《渺小一生》:這部電影要叫什么名字？

　 Even before they became a couple, Willem would always bring him something from wherever he’d been working, and when he came back from The Odyssey, it was with two bottles of cologne that he’d had made at a famous perfumer’s atelier in Florence. “I know this might seem kind of strange,” he’d said. “But someone”—he had smiled to himself, then, knowing Willem meant some girl—“told me about this and I thought it sounded interesting.” Willem explained how he’d had to describe him to the nose—what colors he liked, what tastes, what parts of the world—and that the perfumer had created this fragrance for him.

即使在他們成為一對之前，每次威廉出門拍片，也總會帶東西回來給他。他拍完《奧德賽》之后，帶了兩瓶古龍水回來，是他去佛羅倫薩一家著名的香水工坊買的。“我知道這樣可能有點奇怪，”威廉說，“不過有個人……”聽到這里，他暗自偷笑，知道威廉指的是某個女人。“……跟我提到這家香水工坊，我覺得很有趣?！蓖忉?，他必須跟調香師形容他這個人，他喜歡什么顏色、什么味道、來自哪個國家或地區(qū)，然后調香師就會針對這個人的特質調制出這個香味。

　 He had smelled it: it was green and slightly peppery, with a raw, aching finish. “Vetiver,” Willem had said. “Try it on,” and he had, dabbing it onto his hand because he didn’t let Willem see his wrists back then.

他聞了一下：清新、有微微的胡椒味，尾調帶著一種粗獷的辛辣?！笆窍愀?，”威廉當時說，“擦擦看?！彼亮?，沾了一點在手上，當時他還不讓威廉看他的手腕。

　 Willem had sniffed at him. “I like it,” he said, “it smells nice on you,” and they were both suddenly shy with each other.

威廉聞了一下他的手。“我喜歡?！彼f，“在你身上聞起來很不錯?！比缓笏麄儍蓚€忽然間都很不好意思。

　 “Thanks, Willem,” he’d said. “I love it.”

“謝謝你，威廉?！彼f，“我很喜歡?！?

　 Willem had had a scent made for himself as well. His had been sandalwood-based, and he soon grew to associate the wood with him: whenever he smelled it—especially when he was far away: in India on business; in Japan; in Thailand—he would always think of Willem and would feel less alone. As the years passed, they both continued to order these scents from the Florence perfumer, and two months ago, one of the first things he did when he had the presence of mind to think of it was to order a large quantity of Willem’s custom-made cologne. He had been so relieved, so fevered, when the package had finally arrived, that his hands had tremored as he tore off its wrappings and slit open the box. Already, he could feel Willem slipping from him; already, he knew he needed to try to maintain him. But although he had sprayed—carefully; he didn’t want to use too much—the fragrance on Willem’s shirt, it hadn’t been the same. It wasn’t just the cologne after all that had made Willem’s clothes smell like Willem: it had been him, his very self-ness. That night he had laid in bed in a shirt gone sugary with sandalwood, a scent so strong that it had overwhelmed every other odor, that it had destroyed what had remained of Willem entirely. That night he had cried, for the first time in a long time, and the next day he had retired that shirt, folding it and packing it into a box in the corner of the closet so it wouldn’t contaminate Willem’s other clothes.

威廉自己也配了一種香味，是檀香調。他很快就習慣把檀香和威廉聯(lián)系在一起：只要聞到檀香，他總會想到威廉，就覺得比較不孤單了，尤其是遠離紐約，去印度、日本或泰國出差的時候。這些年過去，他們持續(xù)跟那家佛羅倫薩工坊訂購這兩種古龍水。兩個月前，他總算鎮(zhèn)定下來、可以思考時，做的第一件事，就是訂購了一大批威廉的特制香味。當那個包裹終于寄到時，他整個人很放心、很狂熱，兩手顫抖地拆開包裝、打開盒子。他覺得威廉逐漸從他身邊溜走，他知道自己得設法保存他。盡管他把那古龍水噴在威廉的襯衫上（噴得很小心，他不想用太多），但聞起來卻不一樣。畢竟，讓威廉的衣服聞起來像威廉的，不光是古龍水而已，還有他這個人。那一夜他躺在床上，穿著一件檀香味甜得發(fā)膩的襯衫，那香氣濃到蓋掉了其他氣味，完全毀了殘存的威廉。那一夜他哭了，是好久以來的第一次。次日，他就把那件襯衫收起來，折好放進衣柜間角落的一個箱子里，免得它污染了威廉的其他衣服。

