The box girl only has two more weeks before she gets mistakenly diagnosed with a basically fictional disorder and saddled with a frantic schedule of visits to flaky specialists. One of the specialists will rudely cough in her face more than once without apologizing.
Binson is in second grade, sitting in the second to last row, and he’s compelled to look out the window much more frequently than most kids. He looks because it’s a stunning, cold winter. It’s stunning to feel and stunning to look at, especially through classroom windows. Right now, Binson ignores a droning classmate. She’s showing a box to the class and telling about the time the box held something. Binson is looking at a frozen house across a small field from the school. The field is frozen too, and there are some frozen people standing around in the street between the school and the field, stuck in mid-gesture so that the gestures are impossible to interpret. Where were those gestures headed? How would they have concluded? The mystery! Binson is fascinated. He isn’t aware that the general public and most experts expect an eventual thaw. He thinks all these things – the people, their gestures, their barns, their fields – will stay frozen until after he’s dead and gone, and he doesn’t care what thaws or doesn’t thaw after he’s gone.
His teacher, Miss Grith, says, “Binson, watch Show and Tell. Right now.” She has to interrupt the box girl to say this, so now the box girl is mad at Binson. He can tell she’s mad by the way she’s smashed her box flat, ripped it in half, and wadded the two halves into her ink-stained fists.
The box girl says, “And now it will never hold anything again, not even first place ribbons,” and the class tosses some mild applause her way, which is frankly just salt in the wound. She responds by hurling the tattered remains of her box into the recycling bin designated for plastic bottles. As the box girl stalks back to her seat, Miss Grith, who is less competent than she led her students’ parents to believe at conferences, says, “Wrong bin!” and glares at the box girl until the box girl, ashamed, moves the box fragments to the correct bin. The box girl only has two more weeks before she gets mistakenly diagnosed with a basically fictional disorder and saddled with a frantic schedule of visits to flaky specialists. One of the specialists will rudely cough in her face more than once without apologizing.
Binson’s feeling of minor guilt at ruining the box girl’s Show and Tell has already pushed him into more looking out the window and marveling at frozenness. Wow, there’s some silver creeping into that gray, there’s an icicle with a ninety degree crook in it! Look at the mathematical precision of this and that, the cross-hatch frost patterns on the windshields of ice-crippled cars! Then Binson gets solemn because he loves to get solemn while he’s contemplating the frozen everything. He lets the terrible completeness of the freeze saturate the solemnity centers in his brain, and this is so effective that he becomes a little bit giddy again, but oh well.
Binson is sighing dramatically when the blinds intersect his gaze and flip closed with a metal and plastic racket. His sigh falls apart. Alarmed, Binson brings his attention back to the classroom. Miss Grith closed the blinds, it was her!
Miss Grith is saying, “Lorne, what do you have for us today for Show and Tell?” She’s smiling like she already knows the answer to her question. She’s wheeling the TV and VCR cart to the front of the room, so she definitely has, at the very least, a partial knowledge of the answer to her question.
Lorne stands next to the TV and VCR cart and says, “In answer to your question, today I’ve brought in a home video of myself being born. My dad filmed it with his camcorder and did all the editing. The woman who you’ll see a baby coming out of is my mother, and the baby coming out of the woman is me. The blood covering the baby, me, is not mine. My private parts no longer look how they look in this film. The fact that the rest of me does not look the same as it does in this film, you can see for yourself without being told. Okay, let’s get started.”
Binson’s neck feels hot, oh no, his skin is crawling around, his face skin is feeling tight. Miss Grith is about to turn out the lights. She’s standing by the switch and saying “Shh! Get ready! Shh!”
Binson raises his hand and shakes it. The shake is an attention-getting tactic. Miss Grith narrows her eyes. “Binson. What?” There’s an implied “now” before that “what?”
Binson says, “We’re only in second grade.”
Miss Grith doesn’t consider herself to be a total idiot. “I’m well aware of that fact. Now be quiet so we can watch Lorne emerging from a womb.”
