Asa Nisi Masa

“Cameras!” Direk exclaimed in the background.

“Rolling!” I shouted in reply. Others followed. I didn’t know how many videographers we were. I would never know.

I focused my camera trying my best not to get nervous in capturing the first scene. Interior, it was with a boy clutching an umbrella in the middle of the rain. I could feel the chills brought by the downpour. The voice-over started. It was the voice of the child.

Rain is my first memory. The first time I felt the drizzle of rain on my skin. Under my umbrella, I could feel the cold and the comfort it brought me and to what surrounded me. I could hear the voice of my mother behind me. She’s watching me. Like always. I got a toy whistle between my lips. I kept on blowing it. Don’t worry, Mom. I’m gonna be fine.

I took my sight off the camera view and craned my neck, desperate to spot the mother. I couldn’t find her. I didn’t dare take the shot away from the child in the rain. It was getting blurry. I didn’t mind. In fact, that was better. I continued shooting. Took a tight shot of the child’s feet. He started stomping on the little pools of rain. He continued his voice-over.

I brought down my umbrella, then I danced and started jumping. I opened my mouth and drank the pouring rain. I don’t remember now what the rain tastes like.

Next shot I got was a tight one of a bicycle, then the rain pouring on the ground, then on the roof. Droplets strayed onto the lens. Then came another voice-over. It came no more from the child. This time it was from a young man. The child’s future self I guess. I didn’t read the script very well, I did but I didn’t venture going over the little details. I never read scripts full well.

It’s also the rain’s fault why the path of my wife and mine crossed. She’s my last and my most beautiful memory. I was riding my bicycle at that time when the rain poured like crazy. I looked for shelter. That’s where I saw her.

Another tight shot of pair of hands feeling the rain, the rain falling through the gaps of the fingers. Then I moved the camera up, captured the side view of the face of a girl wearing her hair in a ponytail. Her hair was as dazzling as her skin, glowing like the reflections on the surface of the rain. I wondered if she were just being sentimental, why the need to play with the falling rain? Then the young man’s eyes fixed on the standing girl. The young man catching glances. I zoomed out and took a wide shot of both the girl and the guy. Oh, the awkwardness of the two strangers. The young man, he was trying to suppress the thrill of having a girl nearby stranded too like him. He continued speaking in a cold voice, as cold as the water forming outside a cold glass’ surface.

A girl, so beautiful in her ponytail. She’s carrying a box. A yellow box. Was she really holding a yellow box at that time? I couldn’t exactly recall.

For a long time, the young man stood silently listening to the gurgling of the water; then he must have shut his eyes for quite a while because when he opened them back, the quiet drizzle a while ago had become torrential. Raindrops were threading down like tears and hissing like the murmur of crickets. My lens was misted over. But there was enough vision to catch a shot of the girl smiling. Then a tight shot of her hand holding a handle of a bike, another of her hair playing loose in the air. The voice in the background continued.

And since we’re already both drenched in the rain, she asked me if I could share my bike with her so she could go to her destination. We both headed amid the rain. She set her hair loose. The scent of her hair that had been drizzled by rain swaying through the air.

I flicked tight shots of a dome of an umbrella, the same umbrella a while ago, the one which the child version of the young man was playing with while stomping on little pools created by the rain. As I was recalling to whom it was, the umbrella disappeared letting the infinite threads of rain pour down on the ground. Then I caught the swift action when the young man fell off his bike, got bruised on the knee. I could no longer see the girl as well as the bike. The voice explained it. I really should have read the script.

Then came the strongest storm that made my memories crumble to pieces. Like cards consecutively collapsing. And more broke to fragments.

In this world, you can expect things to drastically change on the spur of the moment. No need for any warning, getting a word from anybody is unnecessary. I wondered if this world were crazy. Or I was crazier. And like someone just snuffed out the candle that had lit this world since time immemorial, my camera live view succumbed to pitch black. Battery empty? Nope. It was the script. Yeah, I can recall this part. In this scene I will have found my shots capturing objects inside a cramped room that have question marks everywhere, on the walls, on the shelves, created either by a marker pen, etched by a knife, or stained by something unrecognizable, walls vandalized with the symbol, surfaces of furniture, train of faded photographs altogether clipped along a thread, picture frame, wall clock, each page of a book fanned by a breeze, basically almost of the things inside the claustrophobic room.