　 The cologne, the ritual with the shirt: they are two pieces of the scaffolding, rickety and fragile as it is, that he has learned to erect in order to keep moving forward, to keep living his life. Although often he feels he isn’t so much living as he is merely existing, being moved through his days rather than moving through them himself. But he doesn’t punish himself too much for this; merely existing is difficult enough.

古龍水、襯衫的儀式：他學著用這兩樣東西搭起一個臨時支架，雖然搖晃又脆弱，卻是支撐他往前走、生活下去的依靠。他常常覺得自己不大算是活著，不過是存在著，被動地度過每一天，而不是自己在過日子。但他不會因此太懲罰自己，僅僅是存在，就夠困難了。

　 It had taken months to figure out what worked. For a while he gorged nightly on Willem’s films, watching them until he fell asleep on the sofa, fast-forwarding to the scenes with Willem speaking. But the dialogue, the fact of Willem’s acting, made him seem farther from him, not closer, and eventually he learned it was better to simply pause on a certain image, Willem’s face trapped and staring at him, and he would look and look at it until his eyes burned. After a month of this, he realized that he had to be more vigilant about parsing out these movies, so they wouldn’t lose their potency. And so he had begun in order, with Willem’s very first film—The Girl with the Silver Hands—which he had watched obsessively, every night, stopping and starting the movie, freezing on certain images. On weekends he would watch it for hours, from when the sky was changing from night to day until long after it had turned black again. And then he realized that it was dangerous to watch these movies chronologically, because with each film, it would mean he was getting closer to Willem’s death. And so he now chose the month’s film at random, and that had proven safer.

他花了好幾個月，才找出有用的方法。有一陣子，他夜里會一直看威廉的電影。他會按下快進鍵，找到威廉講話的場景，直到在沙發(fā)上睡著。但那些對白、威廉在演戲的事實，似乎讓威廉離他更遠，而不是更近。最后他學到最好在某個鏡頭按下暫停鍵，讓威廉的臉定格在屏幕上凝視他，然后他會一直看一直看，看到眼睛灼痛。這樣過了一個月后，他發(fā)現自己必須更謹慎地安排這些電影的觀看方式，免得失去效力。于是他按照順序，從威廉拍的第一部電影《銀手姑娘》開始看起，像著魔似的每天晚上都看，中間不斷暫停，定格在某些畫面。到了周末，他會連看好幾小時，從天剛亮開始，直到天黑之后許久。他發(fā)現按照時間順序看這些電影很危險，因為每看完一部電影，就意味著他更加接近威廉的死亡。他現在每個月都隨機選一部電影來看，結果證明這樣比較安全。

　 But the biggest, the most sustaining fiction he has devised for himself is pretending that Willem is simply away filming. The shoot is very long, and very taxing, but it is finite, and eventually he will return. This had been a difficult delusion, because there had never been a shoot through which he and Willem didn’t speak, or e-mail, or text (or all three) every day. He is grateful that he has saved so many of Willem’s e-mails, and for a period, he was able to read these old messages at night and pretend he had just received them: even when he wanted to binge on them, he hadn’t, and he was careful to read just one in a sitting. But he knew that wouldn’t satisfy him forever—he would need to be more judicious about how he doled these e-mails out to himself. Now he reads one, just one, every week. He can read messages he’s read in previous weeks, but not messages he hasn’t. That is another rule.

