Cold Reading (1)
Late September in Duluth was like a woman turning her back after saying goodbye. The sudden plunge into freezing temperatures made one wonder where the recent warmth had gone. The extreme seasonal shift was courtesy of Lake Superior, which loomed right beside the city. This worn-down town was built on a foundation of blue-collar industries from a bygone era, and it was home to an unusually high number of nursing homes and large hospitals where those who had left those industries now remained.
Feels like rusted steel.
Standing in front of the oldest nursing home among them, Jack Nicholson felt an inexplicable wave of melancholy. It felt as if something beneath his feet was slowly dragging his entire body into the earth. It was likely due to his age; he had firmly entered the autumn of his life. Would he, too, spend his final years in a place like this one day? Waiting lonely for the inevitable end? The oppressive thought suddenly gripped his mind.
Still, I'm glad I came in person.
Repeating that to himself, Jack stepped inside the facility and was immediately greeted by a pungent, clinical odor.
"Oh my, welcome, Jack! We're so honored to have you today~"
A burly nurse greeted him with an overly nasal, sing-song voice. Today, he had come to meet the Alzheimer's patients residing here.
As soon as he received the role for the new film, Jack had re-examined and observed countless portrayals of Alzheimer's patients in various works. The vacant stares, the excessively trembling hands, the almost ape-like behaviors rather than human ones. He identified the common traits they exhibited and then promptly flushed them from his mind, like flushing a toilet.
That's not what's important.
Dementia wasn't a disease that made a person strange; it was a disease where a person gradually lost themselves. Therefore, the key was not figuring out how to perform those eccentric behaviors, but rather how to express the internal struggle occurring within. Who was this man, "Bob," whom he was about to play? What did Bob consider to be "himself"? How would he act when he lost that?
And then, Jack would blend his own interpretation with his signature Jack Nicholson style—the sharp, predatory gaze, the dominant presence, the commanding tone. How would a man who had lived his entire life like that react when he began to lose his very self?
To reinforce this, Jack had deliberately stayed at a hotel near the hospital for a few days to interact with several patients.
His first subject was Margaret Wilson.
"Ah... you're here again, Jack."
"You're knitting today as well, I see."
"Yes. Have you eaten?"
The woman in her seventies seemed perfectly fine at first glance. However, she repeatedly asked the same questions and forgot every detail after a few hours. The knitting in her hands had reportedly made almost no progress for years; she simply couldn't finish it. Just as Margaret could never fully grasp the memory that she had a daughter.
One day, that daughter came to visit and spoke to her mother as if everything were normal.
"Make sure you don't catch a cold. It's going to start getting really cold soon."
"...Yes, Margaret. I'll be careful. Is there anything uncomfortable about staying here?"
The daughter asked gently, careful not to trigger her mother. Afterward, when the middle-aged daughter stepped outside the hospital, she wept bitterly like a child. A mother who couldn't remember her own daughter and was slowly regressing into childhood. A daughter who had to silently endure the process of her mother forgetting her.
A tragedy.
A tragedy where no one was at fault. There was no one to blame, no one to be angry at. It simply had to be endured.
On the extreme end, there were elderly patients who had been virtually abandoned by their families.
"Excuse me, um... I'm sorry, but... I'm not actually supposed to be here, you know?" An elderly man named Harold Miller spoke to Jack like a child.
"What is it? Well, there's someone I need to apologize to. Ah, who was it... I'm sure there was someone."
This old man had suddenly beaten his visiting son with a cane, rupturing one of his eyeballs and leaving him blind in one eye. Devastated, the son never visited the nursing home again. It was a tragedy that had occurred in the blink of an eye.
Hearing the story from the nurse, Jack Nicholson felt a solemn weight settle over him. At the same time, an intense desire to pour all of this into his performance welled up inside him. It was an actor's primal urge to share what they had observed and felt, and to be recognized for it.
For a while afterward, he sat in his hotel room, sipping whiskey and slowly writing down his honest thoughts and observations from the nursing home. As he organized his notes, he realized something clearly. Though it had only been a few days of interaction, he now understood the true nature of the bitter, solemn dread he felt while watching the patients.
It was an emotion he had tried to ignore, buried beneath his desire for recognition and success.
The fear that I could end up like that too.
A fundamental human vulnerability that no amount of accumulated wealth or fame could ever conquer. It could happen to him. If it did, what would become of him?
