Nicholas Rombes

The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing

“So, montage is conflict.”

— Sergei Eisenstein

“On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.”

— Julia Kristeva, from Powers of Horror

“Thou hast removed my soul far off from peace.”

— Lamentations 3:17

“Excuse Emily and her atoms.”

— fragment from an Emily Dickinson “envelope” poem, circa October 1882

CHAPTER 1

Destroyer (1969)

Black Star (mid-1980s)

The Blood Order (1948)

Hutton (1951)

AS FOR R. LAING, WHO CAN BLAME HIM?

There’s going to be a person named Katy, you understand. These were the first words he spoke to me. I kept waiting for Katy. Once, during our conversations, he told me he’d “had people hurt in absentia.” I pondered this, the semantics of this.

I interviewed him over a three-day period during a locust-infested summer in a cramped, hot motel room where, to judge from the morbid condition of things — the rotting brown carpeting, the dresser warped and distended as if it had been waterlogged and then dried out, the heaving, peeling sky-blue wallpaper that suggested infestation — he had paid someone in dubious currency to be left alone. He was wearing something like a scarf. Bright red, I remember that, a scarf that brought to mind the sort of clarity that only happens through the iron-willed exertion of power. Did I see a photograph once of Augusto Pinochet wearing a scarf, as well, and a cracked smile that suggested the terror of pure reason? Laing’s dark skin, reddish hair, large hands, and a pale or cream-colored blazer reminded me of the tropics somehow, and in the weary way that he greeted me it seemed as if he had dragged along with him all the time zones he had passed through to get here, and was existing — at this very moment — in each of them simultaneously. A man in his mid-60s but who looks much younger, as if his exterior aging has stalled while his interior aging continued. He has a shock of white hair and an open face. But, for some reason, when he opened that motel room door the first thing I noticed wasn’t Laing at all but a chair in the corner of the room, a chair that couldn’t possibly have been from the motel. It was situated not on the floor itself, but on an unstable foundation of old books (phonebooks, or so I thought) and newspapers. It looked as if it had been reupholstered recently in blue velvet, but done in such a poor way that the fabric was stretched too tightly in some spots and was bunched up or loose in others. And on the chair — which struck me more as a throne or a throne disguised as a chair — there were several neat stacks of uncased VHS tapes, tapes which I assumed were dubs of the films that I’d been sent here to interview Laing about.

Not that he acted courtly. He welcomed me man to man. He called me by a name that only my grandmother used, as if we had shared some secret history that I had forgotten, and at other times called me “A.” which turned out to be the name (or the initial of the name) of a very dangerous person he fell in with during his librarian/graduate school days. He showed me around the place, as it were. A small room, #228, that smelled of scalded milk and had the feeling of a dungeon to it, not that I’ve ever been in one. A door that opened out onto a narrow cement landing looked down across a vast, gullied parking lot, as if built for a motel ten times larger than this one. A bed stripped of its sheets and covers. The throne-chair in one corner. The motel room TV set, its flat screen spray-painted red, in another corner. A small round table where the interviews took place.

Who among us has the authority, the power, to bind and loose?

I had been sent there on assignment, as they say, but also out of curiosity, my own, as it were, eagerness to come close to the source of a myth. On the surface I was simply here to interview Laing for a short-lived cinema journal dedicated to the preservation of lost films that had been awarded a grant to investigate and report on neglected films. And whose chief editor Edison (that’s what we called him, after Herman Casler, an early film pioneer whose ideas Edison stole, and we called him that because he was a thief himself, but a generous one) I had persuaded, in a rare, belligerent show of confidence, to sign over a large chunk of to fund my excursion by borrowed van from central Pennsylvania into Wisconsin (near the western edge of the Chequamegaon-Nicolet National Forest) to interview Laing, whose obscurity had made him fashionable of late, as if nostalgia for the analog had somehow become nostalgia for Laing and his dirty, mistakist, unrepentant ways. I’m certain others had tracked him down but came to believe that what he told them about the films was unreliable. And yet isn’t unreliability its own form of certainty?

Who was Laing, really? (I can say that the disorienting feeling of depth around him had nothing to do with deep thought, but rather was more akin to the extreme depth-of-field in films like Citizen Kane, that make you feel you might fall into the deep background of the film itself, the background that exists in the space behind the characters.) A librarian specializing not in that category of films we call experimental or avant garde, but rather in films that smuggle these strategies and techniques into films that appear, on their surface, to be more conventional. During one of our conversations he said something to the effect that it was more difficult to make a movie with an experimental and bold vision that many might see rather than a self-proclaimed, willfully obscure avant-garde film. He was rumored to have come from a family whose immense wealth was exceeded only by its internal hatreds, and that he had insinuated himself in the margins of academia so as to have access to a campus office and, more importantly, the institutional letterhead that would allow him to correspond with a false authority to the cinephiles who operated the black markets of film ephemera. Others said he’d had a hand in writing the infamous “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation” CIA manual which had been distributed to South Vietnamese military officers in the 1960s and which contains references to a “weaponized cinema.” I, however, understood him to be a man who staved off disorder and chaos by sorting, by documenting, by naming. First at a small college in the rolling hills of southern Ohio (an area that’s really a secret part of the Deep South) from around 1965 to 1980, and then, until 2003, at a much larger one in Pennsylvania, where, despite its size, you could hear the lowing of the cows in the summer coming through the open dorm room windows on the breeze, and where he earned a reputation as carefully unbalanced by recommending — against the most conservative impulses of the times — films of the most startling, transgressive, truthful sort, salvaged from auctions and purchased with dubious currency from collectors for whom the shock of the new meant unloading the old. But more than that. Laing received, in his library office, canisters of film from the likes of David Lynch, Michelangelo Antonioni, Aimee Deren (granddaughter of avant-garde film-maker Maya Deren), Agnès Varda, Andrzej Żuławski, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and anonymous others through connections that seemed to involve, I could swear, some dark pact he had made in his youth. Laing had watched, in the privacy of his office — so it was rumored — dozens of short films by these directors and others, films of such simple beauty and implied violence. The sort of films that poisoned you if you saw them at the wrong (or right) age.

He had seen these films and then, just as interest began to grow in the so-called lost films of certain contemporary directors, destroyed them, the best of them. Burned them, so it was said, in a simple metal barrel behind the library loading dock. This would have been sometime in the early 2000s and was documented by an analog film group on campus called Radiant Union, one of whose members ended up serving as the editor of the journal that was responsible for sending me to see Laing in the first place. Radiant Union was, as far as I know (which is to say as far as anything can be known about anything) a group of cinephile graduate students who, having become disenchanted with theory, attempted to break free from what they called flying signifiers, which turned out to be the name of their pathetic little fanzine, mimeographed and stapled in the old “analog” way and distributed mostly amongst themselves. And it is in the poorly designed (which may have been, now that I’m committing these thoughts to the screen, deliberate, as a way to disguise the revolutionary nature of the ideas) pages of flying signifiers that information about Roberto Acestes Laing’s stupefying “film dispreservation” (the euphemistic term for “film destruction” used by the journal’s editors) are documented. In the pages of issues one through seven of that fanzine (for that’s all they managed to produce) who knows where fact ended and myth began? As for me, all I can say with certainty is that Edison — whom I knew from my own failed days as a post-graduate and… poor Edison! whose magnificent lisp, which he had decided to embrace rather than suppress, was always subverting his cause rather than aiding it — gave me his copies of flying signifiers, copies that he had acquired through an elaborate, off-line bartering system and that provided first-hand details regarding Laing’s destruction by fire of the most valuable films in his collection.

In truth, Laing had existed at the frayed edges of my imagination for a long time. First as a rumor or ghost — like that fleeting something you see, that moth-like smudge, out of the corner of your eye — and then gradually as a more substantial shape as if the thought of him had transformed into a tiny sliver that had lodged itself in my brain. It was in the credits where I spotted him first, the credits of a crazy, anarchist midnight movie about skiing, and I mean anarchist in the discombobulation of the film itself, its assembly or editing, which was all mixed up. In fact, it wasn’t really clear whether it was a documentary or a narrative film, because some of the sequences showing dangerously fast downhill skiing were voiced over in a very hushed, downbeat, formal way, almost as if it was a golf telecast. And then other parts would treat the characters not as if they were in a documentary, but rather in a fictional film, simply playing the parts of skiers. I watched it in the winter in a theater where you had to wear gloves to stay warm. They served beer, which made things better and worse. The other thing I remember was this: the sound of crickets. Coming, impossibly, from the snow-covered trees and brush of the film. This was around three years before Edison sent me to interview Laing about the destroyed films, and the ski movie was called either Aspen or else it was set in Aspen, or some combination of both, and it was near the end of that interminable film, as I recall, that I was first introduced to Roberto Acestes Laing, or a character named Roberto Acestes Laing.

It was a throwaway scene (as were most of the scenes in the film) that involved a roll call of the ski lift operators who, lined up in bright red and orange snow suits, stepped forward and took their assignment packets (I’m assuming) for that day. That was the first time I heard his name, as a bit-part character (you couldn’t even see his face, obscured by a parka and snow goggles) who was called forward to take a sheet of paper in a heavy plastic envelope: Roberto Acestes (pronounced in the film “Egestes” rather than “Ah-ses-teez,” as Roberto himself pronounced it) Laing. Then, a few months later, I was watching a re-run of a funny but unworkable short-lived 1970s late-night talk show (the one where the host sits, wearing a tan leisure suit, on a couch with a TV tray in front of him rather than a desk) and in the middle of the monologue one of the big stage lights, off-camera, blew out with a pop. Things went dim. The audience laughed in ways that either suggested a secret conspiracy or fear. The host blinked, put the palms of his hands together in front of his face, shook his head, and said, “Oh, Acestes.” And then one other time, on the radio, during an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, around the time of Texasville and grunge. Bogdanovich was asked about his influences. His voice sounded weary, as if it was barely leaking out of my car stereo. I was driving and being followed too closely by a motorcycle, I remember that. Bogdanovich mentioned the familiar names — Orson Welles (which he pronounced “”), Billy Wilder — but then also “Laing,” or what sounded like Laing.

Was I obsessed? If so, my obsession had more to do with the notion of Laing than with Laing himself. All our cryptic ones, our minor-key heroes, turn out to be disappointments in the end. I knew that. Just the idea that someone like him existed, someone who had attempted to destroy the regime of the image by going after its most potent artifacts, someone whose fleetingness in my imagination was closer to an improperly color-corrected character out of a film than real life, that was the hook that had snagged my mind: an abstraction of Laing rather than Laing the person. But what sort of way is that to lead life, avoiding the things you love because you know they will disappoint you? I understood that meeting Laing would demythologize him. I’ve seen enough statues that were supposed to stand forever pulled down with ropes by crowds to know that at some point all thrones collapse. By the time I visited him I had learned that after he burned the films — which according to Edison had been done in a vaguely ritualistic way as if in accordance with some dark, obscure procedure — he fled into the night, leaving behind the fire as it still burned brightly. Whether or not he actually fled into the night (and all of this information is, according to Edison, from an issue of flying signifiers that he showed me prior to my journey to see Laing but refused to let me hold or read) and, for that matter, whether or not he said I love the smell of nitrate in the morning (which hardly makes sense because it was night) almost doesn’t matter. What matters is that after he burned the films he disappeared. The university eventually cleared out his space in the rare books room, removed his name from the door, integrated the films he left behind into the university’s film department (the portentously named Center for the Study of Sound and the Moving Image), and enacted a 500 dollar application fee for student groups so that Radiant Union, no longer officially a part of campus life, was forced to hold its meetings and screen its movies in off-campus apartments in the summer, in some of the nearby abandoned steel foundries, whose leaky broken-windowed walls and oily concrete floors and hulking rusted machines must have lent a false air of danger to the screenings. By the time I visited Laing he had moved to Wisconsin (this would have been some time in the early 2000s, post Towers) and became, in the manner of our time, absent but always talked about. He had purchased (his word) a room in a barely functioning, largely unpeopled motel near the edge of federal land. Laing was a sort of rumor that was breathed on occasion through the obscure, little-traveled back pages of the interwebs.

Mostly it’s just Laing talking. Holding forth with the micro-recorder on the desk. I take notes, prompt him when he runs out of things to say, refill his Star Wars glass with bourbon. He takes off the scarf and puts it on a hanger as if it’s some important piece of clothing. Sometimes he talks off the top of his head. Other times he sorts through one of the cardboard boxes in the room to find his notes or drafts of descriptive essays he wrote concerning the films in question. Sometimes when he looks at me I feel a little sick, and maybe now, before all this begins, is the time to say that I think there was something radioactive about Laing, or if not radioactive then alien. For instance, my face seemed to grow hotter the longer he stared at me, which wasn’t often, but often enough, often enough to make me shake in private when I think about it now, years later, on the other side of the chaos. It’s the same feeling I get when I think about my perished daughter Emily. There was something about his eyes that seemed mechanical, as if there was another pair of eyes behind them, and perhaps even a third pair behind those, so that you weren’t sure what Laing was seeing when he looked at you.

“It seems to be a road movie. From the sixties. One of those.” (He talks in present tense throughout our conversations during the three days I interviewed him in Wisconsin, as if he’s watching the films right now, at this very moment.) I ask him if it’s okay to begin recording, and of course he says yes, and it’s then that I notice how large his hands are, like those of a basketball player. They’re resting palms down on the table and a crazy thought flashes into my head: Laing is receiving some signal, through his hands, which is why they’re resting there awkwardly, and I can imagine that this signal presents itself in the form of slight vibrations, and so I lay one of my hands on the table, too, casually, and then my idea doesn’t seem so crazy because I do feel something, or else I imagine that I do, the table vibrating ever so slightly, as if an electrical current were running through it.

“It’s called Destroyer. This was the first one, the first film that had to be burned. I was still in Ohio then. A hippie, so-called, but the sort of hippie who was just biding time until punk came and laid waste to those false values. The open landscape splintering into shards and fragments that only further alienate the screen protagonists from the audience. Golden sunsets,” Laing says, “lens flare. Blood. Sand. I’m sitting in the velvet plush seats of a cavernous theater with Laura, a student who seems intent on getting me ejected for open displays of lust. There are people smoking six rows up. The light from the projector is blue and visible. Nothing much happens in the film for a good ten minutes. Then in the heated flash of a jump cut it comes to life. The New Wave pretense drains away. This was one of the few films I stole rather than bartered for or purchased outright, having persuaded Laura to distract the projectionist by lighting a wig on fire, clearing him from the booth long enough for me to scissor the film reels free from the projector. It was said to be the only film directed by Warren Oates, the year before he starred in The Wild Bunch. He’s credited as the director under the name Slate Oates, which only made sense to me years later, when I read an interview with his wife Teddy who said that ‘Warren was heavy-duty into slate, natural things, not carpet.’

“The fuck of denim.

“Motorcycles on an American highway, the highway of serial killers, so they say. The engines sputter to life. Gasoline from one of the open overtopped motorcycle gas tanks splashes across the screen. Our napkins are soaked in butter grease. The girl’s thoughts are combustible.

“Three motorcycles with black-leathered and blue-denimed helmet-less characters. Two men and a woman. You get the feeling that she sleeps with them both at the same time. Roaring across the desert. The first twenty minutes are like a mash-up of outtakes from Easy Rider. Jump cuts all over the place. The screen goes black for several seconds. When we see them next the three chopper riders are in a dingy roadside diner, their bikes parked outside the window. The name of the diner, we see from a menu insert shot, is Contina’s. The characters talk to each other over plates of pancakes and bacon and coffee in white ceramic cups, except that on the Woman’s plate it doesn’t look like pancakes at all, but rather a gob of red raw hamburger. Man #1 wears a red bandana. Man #2’s hands are tattooed in red and purple geometric shapes. The Woman is the one who commands the scene through her silence, picking at the bloody thing on her plate with her fingers. Only fragments of dialog are clear:

“‘. . still following us…’

“‘. . came in and that he took that money…’

“‘. . said she’s being watched all the time…’

“‘He’d destroy us if he could.’