但他為自己創(chuàng)造出來最大的假象，就是假裝威廉只是出門拍戲去了。這次的拍戲時間非常久，而且非常辛苦，但時間是有限的，最后他就會回來。這是個困難的妄想，因為威廉以前拍電影時，從來沒有一天不給他打電話、發(fā)電子郵件或短信（可能三者都有）。他很慶幸自己存了很多威廉的電子郵件，有段時間，他夜里會閱讀這些舊的文字訊息，假裝剛剛收到。即使他很想一口氣多看一些，但他沒有，而是留意每次只看一則?？墒撬肋@個方法不可能永遠滿足他——他得注意自己如何分配這些文字?，F在他每星期只看一封電子郵件，僅此而已。他可以看之前幾個星期讀過的，但是不能看他還沒讀過的。這是另一個規(guī)定。

　 But it didn’t solve the larger issue of Willem’s silence: What circumstances, he puzzled to himself as he swam in the morning, as he stood, unseeingly, over the stove at night, waiting for the teakettle to shriek, would prevent Willem from communicating with him while on a shoot? Finally, he was able to invent a scenario. Willem would be shooting a film about a crew of Russian cosmonauts during the Cold War, and in this fantasy movie, they would actually be in space, because the film was being funded by a perhaps-crazy Russian industrialist billionaire. So away Willem would be, circling miles above him all day and all night, wanting to come home and unable to communicate with him. He was embarrassed by this imaginary movie as well, by his desperation, but it also seemed just plausible enough that he could fool himself into believing it for long stretches, sometimes for several days. (He was grateful then that the logistics and realities of Willem’s job had, in many cases, been barely credible: the industry’s very improbability helped him to believe now, when he needed it.)

這無法解決威廉沉默不語的問題：到底是什么情況，會讓威廉沒辦法在拍戲時跟他聯(lián)絡？他一直苦苦思索著答案，不論是晨泳，還是晚上視而不見地瞪著爐子、等待水壺發(fā)出鳴音的時候。最后他終于想出一個情境。威廉去拍的電影是關于一組“冷戰(zhàn)”時代的蘇聯(lián)航天員，而且真的在太空拍攝，因為電影的出資者是個可能瘋了的俄羅斯工業(yè)巨子、億萬富翁。所以威廉會遠離他，每天每夜都在遙遠的地球上空繞著他轉，想回家卻無法跟他聯(lián)系。這部想象中的電影，還有自己的絕望，讓他覺得很丟臉，但同時這個劇情似乎也夠有說服力，他可以愚弄自己去相信一段時間，有時還可以撐個好幾天（這時他會很慶幸威廉工作的邏輯和真實性，在很多時候是難以置信的：電影工業(yè)本身的難以置信，現在正符合他的需要，可以幫助他相信）。

　 What’s the movie called? he imagined Willem asking, imagined Willem smiling.

這部電影要叫什么名字？他想象威廉問他，想象威廉露出微笑。

　 Dear Comrade, he told Willem, because that was how Willem and he had sometimes addressed their e-mails to each other—Dear Comrade; Dear Jude Haroldovich; Dear Willem Ragnaravovich—which they had begun when Willem was shooting the first installment in his spy trilogy, which had been set in nineteen-sixties Moscow. In his imaginings, Dear Comrade would take a year to complete, although he knew he would have to adjust that: it was March already, and in his fantasy, Willem would be coming home in November, but he knew he wouldn’t be ready to end the charade by then. He knew he would have to imagine reshoots, delays. He knew he would have to invent a sequel, some reason that Willem would be away from him for longer still.

《親愛的同志》，他告訴威廉，因為威廉跟他在電子郵件里就常常這樣稱呼對方——親愛的同志；親愛的裘德·哈羅德維奇；親愛的威廉·拉格納拉沃維奇同志。這是從威廉拍“間諜三部曲”的第一部期間開始的，電影的背景是20世紀60年代的莫斯科。在他的想象中，《親愛的同志》會花一年拍攝，雖然他知道往后還得調整這個時間?，F在已經是三月了，而在他的幻想中，威廉十一月會回來，但他知道到時候他會無法結束這假裝的游戲。他知道屆時他又得想象出各種重拍、延誤的狀況。他知道自己還得想出一個續(xù)集，或是某些理由，讓威廉遠離他更久。

　 To heighten the fantasy’s believability, he wrote Willem an e-mail every night telling him what had happened that day, just as he would have done had Willem been alive. Every message always ended the same way: I hope the shoot’s going well. I miss you so much. Jude.