“But my older brother didn’t watch someone being born until he was in fifth grade,” says Binson. Lorne is breathing patiently through his nose, standing with his hands folded. The rest of the class is intrigued by this budding conflict between Binson and Miss Grith. Except some of them are as bored and fidgety as they always are.
Miss Grith says, “Binson. If I allow something to be shown in here, then that means I know it’s appropriate for you. And if you then question that decision, that means that you don’t trust me to make adult decisions. And your parents all trust me to make adult decisions for you. At conferences, they were blown away by my competence.”
Something is slipping away from Binson. He feels that something of his is in peril. His tongue doesn’t feel like his same old tongue anymore. “But I’m too young! We’re too young to see this!” Binson might cry.
“You’re not too young. You’re eleven years old.”
“No we’re not!” says Binson. “We’re seven! Second graders are seven or eight!”
Miss Grith shuts off the lights. Since his eyes always take a few moments to adjust, Binson just hears Miss Grith’s disembodied voice say, “Hush up, Binson. I could have said ‘shut up,’ but I didn’t. Lorne, start the movie.”
Lorne presses play and returns to his spot next to the cart, watching his audience by the light of the TV screen, ready to evaluate their reactions. This will help Lorne to get a form of instant, unedited feedback. In, like, ten years or so, Lorne will start hassling minor celebrities for interviews, fully planning on badly misquoting them.
Binson is panicky, quietly hyperventilating, his whole self feels wadded up and damp. What will he see? He’ll grow up too fast! The room is too warm and Binson feels cut off from that great, clean freeze out on the world.
The movie starts with a black screen – a few seconds of this, then music bursts forth. It’s jazz and at first it seems a little sudden, but then it makes sense. Sure, birth and jazz, sure, sure. A title emerges from the blackness, kind of slowly, and the title is Nine Pounds. “I weighed exactly nine pounds at birth,” says Lorne.
“Aww,” says a girl, as if there’s something cute about that.
It never occurs to Binson that he could close his eyes and plug his ears. As far as he’s concerned, he’s stuck, he’s doomed to see the whole mess, his head is on the chopping block (he knows about chopping blocks from a movie he wishes he hadn’t seen).
The title fades out, the picture fades in, and the action begins. Binson moans. He’s in despair. On screen, there is a tangle of sheets. There are a few white figures moving around in the background. Emerging from the tangle of sheets are two legs, bent and spread, and between those legs, which are flexing and straining, is a vagina. But, interesting to note, there is no sound other than the jazz song which has continued from the title screen, loping pleasantly along. Also, hey, that is some good, deep color, and that is a steady camera. Hey, that is a nice, even zoom, that is a pan that a pro would be proud of.
Something is emerging from the vagina and Binson, not repulsed, gasps at the masterful swoop of the camera. It really draws the viewer into the event. Now there are some effects or filters being used – Binson doesn’t have the training or vocabulary to identify them – but they look awfully sharp. The blood, the afterbirth, the contrast with the white clean sheets is more vivid than reality. How did Lorne’s dad get that look?
Around Binson, some of his classmates are making little choking noises. Someone is breathing deeply through his or her nose. There’s a faint retch, there’s a slight gag. Lorne frowns and writes in a memo pad. Miss Grith is spacing out, staring through walls.
The movie keeps playing. There’s some slow motion, then some fast motion. There are a few time-lapse fade things and they work well, they move things along. There’s an impressive extreme zoom on fluid dripping off of baby Lorne’s tiny purple foot. The creases in Lorne’s mom’s exhausted face, the cracks in her lips! Captured and enhanced, amazing. The vagina on screen doesn’t look like an everyday thing to Binson, but neither does it look disgusting or weird. No, because on film, in this film, it’s more like, wow, what a subject, finally something important. Attention to detail! The trite designs on the floor tiles! We all saw the doctor’s hands shaking, framed against the window, a compelling silhouette!
Binson’s classmates continue to fall apart throughout the remainder of the film. The new kid is giggling uncontrollably and he’s winning a few converts; those who would rather laugh than be traumatized. The new kid’s school shooting plan will never get past the route-plotting stage.