“The level of disengagement from the audience is palpable. This isn’t a movie that wants to be loved. The waitress is radiation-sickness thin in her cornstalk yellow outfit. She clears the table. With her skeletal hand she casually drops what appears to be a folded note in the lap of the biker with tattooed hands. He slips it into the pocket of his denim shirt without looking at it. The woman biker notices this. Her black hair is in what we used to call Indian braids. She murmurs something that’s not audible to us. Whatever she says infuriates the tattooed man. He slaps the table hard with his palm and leans forward as if challenging her. The skinny waitress in yellow looks agitated and says something to all of them, and for a few moments the sound cuts out in a way that suggests conspiracy, like the missing minutes in the Nixon Watergate tapes, a gap that Alexander Haig actually said was caused by a sinister force. But then the man with the red bandana says something to calm him down (‘let it go, for now, man…’) and puts his hand on the other biker’s shoulder in a way that can only be described as tender.

“Finally a character we hadn’t noticed before, sitting alone at a table at the far right edge of the screen, gets up to pay. He has a terrible limp and is slope-shouldered. He’s wearing a black cowboy hat that somehow seems out of place. The tattooed man notices and tips his head to the others. Without speaking they leave their table, casually, and follow the limper out to the parking lot that’s so dusty and loose it feels like some of it has blown up onto the theater screen itself. The camera holds on the empty booth as if there’s still someone there who we can’t see and then something hits the window, hits it hard. It’s a large bird. The sound it makes when it hits the glass is the sound of death. The film cuts to a shot originating from across the road. The restaurant is framed in the middle of the screen like a lonely outpost. The wind has picked up and dust and tumbleweeds scatter in that delicate, gravity-defying way of theirs across the screen in the direction of time. The man in the cowboy hat limps up to a dusty yellow Datsun. There might be something finger-written in the dust that cakes the side of the car, but it’s hard to tell. The man wearing the black cowboy hat gets in the filthy Datsun and tries to start it but like so many bad cars from that era it just won’t turn over. He curses frantically and, with both hands grasping the steering wheel shakes his body back and forth like he’s having a seizure or is trying to tear off the steering wheel. He finally gets it going and takes off in the direction of the blowing sand. The three motorcyclists talk excitedly and point in different directions. The woman tries and fails to light a cigarette in the wind. She finally throws the lighter to the ground. The tattooed man leans down to pick it up. The note falls out of his shirt pocket. It’s carried away by the wind. Then they get on their bikes and head out in the same direction as the Datsun.”

Laing pauses for a second, as if he’s holding the entire movie in his head and the image is projected onto the side of an enormous soap bubble there in the motel room with us that might burst and disappear forever at any moment. I suddenly have no desire to be in the room with him. I’m overcome with the feeling (a feeling that made only a little sense then and only a little sense more now) that we are standing on the sea floor, and that the blue velvet chair, the bed, the table, were all sunken objects, somehow preserved by the icy water that Laing and I, as if by magic, could breathe under. And if Laing hadn’t started up again about Destroyer I may very well have walked out.

“The next scene looks radically changed from what has come before as if a different director or cinematographer has taken over. It’s the familiar three bikers. They are in the same diner as earlier and yet everything is a little larger, cleaner, brighter. But the scene doesn’t begin that way. It begins in darkness. You can hear the sounds of the diner: scraps of conversation, the clattering of dishes, the cash register, maybe the scuffling of shoes on the floor. The light comes up slowly as if traveling through a frozen universe. After a few minutes the dim shapes assume their familiar forms. The bikers sit at the same table. But instead of leather and denim they wear uniforms of some sort, navy blue uniforms. This time the audio is clear. In the background, the window has a soft red smudge mark where the bird hit.

“‘We should tell them that he’s still following us,’ the woman says, stirring her coffee. She pauses. ‘And that Mr. Cyclone or Mr. Destroyer or whatever the girl calls him came in and that he’s the one who took that money.’

“‘How can we?’ the tattooed biker asks. ‘Steadman already suspects. The girl’s on record as saying she’s being watched all the time, man. In every transcript I’ve fuckin’ read the girl refers to Mr. Cyclone or Mr. Destroyer as It. Not as him. What she says is: I have a feeling It’d destroy us if It could. If only to get at her. It, man.

“‘I wonder if It knows we’re talking about it,’ the woman says, with venom, ‘and what if It is a beast and not a man, or a beast that was a man?’

“The scene cuts with no preparation or warning or musical cues to the Datsun as it pulls up beside another car, a black one, that’s stopped on the side of a desert road. It’s a crane shot, the camera stationary in the air as if attached to an invisible telephone pole. For a few minutes nothing seems to happen, at least nothing that can be seen. We hear the wind moving sand across the hot road and the watery waves of heat rippling off the tops of the cars seems CGI’d but that’s impossible in a film from 1969. Finally, the limping man with the black cowboy hat gets out of the Datsun and walks slowly around to the back of the car. He keys open the trunk and pulls something out, something that looks like a heavy iron rod. He holds it to his side and walks around the black car, looking in its windows. If there’s someone or something in there we can’t see it, not from this canted angle. When he taps on the passenger side window with the iron bar we hear it from within the car itself, as well as the soft sound of breathing. It’s as if there’s a split: we’re now hearing things from the inside of the car but seeing things from outside. The Datsun driver taps the window harder and there’s a shuffling noise from within the car, as if someone is searching for something in the glove box. Then suddenly he takes the bar in two hands, raises it over his head, and brings it down against the car window once, then does it again. He drops the bar and reaches in through the shattered window and there are screams, either from him or from whomever’s in the car, and then suddenly it’s clear that he’s trying to pull away, that whatever’s in the black car has got a hold of him and is trying to pull him in, and he’s struggling to get free. The screams are louder now, high-pitched and terrible, and his body is half in the car, his legs kicking in the air, the camera just holding the shot like a one-eyed torturer, watching as, finally, the man goes limp, half his body in the black car and half out.

“The next scene is back at the diner,” Laing continues. His demeanor, sitting there at that table with his large hands folded in front of him, suggests that he doesn’t show the slightest interest in me. And yet I feel that he’s observing me with intensity even as he pretends to be lost in the movies he describes.

“A red line appears in the center of the screen, from top to bottom. It’s about the width of a pencil at first. It vibrates ever so slightly as if etched on the film itself. The line slowly widens, splitting the screen in two. And if that isn’t remarkable enough, this: the characters — now divided by the red line — try to reach each other but can’t. The line is real for them. When the woman reaches across the table she jerks her hand back when it approaches the red line. She shakes her fingers to cool them. She tries again, and the same thing happens.

“The red line widens. It takes up the middle third of the screen. It bubbles slowly like lava. Shimmering waves of heat push out toward the edges of the screen. The characters — the two biker-men on the left and the woman on the right — back away from the center. They splay their hands in front of their faces, palms out, to shield themselves from the heat. Eventually they retreat off the screen, to the left and to the right. Presumably into the implied story space of the film itself.

“As the line expands it destroys everything. The screen itself is eradicated and replaced with molten red. It leaks out of the frame. It hisses when it hits the theater floor. Laura and I want to leave but it’s hard not to watch. It’s hard to think. Something else is being destroyed here. Not just theater seats and empty popcorn buckets.

“Something more.

“We want something more.

“We want something more to be destroyed.”

*

Laing is not so good at transitions. As soon as he finishes describing Destroyer he starts in on another film, Black Star. At the time I chalked this up to his age, but even then I knew there was something else at work, and that Laing’s rough transitions between films — his inability or unwillingness to provide connective tissue — was really the equivalent of the rough jump cuts in the films he loved, the films he loved so much he had to destroy, and that my own desire to fill the void of her loss (a void that had nonetheless given my life its shape) was the very reason I had come out here to find Laing as if somehow he could replace the blank and final fact of Emily’s death with something else, some mystery, the mystery that her life was or would have been had she lived. The earth is stuffed with the dead. This I understand. In a perverse way, I suppose, I had refused to be sentimental about the death of my daughter. I had been deep into Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette during that time, and there was a line that was so powerful that for many years it extinguished all other belief: “A new creed became mine — a belief in happiness.” Lucy Snowe writes this as she is falling in love with someone she knows she cannot love and I can say this now, after exiting the dangerous orbit of Laing: I had not loved my daughter fully in order to protect myself from what I feared most: her loss.

“Black Star,” Laing says, “was simply too close to the truth. It had to be destroyed. The film was shot and is set in the ’80s but it used 16 mm Eastman Kodak stock from the ’40s. While the magenta and yellow dyes that form the image fade in other stocks, the Kodak stock from that era is persistent, so the film has a weird vibrancy to it, so strong and intentional, if that’s the right word, that it’s almost like it’s the film that’s watching you, rather than the other way around.” There’s a sadness or a false sadness as he says this, a lilt in his voice, and while at the time it seemed to be rehearsed I’ve come now to believe that describing the movies to me involved a genuine loss on Laing’s part. I’d go so far as to say that it was a slow method of suicide.

The knife-shaped sliver of sunlight coming through Laing’s motel room window is there on the floor moving and slowly elongating (though he and I can’t see this happening) like a weapon made from light. I remembered something that had happened after I first arrived in Wisconsin, a week prior to meeting Laing. I had gone to a small tavern across the river from my motel. The waitress — thinking back on it now — resembled an older version of the waitress Laing described from the Destroyer film, wearing the yellow server’s outfit and looking so ravaged and thin as if in her mind there was a continuously running blast furnace. Of course it wasn’t the actual waitress from the film because I hadn’t seen Destroyer, and yet because I hadn’t seen it I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t her, as if somehow she, or the phantom possibility of her, had leaked into my life just prior to Laing’s recollection of a movie that featured her as a bit character. No matter, there I found myself at the tavern where a version of the Destroyer waitress brought me my drinks in a ritual that was absurdly formal, as if I couldn’t fetch them from the bar myself, or as if I needed a new white napkin with each glass of beer and in fact it was this last detail — about the napkins — that led to our brief and cryptic conversation, one that I won’t repeat here except to say that it touched on the local children who had disappeared and who had been the subject of the news reports and flyers stapled to telephone poles and even one small billboard along the road that pictured a heavily pixillated face of a young girl with the words FIND ME next to it. The waitress said that she understood like only a mother can (but what about a father? I wondered) the void of losing a child like that and the terror of not being able to shut off the part of your brain that speculates on the details and that my journey to and from Laing’s motel was going to be much more complicated and treacherous than it appeared.

“Black Star begins with a color-saturated Polaroid that fills the screen,” Laing says at last, and with a sort of stupid authority that I would come to understand as a form of concealment. “It’s Alejandro Jodorowsky’s most coherent film, as if he had decided to make a movie whose style went against his every instinct as a director, or as if he had split into two men, one who directed the incoherent elephants-battling-elephants sequence in Tusk (1980) and another who directed Black Star which, despite its madness, is grounded in reality. Which is to say that it’s absurd, but absurd in a way that’s familiar. The Polaroid is of someone crouched next to what appears to be an archeological dig, pointing into a shallow pit and smiling, as if he had just unearthed an artifact. He looks to be of college age, or maybe a little older. He’s in a desert, and the light is yellow. His dark hair is windblown. The Polaroid is accompanied by this voiceover: ‘Diego was into the distribution of goods, and the acquisition of labor. In this way he acquired slaves, used them to produce distributable goods, and acquired more slaves.’

“It’s voiced by a woman — Diego’s girlfriend or wife? — who has a slight Southern accent. You picture her telling this story sitting on the back stoop of some remote cabin, smoking a cigarette, as an owl watches her from the woods. The way she says slaves, it sounds like slayves, the ay coming from the very back of her throat. Then the screen goes black for a few seconds before the Polaroid appears again, this time blown up so that what Diego’s pointing toward is at the center of the screen. What he’s pointing at doesn’t matter though because it’s his finger that draws our attention, bent at a weird angle, an impossible and painful angle, as if broken. And tattooed on the back of his hand is what appears to be a small black star.

“At least that’s how I remember it,” Laing says, as if there’s anyone to question how he remembered it, or as if to distract me from the sliver of sun shaped as a knife which has now taken on an orange hue, a persistent orangeness that suggests a secret passageway beneath the motel to a furnace so enormous that it could only be understood in terms of Miltonic Hell. “I saw the film only once, on late-night cable, in a distant country where I didn’t speak the language. I had been sent by the university in Pennsylvania to Warsaw, of all places, to learn about the latest methods in humidity stabilization as it applied to microfiche and other silver-gelatin and vesicular film-based storage devices. This was in the spring of 1987, or the fall of 1988. It was the first English I had heard in days, and so I watched it straight through. The story was convoluted and hard to follow but just when it verged on the ridiculous some small dark moment kept the film frightening enough to keep watching.

“It turns out that the kid in the Polaroid — Diego — has been sent to Mexico to live with an aunt after his parents were killed in an auto accident. The aunt, who attempts to seduce him, is a former model who goes around her apartment in a pink silk robe and with rollers in her hair and a cigarette whose ashes she taps into the clay flower pots scattered around the apartment. Diego runs away, working various jobs at the tourist hotels up and down the coast of Zihuatenejo, Mexico, and where he eventually befriends a rich childless couple from Germany whom he manages to con, after an elaborate weeks-long performance that begins innocently enough but that ends with an act of violence that leaves stains on the walls that, in another setting and another context, could be viewed as abstract art. The movie suggests that Diego discovers that the couple are Nazis, not neo-Nazis or Nazi sympathizers or far-right extremists but actual Nazis, which is impossible because it’s the mid-1980s, and yet when Diego discovers their Nazi uniforms in the hotel room closet on a rack hidden behind the main closet rack it’s clear the uniforms aren’t antique or vintage but new, new but worn, so it’s not like they’re collectors. They actually wear these things. And this shot — as Diego parts with both hands the first set of hanging clothes to reveal, behind them in the closet, the Nazi uniforms with their bright red armbands and the black swastikas (which seem to be in motion, as if marching through history) — this shot, especially, looks as if it was filmed not just on film stock from the 1940s, but in the 1940s. Just how he escapes their hotel room with over one hundred thousand dollars isn’t exactly clear but I do remember that in the next scene he’s in disguise, or else time is supposed to have passed and he’s grown older. He’s gone deeper south yet into the remote mountains north of Tarija, Bolivia.

“Years pass in the movie. Maybe a decade. The transitions don’t seem linear. It’s as if the movie was edited by people who have a mixed-up or perverse sense of time. Next thing you know, Diego is the owner of three indigenous Bolivians — two men and a woman — who look like their costumes (such as they are) were designed by someone with a poor memory of those anthropological photos of tribesmen and women from 1970s issues of National Geographic. We assume Diego has purchased them with the money filched from the Nazi couple. The movie uses English subtitles when the slaves talk in what sounds like a made-up, mixed-together language of Spanish, Quechua, and Tacana, but the subtitles are riddled with spelling errors, and Diego’s name is spelled at least three different ways. There is a quickly edited, heavy-handed sequence (really the only Jodorowsky-like part of the entire film) that I think is supposed to depict the slaves’ increasing love and devotion to Diego, although maybe it’s intended as a metaphor for hegemony itself: how the oppressed often internalize the very values of the oppressors thus becoming compliant in their own disastrous fates. In one shot, a naked slave smashes his iron ankle chains with a stolen hammer and instead of fleeing or using the hammer on the unarmed Diego, he drops it and embraces Diego with tears in his eyes. ‘My master, mi padre,’ he says, sobbing.

“One morning, Diego — who has grown a full beard and looks like you’d imagine a character might in a Robert Louis Stevenson novel — wakes up to find a letter pinned to his night-shirt. The letter — shown in close-up and read in voiceover by the same woman’s voice that first introduced us to the Polaroid of Diego — is, in effect, a ransom note for a kidnapped German priest who had been in Bolivia to establish an orphanage. Diego has no idea who delivered the letter and, worse yet, has never heard of the priest. He goes outside and there’s a terrible screech in the forest trees and Diego watches as an enormous bird attacks what appears to be a brown sloth which, after a struggle, tumbles crashing through the branches to the forest floor. Diego understands, we are made to see in a close-up of his troubled, sweaty face, that to use his slaves to rescue a priest would be the sort of culminating paradox that his life had tilted toward and the particulars of such a rescue-action would make his mark on history. The next morning, swatting away the flies, he inspects the base of the tree and finds the sloth’s body, already shredded and mostly devoured.

