A few yards away, other men of the 339th had discovered the body. They were laughing. For it was also a comic sight, as if the deceased had slipped and fallen into a vat of whipped cream. One of the men paddled with his arms, miming how his legs must have kicked, and the other roared with both hands on his empty belly. Hugo watched this, and thought that this was the future, too. He almost wanted to die, except for knowing that men like these would survive him, and take the things from his pockets.

That morning, the answer came down through the bureaucracies in Washington and Great Britain. It was agreed that the experiment in democracy had not yet been given a chance to flourish. The Armistice did not apply to the North Russian Allied Expeditionary Force. They were to continue the fight for freedom until Bolshevism—Communism, as it was now called— had been strangled in its crib.

30

November 11 Did Not Shoot. War Over. Mr. Chaplin rehearsing.
November 12 Did Not Shoot. Mr. Chaplin rehearsing.
November 13 Did Not Shoot. Mr. Chaplin ill.
November 14–29 Did Not Shoot. Vacation.
November 30 Did Not Shoot. Mr. Chaplin rehearsing.
December 2 Shot 2000 feet, Mr. Chaplin in bed.
December 3 Shot 1500 feet, Mr. Chaplin in bed, Mr. Wilson as antagonist.
December 4 Shot 400 foot test, Edna hairstyles.
December 5 Shot 1500 foot test, goats and chickens.
December 6 Did Not Shoot. Mr. Chaplin ill.

Chaplin thought of each movie he made as a sea voyage, perhaps because Syd had once been a seaman, and his letters home had a rhythm to them— set sail, drama on the ocean, return to port. On every movie, his creative spirit followed this arc: absolute certainty, doubt, dread, horror, despair, new certainty (sending him into a new compass heading that was 45, 90, or even 270 degrees different from where his first certainty had sent him), and then the Sargasso. Then something saved him. Then he was home.

Sixty-five times he had set out, and sixty-five times he had come to port, each time with a finished negative. He burned to return to port, forgetting that port made him restless.

He had learned to trust himself. He would film factions that had little to do with one another, knowing that some great force—perhaps his own ego—would cause them to have dramatic unity. He saw the scenes as little rafts he had flung over the waters, and he jumped and struggled and swam and dove across them, and somehow they made a bridge back home.

When he was younger, he might have run out of ideas for an hour or two, but now, approaching age thirty, he might spend a week, two weeks, three, in the doldrums. There was no specific way out. If he cared to list his previous solutions, they would look like this: