《渺小一生》:这部电影要叫什么名字？

　 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.

即使在他们成为一对之前，每次威廉出门拍片，也总会带东西回来给他。他拍完《奥德赛》之后，带了两瓶古龙水回来，是他去佛罗伦萨一家著名的香水工坊买的。“我知道这样可能有点奇怪，”威廉说，“不过有个人……”听到这里，他暗自偷笑，知道威廉指的是某个女人。“……跟我提到这家香水工坊，我觉得很有趣。”威廉解释，他必须跟调香师形容他这个人，他喜欢什么颜色、什么味道、来自哪个国家或地区，然后调香师就会针对这个人的特质调制出这个香味。

　 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.

他闻了一下：清新、有微微的胡椒味，尾调带着一种粗犷的辛辣。“是香根草，”威廉当时说，“擦擦看。”他擦了，沾了一点在手上，当时他还不让威廉看他的手腕。

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

威廉闻了一下他的手。“我喜欢。”他说，“在你身上闻起来很不错。”然后他们两个忽然间都很不好意思。

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

“谢谢你，威廉。”他说，“我很喜欢。”

　 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.

威廉自己也配了一种香味，是檀香调。他很快就习惯把檀香和威廉联系在一起：只要闻到檀香，他总会想到威廉，就觉得比较不孤单了，尤其是远离纽约，去印度、日本或泰国出差的时候。这些年过去，他们持续跟那家佛罗伦萨工坊订购这两种古龙水。两个月前，他总算镇定下来、可以思考时，做的第一件事，就是订购了一大批威廉的特制香味。当那个包裹终于寄到时，他整个人很放心、很狂热，两手颤抖地拆开包装、打开盒子。他觉得威廉逐渐从他身边溜走，他知道自己得设法保存他。尽管他把那古龙水喷在威廉的衬衫上（喷得很小心，他不想用太多），但闻起来却不一样。毕竟，让威廉的衣服闻起来像威廉的，不光是古龙水而已，还有他这个人。那一夜他躺在床上，穿着一件檀香味甜得发腻的衬衫，那香气浓到盖掉了其他气味，完全毁了残存的威廉。那一夜他哭了，是好久以来的第一次。次日，他就把那件衬衫收起来，折好放进衣柜间角落的一个箱子里，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.

古龙水、衬衫的仪式：他学着用这两样东西搭起一个临时支架，虽然摇晃又脆弱，却是支撑他往前走、生活下去的依靠。他常常觉得自己不大算是活着，不过是存在着，被动地度过每一天，而不是自己在过日子。但他不会因此太惩罚自己，仅仅是存在，就够困难了。

　 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.

他花了好几个月，才找出有用的方法。有一阵子，他夜里会一直看威廉的电影。他会按下快进键，找到威廉讲话的场景，直到在沙发上睡着。但那些对白、威廉在演戏的事实，似乎让威廉离他更远，而不是更近。最后他学到最好在某个镜头按下暂停键，让威廉的脸定格在屏幕上凝视他，然后他会一直看一直看，看到眼睛灼痛。这样过了一个月后，他发现自己必须更谨慎地安排这些电影的观看方式，免得失去效力。于是他按照顺序，从威廉拍的第一部电影《银手姑娘》开始看起，像着魔似的每天晚上都看，中间不断暂停，定格在某些画面。到了周末，他会连看好几小时，从天刚亮开始，直到天黑之后许久。他发现按照时间顺序看这些电影很危险，因为每看完一部电影，就意味着他更加接近威廉的死亡。他现在每个月都随机选一部电影来看，结果证明这样比较安全。

　 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.

但他为自己创造出来最大的假象，就是假装威廉只是出门拍戏去了。这次的拍戏时间非常久，而且非常辛苦，但时间是有限的，最后他就会回来。这是个困难的妄想，因为威廉以前拍电影时，从来没有一天不给他打电话、发电子邮件或短信（可能三者都有）。他很庆幸自己存了很多威廉的电子邮件，有段时间，他夜里会阅读这些旧的文字讯息，假装刚刚收到。即使他很想一口气多看一些，但他没有，而是留意每次只看一则。可是他知道这个方法不可能永远满足他——他得注意自己如何分配这些文字。现在他每星期只看一封电子邮件，仅此而已。他可以看之前几个星期读过的，但是不能看他还没读过的。这是另一个规定。

　 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.)

这无法解决威廉沉默不语的问题：到底是什么情况，会让威廉没办法在拍戏时跟他联络？他一直苦苦思索着答案，不论是晨泳，还是晚上视而不见地瞪着炉子、等待水壶发出鸣音的时候。最后他终于想出一个情境。威廉去拍的电影是关于一组“冷战”时代的苏联航天员，而且真的在太空拍摄，因为电影的出资者是个可能疯了的俄罗斯工业巨子、亿万富翁。所以威廉会远离他，每天每夜都在遥远的地球上空绕着他转，想回家却无法跟他联系。这部想象中的电影，还有自己的绝望，让他觉得很丢脸，但同时这个剧情似乎也够有说服力，他可以愚弄自己去相信一段时间，有时还可以撑个好几天（这时他会很庆幸威廉工作的逻辑和真实性，在很多时候是难以置信的：电影工业本身的难以置信，现在正符合他的需要，可以帮助他相信）。

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

这部电影要叫什么名字？他想象威廉问他，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.