Desire clashed with vulnerability. And the one pulling his aging self down more forcefully was the latter. Jack Nicholson was suddenly overcome by a sensation of being utterly alone in the universe.
"..."
Perhaps it was the alcohol. To prevent himself from being consumed by the encroaching darkness, he turned on the television. Flipping through the channels, he found Episode 10 of Sion Lee Takes You Out broadcasting. Today's guests were...
"That crazy bastard."
They were none other than Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jackson. They weren't actors, nor were they figures who represented a harmonious past and present. Furthermore, Oprah Winfrey was a host who already ran her own massive talk show, and she had a notoriously strained history with Michael Jackson due to her infamous 1993 interview with him.
The very first question Sion asked Oprah on the show was:
"Oprah, are you a virgin?"
"Bwahahaha!"
It was a hilarious parody of the exact question Oprah Winfrey had thrown at Michael Jackson on her own show back in 1993. Whether it had been pre-arranged or not, Michael laughed like an angel, and Oprah, sitting opposite him, shook Michael's hand, saying, "Now I know how you felt."
It was a revolutionary concept and execution, operating on an entirely different level. Watching the broadcast, Jack Nicholson felt a strange warmth swell in his chest. Reluctant to go down to the lobby, he pulled out his heavy brick of a mobile phone. He flipped through his address book and dialed Sion Lee's house.
"That kid..."
Half-drunk and watching the TV, he felt an urge to say something to Sion. He wasn't entirely sure what. But every time he looked at the boy, he saw so much of his younger self as an actor, which made him want to keep looking out for him. Thanks to the kid's incredible knack for walking the line and his slick charm, their connection had endured pleasantly without snapping. Though Jack's pride kept him from showing it openly, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say he treated Sion more like a son than his actual son.
The phone rang for quite a while before someone finally picked up.
"Yes, this is Sion Lee's residence."
A blunt female voice.
"...Hello. Is Sion Lee not home?"
"He is currently away from the residence. Would you like to leave a message?"
"No." Feeling a bit embarrassed to speak to someone else, Jack was about to hang up but couldn't help but ask, "Will he be back soon?"
"No. He is expected to be away from home for about a month."
"...Why?"
"He has personal business to attend to."
"Look... this is Jack Nicholson. We're shooting a movie together soon. I need to contact him regarding that."
"Ah, Mr. Nicholson. In that case, I will share his external contact number with you."
The woman read out the number, and Jack mechanically jotted it down on the notepad lying haphazardly beside him. After the call ended, Jack went to dial the number but paused, tilting his head in confusion.
"This area code is..."
It was the area code for Duluth.
Early morning. Waking up, Sion got out of his creaking bed.
"Whew."
It felt like he had slept on a slab of stone. It was a considerably old house, even by Duluth standards. Had they said it was built about fifty years ago? Yawning deeply, he washed his face and thought about ordering a delivery pizza, only to realize that unlike California, no places nearby would be open at this hour.
Sion chewed on some bread he had bought from the supermarket yesterday and sat down, staring blankly at the television, which only broadcasted local channels.
I suppose this is what it's normally like.
Unless they were in a hotel with cable TV, a poor family in Duluth would spend their days watching only these channels.
Even if the bank loans are paid off, once you retire, your income drops significantly.
Sion was living as if he had returned to the home of a father from whom he had been estranged for a long time. He spent his time quietly alone, occasionally driving his rental car to the nearby supermarket to buy basic groceries. Whenever he saw a McDonald's, he would think, Ah, what the hell, and pull into the drive-thru to buy three Quarter Pounder with Cheese burgers, wolfing them down with a large Coke.
...If his father saw him like this, what would he say?
He'd probably have a reaction similar to Bob in the movie.
Recalling a faint memory, Sion finally reached that conclusion. The father in his memory was definitely an old-fashioned man.
"...Did you suddenly remember?"
Her voice was soft and soothing. Feeling deeply embarrassed, Sion suppressed the rising urge to deflect with a joke and answered.
"Yeah." This was connected to his deepest emotions, so he wanted to speak honestly, at least to Elena. "My father was a second-generation Korean-American. He grew up in an era when racial discrimination against Asians was severe. He probably tried to make money by any means necessary to chase the American Dream... That part is just a guess."