為了加強這個幻想的可信度，他每天晚上都寫一封電子郵件給威廉，跟他說這一天發(fā)生了什么事，就跟威廉生前出門拍片時一樣。每封郵件的結尾總是一樣：希望你拍攝順利。我好想你。裘德。

　 It had been the previous November when he had finally emerged from his stupor, when the finality of Willem’s absence had truly begun to resonate. It was then that he had known he was in trouble. He remembers very little from the months before; he remembers very little from the day itself. He remembers finishing the pasta salad, tearing the basil leaves above the bowl, checking his watch and wondering where they were. But he hadn’t been worried: Willem liked to drive home on the back roads, and Malcolm liked to take pictures, and so they might have stopped, they might have lost track of the time.

他終于走出恍惚狀態(tài)，開始意識到威廉的缺席已成定局，是在去年的十一月。此時他才明白自己麻煩大了。前兩個月的事情他記得的非常少；那天的情況他也不太記得。他記得自己做完意大利面沙拉，正在沙拉缽上方撕九層塔葉子，看了一下手表，很好奇他們到哪里了。他當時并不擔心：威廉開車回家喜歡走小路，而馬爾科姆喜歡拍照，他們可能中途停下，可能忘了時間。

　 He called JB, listened to him complain about Fredrik; he cut some melon for dessert. By this time they really were late, and he called Willem’s phone but it only rang, emptily. Then he was irritated: Where could they have been?

他打電話給杰比，聽他抱怨弗雷德里克；他切了一些甜瓜當餐后甜點。等到他們真的晚了太久，他撥了威廉的手機，但電話響了半天都沒接。他煩躁起來，他們會跑去哪里了？

　 And then it was later still. He was pacing. He called Malcolm’s phone, Sophie’s phone: nothing. He called Willem again. He called JB: Had they called him? Had he heard from them? But JB hadn’t. “Don’t worry, Judy,” he said. “I’m sure they just went for ice cream or something. Or maybe they all ran off together.”

然后更晚了，他開始坐不住。他打馬爾科姆的手機、蘇菲的手機：都沒人接。他又打了威廉的手機。又打給杰比：他們有打給他嗎？他有他們的消息嗎？但杰比說沒有?！皠e擔心，小裘?！苯鼙日f，“我很確定他們只是跑去吃冰淇淋或什么的?；蛘咚麄円黄鹋艿袅恕！?

　 “Ha,” he said, but he knew something was wrong. “Okay. I’ll call you later, JB.”

“哈，”他說，但他知道不對勁，“好吧。杰比，我晚一點再打給你?！?

　 And just as he had hung up with JB, the doorbell chimed, and he stopped, terrified, because no one ever rang their doorbell. The house was difficult to find; you had to really look for it, and then you had to walk up from the main road—a long, long walk—if no one buzzed you in, and he hadn’t heard the front gate buzzer sound. Oh god, he thought. Oh, no. No. But then it rang again, and he found himself moving toward the door, and as he opened it, he registered not so much the policemen’s expressions but that they were removing their caps, and then he knew.

正當他掛斷電話時，門鈴響了，他整個人僵住，嚇壞了，因為從來沒人按過他們的門鈴。這棟房子很難找，得專程找才找得到；而且公路轉進來之后，有一道柵門必須從屋里遙控打開，否則就得走上來，要走很久、很久，而他并未聽到柵門的鈴聲。老天，他心想。啊，不，不會。但接著門鈴又響了一次，他不自覺地走向前門，打開來，他其實沒怎么注意到那些警察的表情，只看到他們摘下帽子，然后他就知道了。

