Begin with an unfamiliar sound

In the other room I hear a noise, a sound like metal creaking, above the whir of the fan. I go out into the hallway to investigate. The light’s on in the kitchen. Someone is baking; they would have woken me up if I’d been asleep.

            I stand in the doorway and squint at Charlie, who is wiping down the counter. When he sees me he is not concerned that he might have woken me.

            I’m making oatmeal raisin cookies, he says, throwing the rag onto the microwave. He picks up a mug of something hot and stands in the crook of the counter. I need to know what they smell like.

            The coffee maker gargles. He wants me to ask why he needs to know what oatmeal raisin cookies smell like, but I don’t like being hinted at, so I open the fridge and start poking around instead.

            He is undeterred. I’m in a student film, he tells me. I mean, an indie film.

            Who’s film? I ask, selecting the mint Haagen Daz from the freezer.

            Jon’s. Our old roommate. I play a blind man who sustains a terrible head injury in a car crash, and the smell of oatmeal raisin cookies is supposed to remind me of my childhood. Like, wake me up out of a head funk. Because my dear old ma used to make them, or something.

            This is an absurd plot, and I tell him so.

            Here’s the twist, he says. It doesn’t. The smell, I mean. The smell doesn’t wake me out of being amnesiac. You’d think it would, plot-wise, but it doesn’t.

            Aren’t student films usually more subtle than that? I ask. Like, more cerebral?

            Well, he says, it’s complicated. It’s a story within a story. The blind man, me, is a figment of another character’s imagination. The real part of the film is about a professor who’s having marital trouble. He suspects that his wife is secretly in love with his sister, so he sets a trap to see who she really loves, that night at a cocktail party he’s hosting.

            What’s the trap?

            Well, it doesn’t get that far, because first he has a class to teach. So he’s all tense and worried when he gets on the bus with his students. They’re going on a field trip to a museum.

            I see. Then what? Is the wife there with the sister?        

            No, on the way into the museum one student accidentally falls and hits his head.

            And sustains…

            And sustains a terrible head injury, Charlie finishes for me. Although not as bad as you might think. Knowing about the blind man, that is. The student has to go to the hospital in an ambulance, and a couple classmates go with him, but he doesn’t lose his memory. I don’t think he even loses consciousness.

            So where does the blind man and his amnesia come in?

            In the waiting room. The classmates are bored, so they start telling each other stories to pass the time.

            Like the Canterbury Tales.

            I guess so. But there’s only one.

            So why the blind man, again?

            Well, you know how framework narratives are usually all preachy and moralistic? Like, the inner story is a metaphor for the outer one, and it’s all neat and tidy at the end, and you’re supposed to come away with a lesson, like it taught you something? Well, this is a commentary on that. Because I hate films that do that. And so does Jon.

            So you never find out if the wife is in love with the sister.

            Nope. It’s a whole different approach to literary theory.

            Now I would have weird dreams. I always have weird dreams when Charlie is the last person I talk to before I go to sleep.
            I put the ice cream away, deciding I won’t brush my teeth again because it was mint-flavored. That’s great, Charlie, I say, wishing I hadn’t gotten out of bed.