“The movie switches gears yet again. We are shown, via flashback, the priest’s kidnapping a few months prior by the splintered remnants of the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army which, the film suggests, probably amounted to no more than five or six delusional, authoritarian, ex-Bolivian soldiers, unshaven in the Che Guevara-Allen Ginsberg fashion, whose obsession with the Nico phrase ‘you’re number 37, have a look’ from that first Velvet Underground album was, in fact, a decoy. For in truth, the Tupac Katari Guerilla Army despised what they perceived as the weak, narcissistic indulgences of ‘the sixties’ and in fact saw The Velvet Underground as an extension of, rather than mocking rejoinder to, The Beatles. Diego understands that the ransom note pinned to his shirt has nothing to do with ransom. Instead, it’s the priest’s death sentence, delivered to Diego by the priest’s captors in order to entice Diego to stage a rescue operation (an assault, really) that will, of course, result in the death of the priest. That way, his captives won’t have to do the dirty work of killing him themselves, as they are Catholics, a splinter group of a splinter group of the Liberation Theology spectrum.

“‘Kill them all, including the priest.’ That was the deal, as Diego understood it, ‘them all’ referring to the nameless others who had also been kidnapped so as to disguise the fact that the priest was the real target. And how to recognize the priest? The slaves would recognize him, the slaves in the aluminum canoe pulling across the river in strokes. The priest scarred by acne and humbled by one leg shorter than the other, from childhood polio, his pretext for a life defined by self-pity.

“The movie switches back to the present and goes quiet as Diego and his three slaves navigate the wide, glassy, green river deeper into the hot jungle. The strong current pulling time itself downward into the river-bottom muck. The peeling bark on the shore. The fungal, persistent stench of decaying jungle. A grouping of sloths in a tree, a congress of fur and shiny brown marble eyes. The film turning into a nightmare, a real out-and-out nightmare. This is all shot from the point of view of the boat, and we see as the metal and twig cabin on the river bank comes into view where the priest and the others are held. There’s a smash cut and suddenly the assault on the cabin is underway. Images on the screen burst forth like explosions. The camera is in on the action, its movement as violent as what’s happening on the screen. The cabin, of course, is not well-guarded, as the whole point of the plan was for the kidnappers to allow the priest and the other hostages to be murdered during the so-called rescue.”

Laing stops here. He stands up from the table, untucks his shirt, and takes a small red object that had been attached with white adhesive or hospital tape somewhere on his lower back. It’s about five inches long and is shaped like a cone, narrowing to a sharp point at one end. He sets it on the table. This doesn’t come across as a threatening gesture, as you might expect, but rather a protective one. I’m somehow grateful and relieved to see the object there before us even as the first word that fills my head when I see it is annihilation. Laing sits back down and continues his description of Black Star.

“Everything seems to be going as planned with the rescue-action assault. Inside the cabin, the priest and several others are tied to chairs. But the hostage-takers from the Tupac Katari Guerilla Army aren’t anywhere in sight. In fact, not a shot has been fired. Diego stands in front of the priest, holding a gun, and next to Diego stands his most devoted slave. ‘If you murder me,’ the priest says, ‘they will kill you, and say they did it trying to stop you from killing me.’

“‘Who is they?’ asks Diego.

“‘The ones who sent you,’ says the priest. ‘The ones watching you out there.’

“‘There’s no one out there. There’s no one here to protect you, priest.’

“‘If they wanted you to see them, you’d see them,’ he says. And then, as if addressing an unseen force, he says: ‘It is a faithful saying: For if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him.’

“By this time the movie has slowed down to a Henry James pace and you get the feeling that what’s being talked about isn’t really what’s being talked about. Everything’s at a standstill, but time is still flowing. In fact, you can almost see it moving across the screen from left to right and for second after second and maybe even minute after minute no one in the film says a word.

“Then, in a spasm of violence, there’s a sharp noise outside, like a gunshot, and Diego shoots the priest in the head, as if these had always been his instructions.” Laing pauses.

“Does that bother you?” he asks me. “The part about the priest?”

I want to answer with a quip but I hesitate. There is something about the red object on the table that worries me, as if Laing’s question (and my answer) was intended not for Laing or myself, but for the cone. When I don’t answer, Laing continues.

“There is no dialog or screaming or swelling music, just the sound of the gunshot. Almost at the same time, the slave who had embraced Diego turns to face him and, with a rough and worn hand axe that he must have been holding all along at his side but that we didn’t see or refused to see, strikes the unsuspecting Diego with one heavy blow to the side of the head. Diego falls where he stands, and the slave kneels down and strikes him again and again until he is up to his elbow in blood.

“There is the distant but approaching sound of a helicopter. The remaining two slaves untie the other hostages and the camera (there is a fleck of blood or mud or brain matter on the lens) follows them out and back into the jungle as someone barks instructions or warnings from a speaker on the helicopter. The jungle trees blow and shake violently as the slaves and hostages disappear into them.

“Then the screen is filled with that same Polaroid from the beginning and it’s clear that the film is about to end. This time, however, there’s no voiceover. The camera slowly pulls back and it’s revealed gradually that the Polaroid of Diego at the archeological dig is taped to a wall along with other, many other, Polaroids. As the camera keeps pulling out it becomes clear that we are in something like a police station, or a room where detectives are at work. They crisscross in front of the camera, in white shirts with sleeves rolled up, some of them wearing their gun holsters, a few of them even smoking like in the old days. There must be six or seven of them, in this large room with wooden desks and file cabinets and the wall of Polaroids, so indistinct now that Diego’s face is no longer discernible.

“The movie ends just like that, though I’ve often wondered if it was edited for TV. Is there a different ending, one that at least tries to explain what has just happened? Is Diego’s picture on the police wall because he’s a victim, or a suspect? And why, as the camera pulls back and away from the room, does it linger, for just a moment, over some official documents on a detective’s desk, one of which has embossed, on its letterhead, a black star, the very same black star tattooed on the back of Diego’s hand?”

I make a move as if to say it’s time to break but Laing gets up and walks over to the blue velvet throne-chair and comes back to the table with one of the VHS tapes, unmarked. For the first time I think of Laing in relation to that other Lang, Fritz, whose Metropolis had transformed everyone who saw it into detectives of film, and who Edison had referred to either as the German Lang or the American Lang, depending on whether the films in question were made before or after he fled Germany in 1934. Lang, for whom in M and the Mabuse films there was no such thing as truth, only illusions, pitiful illusions, his characters pretending to be one thing when they are in fact another, a duplicity which lasts only so long, until the character betrays himself. Laing brings one of the tapes back to the table.

“In those days,” he says, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms across his chest as if the red cone-like object has somehow renewed in him the stupid, blind confidence of youth, or as if the sun — which is directly overhead now, sending its rays or whatever they are down through the Wisconsin sky — was actually like the sun we had imagined as children. “In those days,” he repeats, “the only way to see David Lynch’s early short films was to start or join a film club, pool resources, and rent them from someplace like Facets in Chicago. It must have been around 1978, or maybe earlier, when they finally arrived, in brown metal canisters stamped — into the metal itself with all the finality of a tombstone — with the words PROJEKTOR CORP. They were the usual suspect early Lynch films: The Alphabet (1968) and The Grandmother (1970). 16 mm prints, threaded through the projector by the president of Radiant Union. Because shipping was free, we had also ordered a third film, from 1948, called The Blood Order. It didn’t star anyone famous. It turned out that after the Lynch films screened, everyone wanted to go outside to talk about them, so I stayed behind and was the only one — no, there was other person who watched it with me, although we never spoke, a girl who should never have been there — who watched The Blood Order.

“It’s in black and white, except for the flashbacks, which are in color. Maybe colorized. An American pilot has crash-landed in a wet field outside a French village and is taken in by a family whose daughter, the pilot comes to suspect, is a Nazi collaborator. She’s beautiful, and not in a movie actress way, but rather in a way that draws attention to the dark circles beneath her eyes and a severe scar that cuts a channel across her chin, and I remember thinking that maybe this was an Italian neorealist film, but it doesn’t make sense that it was set in France and that the dialog was in English. There is a dog with a limp, I remember, that’s poisoned and that dies terribly and melodramatically, clawing at its own stomach and churning up foam, and that’s when the pilot begins to suspect that the daughter is on the Nazi side, and that she has murdered the dog — her own dog from childhood — to prove her allegiance to the Reich somehow.

“There’s a factory that looks like a castle, or a castle that looks like a factory, I think, not far from the farmhouse that shelters the American pilot, and that’s where he and the girl go to have long philosophical conversations (the French girl speaking English in a beautiful, broken, menacing way that suggested she knew English better than she was leading on), conversations about being and time that inevitably turn into Production Code-era love-making scenes that are interrupted by machine-gun fire or the breaking of dawn. The pilot and the young woman fall into deep discussions that touch on the war, of course, but also methods of torture (the girl says her uncle was tortured by the Germans who broke his kneecaps with a hammer that he himself was forced to provide), the indifference of God, Hollywood movies, the persistent and insane theory that Vladimir Lenin and Sigmund Freud are brothers, the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and whether evil is a constant or only something that flowers (they kept using that word, I remember) when conditions are right. These passages of the film are shot in long takes, the camera quietly, almost undetectably, passing through the same space that they share in the factory. They sleep, and the film actually shows them sleeping. It’s remarkable. At dawn, as the factory engines began to ramp up for the day (it was a secret factory where bullets were manufactured for the French Resistance, although I can’t remember how the film conveyed this), the flashbacks begin. In the first flashback, The Blood Order switches suddenly to color, and it isn’t a nostalgic flashback like you’d expect, but a bloody one that shows the slow, methodical slaughter of a pig by two men whose faces are obscured on a farm from what appears to be the American pilot’s childhood memory, although why his dreams are presented in color in the film is never clear. One suspected that the filmmakers were secret experimentalists or avant-gardists subverting the war-movie genre from within.

“Then the screen goes black and we’re brought into the second flashback in full color,” Laing continues. “The film’s aspect ratio shifts and I remember feeling sick and light headed. An open meadow bathed in orange sun, a blue sky, the meadow-grass and wildflowers moving in the wind, and a man on a black horse slowly crossing the meadow from screen left to right, the camera stationary. One thing that’s always bothered me about that scene: it was silent except for what appeared to be a gunshot. At least that’s what I remember from that night, watching the film that no one else wanted to see because it wasn’t by David Lynch. The gunshot. But no corresponding action in the scene. Neither the horse nor the horseman react to the sound, as if it was meant only for the audience, some sort of secret signal from the filmmakers to us.

“After this, the film falls back into the expected patterns: the American pilot, on the mend, begins to suspect with more confidence that the young French woman is a Nazi sympathizer, or even worse an out-and-out collaborator; he lies and tells her that he’s Jewish in hopes of catching a reaction from her, and that his presence at the farm endangers her family; the girl goes out for a walk in the woods in the middle of night, unaware that the pilot watches her from the window of his room. Just then a shot rings out in the forest and, although the pilot’s first thought is that it’s a trap, and that perhaps the girl has indeed seen him watching from the window, he pulls on his wool coat and dashes out into the cool night. For the next several minutes, the film goes black. Instead of images, there is nothing except the sound of the pilot running blind through the night, his labored breathing, his footsteps across the field, the call of an owl. Twice the pilot calls out the girl’s name breathlessly as he runs, until another shot rings out, and the moon clears from behind the clouds. There at his feet is a young man in a torn soldier’s uniform that appears to be German, although it’s hard to tell in the dark, and the uniform from what I could remember wasn’t even World War II era. The soldier grasps his throat, obviously dying from gunshot wounds. In the moonlight, the pilot leans down to listen to the man’s dying words.

“‘She can’t…’ says the German soldier before breathing his last in a gurgling whisper. Before the meaning of this settles in, the screen grows brighter, in flickers, and the pilot looks back over his shoulder to see — in a point-of-view shot — a fire in the distance. He takes off running back to the farm, and within a few seconds it becomes clear that all is lost. By the time he arrives the farmhouse is engulfed in flames and the pilot falls to his knees and slumps forward. Then something very strange happens: the film switches to color again, but not because it’s a dream or flashback. Bathed in the yellow light of the fire, the pilot remains hunched forward in sorrow and despair as a shadow — the shadow of a human being — emerges from frame right.

“It’s the girl, in color, wearing a bright red beret. For the first time you can see that her eyes are blue. She kneels down beside the pilot and puts her hand beneath his chin and gently lifts his face toward hers. By this time the color has become almost psychedelically saturated, with both the girl and the pilot bathed in the hellish red light and black leaping shadows from the fire. The camera slowly pans down, revealing her clenched fist, which she slowly opens, palm up. In her hand she holds a small silver swastika, which gleams in the light. It seems to move imprecisely in the palm of her hand, as if animated. As the film switches again back to black and white, the familiar Hollywood music begins, signaling the end. The camera slowly pans up to the pilot’s face, which wears an expression of agony or ecstasy. After holding there for a moment, the camera continues panning up to the sky, revealing the moon, partially obscured by the black smoke from the smoldering farmhouse.

“At the time, I thought the ending was clear: the girl had torn the swastika from the uniform of the German soldier she had shot in the woods. She was a double agent, working for the Resistance, and murdered the German before he had a chance to sneak into the farmhouse to murder the pilot. But later, as I thought more about the film (which I only watched that once) I wondered if the swastika might have been the girl’s confession, an affirmation of what the pilot had suspected: that she was a Nazi and worse yet, a Nazi out of choice, not coercion. There was also the fact of the burning farmhouse, which seemed to me symbolic of the irrational terror of total war. But back then we found symbols in everything. The truth is the ending of the film was too terrible, too truthful, to ever really talk about, involving a technique that used multiple split screens, a technique I’d never seen before that literally split the screen into not two but four or five panels of action, each one divided by a vertical red line.”

*

My notes say Laing’s description of these two films (although description isn’t the right word) lasted about three hours (it can’t have been that long) and that I left the motel for lunch and returned a while later, having agreed with Laing that the only business we should conduct together in the motel room was “movie business.” When I return he has straightened the room up a bit, shaved, and the scarf isn’t to be seen.

“Hutton,” Laing says, “was the name of it. A short film, but suggestive of something much longer, almost historical in length, epic, with all the darkness that trails history, catching up with it, overtaking it, devouring it.

“As I remember it, Hutton waits in the car. These are his instructions. To wait.”

As Laing recalls the movie he sometimes squints, as if bringing it, or parts of it, the parts of it he wants to remember, into sharper focus.

“It is late in the afternoon, now. He has been there since 10 a.m., in his gray suit provided by the Messiah Detective Agency. Out the passenger side window is a city park. Families come and go. Out the driver side window is an old red-brick apartment building, with beautiful leaded windows and black iron work around the steps. Out the front windshield the street divides into a boulevard about 50 yards ahead of the parked car.

“The car windows are open. A fluke warm day in late October, the movie suggests, though I can’t remember how. Maya Deren’s granddaughter, Rachel or Raquel, or Aimee, gave it to me, the film, in the old stale cafeteria at the land-grant university in Pennsylvania, where we had agreed to meet through a series of letters (letters that served as long negotiations) and then through many short phone calls. When I say gave I mean loaned, though it amounted to the same thing in the end. She wore her black hair in sharply cut bangs, I remember, that was the style during those long years before the Towers fell. I could see the face of her grandmother behind or inside her own face, and her gestures seemed to imitate Maya’s swift and elegant movement in Meshes of the Afternoon. And with her, Aimee — that was her name, not Rachel or Raquel — brought several pages of her grandmother’s notes for the film, notes suggesting that it was not nearly complete, and that its ending would involve an apocalypse the likes of which had never been rendered on screen before. Aimee turned out to be a real chatterbox, which surprised me, except when it came to the topic of Maya’s notes for the calamitous ending, which she talked about in hushed tones as if not to arouse the curiosity of some invisible butcher towering just behind her there in the cafeteria, in a sort of transparent region of space that loomed behind her and that I could almost make out. And she wouldn’t allow me to examine her grandmother’s notes in front of her, forbidding me to so much as look at them in her presence. The cafeteria food was dull, which gave us a chance to laugh together at something, some shared experience, and it was then that I finally relaxed and flirted a little bit with Aimee over our dry mashed potatoes and slightly crusty orange Jell-O. In fact, it was Aimee who pointed to the mashed potatoes with her Spork and said, as if naming it for the first and last time, Mashes of the Afternoon.

