=This is a movie=

This is a movie and a dream, but it's also real-life, too. So 
stay tuned. My father explains, You always get two chances 
to escape from even the most  hopeless situations in life. One is good, the other, less so. But you have to stay awake to spot them. Most people give up, fall asleep, miss out, and get eaten, he says. Do you understand? I nod yes, biting my lip. Good girl, he says. We've been captured by a high-end cannibal, one of the 1%, who looks an awful lot like Jessica Alba. I think our plane must have gone down over a tropical island. One of those exotic, tax-sheltered playgrounds of the uber-rich. How else can I explain what happened next? Michael Martone, who has a cameo walk-on role, parachutes down to provide explanatory commentary on narrative's role in establishing reality.  A fact, he says, is a thing done and a fiction is a thing made so that even the most real thing, after it is done, has no reality, while even the most made-up thing, when it is made up, has a reality. He doesn't stick around for follow-up questions. The facts are these these: My husband and I had gone to the movies. I don't remember which one. Something he wanted to see, I suppose. One of those action-adventure extravaganzas with lots of explosions, one-liners, and high body counts. I don't mind. I like sitting there daydreaming in the dark beside him with his hand on my thigh. My whole life is like a movie going on inside my skull, a private screening, while the general release everyone else is watching plays on outside of little interest to me. During a lull in the relentless action, he slips out into the lobby for popcorn. He never comes back. I wait and wait for him in the now empty theater, the screen gone black, the lights up and I continue to sit there just in case he returns. At last I go out into the lobby to look for him. He's nowhere to be found. I search the streets around the theater. No sign. In a panic, I try to call him on my cellphone, but it's a new phone and my fingers slide over the screen, unable to stop the unpredictably touchy scroll. I start to cry. At the same time, I grow inexplicably hungry. Ravenous. Deeper in the theater, a banquet is being set up for a private function.  When no one's watching, I snatch a pastry from a fancy, multi-tiered display. Then another. I'm compulsively cramming food into my salty, wet, swollen face. That's when I find myself on the desert island, where my husband, who is now Jason Statham, and also my father, explains to me that we have two chances, one good, one not-so-good, to escape. Father-husband-action hero. He's three-in-one, like the Holy Trinity; it seems plausible, I was raised a Catholic, after all, so there's a precedent. He holds me by the arms, steadying me. He searches my tear-stained, cream-smeared face for some sign of comprehension. This is important, his expression says. The most important thing ever. His own face is shiny with sweat and stained with grease and diesel smoke and other men's blood, evidence of his heroic efforts to extricate us from this cinematically impossible jam. Do you understand sweetie?, he asks again in that special voice he uses to trick me into believing that everything will be alright. Again I nod yes, even though I'm never fooled and nothing will ever be alright. What I do understand, though, is that this is incontrovertible proof of the reason every girl needs her daddy. Then it's Michael Martone again, climbing out of the underbrush by the bubbling cooking pots, to deliver the coda. Freud fucked us up, he says, this Father business. The Mother business as well. He says, Freud is the inventor of the modern novel. He is the Father of the notion of  Character, this business of depth, this business of three dimensions, this business of complex. He's the forefather of the epiphany. Martone says, You'll never invent any Character as real as Ego, as real as Id. There are fictions for you! So contagious as to jump the page, reformulate the brain chemistry so completely as to deny the efficacy and accuracy of Brain Chemistry to explain the brain. Freud's invention of the Subconscious and the Unconscious, Martone says, naturalizes inside us the idea of the Subconscious, the Unconscious as if these fictions are not fictions. The water is boiling under my chin, but it doesn't burn. I guess I've gotten used to it. Finally, it's the old joke all over again. Something sure smells delicious, what's for dinner anyway, I'm starving, and it comes to me, belatedly, it's me.