Log Pub' next door. In all, a selection of cool-looking establishments you wouold be hard-pressed to find in a major city, let alone making up the entire commercial zone of a nameless town in the mountains.
"Ray, what is this place? I can't believe my eyes! What is all this doing in the middle of nowhere?" Jake gasped and stepped out of the car. It was just after eight, and the air had become cool with the increase in altitude and cloudless night. Ray buttoned up his coat and stepped out of the car.
"Not bad, huh? I thought the same thing when I first arrived. Basically what we have here is a collection of students, scientists, hippies, artists, writers and other sorts that settled in over top of the ghost town that was The Pier on Bear Lake and made it into this. Just good timing, I suppose. The universities started sending kids up here to study the glacier and local watersheds and to conduct research on local flora and fauna, but the solitude and silence was driving them back down the mountain in droves. I guess word got around to the writers and artists who came up seeking peace and quiet, but had to truck all the way down the mountain for and modern comforts they wanted. A sort of symbiotic relationship took shape and that was that; The Pier on Bear Lakehad been ressurrected. I don't know why they never fixed the pier, though. Some kind of memebto I guess. Come on, let's head on over and see if Sarah is around."
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