　 He lost himself after that. He was conscious only in flashes, and the people’s faces he saw—Harold’s, JB’s, Richard’s, Andy’s, Julia’s—were the same faces he remembered from when he had tried to kill himself: the same people, the same tears. They had cried then, and they cried now, and at moments he was bewildered; he thought that the past decade—his years with Willem, the loss of his legs—might have been a dream after all, that he might still be in the psychiatric ward. He remembers learning things during those days, but he doesn’t remember how he learned them, because he doesn’t remember having any conversations. But he must have. He learned that he had identified Willem’s body, but that they hadn’t let him see Willem’s face—he had been tossed from the car and had landed, headfirst, against an elm thirty feet across the road and his face had been destroyed, its every bone broken. So he had identified him from a birthmark on his left calf, from a mole on his right shoulder. He learned that Sophie’s body had been crushed—“obliterated” was the word he remembered someone saying—and that Malcolm had been declared brain dead and had lived on a ventilator for four days until his parents had had his organs donated. He learned that they had all been wearing their seat belts; that the rental car—that stupid, fucking rental car—had had defective air bags; that the driver of the truck, a beer company truck, had been wildly drunk and had run through a red light.

再之后他就失神了。他只記得一些畫面的片段，看到了一些人的臉，包括哈羅德、杰比、理查德、安迪、朱麗婭，他記得自己自殺未遂時看到的也是這些臉：同樣的人，同樣的眼淚。他們當時哭了，現在也哭了。中間有些時候他會糊涂起來，以為過去的十年，他和威廉在一起、后來失去雙腿的這些年，可能是一場夢，他可能還在精神科病房里。他記得那幾天得知了一些事情，但他不記得是怎么得知的，因為他不記得任何對話。但他一定是跟別人講了話。他知道他去認尸，但他們不讓他看威廉的臉。他從車子里面被甩出來，頭部撞上馬路對面三十英尺的一棵榆樹，臉被撞爛，每根骨頭都斷了。他是憑著威廉左小腿上的一個胎記，還有右邊肩膀上的一顆痣認出是他。他得知蘇菲的身體被壓扁了，“徹底摧毀”是他記得某個人用的字眼。而馬爾科姆被宣布腦死亡，接上人工呼吸器又多活了四天，直到他的器官捐贈完成為止。他得知他們三個都系了安全帶；得知那輛租來的車的安全氣囊有缺陷，那輛愚蠢的、他媽的租來的車；得知那輛啤酒公司卡車的司機當時嚴重酒醉，闖了紅燈。

　 Most of the time, he was drugged. He was drugged when he went to Sophie’s service, which he couldn’t remember at all, not one detail; he was drugged when he went to Malcolm’s. From Malcolm’s, he remembers Mr. Irvine grabbing him and shaking him and then hugging him so tightly he was smothered, hugging him and sobbing against him, until someone—Harold, presumably—said something and he was released.

大部分時間，他都處在鎮(zhèn)靜劑的藥效下。他去蘇菲的告別式時吃了鎮(zhèn)靜劑，所以半點細節(jié)都不記得。他去馬爾科姆的告別式時也吃了鎮(zhèn)靜劑，不過還記得歐文先生握了他的手，接著緊緊抱住他，緊得他無法呼吸，然后靠在他身上啜泣，直到有個人（想必是哈羅德）說了些話，他才放手。

　 He knew there had been some sort of service for Willem, something small; he knew Willem had been cremated. But he doesn’t remember anything from it. He doesn’t know who organized it. He doesn’t even know if he attended it, and he is too frightened to ask. He remembers Harold telling him at one point that it was okay that he wasn’t giving a eulogy, that he could have a memorial for Willem later, whenever he was ready. He remembers nodding, remembers thinking: But I won’t ever be ready.

他知道威廉也舉行了一個小小的儀式；他知道威廉被火化了，反正他完全不記得。他不知道是誰安排的，甚至不知道自己有沒有去參加，后來也怕得不敢問。他還記得中間某個時候，哈羅德告訴他說他沒致悼詞沒關系，可以晚一點，等他準備好了，再幫威廉辦追思會。他還記得自己聽了點點頭，心里想著：我永遠不會準備好。