“We spent the day like that, walking around campus, her all the while with the 16 mm film in her grungy satchel, and she would say things to strangers like I haven’t slept with your son, or Don’t worry, it will be over before you know it. She finally handed the film over, in one of those beautiful and alien metal circular canisters that can only be opened carefully and in a balanced sort of way by placing your fingers on opposite sides of the top lid and gently lifting. It had a red sticker on it, I remember, in the shape of a jagged cone that seemed something like an emblem of death, an emblem painted on with nail polish and, I could swear, warm to the touch. This was up in the storage area part of my library office where I had set up two 16 mm projectors and an AV cart with a VCR player, and I remember that it was hard to breathe for a few moments with Aimee Deren sitting there cross-legged on the floor next to me as I opened the canister and unspooled the film leader, holding it up to the light like it was secret microfiche depicting the code names for all the torture centers. I had difficulty breathing not because of Aimee or the closeness of her bare knee but rather because I felt that the apocalyptic ending that Aimee had told me about might actually be lying in wait there in the film itself and that’s why I asked Aimee, So have you seen this before? to which she replied, as I knew she would, Not all of it. For a moment it struck me that we were alone together — really alone — and that we could have done anything with each other had we wanted to. So you don’t know if the world ends or not? I asked, half-teasing, but her face suddenly had the look of someone stricken, stricken with a terrible thought in the shape or form of a shadow.”

Laing stops for a moment, as if realizing for the first time that he had veered off track, or as if regretting that I had been sent here on assignment not to ask him about Aimee (and later A.) but instead about the unfinished Maya Deren film she had brought to him. He produces from a pocket a blue bandana that he uses to wipe at a spot or something (I don’t see a spot) on the table in front of him and I assume it’s a tick or a habit or something about who he is that lurks beneath the surface of who he pretends to be that is just now beginning to reveal itself in this small action. I size up the discrepancy between my idea of Laing and the Laing who sits across from me now and it’s clear to me that if he’s telling me the truth about these films then it’s a special form of truth, one that operates by its own uncertainty principle. It’s actually worse than that. It’s as if Laing himself — even though he’s right in front of me — occupies an uncertain space, or else makes that space uncertain, so that position and momentum can’t be known simultaneously. And then I think about the missing children, and understand that this is how they exist, too.

Laing returns to the film.

“Hutton gets out to stretch, the 10th or 12th time that day judging by the bored look on his face. Puts his arms above his head. Reaches down to his shoes. Gets back in the car. Maybe not in that order, but close enough.

“Finally, as the sun begins to set in furious orange (the sort of orange that’s such a hot image that it threatened — and if Aimee were here she’d say the same thing — to burn up the projector from the inside) the back car door opens and a man slides in. Hutton knows him as Hector. Dressed entirely in white. Large hands. Full beard. The whole scene is shot reverse-shot, just back and forth, Hutton in the front seat, Hector in the back.

“‘Well,’ Hector says. ‘How’d it go?’

“‘Good, I guess. Nothing happened.’

“‘Was something supposed to happen?’

“‘Well, I thought…’

“‘Just a joke, Hutton. Of course something happened. Now tell me what you saw.’

“‘From memory or…’

“‘If your memory’s good, then just tell me,’ says Hector.

“‘… because I jotted down notes…’

“‘Of course you did. As you should have.’

“‘… and I could read…’

“‘Like I said, Hutton, if your memory’s good then just tell me. But if there’s some fault in it then read me from the notes.’

“‘… the notes…’

“‘That you said you jotted down.’

“‘…’

“‘Hutton.’

“‘…’

“‘Hutton.’

“‘I could…’

“‘Read from your notes.’

“‘… find some fault.’

“‘In?’

“‘My memory,’ says Hutton.

“‘Even though it was just from this morning.’

“‘But that was…’

“‘Not such a long time ago, Hutton.’

“‘… under different circumstances.’

“‘Than what?’

“‘…’

“‘Than what, Hutton?’

“‘…’

“‘Hutton.’

“‘… than…’

“‘Than what?’

“‘Than now.’

“‘Of course, Hutton! Of course they’re different!’

“‘You weren’t here.’

“‘And that’s why I need you to tell me what you saw.’

“‘If only…’

“‘Hutton. Enough.’

“‘If only it…’

“‘Had been what?’

“‘Clearer.’

“‘I understand. And so.’

“Hutton opens a small green flip-spiral notebook provided to him by Hector that morning. His jottings are mundane, trivial: boy falls off swing, 10:20; low-flying plane & everyone in park looks up, 11:07; two men in sweat suits argue in street, 11:30; Hector crosses street in distance, 2:35… These are shown, I think, as inserts. Hector says something like ‘Do you mean you saw me cross the street at 2:35? Is that what this says?’

“‘I think so. It looked like you.’

“‘Would you say I crossed the street in order so that you would see me?’

“‘Yes, I’d say,’ Hutton replies, ‘right up there,’ motioning to where the street forks into the boulevard.

“Hector leans forward in the backseat. He points through the front windshield: ‘There?’

“‘About there, I suppose.’

“‘Drive me up there, Hutton,’ Hector says abruptly, leaning back in his seat. ‘Drive me to where you think you saw me.’

“Hector starts the car, adjusts the rearview mirror so that he can see Hector, pulls forward along the curb. The sun is very low now. The earth is disappearing. This is conveyed,” Laing tells me, “by some weird red line that suddenly appears horizontally across the screen. That line, that wavering line, somehow suggests the disappearance of the earth. The very earth itself as well as the conditions that made earth possible along with any thought of humanity. This is something that both Aimee and I felt, as it seemed to drain the space we were in of meaning and while it’s true that my library office was never the same after that red line appeared it may have had more to do with what was going on secretly and magnetically between Aimee and myself than with the line, which after all was just something projected on the wall.”

Laing pauses, as if deciding whether to lie to me or not, and I say this because — and listening to the tapes again now makes this clear — rather than pause or hesitate when he was about to lie he sped up, as if the speed of words could waterfall on ahead of the rotten ideas they signified, or as if that knife formed by the angle of the sun on the motel room floor had been anything other than something conjured, some warning to me but not a warning from Laing, but rather from the dead field next to the motel where, if this were a film that had lost its way, the bodies of some of the children were buried would be revealed in a series of cuts that would strobe across the screen, depicting first Laing’s room, the throne chair splashed in blood, followed by a shot of the motel from a distance, followed by the field with the buried bodies framed by the motel in the very near background, followed by a final shot of an X-ray version of the field, with the bones of five or six small bodies, some intertwined as if in forced embrace.

“‘Here,’ Hutton says, stopping. ‘You crossed right about here.’

“‘From which side?’ Hector asks.

“‘From left to right,’ Hutton says, gesturing. ‘From there into the park.’

“‘And you’re sure it was me.’

“‘It looked like you.’

“‘Of course.’

“‘I thought that was part of the assignment,’ Hutton says.

“‘The assignment.’

“‘Why I was here. To notice something unusual, out of the ordinary. Seeing you at 2:30—when you said you wouldn’t return until evening — was unusual.’

“In the film (movie as Aimee called it; she thought film was snobby) it’s fully dark now. Hector has lit a cigarette, and Hutton can see him in the rearview mirror, the orange glow illuminating the vague shape of his bearded face. A distant siren wails.

“‘Hutton,’ Hector says, tapping his cigarette ashes outside the open backseat window, ‘let me ask you something.’ He pauses. ‘Let me ask you this: what if who you saw wasn’t me, but someone who looks just like me?’

“Hutton thinks about this for a moment. Turns the question over in his mind, it seems, wondering if it’s some sort of trap. The movie conveys this in a secret way, making you complicit in the act of moral defilement that gives rise to omniscience.

“‘Looks just like you…?’

“‘Let me put it another way,’ Hector says. ‘Hutton: are you not unhappy?’

“‘I am not.’

“‘Not what?’

“‘Unhappy,’ Hutton says.

“‘So then you are happy. Can we reliably agree on that?’

“‘I’m afraid not.’

“‘You’re not happy?’

“‘That’s right,’ Hutton says.

“‘And you’re not unhappy?’

“‘True.’

“‘For God’s sake, man! You’re neither happy nor unhappy.’

“‘I’m afraid I’m neither. It’s the bodies.’

“Hector pauses and sort of pulses on the screen, as if there was a strobe light inside of him,” Laing says.

“‘The bodies, Hutton?’ Hector more says than asks.

“‘The ones out there,’ Hutton replies, pointing weakly at the camera, which means of course that he’s pointing at Aimee and me, us and our world on the other side of the screen, or wall I should say, the white wall of my cramped library office where we were projecting the film.

“There must have been missing footage because the movie cuts — cuts as if slashed across the eye with a razor — from that moment to a shot depicting Hector, who has left the car and is running down the boulevard. The film jumps to life in a new, revolutionary sort of way, the colors more vibrant (even though it’s night), the camera movement more aggressive.

“‘Follow me! Hutton!’ he screams. Hutton starts the car, turns on the headlights, follows Hector as he runs, impossibly fast it seems, faster than any movie camera can follow, down the boulevard, his white suit glowing like phosphorous, until he comes upon another man, also dressed in white, also running, and Hutton trying to follow as they cut through quiet side streets and down dark alleys, in Hutton’s mind a slow realization blossoming (though again I don’t remember how exactly the film conveyed this) that he is being led into some trap, some circumstance from which there will be no escape, and the longer he follows Hector and the Hector look-alike — now indistinguishable in the night in the uncertain glow of headlights — the more trouble he’s in, the deeper into some metal-melting maze, and that is why, at the last moment, Hutton turns the wheel in the opposite direction of the men he’s following, makes his way back to the familiar highway, and drives in escape-mode at impossible speeds. This part is shot from the backseat, where Hector had been sitting. The highway is blocked by flashing lights — either a terrible accident or a police blockade — and so Hutton takes an exit ramp that leads onto a service drive and then into a neighborhood littered with broken glass bottles. We hear an explosion or a gunshot and quickly realize, at the same time Hutton does, that one of his tires has blown. He stops the car beneath a tilting streetlamp and then notices that all of them are tilted in the same direction and when he gets out of the car he realizes why: the wind here is so strong and steady that over the years the street lamps have slowly bent, and his coat blows up over his head from behind, blinding him for the few moments it takes for there to be a slow dissolve from the backseat of the car to an angle and position across the street from Hutton. The style has shifted again and now the camera movements are slow and steady and as he stands there in the night beneath the streetlight we — but not Hutton — can see the man in white, who is either Hector’s doppelganger or else a person who is similar to but not quite a duplicate of Hector, crawling (it seems like he’s crawling) in the deep-focus, back part of the frame, behind Hector. Aimee can’t help laughing at this point, and I remember that somehow her laughter broke the movie’s spell for me right then and there, so that the anarchic, maniacal chase that followed seemed somehow to be a letdown, even though, thinking back on it now, talking with you, it was a remarkable sequence.

“So, Hutton turns suddenly, as if alerted to Hector’s double by the implied audience watching the film, and takes off on foot after him, the camera tracking along smoothly behind and sometimes beside him like that remarkable opening shot from Touch of Evil. It’s only after around five or six minutes of Hutton running and breathing hard as if right on the heels of Hector’s double that we realize that Hector’s double is actually nowhere in sight. What has Hutton been chasing all this time? He leans over to catch his breath, the palms of his hands on his knees. There’s a bright flash of light that’s sourced from what appears to be right outside the left part of the frame and Hutton reacts by reaching into his shoe or sock and pulling out what seems to be a gun, because that’s the most logical thing for it to be. But it’s not a gun, or rather not the sort of gun we’ve ever seen before. It’s more like an insect in the shape of a gun, with a barrel or snout that resembles a needle or a mosquito proboscis and it seems to droop (melt, Aimee had said at the time) and Hutton has to shake it violently before it holds its shape. He takes aim at whatever it is off screen and the gun or gun-like object he’s holding appears to be breathing, or expanding and contracting in a way that suggests breathing and then, just when he’s ready to fire, there’s another flash of light and then another and he drops the gun and steps back from it as if it’s the gun itself that has caused the flashes. This is when he makes an obscure decision that hints at the apocalyptic ending sketched out in Deren’s notes. Instead of fleeing, Hutton steadies himself and steps with great care and grace toward the source of the flashes. But the camera doesn’t move or follow. Absent of any human beings or action, what we’re left with is a static shot of some buildings in the distance, in the night, and the sound of the wind. I remember that Aimee said Look, here it comes and I expected blood or something worse to fill the screen but instead it gradually voided out, the creeping blackness filling everything and that’s how it ended, in a consuming blackness that plunged the room itself into the night.”

CHAPTER 2

Aitswal Beach (1969 or ’70)

AXXON N. (1980)

The Murderous King Addresses the Horizon (1910)

The Story of A. (Laing’s digression)

Blinding Forward (1990)

THE NEXT MORNING LAING’S NOT AT THE MOTEL. Or he’s there but not answering my knocks at the door. I drive around for a while, circling the motel a few times, slowly, and it’s then that I notice the red X painted on one of the room doors two floors above Laing’s. A blood-red X across the entire door, condemning what lies on the other side or, worse, the one who looks upon it. At that moment I feel the presence of my daughter Emily so strongly, so intensely, as if she had not died at age nine but instead lived and blossomed into a young woman beside me now, making the adventure complete, snapping pictures of the marked door as if it was too dangerous (“hot,” she’d say, “it’s too hot”) and we needed to keep our distance and not look at the door directly in the same way you shouldn’t stare at the sun. Seeing that X’ed over door, I understood it was either a signal not to enter or a signal that this was the very door — the only door — that must be entered. (Emily, born of the one married to Christ and then no longer married to Christ, who died at age nine but began to die, to perish, at age eight, when the nosebleeds began to last beyond reason, the tumor growing in her head, her very own body killing itself. I thought here too of Lucy Snowe’s description in Villette of an enormous garden hidden in the heart of a city, a garden that contained, if you knew where to look, “the portal of a vault” that held imprisoned in it “the bones of a girl whom a monkish conclave of the dreary middle ages had here buried alive, for some sin against her vow.”) Could Laing possibly understand that the stories he was telling me about the films he destroyed weren’t about the films at all, but something else, a deep code, and that I hoped to find in one of his phrases some black magic, a curse or a prayer or a spell or an incantation that would crack it? In college I had a physics professor who wrote the date and time in red marker on a sheet of white paper and then lit the paper on fire and placed it in a metallic mesh basket on the lab table where it burned to ashes. He asked us whether or not the information on the paper was destroyed and not recoverable, and of course we were wrong, because physics tells us that information is never lost, not even in a black hole, and that what is seemingly destroyed is, in fact, retrievable. In that burning paper the markings of ink on the page are preserved in the way the flame flickers and the smoke curls. Wildly distorted to the point of chaos, the information is nonetheless not dead. Nothing, really, dies. Nothing dies. Nothing dies.

From the van I see Laing dragging the table from his room out onto the landing. I park — I can park anywhere because there’s no one else here besides Laing and myself, which is to say I don’t “park” at all but just stop the van near Laing’s room — and join him at the table. He brings out a new, unopened bottle of obscure bourbon and two small glasses. I notice the scars on the back of his hands that look like melted plastic and his knuckles fat as if marbles had been shoved beneath his skin and the smell also, very slight, that reminds me of a campfire that has just been doused with water.

“It is one of the films David Lynch made in Philadelphia, before moving to Los Angeles in 1971. I watched it over and over one night, projected against the back wall of the rare books room. The first few times the frames kept emptying out, the images just falling away, and it’s not until the third time that the images held fast enough to resemble anything close to a movie. What turns out to be the most terrifying thing about the film is how un-Lynchian it is, a sort of espionage-thriller of all things. In truth, I’m not sure it was a Lynch film at all, especially now, recalling it many years later. It was more like a deleted sequence from Antonioni’s The Passenger, perhaps from right after the scene where David Locke (Jack Nicholson) and the Girl (Maria Schneider) sit out by the highway at the cafe in the sun and the cars go by, the camera panning quickly from left to right as one car speeds by, and then, when another car enters the frame from the left, panning quickly to follow it, until finally stopping mid-pan with a two shot of David and the Girl who are talking about their lives or their possible lives, and David says something like I think I’m going to be a waiter in Gibraltar (too obvious, the Girl replies). And then David says, Maybe a novelist in Cairo. That’s where the missing scene’s from, it must be, except the actors are different, and so are the characters’ names.

“His name is Sollors, the man in the film I watched.

“He is in his small room in Agadir, Morocco. The Atlas Mountains in the distance break the horizon like the upheaved spine of some ancient, magnificently sized creature. Sollors ‘works for’ Schneid who has bugged his apartment. Best not to talk. Best not to think. He understands this. Retrieve the loaded handgun stashed between the mattresses, he tells himself. Take the blue folder from beneath the socks in the top drawer of the dresser. Go to the cafe on the corner where the Marxist students used to congregate, before he wrote the poems that identified them by name, the poems that gave the students over to their tortured futures. Their dialectical futures. Their forced electro-shock futures. Less than a mile away, in the hot sun at Aitswal Beach, there are three shirtless African men waiting for Sollors, each one dedicated to murder in his own way.