The third act of the film, or what Binson thinks of as the third act, is slightly confusing, but in a good way. It confuses you so that it will stick with you, assumes Binson. There are a few baffling overtops and dualtones (Binson calls them overtops and dualtones; God knows what they’re really called) and a few shots of seemingly unrelated scenes (a car dealership, an artist’s rendering of the planet Venus) spliced into a long, wobbly shot of baby Lorne shrieking soundlessly, and then, climactically! the sudden, jolting snip of the umbilical cord, the shot blacking out just as the scissors close. The jazz squeals off into the distance and the word “fin” appears on the screen. There are no credits.
Miss Grith turns the lights on and the students are blinking looks of inappropriate amusement, shock, blossoming distrust of authority, and so on. Binson raises his hand and doesn’t really wait to be called on. “Why did it say ‘fin?’”
Miss Grith says, “It’s pronounced like ‘feen’ and it is Latin for ‘baby.’”
Lorne grimaces and scribbles several more lines in his memo book before closing the book, ejecting the video, and returning to his seat.
“Does anyone have any questions for Lorne?” Miss Grith isn’t observant enough to see the bleeding psyches staring back at her. And, let’s face it, she just doesn’t understand kids.
Binson says, “I liked the part when Lorne’s mom was doing that strange breathing, but it was all sped up.”
Miss Grith frowns. “That’s not a question.”
Binson again: “Lorne, how did your dad think of cutting up the nurses’ nervous movements to go with the rhythm of the trombone part?”
Miss Grith doesn’t let Lorne answer. “Binson, that’s not educational. Does anyone have a question about babies being born?”
An androgynous kid asks if having a baby hurts.
“In some ways yes, in some ways no,” says Miss Grith, who hasn’t had a baby and never will because, though she doesn’t know it, she’s infertile, which will secretly be a relief to both her first and second husbands.
Binson pipes up, “In some ways no? The entire second act was all about the pain! The screams of the clarinets! The edges of the frame were all scratchy, the blood looked almost orange!”
“You know what, Binson?” Miss Grith licks her lipsticky lips in the not-sexy way. “Since you want everyone to always be paying attention to you, even when it’s to their own detriment, why don’t you do your Show and Tell right now. Get up here. Don’t stall, Binson. If you talk back, that’s stalling.”
Binson walks to the front of the room. It wasn’t important to know what he looked like until now. Now you should know. He’s wearing a sickly green sweater and khakis that are too long. His hair is buzzed short and he has a small mouth. No glasses. That’s probably enough.
The kids are semi-desperate for Binson to make enough of a spectacle, whether that be in success or failure, to displace the horrifying images of birthmess smeared on the fronts of their minds. While Binson, stalling, clears his throat several times, Miss Grith opens the blinds and frigid daylight pierces the room. Outside there are snow flurries, very tiny flakes swirling every direction.
Binson reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out a folded photograph of himself eating a big bite of something white and droopy. As the class passes the picture around the room, Binson says, “This was the time I ate squid. It was like wet rubber, but I kind of liked it. You know, I don’t always try my hardest. This Telling part of my Show and Tell is going to be worse than it could be, maybe because I’m not trying hard enough. Look out the window like I do and you’ll see that the world is iced over and stuck, holding still so that you can see it. But also, Lorne’s mom gave birth to him in a complicated movie, so now you have to throw that into the stew too. In conclusion, today has almost made a fifth grader out of me. I might be too old for Show and Tell.”
“Class, it’s OK to voice your displeasure,” says Miss Grith. Fifteen kids boo. Eight don’t.
But three of those eight aren’t really paying any attention at all. They’re just silently obsessing over some current kid fad.
Binson returns to his seat where, in a few minutes, he will deliberately fail a map-reading test. The cold cracks a window.
Adam Drent got a degree in English and a healthy fear of demerits from Cedarville University. He's somewhere in the middle of getting an MFA from Columbia College Chicago and in order to pay his rent, he rings up groceries for the privileged and the unprivileged alike. He also makes rap songs.
Check out some of Adam's other projects at: Helical Studios