I saw a pair of fading eyes of an old man, I caught them opening. The eyes came from an old man lying on a bed, motionless, alone inside the room. Then quick shots of clocks ticking, memory pills, dishes unwashed, and flies hovering everywhere. He continued narrating.

I was left with almost nothing. Until I was the only one remained. Names of every object had finally escaped my head, ordinary or unreal. Until even the world itself had forgotten me. A lonely old man lying alone on the bed waiting for his own death to come.

Then tight shots of a chest on which hands are gripping in a desperate action of alleviating the sudden pangs of pain, then illusions of knee profusely bleeding, of throwing up clear liquid, I assume it was water. When the old man recovered, his eyes slowly closed. He found himself in a dream.

There was a box in front of him. It was yellow. He tried to open it. It didn’t. He discovered he didn’t have eyes. Meanwhile, in the waking world, his pupils moved rapidly causing the eyes to twitch. Back to the dream, he rubbed his face with force. When he took his hands off his face, his eyes came back. But when I took a wide shot of him, he was no more an old man. He had turned to his younger age, the young adult. He tried to open the box again, but this time his hands had turned into paper cut-outs. Stunned, he shook them up vigorously. Soon after, his hands returned to normal. He was finally able to open the box. To his dismay, papers with nothing but question marks unfolded. He tore up all the papers in anger. I captured his whole outrage.

Strangely, the box didn’t run out of papers. He peeked and measured how deep the box was. He put his head inside. It swallowed him whole. I pictured in my head the scene of Renton’s notorious diving scene into the worst toilet bowl in Scotland from the film Trainspotting. It was just pretty much like that. But a yellow box took the place of the toilet bowl. I snapped quick shots of the man drowning underwater. Bubbles frothing off his mouth. He soon found himself amid the darkness.

He stepped on what seemed papers. As he was making his way over the papers on the ground, he soon noticed that his weight of walking seemed a little light. He didn’t know, but I could see that he had turned from a younger version of the old man into a child now. I remembered the young face of the little kid playing in the middle of the rain holding an umbrella.

When the child’s eyes had finally adjusted to the dark, the boy picked up a paper off the floor. I hurried to get behind the child and took an over-the-shoulder shot of what he was reading. There was nothing. At first, it was what I thought. None was appearing on paper, but gradually an image formed. Finally, a drawing of a whistle unfolded. I heard a blowing of a whistle. I was not sure if the kid did also. He picked up another paper. A sketch of an umbrella. Came the drizzling sound of rain. Next image, a bicycle. Came the metallic sound of gears and pedal. And finally, a head of a girl with a ponytail. Like the first chirping of the birds on the first day of summer, it was melodious and calming, the girl’s sweet chuckle under the rain.

The child closed his eyes. That insert got me a pretty nice closer look at the kid’s eyelids, no trace of wrinkles, unlike with the old version of himself whose eyelids had already taken a thousand folds. Then came the combination of all sounds I had heard earlier: the whistle, umbrella, bike, and of the girl’s chuckle.

When he opened his eyes, he’s back to being old again. And then I took a wide shot. Miraculously, things from his memory had materialized. He saw his young wife on a bike, sounding off her whistle calling him to get out of his bed. I captured all her movement, one-shot, when she got off her bike and pulled the old man off his bed. Rain began to pour down inside the room. She took the umbrella, that same umbrella which the old man, when he was a child, was playing with in the middle of the rain. I took inserts of their smiles as they both danced amid the rain inside the room which seemed claustrophobic to no one anymore. They kept on dancing, turning and swaying, swaying and turning.

After several sways and turns, the old man lost his grip from his wife and fell backward on the bed as if in surrender to exhaustion. I really couldn’t remember whether this was part of the script. I should have known. But this scene, it seemed very unfamiliar. As though it had been edited right during this shoot. I postponed my confusion, it had been getting in the way of my shooting since the start of this shoot. I must concentrate shooting until the end of this story. Finally, the last voice-over came.

Shutting my eyes forever, I’m leaving the world bringing with me the memories which the world once had withdrawn from me. Perhaps this is what life really means, to gather memories as many as you can… so at the time of your death, you have something to look back to, to prove that you have worthily lived your life.

“Cut! Excellent take!” Direk shouted in the background. “It’s a wrap, guys!”

I sighed in relief. God, I so love those final words. That’s the cue. This world is once again finally coming to an end.

But I kept on rolling.