《亲爱的同志》，他告诉威廉，因为威廉跟他在电子邮件里就常常这样称呼对方——亲爱的同志；亲爱的裘德·哈罗德维奇；亲爱的威廉·拉格纳拉沃维奇同志。这是从威廉拍“间谍三部曲”的第一部期间开始的，电影的背景是20世纪60年代的莫斯科。在他的想象中，《亲爱的同志》会花一年拍摄，虽然他知道往后还得调整这个时间。现在已经是三月了，而在他的幻想中，威廉十一月会回来，但他知道到时候他会无法结束这假装的游戏。他知道届时他又得想象出各种重拍、延误的状况。他知道自己还得想出一个续集，或是某些理由，让威廉远离他更久。

　 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.

为了加强这个幻想的可信度，他每天晚上都写一封电子邮件给威廉，跟他说这一天发生了什么事，就跟威廉生前出门拍片时一样。每封邮件的结尾总是一样：希望你拍摄顺利。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.

他终于走出恍惚状态，开始意识到威廉的缺席已成定局，是在去年的十一月。此时他才明白自己麻烦大了。前两个月的事情他记得的非常少；那天的情况他也不太记得。他记得自己做完意大利面沙拉，正在沙拉钵上方撕九层塔叶子，看了一下手表，很好奇他们到哪里了。他当时并不担心：威廉开车回家喜欢走小路，而马尔科姆喜欢拍照，他们可能中途停下，可能忘了时间。

　 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?

他打电话给杰比，听他抱怨弗雷德里克；他切了一些甜瓜当餐后甜点。等到他们真的晚了太久，他拨了威廉的手机，但电话响了半天都没接。他烦躁起来，他们会跑去哪里了？

　 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，他开始坐不住。他打马尔科姆的手机、苏菲的手机：都没人接。他又打了威廉的手机。又打给杰比：他们有打给他吗？他有他们的消息吗？但杰比说没有。“别担心，小裘。”杰比说，“我很确定他们只是跑去吃冰淇淋或什么的。或者他们一起跑掉了。”

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

“哈，”他说，但他知道不对劲，“好吧。杰比，我晚一点再打给你。”

　 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.

正当他挂断电话时，门铃响了，他整个人僵住，吓坏了，因为从来没人按过他们的门铃。这栋房子很难找，得专程找才找得到；而且公路转进来之后，有一道栅门必须从屋里遥控打开，否则就得走上来，要走很久、很久，而他并未听到栅门的铃声。老天，他心想。啊，不，不会。但接着门铃又响了一次，他不自觉地走向前门，打开来，他其实没怎么注意到那些警察的表情，只看到他们摘下帽子，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。他只记得一些画面的片段，看到了一些人的脸，包括哈罗德、杰比、理查德、安迪、朱丽娅，他记得自己自杀未遂时看到的也是这些脸：同样的人，同样的眼泪。他们当时哭了，现在也哭了。中间有些时候他会糊涂起来，以为过去的十年，他和威廉在一起、后来失去双腿的这些年，可能是一场梦，他可能还在精神科病房里。他记得那几天得知了一些事情，但他不记得是怎么得知的，因为他不记得任何对话。但他一定是跟别人讲了话。他知道他去认尸，但他们不让他看威廉的脸。他从车子里面被甩出来，头部撞上马路对面三十英尺的一棵榆树，脸被撞烂，每根骨头都断了。他是凭着威廉左小腿上的一个胎记，还有右边肩膀上的一颗痣认出是他。他得知苏菲的身体被压扁了，“彻底摧毁”是他记得某个人用的字眼。而马尔科姆被宣布脑死亡，接上人工呼吸器又多活了四天，直到他的器官捐赠完成为止。他得知他们三个都系了安全带；得知那辆租来的车的安全气囊有缺陷，那辆愚蠢的、他妈的租来的车；得知那辆啤酒公司卡车的司机当时严重酒醉，闯了红灯。

　 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.

大部分时间，他都处在镇静剂的药效下。他去苏菲的告别式时吃了镇静剂，所以半点细节都不记得。他去马尔科姆的告别式时也吃了镇静剂，不过还记得欧文先生握了他的手，接着紧紧抱住他，紧得他无法呼吸，然后靠在他身上啜泣，直到有个人（想必是哈罗德）说了些话，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.

他知道威廉也举行了一个小小的仪式；他知道威廉被火化了，反正他完全不记得。他不知道是谁安排的，甚至不知道自己有没有去参加，后来也怕得不敢问。他还记得中间某个时候，哈罗德告诉他说他没致悼词没关系，可以晚一点，等他准备好了，再帮威廉办追思会。他还记得自己听了点点头，心里想着：我永远不会准备好。