Back in the Tall Grass

During the “I am your father” scene in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, after Darth Vader delivers the famous line, an unnamed extra dressed as a Cloud City technician can be heard muttering, “Heard that one before.” When the scene ends, he walks across the catwalk of the reactor shaft and onto the filming area of stage 3 in Hertfordshire, England. He exits the building, removes his Cloud City technician costume, and changes into jeans and a tie-dye T-shirt.

Outside, he can hear the old church bells of All Saints ring twelve, tolling a melancholy lunchtime across the town. At Sainsbury’s he picks up an egg and cress sandwich. Just a few steps from the entrance to Sainsbury’s is a bus stop. The unnamed extra waits for the bus. The air smells faintly of diesel. He sees part of a fluorescent advertisement flapping in the breeze, Terry’s All Gold chocolates for Christmas. In two months, it will belong again.

He stands next to an older Irish bricklayer who chain-smokes Player’s Navy Cuts, each one lit from the end of the last. There is a quiet elderly man in a brown wool coat holding a white paper bag, conversing in Yiddish with his wife.

The bus arrives, and the unnamed extra boards and climbs to the top deck of the double-decker. The vinyl seat he selects is still warm from the last passenger. A few rows ahead, an older woman’s feet disappear among her shopping bags. An apple has fallen from one of them and rolls under her seat as the bus lurches forward. The unnamed extra notices, but the woman’s head tilts toward her chest. Her mouth slightly open, she is asleep.

He unwraps the egg and cress sandwich from its wax paper but doesn’t eat it. Outside, the town rolls past in rows of red-brick terraces. A small boy drags a stick along the ground, scratching a line into the heart of the sidewalk. A black-and-white border collie tied to a lamppost with a bright red scarf in place of a leash. Its head tilts as it watches the brown pods of a laburnum tree fall.

He leans his forehead against the cool glass of the bus window and closes his eyes, its chill rising through his skin like a second thought. The bus heads toward Knebworth Park, where Led Zeppelin will play their first concert in two years. It will be the band’s first performance since the death of Robert Plant’s five-year-old son Karac two years earlier. There is a photo dated August 4th, 1979. Robert Plant and Jimmy Page standing in a field, tour bus parked behind them on the grass at Knebworth. They lean on each other’s shoulders, smiling, their arms hanging loosely at their sides. In the background, the unnamed extra sits on the grass. Hands pressed hard into his face. He is weeping.