“A warpath of words, that’s what his poems are,” Laing says, his voice tipping into a sort of incantation, as if the film is unfolding right there in front of him and he’s merely reporting back on what he sees and what he thinks it means. “Sollors’s poems,” he continues, “give shape and substance to the revolution itself, blocking its increasingly violent stages into gigantic leaping stanzas that bleed out meaning. Sollors, his long blond hair giving a false impression of dude-ness, sits at a wooden bar so splintered and clawed-at that you’d think it had survived attempted extermination with machetes. The bartender appears to be no older than twelve or thirteen. His face is scarred and one eye droops heavily as if sagging under the sorrow of terrible things it had witnessed. He wipes down glasses with a sort of detached compassion. Africa is no longer the same. The signals are weaker. The patient is dying. Sollors removes the blue folder and places it in front of a woman who sits to his right at the bar, a woman we had not noticed before because the camera had not allowed it. It’s as if Sollors was not only a character in the film but also an observer of the film itself. The woman has a Cleopatra haircut. The cafe door is propped open with a broken cinder block and there is a warm breeze coming in and she uses her glass of illegal beer to hold the papers still. Another woman, this one younger and with pink palms appears and stands to his left at the bar. The African sand flies appear and disappear on the sweaty legs and arms and necks of Sollors and the others. For a moment everything is very still. No one moves. It’s like a tableau or a hyper-realistic oil painting. The movie—Aitswal Beach was what it was called — just holds the image. Do you know how difficult it is to do a freeze frame?” Laing asks me. “The waste of hundreds of frames — each repeating the same image — to give the illusion of stillness? Twenty-four frames per second of the same image, three feet of film to equal one second of screen time. A ten-second freeze frame measuring over thirty feet of film, the length of this landing, I’d say. You understand?”

“I understood before you explained,” I told him, and although that was true, it wasn’t true in a literal way.

“The enjambment of just one line in just one of Sollors’s poems could make the difference between a prolonged death and a short one. Sollors’s job is to ferret out insurgents and — for reasons that may have been made clear in a different cut of the film, but not in this one — communicate their identities to Schneid. The television above the bar seems to switch channels on its own. Next to the television is a cross affixed to the wall, except that what’s nailed on it appears to be the figure of a woman, not a man. The bartender is cutting lemons right before their eyes, unaware of or ignoring the switching channels. I hesitate to say this because it may strike you as more absurd than what I’ve told you already, but the channels seem to depict action that is happening at other locations in the cafe. It’s as if someone unseen is switching through different surveillance cameras scattered throughout the cafe and broadcasting them there on the mounted television set. Even worse is that one of the feeds shows the bar where Sollors, the woman with the Cleopatra haircut, and the one with the pink palms sit, apparently in sync time with what’s being depicted on the screen itself, except that in the image on the television we see four people at the bar, not three. This fourth person — sitting there at the bar to the left of the pink-palmed woman, so that, from left to right we’ve got the unknown person, the pink-palmed woman, Sollors, and the woman with the Cleopatra haircut — this fourth person appears to be a man.

“The code Schneid gave to Sollors implicates Sollors himself. It’s not clear if Sollors is aware of this betrayal, of the fact that Schneid has asked Sollors to break a code that, once broken and revealed, condemns him to death. The kid bartender removes the quartered lemons and wipes the counter. The woman with the Cleopatra haircut stares out the door at the desert and blinks. The film becomes most filmic at this point,” Laing says, “as if it knows it’s being watched. There is a phone ringing from the black depths of the back of the bar. Sollors has never shaken fully the soft sand from this part of the Sahara. It falls from his hair like thunder. The West hears it now, too late. The girl with the pink palms to his left says something behind his back to Cleopatra-cut, but she just keeps staring out the open door and her face seems to vibrate like an engine throttled up far too high.

“The film switches to a different scene and we learn how Sollors, assassin of insurgents, arrived here, in this lonely bar. The flashback begins as the camera slowly tracks forward to the doorway that leads from the bar into the open desert. He was sent first to the small village of Garoua, Chad. His memory sloshes from one side of his head to the other. From Garoua Sollors is driven through impossible shifting sand (sand that never stays still) north to Mokolo. Then further north, for weeks, deeper into shallow, blinding light. There is dissent in the caravan. Men with yellow teeth bark orders at other men with yellow teeth. There is a fight over the safest route. A sparkplug is stolen during the night and they languish for days, drinking brown water from the rusty radiator, before arriving here.

“It is Schneid who has sent Sollors. Schneid is the theorist of the movement to exterminate the insurgents. He is interested in typology and time. When new revolutionary thought blossoms he murders the thinkers. His job is to keep order by disordering the ideas of the radical thinkers, and he does this by killing them. He hires people who imagine themselves as artists, people who think of themselves as poets, and sends them across North Africa to do this and then he has them murdered, too, as Sollors is about to be. There are other units, in other continents. Schneid speaks of Black Easter and cosmic dread and speculative annihilation. He sends his agents/artists white papers on the psychological archaeology of repulsion. His favorite weapon is a flare gun, used up close and in the face.

“Aitswal Beach cuts from the flashback to the cafe again. Even sitting at the bar Sollors can hear the ocean waves in the distance. There is a two shot of the girl with the Cleopatra haircut and the pink-palmed girl that reveals a soulless, vacant space between them. One of them (I can’t remember which) reaches out of the frame and brings back a book, whose title is obscured, and hands it to the other one and that moment on the screen seems to hold the fragile world in balance for just the right length of time, and if any of these stories I, Roberto Laing, have been telling you (you, who have been sent by the poisonous editors of film journal X) mean anything at all then it must be this: had I not burned that movie in the garbage barrel behind the library I would go back to trace every frame of that brief shot, that fleeting moment when the book belonged to neither of them. So the exchange happens, and then what? Does the Lynch film end (if it even is a Lynch film) as it should? Not at all. In fact, the scene (the shot) is repeated, but this time with a difference: it is not a book that is passed between Cleopatra and the pink-palmed girl, but rather a map, a map which indicates the fate of all involved in this story: the death of Sollors, the sad triumph of Schneid, the butchery in the taxi of Cleopatra. These parts aren’t in the short film, but are revealed nonetheless in non-synchronized sound, the sound of screams and of flesh-cutting.

“Now the television above the bar shows what appears to be news footage of a military execution. It seems to be from Vietnam. For the usual reasons Sollors and the others pretend not to watch it. The three men from Aitswal Beach are there, too, the ones who will murder Sollors. They are sitting in the back in plastic chairs. They are wearing loose white shirts now. One of them is smoking. These are the men that Schneid has sent to rid himself of Sollors, who has identified more than his share of insurgents. They are butchers of men, and Sollors is just a poet. He can see their small axes beneath the table. It’s unclear whether Sollors understands what is going to happen to him. It’s not clear whether the shot of the axes was meant to signify Sollors’s point of view, or simply the impersonal camera’s.

“Somewhere in Europe Schneid practices with his flare gun on one of the students Sollors has named in his poems. The bartender makes an alien symbol with his hands and one of the men from the back comes over and sits beside him. There is sand blowing in through the open door and collecting in the corners of the cafe. The parallel reality surveillance footage still plays on the television. Two men walk across the screen in the bright sun beside a blue pool. One of them wears a white track suit. A voice off screen — a woman’s voice — says, ‘Love among consenting holograms?’ What will become of the North African Unit, without the words, the poems of Sollors?

“And then the other two men from the back approach him, one of them holding an axe. They take him to the beach and in what happens next, there is no poetry to convey the tenderness by which they hold him as they use their weapons, laying their hands upon him, Sollors, the animal they have been given to destroy.”

The cone on the table seems to have grown larger. It takes up more space. Laing doesn’t want to quit. A wall of clouds menaces on the far horizon. I switch out the batteries in the micro recorder. For the first time Laing produces a pack of cigarettes. They appear unsteadily on the table, next to the cone, a soft pack still wrapped in cellophane, Camels I think or some other brand that looks like Camels (“Fritz’s camel” my great uncle used to say) so that the animal appears to have been overtaken by a sandstorm, or as if the camel itself was made out of sand. Laing opens the pack and lays out two cigarettes, one for me, and one for him. I remember thinking that this was a test. In the wind, my cigarette rolls across the table to the left, and then, a few moments later, when the wind changes, back to where it had been. Laing doesn’t touch his, doesn’t even look at it.

Between the cone and the cigarettes some sort of force field emerges. As crazy as that sounds that’s the only way I can put it. Like a dome of outward pressure rising in the space between the cigarettes and the red cone. I think of the fate of poor Sollors, hacked to death on the beach in Africa. And then I think of those missing children, the ones the waitress at the tavern described, and what she said about not being able to turn off the part of your brain that imagines what might have happened to them, the sharp crease or fold in time sharp like a knife blade that they had the misfortune of falling beneath, and the fact that “missing” always turns out to be the gentler, more abstract term for something much, much worse. And then Laing reaches his hand through the force field and takes one of the cigarettes, lighting it with his chin low against the slight wind. He shakes the match out as if casting a spell and the black clouds just hang there in the sky, and he does so in a way that recalls the snapping wrist action used to open a flick knife, the sort of knife that could be used to carve atrocities on the body of a child.

“Not all of them were films in the proper sense, you know. A few of them came to me on VHS. The only one worth mentioning from that era isn’t really even a film,” Laing says, in the strange time-bending present tense. “It’s footage for a documentary that was to feature one of my old professors — Ephraim — a documentary about the last generation of ’60s campus radicals. He sent me a VHS of the segment that featured him, or maybe it was just footage of him talking that wouldn’t have made it into the documentary anyway. It begins with Ephraim saying It wasn’t always like this.

“It wasn’t always like what? an off-camera voice asks.

“There’s a very long pause. Ephraim’s gaze drifts into the surrounding forest. He looks like a person who’s been napalmed. His neck is shiny with old scars. His black hair is patchy.”

Suddenly Laing stops talking and tenses, as if he’s heard something. His hand edges slightly closer to the cone. Then, for the very first time, he looks me directly in the eyes. The late Wisconsin sun has cast everything in blood orange. “Were you followed here?” he asks, and I nearly laugh out loud. Followed, as if he has me confused with one of the movie characters he’s been telling me about. I begin to say, “I don’t think. .” but he interrupts me with, “I’m not so interested in what you think.” Then something else happens: a look of pity comes across Laing’s face, pity for me, and I wish I had never seen that look, I can tell you, not that I attribute to Laing or to his knowing look the losses that I’ve suffered since that time. I’m not that superstitious. Those aren’t the sort of demons I believe in. Then his face relaxes, almost in regret, and he continues.

“It wasn’t always like what? the off-camera voice asks Ephraim again.

“This, he says, fumbling to light yet another cigarette, nodding to something out there, as if the forest itself were an entity. He’s at a weather-worn picnic table. His shirt is Nirvana-era denim, as if grunge had slipped back in time and caught him up for the three-minute-and-thirty-four-second duration of this tape.

“The old professor, dead now to the world. The very world that he had brought into being. A man of theory, began the letter announcing his dismissal from the university, must be at all times vigilant lest his ideas yield actions hostile to theory itself.

“He’s not particularly eloquent, Ephraim isn’t. It’s only after the fourth or fifth viewing that you realize where the hidden action is. In between the trees. Ephraim’s words are just cover. The sort of bitter, dustbin-of-history philosophizing you’d expect from a man who had predicted punk was the harbinger of a truly revolutionary accelerationist movement, only to see it swallowed like everything else into the networked, invisible machinery of our age.”

Laing stops for a moment, as if he’s heard something. For some reason when I think about it now it seems like he was wearing the scarf again. But he wasn’t. After a few seconds he goes on.

“I watched the tape in Marlene’s basement apartment, with its warped, damp walls, around the time that the Walt Disney film The Black Hole was released on VHS (it had to have been 1980), a movie so overpowered by Maximilian Schell (‘you were monitored ever since our sensors first detected you,’ he intones to Anthony Perkins as if reciting for the first and last time in human history a long lost line from Shakespeare) that the black hole swirling continuously in the spaceship’s monitors becomes an afterthought. The tape was labelled, in black ink, AXXON N. It was my last year in southern Ohio, and Marlene (who also went by Arlene) was a teaching assistant for a professor there in ‘art theory’ (no one knew what that meant) whom I had audited a class with a few years earlier, which was how I met Marlene, who had piercings in her left eyebrow before this became common, and who gave off a sort of Patty Hearst vibe, someone who potentially could be vulnerable and very dangerous at the same time. The next year I would be gone, blasted into the heart of Pennsylvania at a college much larger and indifferent and even crueler than where I was at the time of Black Hole.

“Wasn’t always like what? the off-camera voice asks again, at which point Ephraim twists out his cigarette on the patchy and slanted picnic table and proceeds to remove from his denim shirt pocket a sheaf of folded yellow papers — obviously his well-worn and now irrelevant research notes — and begins to read. But the wind has picked up and in a gust they fly out of his hands, screen left. He moves faster than you’d expect, leaving the frame, presumably, to chase down the pages. The camera doesn’t follow him but remains fixed on the empty picnic table and the tall pine trees swaying in the sun in the background. And in that background, between the trees, there’s a slight blank spot — a gap — that reminds you of its presence, but just barely. Ephraim returns to the frame, pages recovered.

“It wasn’t always like this. The nostalgic lament of an ex-academic, or a prophecy disguised as something backward-looking? Ephraim had told us in that art theory class to read between the lines and against the grain. Wasn’t that what Marlene and I were doing now, with this tape? Reading between the lines and against the grain. Wasn’t that what Marlene and I had been doing for years there in southern Ohio, with each other, pretending to meet for the first time each Thursday at the same quiet spot by the flat river, just two people who happen to be there at the same moment? That was our plan, to never let our relationship advance to the point of familiarity, to always be experiencing each other for the very first time, an endless loop of surprise and happiness there on that bright green grass made lush and fertile by the annual spring flooding of the river. Rewinding over and over to that moment, so that in time acting or pretending we had just met felt no different than truly, actually just meeting for the first time.

“And where had it gotten us?

“Once, as a professor, Ephraim had thrown a baseball against a closed classroom window to illustrate the spider webbing effect of narrative in Mrs. Dalloway, but instead of cracking the glass the ball sailed through it cleanly, leaving a hole roughly the size of the ball itself. He lit a cigarette in frustration and then, in anger, flicked it into the front row of students. This was the visible and symbolic beginning of his end.

“He believed in the tunnels. He really did. That they — like the glass he could not transform with a thrown ball — spider webbed beneath these United States, emanating from beneath his feet in that soft border area between Ohio and Kentucky. He assigned his students paranoid, art-themed novels that spoke to this truth. He asked them to underline passages in class, look into each other’s eyes and read them to each other, causing some of them to fall in love, at least for a semester.

“And the VHS tape, AXXON N., what new chaos does it portend? Already, Marlene and I can feel our brains curdling, a feedback loop growing between us and the TV set. We pause the tape right at the moment when whatever it is that isn’t there emerges from the gap in the forest behind Ephraim, all frame-dragged and distended, like an avalanche of melting pixels.

“The force of our generation, that’s what it is, says Marlene, pointing the remote at the television like a weapon.

“The front part of my brain doesn’t know what she means, but in the back part of it I do. The tape — and I’ve spent the better part of thirty years trying to rid myself of this thought — the tape can’t seem to shake itself free of the widening gap between the trees, as if that gap had become the subject of the video itself. The gap, it appears when Ephraim leaves the frame to chase down his papers, widening, filling the frame, the blankness pushing against the boundaries of the TV set, cracking it open, expanding slowly against the basement walls. I remember glancing over at Marlene and understanding that everything that we needed in each other was disappearing, evaporating, right there before our eyes as the blank space in that gap widened to expand — impossibly, and yet somehow it was happening — beyond the confines of the television screen itself. The tape cuts back to The Black Hole, right at the moment when Maximilian Schell — playing the Dr. Faustus-like captain of the spaceship, Hans Reinhardt, which also happens to be the real-life name of a Nazi general accused of hostage-taking and murder — refers to one of his robots as ‘Maximilian.’ And then it cuts back to the Ephraim portion. The gap in the forest has opened up, like I said, beyond the confines of the television set and into Marlene’s apartment. There’s a small dot of blood collecting around her pierced eyebrow and when I go to dab it she flinches, the first time she’s ever flinched around me, and I think she flinched because of something to do with that VHS, and the exposed blankness of the screen that took over when Ephraim left the frame. It’s the last time we were together, really. After that the distance between us grew greater, at first just a little bit but then more and more, until we regressed from lovers to friends, and then acquaintances, and then colleagues and then, by the time I left for Pennsylvania, strangers.”