"Mmh, I think I understand how that feels. My parents were Russian immigrants who were active during the height of the Cold War, so they had a strong belief that they had to succeed and become powerful so others couldn't look down on them."
"They trust their family, but at the same time, they end up suffocating them more than anyone else."
"Exactly. Still, when I was a kid, or maybe later, things got a lot better after we went to family counseling."
"But there's no way Bob and Dan in this movie would ever get something like that."
"Probably not. ...Have you eaten?"
"I ate three Quarter Pounders earlier and drank a ton of Coke. My dad would've scolded me."
"Haha, so you're building your character by fighting with an imaginary father? When are you going to introduce him to me?"
"I'll invite him as soon as the movie is released. Right now, he only exists on the screen."
"I can't wait. I'm sure everyone who knows about it feels the same. You and Jack Nicholson working together."
"There's a scene in the latter half of the movie where we transform into the Joker and Lucid and fight, so look forward to that."
"No spoilers, Sion."
Elena had grown comfortable enough to trade banter with him. Sion felt that these conversations with her about films and life had come to occupy a significant place in his heart.
"I miss you."
"I miss you more."
"No, you don't. Should I actually go there?"
"...Ah, I lose."
"Are you underestimating me? I'm slightly offended."
Starting in the late afternoon and stretching into the evening, they talked for a long time, exchanging sweet words before finally hanging up.
Tick, tock. The sound of the clock's hands ticking tickled his ears. It was already ten in the evening.
Time really drags here.
Since smartphones didn't exist and the internet was only just beginning to spread, there was truly nothing to do in this old house.
If I were in Hollywood, I could at least go out to have some fun.
Thinking he should go to a bookstore tomorrow to buy some books, Sion once again pictured his imaginary father in his mind.
"Are you just going to lie on the sofa all day?"
A man who looked somewhere between Jack Nicholson and his actual father, Jinwoo Lee. He was by no means real, but he wasn't entirely fake either.
"Go outside and get some exercise. Eating hamburgers all the time is why you're getting a gut."
"..."
He didn't want to talk. But he didn't want to fight either. After all, they would only end up hurting each other.
Just as Sion was about to quietly get up and leave the room, the loud ringing of the telephone pierced the silence. Startled, he picked up the receiver.
"...Hello?"
"Yeah, it's me."
"Father?"
"Who's your father! I'm not your father!"
"I see dead people..."
"Shut up. I heard you're in Duluth right now?"
Jack replied, ignoring Sion's joke.
"Wait, how did you know that? Did you hire a private investigator?"
"I called your house, and the person staying there told me."
"Ah, Chloe."
To be precise, Chloe wasn't staying at his house; he had simply set up call forwarding from his personal home line to her office desk.
"What about your show's filming? Why are you here?"
"Here? Are you in Duluth too, Jack?"
"...Yeah, to study my character."
"There are plenty of nursing homes in Hollywood."
"Those places are for rich old folks. Visiting them wouldn't help much with our movie. I came here to get a feel for the atmosphere. The whole city feels like some kind of camp... Dammit, it really puts you in a foul mood."
"I suppose talking to the dementia patients—seeing people who worked hard their entire lives only to end up unable to remember the life they built because of Alzheimer's—made you feel deeply saddened."
"Dammit. Don't spell it out like that."
Jack fell silent. In that silence, Sion read the presence of a "father."
He was a powerful figure. From 1974 to 1976, Jack Nicholson had established an overwhelming prime through Chinatown and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Entering the 1980s, he cemented his global presence with The Shining, Terms of Endearment, and Batman. He had become a living legend, standing tall even alongside the legendary actors of the past.
...But they say no one can withstand the weight of time.
In 1998, Jack Nicholson was significantly weaker than he had been in the past. Having stepped away from being the overwhelmingly dominant force, he was feeling a subconscious, vague fear of being overtaken by those who were catching up to his stature.
And that was an emotion any man living in this world—any father—would feel. The sensation of having what you believed to be right denied, of slowly being left behind.
To this giant of an actor, who was also like a father figure to him, Sion wanted to say:
"Father. I'll call a cab for you, so why don't you come over to my place?"
"Let me say this one more time. I am your father... No, no! Not your father! Dammit, you brat!"
Listening to Jack's tongue-tied voice as he accidentally blurted out a famous movie line and then got furious at himself, Sion thought:
This is why sons hate talking to their fathers.