② 🅾🆁 ③ 🅼🅾🆅🅸🅴🆂

Gabrielle Sicam

Actually, Edward Norton made a movie before Motherless Brooklyn. It's a very before 9/11 movie. At least I think so, I was born after. It's called Keeping the Faith and it's based on the ‘so-and-so walk into a bar’ style joke. A priest (Norton) and a rabbi (Ben Stiller) tussle over the same secular woman (Jenna Elfman). Her closest religion is business—she wears a headset. She is a very busy woman.

Ben Stiller's good in it. He's a shaker-upper. In one scene, he invites a gospel choir to perform the Ein Keloheinu. Do I say Ein Kelokeinu? He takes on the persona of a gospel rabbi and is very good at embodying this interreligious fantasy. He says charming one-liners like “up in the cheap seats!” and for a moment I am able to imagine him sexually. This doesn't last very long. Like most community men, he alchemises the perfect balance of nice words and dead-eyed lust.

There Will Be Blood is a much better movie than Keeping the Faith, but maybe not a better priest movie. I like Eli Sunday. Paul Dano is good at being Eli Sunday because he is good at being a dog. At one point Eli Sunday seemed the most writerly name in the whole world.

I never got his name, but he knew mine was Gabrielle. He said it was a writerly name before he slipped a tab into my shot of Luft. It was perfect, translucent, a small communion wafer.

I woke up to him saying I had taken a big fall, and that before I had fallen, I had agreed to give him my number. I tried very hard to remember how many digits were in a British phone number. I also noticed my jeans were wet. Did you know he is an archangel? Yes, I knew my angels, I was a choir girl once. Anyway, my jeans feel kind of weird, I said, as I typed in a fake number that I wish I had noted down—since then I have been made aware of angel numbers.

I warned him that my phone was dead. I wanted to say that I had pissed myself, the way it feels natural to announce encountering damp or mould in a flat. He called the number to make sure that it would ring. He needed it to be real. He was a sound engineer so I figured he knew a lot about sounds like phone rings and whether they were real or fake. I turned 20 on the first ring, and my birthday wish was for some rando to pick up. Just to be funny.

When a priest does a homily they are showing off their prowess in the colonial art of elocution. They are equal parts God and stand-up. In There Will Be Blood, Paul Dano screams and shakes a lot to show that God is screaming and shaking in or at least towards him. In Keeping the Faith, Ben Stiller tells his date, a beautiful journalist, that he generates all of his homilies through an artificial intelligence service called HotGod.com. She does not find this funny, not even a little bit.

He wanted my number because his wife worked where I lived, and he believed that she would like me, and I her, and that we could all have lots of fun together. So the number had to be real, the trade-off had to be legitimate, in order for the fun to take place. I was sprawled over an armchair as he sold this to me. I was foaming at the mouth, like a dog, and sitting in my own piss.

Has it ever been so profitable to convince others of your loneliness, to talk in superlatives? Writing feels so godless, sometimes, as though we all do it as recompense for emanation disappearing.

I never really got the appeal of a threesome until I read a poem online about a threesome where the couple drive the third back home, holding hands over the gear stick the whole ride. The third feels like a child, subsequently comforted by the unfurling.

I woke up two mornings after which was also Valentine's Day morning. I walked into the wrong entrance of a gallery and saw an exhibition about bombings. Mock-ups of dead black crows were strewn on the floor. If you wanted to walk around and look at them closer you had to take off your shoes. I got embarrassed because I had holes in my socks around the toes and I had walked into the wrong entrance. But the numbers were big, they were elegiac. I stayed and watched the crows for hours. Everything felt smaller the more I looked at them.

When I got back into London, I went to watch some people read their writing out loud. I was thinking about writing about the sound engineer. Then someone got up and read a story about being drugged after a fancy event. “Isn't it funny,” they said, that it was such a beautiful event, with such beautiful things, and still they could get overpowered by someone ugly. Someone poor. “And I lost my shoes, the worst.”

A friend asked me if l thought it'd really happened. I said yes, losing shoes would be a strange thing to lie about. And I don't think I'm going to work on that thing I said I was working on anymore, by the way.

Once, at maybe ten, my mother caught me reading the memoir of Jaycee Dugard. I was obsessed with going through her bookshelf when she wasn't home, which mostly consisted of Dan Brown and Mitch Alborn and Star Wars DVDs. But, once, I had picked up the memoir of Jaycee Dugard. I had seen the word 'cherry' used in the book, in a different context than I was used to, so when she got home from work I asked her if ‘cherry’ could be more than a fruit.

In Keeping the Faith, we are led to believe that Ben Stiller is more charismatic than Edward Norton. He steals Jenna Elfman and they spend many scenes having good sex. Edward Norton has no sex because he is a good priest. At the climax of the movie, Norton kisses Elfman, mistakenly thinking she has been hiding her love for him. She is very visibly caught off-guard, her eyes opening wide like a fish. Her arms are slack at her sides. He tells her it's okay and continues to force the kiss. She overcomes the shock, and his force, to say that she is in love with Ben Stiller. A revelation for Edward Norton, who has become bad at his job. He rehabilitates by encouraging their love.

Later, we learn that Jenna Elfman rehabilitates herself, her sin of modern-girl ambivalence, and prepares to convert, so that she may marry Ben Stiller.

Gabrielle Sicam is in pursuit of greatness.