The soft light spills out from Laing’s room and illuminates our table. But other than that we’re surrounded by darkness. The storm clouds on the horizon from earlier haven’t advanced, and the night air is pure, as if there is not now or ever has been a contaminate in the world. I think about what Laing said about Marlene, and the blood above her eye, and about the time, before the disease, that Emily had helped me patch the bottom of our aluminum boat with tar that we had warmed up so that we could spread it over places the metal had rubbed thin from dragging the boat loaded with firewood across the shallow river behind our house, wood gathered from the uninhabited island, wood that we scavenged in the summer so we could burn it during the winter. And I remember the smell of that tar, and how difficult it was to remove the stains from Emily’s hands who, at age seven or eight, pretended they were something like tattoos for a while, or something even more primitive, markings, black markings, streaks and splotches that stayed sticky for days, collecting dust and lint and leaving smudges on her pillowcase and sheets.

A large brown moth lands on the table and begins walking in circles. Laing puts his hand on the table, palm up, and the moth keeps circling lazily and unsteadily and then manages to crawl into his palm. It’s wounded in some way, but who can say how? It’s just a moth, and yet to destroy it… to destroy it would be an unforgiveable act, and it’s as if Laing knows this too and so he gently raises his hand and watches the moth, its antennae twitching as if trying to detect the danger level and then it flies off, first toward the open motel room door and then back out into the black night. It was a small act of mercy, but intended for whom? I only say this because, thinking back on it now, Laing’s gesture — releasing the moth — seems inauthentic. There was something — how to put it? — rehearsed. That’s not the right word. Forced. There was something forced in Laing’s handling of the moth, almost theatrically forced, as if to suggest to me, Look, if you weren’t here to see this I’d smear the moth across the table.

“The film is only one frame long,” Laing says.

I understand he wants to move on.

“Then it’s not a film,” I say.

“It’s the only part of the film that survives.”

“Title?”

“The Murderous King Addresses the Horizon. 1910. A fragment.”

Laing is sitting at the table now and he tells me about the film frame, which he produces from a yellow envelope from beneath the blue velvet chair. It’s actually not a film frame, but a paper print from the Library of Congress, Laing says, referring to the early method for securing copyright of films from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Rather than strike extra prints of films, paper versions were made, an opaque from the film negative printed onto various sorts of paper, which were coiled tightly and preserved. The frame that Laing produced was actually stolen, Edison told me later, from the vaults of the Renovare Company, which had been commissioned to convert the paper prints to 16 mm acetate safety film stock. An image from a forgotten film, by a forgotten director although, as Laing reminds me, the concept of the director was alien in early cinema, and more than likely it was the cameramen who dictated the composition of space within the shots and all sort of other decisions we now associate with the role of the director. In fact — and for some reasons he seems adamant on this point — early filmmaking was an intensely collaborative enterprise with interchangeable roles, so that there was no clear distinction between who did what at the various stages of production. What Laing calls the “assembly line” mode of Hollywood production, perfected during the studio era, didn’t exist yet and it was no surprise, Laing insists, that Hollywood’s method of production followed so closely and emerged at nearly the same historical moment as Henry Ford’s assembly line: film and automobile as imagined as a grouping of interchangeable parts assembled by a series of workers trained to do one or two jobs expertly and therefore alienated from the overall process of the entire project. But this, this early frame comes from a time before that, when filmmaking was still an organic enterprise and when films were created by small groups (“collectives” is the word Laing uses) of people working together to create a shared object.

Laing begins to spin out the narrative, the “secret history” of this particular fragment, the sole surviving ghost image of a film that someone had taken the time to transfer to a paper print and register at the Library of Congress.

“It’s a story about the woman, taking notes, at a wooden desk in a wide-planked, bright office in a film from 1910, her hair done up in the style of the day in the years before the ‘war to end all wars’ which, beginning just four years after this film frame, will claim millions. There is a man — stately, king-like — across the room from her, watching. With murderous intent, as I recall. He wears some sort of uniform. I’d swear it involves a Nazi arm band, blinking in blood red, but that’s impossible, of course, in 1910.

“There are so many details in the film frame, but which ones are important? Neither of them are looking directly at each other. He might be dictating; she might be taking notes. Or perhaps she is simply recording information, tallies that indicate some dark, bloody statistic. There is in fact — if you examine the frame closely, which I happened to do during the dead-time of my life then, after Marlene had accused me (falsely) of ‘unpardonable actions’ and subsequently exiled herself from me — nothing written at all on her pad of paper. There is the carved face on the wall above her head. There is his seat cushion. There is the overexposed window behind him, which is open. There are many objects on her desk whose meaning can only be guessed at. It’s not fair that we don’t know.”

Laing gets up from the table, goes into the motel room, and comes back with a yellowed folder, removes a stack of typed pages, and shuffles through them with the blank intensity of a person teleported back and forth through time so often that his very self becomes stretched into something that exists both then and now. The pages contain Laing’s theories about what happens after the frame, in the way that we sometimes wonder what happens in the moments right after the instant captured in a photograph and I’m struck for the first time by the degraded sadness of the whole enterprise. Laing and I talking about these destroyed films as if they mattered any more, or as if they ever mattered, and to make things worse, the black night accumulating around us with greater and greater force, as if leaking in from parts of the universe that carry with them a special kind of evil, the kind that we can’t even imagine, the kind that you can’t find in Blake or Milton or with telescopes trained at the cosmos or in particle colliders or in Indian mounds or even in the terrible things that one person will do to another person alone in a dungeon. There’s a stillness in the black night that surrounds us and Laing seems to respect this silence somehow and in that void we share I have a terrible thought: that one of the missing children is right now, at this very moment, aware of us out here on the motel landing and I too become aware of him, the boy chained to a tree, his bare chest pressed hard against the bark, forest mud stuffed into his ears and nose, a lantern hanging from a branch swaying beside him, a lodge in the distance with a yellow light on inside, the sound of a tractor engine coughing to life in the distance, and the boy’s thoughts running in a weird relay circuit between me and him. These thoughts come to me in a terrible rush so hard and fast and with such force that the image of the boy sticks to the inside of my skull.

Laing begins to read from the pages, and, like a slow dissolve, it takes more than a few seconds for the image of the boy to dissipate. “In the ‘Western’ from which the film still is taken the man is the new sheriff and the woman his young wife, and when she sees a man’s throat slit behind a barn and the way he tries to hold his life in as it bleeds through his fingers, something in her mind will become dislodged and even the act of acting happy will be impossible for her. In the ‘great train robbery’ version her husband will act the hero, stupidly, to the bandits (including a boy no older than ten) who are about to burst into the photograph from off-screen right and demand the cash from the day in the hidden drawer next to the man’s left knee. In the ‘Civil War nostalgia’ version she will treat the house slave with unexpected compassion, subtly reinforcing the fact that she, the mistress of the house, has the power to confer such compassion. In the ‘domestic melodrama’ version she will be the mistress, seated in the very chair where he first fell in love with her, the light coming in from the window at frame left, illuminating her face in such a way that makes us wonder even now, over one-hundred years later, what she is thinking about.

“There are the precise moments that existed immediately after the seconds in the film from which this frame was taken, moments that while lost to documented reality exist nonetheless. In these, after the director is satisfied, the woman will throw her hands to her mouth in laughter. Her brother (his name, let’s say, is Edward) will laugh also, because this is what they have always done; this is their way. She laughs and then he laughs. Sometimes they don’t even know why. No, wait: he knows why. When she (her name is Evelyn) was a girl, she nearly died of scarlet fever, the rash slowly spreading from her neck to arms to back as if she were being consumed by her very own body. He stayed with her for those two weeks (he was ten; she was seven), sleeping on the wooden floor beside her bed, and listening to her labored breathing and the mysterious, incoherent phrases she would sometimes call out during her fevered nightmares. And sometimes, now, years later, when her face flushes in embarrassment, he calls her Scarlet, and she smiles and laughs. And then he laughs. It is these small, private exchanges that — in a way that even he himself does not fully understand — give order to his life.”

Laing puts the notes or whatever he’s been reading from down. His face looks, for a moment — and I’m not sure exactly how to say this — like that of a man who expects Satan himself to appear in the doorway. His hands tremble slightly. He finishes his glass of bourbon, pours another, and continues reading.

“But there is also a darker version of events, one in which Evelyn never wakes up from the scarlet fever, and Edward, perhaps too sensitive to the tragedies of this world, as if even the sight of a broken-winged sparrow fluttering in the street gutter would tinge his day with sadness, never recovers from the loss. Oh, he appears to. And in this version of the story the woman in the film frame is not his sister at all, but rather some other person, hurried in from the outer offices of wherever this was shot to sit at the desk and pretend she’s writing. And even at the moment this is filmed, Edward can feel himself being torn between two possibilities: the so-called real world and the world of magic cast by the very movies he has helped to produce.

“The only book he has ever truly loved is Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, which he first read several years prior to this film, when it was still James’s latest book. And in that novel (whose words to him are like steel cage bars that either protect him from something terrible or else trap him away from something wonderful), one phrase especially has stuck with him: the darkening shadow of a false position. That’s how he feels now, looking at this film frame: that ever since his sister’s death (for she died, not ‘nearly died’) he has lived more and more comfortably beneath the darkening shadow of a false position. The false position of hope.

“The most horrendous — but also the truest — version of what happens in the moments after this film was shot is that there will be a knife fight between them, whoever they are, and fuck Henry James, because this will be the real thing. She will strike first, out of lustful revenge (‘You promised. I was the only one!’) and he will be wounded in the arm and leap out of his chair, scattering papers. He has no knife per se, so he reaches for the silver letter opener as she takes another jab at him, puncturing his leg. He falls back against the wall. A framed picture falls. She shakes her hair loose and for a moment it’s possible that, rather than kill each other, they’ll have sex right then and there. But then he lunges at her with the letter opener and punctures the soft flesh beneath her ribs. Her white blouse is stained in crimson blood (scarlet you might say were this the different version of the story) and she lunges right back at him and gets him in the same spot, beneath his ribs, and life leaks out of both of them now. And then, unexpectedly, she jabs him again, and again, in the same spot. It’s as if she has prepared all of her life for this very moment. In desperation he lunges for her in agonized fury and bites her arm so hard he breaks a tooth.”

Laing, at this point, is reading from his typed notes as if he himself cannot understand it, a word of it. Something in his voice, the way he stutters between the words, distances him from what he’s saying, and for the first time he pauses and looks at me long enough to cast or break a spell. It begins raining, and we pull the table back into the room. The cone-like object swivels off the table and Laing tries to catch it and that’s when I see, in the gap of his collar as he bends down, tattooed on the back of his neck, an image of a disk with grooves cut into it. I recognize it immediately as a film projector shutter, the small circle of plastic that rotates just in front of the film as it passes through the projector’s light, providing a regular interval of darkness between each frame to create the illusion of continuous motion. It always struck me as strange that what the brain needs to be tricked into seeing still images as moving images is something that actually breaks the continuous motion of images, shuttering them from our eyes intermittently and so quickly that we don’t notice. This separation, this darkness that comes between us and the images we want to see, is necessary if we want to see them, otherwise, dragged in front of the projector’s bulb with no interruption, they would appear as a muddled blur, images running together in a way that suggests chaos rather than ordered motion.

In the motel room something has changed. The wind and rain gust against the door, blowing it open until I shoulder it shut and lock it. Laing and I are either some place that looks very much like the original room, or else we are still in the original room and it’s been altered slightly. So how was the room different? In some ways, admittedly, the changes were simply the result of the passing of time. It was brighter, for instance. But other differences were harder to understand. Why was the TV set smaller, or the peephole in the door higher so that now I had to stand on my toes to see through it? And the cheap heavy curtain across the window that looks out onto the balcony is the color of lilac now, though to be honest perhaps it was always lilac.

Laing continues, his voice slightly lower, as if someone or something else was listening in and this part was just for me.

“Just over a month before this movie was made, a bomb destroyed the Los Angeles Times building, killing over 20 people, and when he hears gunshots outside the window his mind is seized with the images of the mangled dead in Los Angeles, their severed parts in the dust only to be re-animated in the second coming (‘He will come again to judge the living in the dead’) and this epiphanic moment of his gives her time to finish him off, to gut him like she gutted deer so many times as a young girl with her full-bearded uncle in Oneonta, New York.

“There is so much blood now on the wall and the window and the desk and the floor that she slips. Somewhere, not far away, a camera is rolling and Edwin S. Porter is directing a scene from the short film The Greater Love. The earth passes through the tail of Halley’s Comet, and a woman in Philadelphia is said to die from the resulting cyanogen gas. President William Howard Taft has a nightmare in which the sheets of his bed metamorphose into sheets of black quicksand that suck him into outer space. H. G. Wells republishes his story ‘When the Sleeper Awakes’ which contains the lines ‘We have our troubles… this is a time of unrest.’ There is so much blood now, even the sepia can’t disguise the color.

“But the film doesn’t have to end this way. Why should it? It could end, instead, in the very instant it began: the precise moment of the film frame. There is no before. There is no after. There is just the forever now of this frozen moment, full of possibilities, when their eyes are always-already on the verge of meeting.”

Laing glances around the motel room as if to check for some secret thing he had left hidden in plain sight, or as if to confirm the presence of someone else in the room, a third person unseen to me. He smiles or pretends to smile. It’s at this point in the story that I think I should make something clear: I’m not exactly certain that the person who returned to the motel room with the grocery bag was, in fact, R. Laing. Listen, of course it was him. I don’t mean I doubt it was him literally, in the sense that Christ is “Christ” or Satan is “Satan.” Something had changed, that’s all I’m trying to say. At the time I had no such suspicions that it wasn’t him, or at least not outright suspicions, rather something more like very thin spider-webbed doubts spread so delicately out upon my thoughts that I couldn’t collect it all into a single idea. It was only later, in preparing this manuscript in fact, that these doubts began to take shape into something more fixed and permanent. And even now, like I’ve said, of course I know it was the same Laing as before, just as the resurrected Christ is the same as the pre-crucified Christ, or Satan is the same as the rebellious angel that became Satan. It’s just that when I think about it now, looking back, I have the feeling that it wasn’t him, or at least not the same him. But it’s just a feeling and nothing more.

And yet, his descriptions of the films changed somehow, linguistically, in ways that I’m only now beginning to sort out. For I’ve come to see, in retrospect, that there was a void at the heart of the films that Laing destroyed, and that through his descriptions of those films he was attempting to fill, somehow, that void, as if talking about the films might fill in the meaning that they themselves lacked. I also came to understand that Laing didn’t think of the destroyed films as “lost treasures” at all, but instead as something more dangerous, as expressions of pure nothingness. A nothingness that goes beyond nihilism, beyond philosophy, a sort of absence that’s so seductive and so powerful that to look upon it is to corrupt a part of your soul. At my darkest, most irrational moments I fear that this is what happened to Emily, that she came across not “a something” but “a nothing” so powerful in its absence that it emptied her out and destroyed her. And that somehow it only happened because she was my daughter. Sounds like simple guilt, I know, the sort of guilt any parent who’s lost a child might feel. Guilt at not being able to… intervene.

But like I said, Laing acted as if there were a third person there with us, sometimes even catching himself, it seemed, from searching the room, with his eyes of course, as if the person or presence or whatever appeared and disappeared and reappeared. In any case, it seemed Laing was trying to keep track of movement in the room. In the brown paper bag was Chinese for both of us and another bottle of bourbon, the same obscure brand from earlier with the charcoal drawing of the slaughtered lamb on the label. He asked me what I thought of the Gutman movie, and I told him I thought it was strange that he remembered so clearly the voiceover.

“That was from notes. Not from memory,” he says.

“Notes you took while you watched the movie?”

“I typed them up afterward.”

“Because?”

“I figured you, or someone like you, would eventually come. With questions. And here you are.”

“I’m not a lawyer or a detective, if that’s what you’re saying.”

“That’s not what I’m saying at all. I know who you are. I know that Edison sent you. Of course, it doesn’t matter. Because, like I said, here you are.”

