The Adaptation.

The movie based on 'The Historical Novel' opened and took the waiter at the restaurant completely by surprise -- to the point where he looked around the rest of the theater to see if there was enough ample evidence to support the fact that he wasn't dreaming, because, my god: the life of Frederick Douglass as a 'beach movie?' Was he really seeing what he was seeing? "The Meaning Of July The Fourth" delivered in a Hawaiian shirt as the waves lapped at his feet?

The Confederacy had sent a delegation to Cuba in the name of annexing it, and, somehow, Frederick Douglass was there, too, like something from Swamplandia or "George Saunders Land" -- the kind of thing sweeping through MFA programs across the United States. He'd be offended if it wasn't first terribly confused, offended that paragraphs like this --

Young bicycles swung their way like metronomes up the sidewalk. He could see that much on shore. He made his way around the island with a torch -- an Apollo 11 dot of a star stood freshly launched underneath the outer strata. A lighthouse nestled in the abundant pink. The silent green lung breaths of the outdoors. A sandstorm in a fish tank made itself visible in the arc of the incoming tide, and he was amazed that physics were as such in this universe that someone could put a boat in the water and nothing would screw up -- or that a body could enter into the water and that that body wouldn't somehow 'miss.' It wasn't quite a belief in a celestial order, this -- he wasn't quite willing to sacrifice to heaven strands he could feel he felt he could touch and move on his own -- but it did convey something to him that left him amused and impressed.

-- were left out of the movie altogether.

He went back to the restaurant after the film. It was closed. He had a key, let himself in, and began to wait tables in the dark.