“I’d heard about you before Edison. Aspen.”

“The experimental journal that came in a box,” he says.

“I mean the film. The ski movie.”

“That’s what it was named after, the journal. Aspen. The 1966 issue that came with an article by Martin Luray on downhill skiing, and an essay on cinema by Lionel Trilling where he says something like, maybe cinema will be able to step in and do what literature is no longer able to do: tell the truth about life.”

“Is that what you think. That films can do that?”

“If they did — tell the truth about life — who would want to watch them? They’d have to be destroyed, because who can look at truth and survive, or at least survive all in one piece? Mentally. It’d be like looking directly at the sun, or reading a curse whose words would choke you to death, so yes, to answer the question I’m surprised you haven’t asked yet, I, a lover of cinema, destroyed the films — in nothing more than a shitty little garbage can, which is funny considering the can had no idea that its insides were being burned and scalded by the likes of Lynch and Antonioni and Deren and Jodorowsky — destroyed them back behind the library of that land-grant university surrounded by the Amish and cow pastures. I’d watched them, all right, and seen something in them that should never be seen, and I’m not talking about a real-life killing on camera or a dangerous, evil idea convincingly expressed by an otherwise sympathetic character or anything like that. What I mean is that there was something there, in between the frames, something that wasn’t quite an image and wasn’t quite a sound. It was both and neither of those things at the same time. In other words, an impossibility, an impossibility that, because it expressed or represented a new way of being, had to be destroyed. An extreme, undiluted truth, that’s what I’m talking about.”

“I know what you mean,” I tell him.

“How could you?”

It’s hard to say why I open my wallet and remove the small scratched picture of Emily. In the ten years since her death I’d shown it to only one other person. I place it on the table and slide it over to Laing. She is eight years old, in a tree, the shadows of leaves on her face and arms, waving to me, smiling, probably laughing. What are the circumstances of the image? I have no idea, no memory of when it was taken or by whom, although I’ve always imagined I’m the one who took it, and that in her look is a secret message to me, a message that suggests she knows what’s going to happen to her. But how could she have known? As Laing looks down at the picture I think about the missing children, the ones in the news, and that Laing’s reasons for destroying the films only made sense if you believed there was such a thing, as he had called it, as undiluted truth because in fact, well let’s face it, we’re luckless when it comes to truth because there’s just no way to grasp it without polluting it or mucking it up with ourselves, as if the observer effect didn’t only apply just in physics, but in metaphysics as well because, sure, you can coax it out, the truth, but the moment it shows or reveals itself to you it’s changed in response to being detected, and maybe that’s what Laing meant, after all, that somehow, against all reason, the films in question had actually managed to capture the truth unaltered by perception and that’s why they had to be destroyed, but how does that account for someone like Emily, who at eight years old in that picture was on the verge and did not know of or even imagine an abyss of unknowing, and yes it’s dramatic to say it that way but it’s my daughter we’re talking about and that gives me some room and if there’s anyone to blame (not for Emily’s death of course, not that) it’s Laing, who took it upon himself to destroy beautiful things, those films, those films whose fleeting traces of beauty can now only be conjured in words, as if words could approximate the images and edits and cuts anymore than my words can make Emily — with her in-turned left foot and slight lisp and yellow plastic butterfly barrettes that held back her unwashed hair — anymore than my words can make her real for you like she was for me, the sweet and bitter smell of my daughter as she came running up to me after once becoming lost and separated in the woods and clinging to me like a tick, we joked later, as if she wanted to burrow back into me or as if she understood that the day was coming soon when she would no longer be able to leap upon my back like that the way daughters do who love their fathers, a sort of undestroyable love, so fierce and primal and frontier-like that nothing prepares you for it because when it’s depicted on the screen or in books it’s either too sentimental or too cynical and if I had come to hate Laing it was for that one simple fact: that he had destroyed films that actually captured this mystery, not just the mystery of the love between a father and daughter but the mystery of what that might become if left free to flower.

Laing studies the picture of Emily while I study his face. But actually — and I can’t be sure of this — he’s not looking at my daughter’s picture at all, but rather at the cone object on the table right beside her in the picture, and the first thought that comes into my mind when I notice this is that Laing can’t bear to look at the photograph for the same reasons he couldn’t bear to keep the films he destroyed. Or else the picture of my daughter reminds him of the other children.

*

That evening, during an intense windstorm that seems to lift the motel itself off the ground and set it down somewhere else, Laing tells me about A. in one unbroken monologue. At the time I didn’t understand what A. had to do with anything but looking back on it now — when it seems all I do is look back — I see that without A. none of the rest of what he told me made sense. I’d first read about A. in flying signifiers, where she was described in an uncharacteristically clichéd — almost mocking — way as a cinema theory groupie who had experienced a revelation of doom after watching the Isis/Cleopatra character make her secret signals in the mouth of the desert cave in Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising.

“What I didn’t tell you earlier was that A. was the person who, back in 1978, had stayed to watch The Blood Order. She was just a girl — eight or nine — and I assumed she was the kid sister of one of the older grad students who had come to watch the Lynch shorts. She was sitting on a folding chair the way kids sometimes do with one foot tucked under her. I remember that. And also: at some point during The Blood Order the film cut out and the room went black for just a few minutes and that’s when she must have brushed by me in the dark because I felt something against my leg and there was the momentary smell also of perfume or candy. Our paths crossed again, in a fatal sort of way, around ten years later during a time when, in Pennsylvania, I was playing two roles at once, as both a librarian in the rare books room, and the other as a part-time graduate student.

“There were two separate but related incidents involving A. It was during the summer of a blazing heat wave. I remember this because the green leaves of the campus trees — even the strong and old trees lining the broad walkways through the middle of campus — these leaves had curled inward, taking the shape of little green tubes, like cigarettes with nothing inside them. They would survive, I knew, and unfurl again miraculously when it cooled, and it reminded me of A., in her apartment with the blankets over the windows to keep the sun out, and how that might not have been an act of retreat or depression, but rather survival, as she waited (she, with her page-boy hair and small knees) for the pressing evil to pass. Also: in her apartment was a white sheet that she had hung across the doorway into what I suspect was a narrow hallway.

“That was the first adventure with A. It’s hard for me to talk about the second one because that was a very dangerous time (as it is for you, now) a time when I felt that hot cauldron beneath my feet. We — all of us enduring the mental excitement of a university falling apart under the weight of bad ideas — had been reading Jonathan Edwards’ 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God for a seminar on the religious experience in America, where Edwards’ words became super-charged, colliding like spooked atomic particles against our postmodern skepticism. Secretly, Edwards’ sermon frightened me. There were so many traps in his writing, and the easiest solution was laughter, but that was temporary. ‘It is no security to wicked men for one moment, that there are no visible means of death at hand,’ he wrote. ‘The unseen, unthought-of ways and means of persons going suddenly out of the world are innumerable and inconceivable. Unconverted men walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering, and there are innumerable places in this covering so weak that they will not bear their weight, and these places are not seen. The arrows of death fly unseen at noon-day.’

“‘Now it’s dark,’ Frank says in Blue Velvet, murmuring to himself, a moment of what psychologists call insight: he knows that something is wrong with him, and that he’s going into the dark place, which make his actions even more terrifying. In another era, I would have suspected that A. might be an informer. A. invited me inside. I leaned my bike against a tree and, book in hand, followed her. Already at this point I could feel the undertow of Lynch’s movies tugging at me. Back then I knew nothing of split edits and so had no framework for understanding what was about to happen in A.’s apartment. She threw a blanket over the books on the lawn, and we went inside. Blankets — not unlike the one she had just tossed over the books outside — hung over the windows in place of drapes. It was dark. The furniture — a few ladder-back chairs, a white wicker loveseat with no cushions, a round table piled with newspapers and magazines, a floor lamp — was pushed back against the walls. The room, for lack of a better word, was enigmatic. The pall of danger hung over it, and the ceiling itself was so obscured in darkness that it seemed as if there was nothing above us except black, empty space. A. didn’t (thankfully) invite me to sit down. She didn’t invite me to do anything. In fact, for several minutes she was so still, so silent that she seemed to have disappeared completely, and there I was standing alone in this strange dark apartment that felt like some sort of pressure chamber, as if the blankets on the walls were not covering windows but tightly sealed portals into the outside world, which I yearned for suddenly now, the world of grass and wind and bees and the warm summer sun.

“But of course A. hadn’t disappeared. She was standing, instead, near the round table, in a thicket of shadows that seemed permanently fixed in the room. On the table was one of Julia Kristeva’s most dangerous books, her photograph adorning the cover. And yet in this copy the image was reversed so that Kristeva was looking the wrong way. I remembered distinctly sitting behind her watching those Lynch shorts ten years earlier, and the way the side of her face seemed to flicker in and out of existence to the dim blue light of the movie projector. You should know where it is, A. said suddenly and for a terrible and tender moment I thought she might do something else, but instead she reached into the pile of junk on the table and pulled out a simple red shoebox. These people, she said, waving the box in the air, they are blacker than a hole inside. And that’s when, by complete surprise, she told me about the revolutionaries who had ‘disappeared’ her mother. How she expected me to keep up with the reckless flow of her words (which frankly struck me more like a hasty confession), I don’t know. It was all very dramatic: the graphic nature of her story, her standing there in the shadows with her long arms, holding the shoebox in the air between us like some sort of totem, and the really sickening feeling I had that I never should have followed her into this room.

“It was only years later, re-watching Blue Velvet and then Wild at Heart on DVD, that it came back to me, what happened next with A. The room was very still, very quiet, until there was the sound of something swooshing, like the soft noise a canvas tent might make if it collapsed. I looked to the source of the sound — the largest window in the apartment — and saw as the enormous blanket that had been covering it slid to the floor in silence, flooding the room with sunlight. At the time I don’t think it even registered with me that I had heard the blanket fall before I saw it fall. A split edit. The scene changing suddenly from dark to light, but the sound and the image not matching up. Here, it’s yours now, A. said, and shoved the red shoebox (the shade of red reminded me of the Indiana Ave. card in Monopoly) into my hands and fled the room like a vampire, though of course she was not afraid of the sun at all, having just minutes before been standing in it on the front grass of her apartment building as I rode my bike. Just before fleeing, an expression passed across her face that was so beautiful and sad that it furrowed her brow, as if for that moment the entire beauty of the known world accumulated there, and how I wished I could reach out and gently draw my thumb across the caterpillar fur of her eyebrow. The room, bathed in orange-yellow light, looked as if creatures with yellow blood and guts had exploded. A hyper-realistic oil painting on the wall that had gone unnoticed before — a woman in a long red cape whose deep folds practically undulated like slow rolling waves across a deep and immense ocean — seemed to foretell the dawning of some new dark era.

“I followed A. out of the apartment, chasing her down the stairs and out into the Martian Chronicles sunlight (it hadn’t been this bright for weeks) as she cut across the street and headed toward the sloping greens of West Park, where just the previous week a boy had been knifed to death. As she trailed away in the distance I had a feeling that the shoebox contained something dangerous — perhaps a bomb that was set to go off at any moment — and that’s why A. had fled. It’s true that the events of the past few hours (Kristeva’s reversed book cover image; the darkened apartment draped with blankets to keep evil from seeping out; the Lynchian split edit, followed by A.’s escape) had really disoriented me, and I finally gave up on A., and sat down, out of breath, on a park bench beneath the doomy shade of an enormous oak tree. Beside me was a thin homeless man staring into what seemed to be a worn and crinkled empty brown paper bag, the sort of which that mothers and fathers pack their children’s school lunches in.

“‘Oh Sailor, honey, I hope seeing that girl die didn’t jinx us,’ Lulu says in Wild at Heart, unraveling a complete universe of truth with the pull of a thread. The movie is a weird sort of triumph (of the sort you don’t want to claim) because it balances so precariously on the unpoliced border-fence between sincerity and irony that periodically rises up and something important happens. What a terrible (‘I hope seeing that girl die…’) and honest thing to say. By this time, I was desperate, and the park bench sagged and the old drunk beside me seemed to have completely lost himself in that paper bag, as if the whole history of the universe was in there, reduced to the size of a pea. The shoebox seemed to vibrate there on my lap, like a dying wasp, and I imagined opening it right there and unleashing a terrible fury and blaze that was meant for some apocalyptic future, like some carefully erased sentence slowly re-appearing across the page. My hands trembled at the thought of opening the box, not so much for what I would find inside but for the irrevocable action of it all, and now comes the moment when I must tell you what A. said to me back in the apartment, standing in the impossible shadows near the table, just before she grabbed the shoebox off the table and shoved it into my hands. Don’t let on you’re being watched, she said.

“Of the several things A. told me in her apartment the two that sent a chill up my spine and that continue to haunt me were: Don’t let on you’re being watched, and Here, it’s yours now. It had grown dark very suddenly, and I left the park bench with the box and walked alone back toward A.’s apartment where I had left my bike. I cut through the old part of town, with its crooked alleys and hidden art galleries and stopped at Zeno’s — where once the bartender had taken pity at just the right moment in my life, a moment when nothing but the pity of a kind stranger would have saved me — and ordered a cold beer. There was a baseball game on the television (the Mets losing to the Braves as usual, whose Tom Glavine that year worked like a terrorist on the mound) and the light in the thin bar was the darkest of oranges, as if an enormous door to hell were cracked open only a hair. I found myself thinking about Julia Kristeva again, just like that, and how that black and white photo of her on the cover of Powers of Horror seemed like a dire warning to anyone who cared to notice. The bartender (Bill was his name, I think) read my mind (although that was part of his job and the duty of every decent bartender around the world) and set another glass of beer down before me on a fresh white napkin, embossed with some symbol that seemed familiar but that I couldn’t place, just as I had finished my first one. He had the old eyes of a man who, it seemed, had suffered the deepest and most painful sort of betrayal, and for that he was our comrade, the comrade to all of us who came to his bar.

“Don’t let on you’re being watched, A. had warned. Watched by whom, and why? There was a moment — and I’m just remembering this now — when Laura Dern in Wild At Heart glances at the camera, not in a self-conscious, ironic way, but in a desperate and serious way, as if she understood — too late — that the film she was starring in was nothing less than a long unfurling celluloid secret message.

“At some point during the night the professor who had vowed never to teach Faulkner to northerners came in to Zeno’s, stinking of gin, wearing a ridiculous, immaculately fitted, dusty three-piece suit, damp with sweat beneath the armpits, and tried to strike up an argument with me, calling me ‘boy’ in his exaggerated Southern accent and whispering sexual insults about the bartender. He left after I refused to open the shoebox for him, which by that time — it must have been two or three in the morning, because the insects in the trees outside were screaming at a resurrection pitch — I realized that the baseball game was not yet over, and that it was into the 17th inning, and that it would not be over until I left. Except that I was afraid to leave the bar. Literally afraid. I understood now the meaning of A.’s warning about being watched: now that I had the shoebox, I was no longer alone. In those moments — just before I left the bar — I remembered one more detail from A.’s blackened apartment, which was this: the dampness of A.’s eyes that suggested she had been crying, crying because she understood that opening that shoebox would be like breaking the seal to the blanket-covered window in her apartment, letting some terrible blank darkness seep in.

“David Lynch has said that ‘I did not feel that Blue Velvet was so strange — in fact, I always said that it was my most normal film. It’s an American picture.’ In one of the deleted sequences, ‘Dinner at the Williams’,’ (the images are included on the special edition DVD) Sandy (Laura Dern) and her boyfriend Mike watch television with Jeffrey in the basement. In one frame, Mrs. Williams (Sandy’s mom) brings some dessert in on a tray. In another frame, after Mike pretends to leave the room, Sandy and Jeffrey lean across their couches, the blackness of an open doorway behind them, and talk about the Dorothy Vallens case: ‘I’ve found out some things,’ Jeffrey says, ‘nothing really for certain. There are some strange people involved,’ and in those lines there’s a recognition that ‘nothing really for certain’ constitutes an entire method of knowing. Or not-knowing. The detective’s job is to move forward toward the unachievable, collecting and arranging clues and evidence and testimony in the service of some truth — any truth — that will make sense of the monstrous actions of others.

“When A. handed me that red shoebox, which to this day remains unopened on my bookshelf, she committed a monstrous action, and that’s why she ran, ran away from her dark apartment with curtains not to keep the beasts out, but to keep them in. That’s a mystery, right there, akin to when, in 1947, Albert Einstein, in a letter to Max Born, expressed skepticism about quantum entanglement referring to it as ‘spooky action at a distance.’

“Spooky action at a distance. David Lynch’s split edits, where the sound arrives before the image that creates the sound, is some distant cousin to this spooky action. And A.’s action that day — handing me the box while saying Here, it’s yours now—was in itself a weird sort of time-space game of tag, making me ‘It.’

“But was I ‘It’? And if so, just what did that mean?

“I walked out of Zeno’s bar, finally, and the night greeted me not with the terrorizing blackness that I feared but with soft air and the smell of honeysuckle. Before going home, I made my way back up to A.’s apartment. In the distance, in the moonlight, I saw my bike. I could tell that it had been moved by someone, for it was leaning against a different tree, but even this didn’t spook me, because I understood now that my life, for some uncertain time, would be marked with small, strange occurrences like this. Carrying the shoebox beneath my arm, I approached A.’s apartment in the dark, positioning myself so that I could see the window from which the blanket had fallen. I leaned against a tree, set the shoebox at my feet, and lit up a cigarette (the first one I had smoked in years) given to me by the bartender as one of his small gestures of camaraderie. And then I waited. For what? For something to happen at the window, of course, like in any good detective story. I learned as a child never to stare for too long into an animal’s eyes, as it might awaken or provoke some dormant violence, and I thought about that as I watched the window. Was I provoking something? Was the window alive in some inscrutable way, in the same way that Julia Kristeva’s face was alive on the cover of Powers of Horror? ‘The unseen, unthought-of ways and means of persons going suddenly out of the world are innumerable,’ Jonathan Edwards preached, in his own unintentional way predicting modern film editing.

“At some point during the night, I began to sense that I was the watched, not the watcher. The apartment building was completely dark, except for the faint blood-orange glow of A.’s window which, for all I know, may have been a reflection of the distant sunrise. In any case, it seemed to take on the semblance of an eye, fixed in some pestilential way upon me. It was only then, my body penetrated (as absurd as this sounds) by the gaze of the window, that I realized the shoebox A. had given me was not an object of danger, but of salvation. I scooped the box up from the ground beside me and dashed across the dark apartment lawn to my bicycle, terrified, in such a way that made me laugh openly, that I would be dragged back by some unseen force, and rode like a ten-year-old through the empty night, one hand on the handlebars, the other clutching the shoebox to my chest, against my very own beating heart.

“The third adventure involving A. was like the first two in that the incidents were different but the feeling was the same. It was about a week later and I should make it perfectly clear that I desired A. in a criminal way at that point. I was guilty of the male gaze and she was guilty of something too, but what, I wondered? We were in the Burrowes Building again making photocopies in the graduate office and the periodic cold light on her face from the machine reminded me that I was illuminated too, and that if anyone was going to kiss anyone it would happen that night.

“‘Something terrible is happening in the basement,’ she blurted out. What sort of person would say that? And yet as I stood there, the light from the Xerox duplicating more than just words on paper, what A. said came out like a taunt, a playground taunt, and for a moment the most thrilling, ominous feeling came over me. I imagined that the room we were in led into the rest of the building not through a door but through a sheet hanging loosely in the door frame and that the only way to get beyond the sheet and into the hallway was to burn it, was to kneel down and light the sheet afire, which is strange because that is exactly what David Lynch did in his Lumière-inspired 50-plus second film Premonitions Following an Evil Deed, which was made with a restored Lumière camera, with no post-filming editing. And so to make edits in camera, Lynch burned a sheet to lead us into the next scene, which was behind the sheet.

“What I want to say is that what happened after I followed A. into the basement of Burrowes was like standing directly in front of a burning sheet that led from one scene into another. Of course I realize now that I never should have gone into that basement room, and perhaps I even knew that then; it’s hard to remember. The Burrowes building itself was utterly familiar to me. It was the home of the Graduate English Department, the place where the secret transactions between theory and practice happened. The light inside always seemed the same soft aquarium green. There had been rumors of the basement, a place where, so it was said, enormous computers generated code during the early years of the Cold War. The writer John Barth had taught and written there in the 1950s, and although no one we knew ever actually read the novel to verify it, it was said that he (with the Machines behind him and the cigarette in hand) set a few scenes from his 1966 novel Giles Goat-Boy in the basement of Burrowes. By the time I caught up with A. and spotted her darting into the building, the end-of-the-day light was already spreading across the sky in red like blood slowly leaking through a bandage.

“It turns out that the door to the basement was located in an abandoned bathroom (what gender it had been assigned to was indeterminate; the spot where urinals should have been was damaged), where I heard A. moving about. We were all still so heavily into Julia Kristeva at that point and her fascination with the abject that, standing just outside the restroom door, I expected a corpse to greet me on the other side as I gently pushed it open after minutes of silence. The restroom was empty. The static-y hum of the fluorescent lights, the dripping of water on the porcelain sink, this is what I remember most about that moment. If A. had been in there just a few seconds ago, there was no sign of her now. The door closed behind me and there I was, in that spaceless restroom, three stalls with old wooden doors to my right, and two stand-alone sinks to my left, and a plastic dispenser half-filled with pink soap. The floor was white tiles and the mirror above the sinks was just long enough that, from where I was standing, I could see into the middle stall, whose door was open.

“The door to the basement was on the back wall of the stall, above the toilet. It was more of a large vent than a door, a vent whose grate had been removed and set carefully across the toilet seat, which, I soon discovered, had been placed there to stand on to lift oneself into the vent and descend the stairs into the cool basement, which was not as menacing a place as you might think. (And of course all of this is true in the same way that a Lynch film is true, which is to say it’s a version of a possible past.) The darkness seemed to seep into the basement from another place. It was an enormous cold room with a series of partitions that stored old furniture, filing cabinets, bookshelves, wooden office chairs, obsolete typewriters, analog phones choked in their own cords, and some objects whose shape was completely alien to me. The screams, distant and muffled, seemed to be coming from the farthest corner of the basement, where an orange light glowed and flickered like an exit sign. At the time I thought that these screams (and to this day I don’t know why I thought this) were not occurring in real time, but that they were being played back on a tape recorder. Perhaps my mind needed to think this in order to summon the courage to move forward toward the sound.

“That wavering orange light, it dimly illuminated the entire basement just enough for me to find my way between and around the partitions and the wooden crates and the ropes on the floor to the source of the screams which was, as I’ve said, in a room whose doorway was overhung by a white sheet. The screaming had stopped and the sheet, just as the one in A.’s apartment, gently billowed in and out, like the chest of a carefully breathing beast. The orange light was coming from the room itself, casting the sheet from behind with a glow that reminded me of a jack-o-lantern or what I imagined could be a distant city on fire. The notion to reach forward to pull back the sheet kept entering and fleeing my mind. I understood on some weird gene-memory level that touching the sheet would be akin to touching some highly radioactive object. There was no sign of A. I was alone in the basement. If there remained a world out there, outside of this black tar-pit trap building (and of course there was) it meant nothing to me anymore. Around the time that this all happened, in the early ’90s, a phrase became popular underground. All your base are belong to us. This was spoken in the sort of off-hand, coded way among the younger graduate students late at night after many drinks. Even those of us who didn’t recognize its source used it, and standing in front of that sheet in the basement I felt as if I was at the threshold of whomever ‘us’ was at the end of that phrase.

“I thought of A., and the fragility of her smile and of the absurdity of believing in half the things I believed in and of the absolute perfection of Marlene as she ran alongside a chain link fence on a warm winter day so many years ago in southern Ohio, and of the words in the book of Isaiah to ‘Arise, Shine’ and how all that meaning now was poured onto my head. So I lit the sheet afire. I crouched down, fumbled with my lighter, and the sheet disappeared in flames as if some prop on a magician’s stage. It was a transition, an edit, (as I would realize later watching the Lynch film) and the room behind the sheet was bare, except for a tipped-over wooden chair tangled in binding rope and when I stepped inside the room I could smell the odor of a ruined human being and it was then that I understood that the implied speaker of the phrase all your base are belong to us was not them, but us. It was me, at this moment. I was the colonizer, having no natural right to set foot in this room (which was really a territory) and it was I who through my sick curiosity had followed A. where she should never have been followed and, years later, watching Premonitions Following an Evil Deed I understood that any depiction of the room would be like a Theodor de Bry etching, De Bry who never traveled to the Americas but whose engravings of the Native Americans, nonetheless, entered into the realm of historical fact.

“The sadness of that tipped-over chair. With both hands I gripped it and set it upright in some lame attempt to restore order. Did I understand that in doing so I had become an intruder of the highest order? I suppose I did, and yet I was still under the spell of Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Tzvetan Todorov and the other alien theorists for whom there was no action that could not be explained in terms so deterministic that they made a complete lie out of the concept of free will. Todorov, especially, his name over-spilling with vowels and that lone and violent letter z. His book The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other quoted heavily from The Devastation of the Indies: A Briefe Account published in 1552 by Bartolomé de las Casas, which offered a first-hand account of the Spanish atrocities against the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Caribbean:

As has been said, the Spaniards train their fierce dogs to attack, kill and tear to pieces the Indians. It is doubtful that anyone, whether Christian or not, has ever before heard of such a thing as this. The Spaniards keep alive their dogs’ appetite for human beings in this way. They have Indians brought to them in chains, then unleash the dogs. The Indians come meekly down the roads and are killed. And the Spaniards have butcher shops where the corpses of Indians are hung up, on display, and someone will come in and say, more or less, ‘Give me a quarter of that rascal hanging there, to feed my dogs until I can kill another one for them.’ As if buying a quarter of a hog or other meat.

“If I was the intruder here — in this room that A. had led me to in the basement of the Burrowes building — then whose territory was this, and how was righting the fallen chair an act (which I considered an act of love) more violent than the atrocities that had been borne upon the poor soul who had been strapped to that chair? By the time A. appeared in the doorway behind me, stepping over the remnants and ashes of the burnt sheet, I realized that the phrase All your base belong to us was no longer a sentence that I was outside of, but rather a sentence that I inhabited in some fatal way.

“Of course, the solution to all this was obvious in that moment: the only way to make things right was to seat myself in that chair, and to wait for the terrible inevitable. I had placed the fallen-over chair back on its feet to prepare it for the next subject: me. And if it hadn’t been for A., at that moment putting her hand gently on my shoulder, and leading me back, out of the basement, then I really do think I would have given myself over to the strange territory of that room whose dull orange light, even to this very day I still see sometimes when I shut my eyes, glowing like both a warning and an invitation.”

*

Laing seems to be completely lost. I sense that it’s best to give him a few moments. During this entire time the wind has been gusting against the cheap motel door and window, and it seems right to just listen to it. And for the first time I notice that the room’s walls aren’t blue, as I thought they were, but a very pale shade of ocean green. Laing stands up and goes to the window. He’s wearing some kind of khaki shirt that brings to mind a photograph of someone on safari. He parts the drape and watches as the rain pelts the window so hard that you could imagine a row of soldiers machine-gunning the hotel except that by the time the bullets arrive they have turned to water pellets. Laing lets the drape fall back and turns to face me. His face — something about his pinched eyes and slight scowl that disguises a grin — reminds me of Charles Bronson, mid-1970s Charles Bronson of Mr. Majestyk and Hard Times. He seems not to be looking at me but through me, as if there’s another version of myself right there behind me, a version that’s accessible to Laing only. I don’t know how long he stares at me (or the me behind me) but I can tell you it feels like hours had been compressed into a few moments and during those moments I can feel myself aging, really feel it in my bones and muscles and veins as if Laing — through his weird, altering gaze — is somehow butchering time. The motel room seems unsteadier than ever as if it’s collecting itself more compactly around the figure of Laing, who by now has stopped staring at, or through, me and has gone into the small bathroom where, impossibly, I hear him speaking in a hushed, brusk voice to someone. Impossible, I say, because I had been in the bathroom earlier and there was, of course, no one there. I feel the flash of some super-new truth behind my eyelids. It’s like I’ve gulped down water too fast and the back of my throat hurts. And that’s followed by more soft, hushed words by Laing spoken to someone or something in the bathroom, or just to himself which maybe amounts, in the end, to the same thing. When he comes out his safari-like shirt looks damp, like he’s been sweating. He claps his hands together as if to say, There! It’s all done now! and comes back to where he was.

“The last film,” he says, “that I remember. A. took me to see it, or else I dreamed that she took me. She tells me there’s a movie I need to see. The last showing’s at midnight. She takes my hand and leads me through the streets of Philadelphia, a city I thought I knew but that, with each step with her, fades away and is slowly replaced with something completely unfamiliar. Different buildings (if buildings is even what you’d call them) and crazily named streets that loop like cursive.”

Laing hands me a slim yellowed folder.

“All I have left are notes, fragments of a film that was itself fragmented, told in lightning jolts. It actually wasn’t the last showing. We watched it three times that night, into the early morning hours. It’s called (or was called then) Blinding Forward. Something to do with snow, but there’s no snow in it. It was made in 1990, directed by Agnès Varda, her only American film, which she suppressed, but which was sent to Edison (who for a short time owned the Orpheum Theater outside of Harrisburg) by Alain Ronay who, along with Varda, had been one of the few people to attend Morrison’s funeral in Paris. With each viewing,” Laing says, “I added to and refined my notes (in parentheses, in italics) jotting down dialog, bits of information, fragments of dialog and voiceover in quotation marks.”

Here is what he handed me, his typed viewing notes on Blinding Forward, which I’m reproducing here:

A man named Haydn’s standing on the balcony of the decrepit, yellowing motel in summertime. A car crash has killed his wife and daughter on their way home from the mall on a bright and sunny Tuesday afternoon the previous year (the movie conveyed this with an elaborate pattern of cross-cutting) and the fact of their deaths was already “hardening into legend” in his mind. Haydn remembers how Tommy Parker, the principal, stood outside the hot gym waiting after the seventh-period assembly and put his big hand on his shoulder (conveyed via Haydn’s voiceover, but a voiceover that seems to come from the other side of the grave) and looked at him with sad, distracted eyes, and how the police officer told him the news with a sort of awkward familiarity, and how quickly and efficiently his wife and daughter were buried and spoken about by the “passionless minister,” and the old house that they had moved into north of Detroit when they were married sold along with nearly everything they had owned. The funny purple couch, the antique filing cabinet (details on the screen; the smell of burnt popcorn) they had bought together in Millersburg, Pennsylvania, the espresso coffee maker that they had only used twice, the piano with stuck keys increasing like a contagion. Their daughter’s computer, her new clothes for college, her trophies from track, her bulletin board. All these things, they were props, they belonged to someone else. Haydn feels as if all the “secret greasy mechanisms” that lay beneath the surface were exposed, revealing the absurd logic of events and consequences: death and burial, morning and night, waking and sleeping, talking and listening, standing and sitting. He feels that maybe he was being punished (this is depicted, according to my notes, by Puritan era woodcut images of hell) for thinking this way, for harboring these thoughts.

Haydn gives himself a couple of weeks (it seems; time is disjointed through elusive editing that recalls Varda’s French New Wave roots) and then goes back to work. People had said it was the best thing to do. He assigns his English class Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker and is reprimanded at the end of the year, kindly but formally, by the superintendent in his absurdly cold air-conditioned office. Then Haydn slowly and deliberately cuts off all connections to his limited and far-flung family: his wife’s mother, who at age 43, abandoned her family to sell her art on eBay; his older brother (all this is told in weird short mini-films within the film, like Polaroids come to life) in San Francisco; his aunt who gave him all those rare books and the Roman coin. Haydn sells his house and moves into a smaller one, and then a while later sells that and moves into a smaller one yet (shown in a slow montage of dissolves), a cabin really, that backs up against a five-hundred-acre woods outside of town. Sitting on the back stoop now, in the dark (we are in real-time present again) June night two days after summer vacation has started and many, many months after the accident, nursing a beer, he can remember the dumbest of details about them — like how his daughter always skipped stairs or how his wife said “whew” and tossed her keys on the entry-way table when she came home, no matter where she had been.

On the first day of summer (big jump here; the film becomes full of color and sun showing all that happens next) Haydn goes to town for groceries, and as he pulls out of the parking lot, he sees a girl waiting, she says later, for a taxi.

Her red backpack.

Her army fatigues.

Her beautiful face beneath her stringy hair.

She is standing in the sun, by the side of the road, watching him.

She seems to have rings on every finger.

She gets into his car because he leans over and opens the door, unexpectedly.

It’s not something he planned to do.

He drives away with her because she lets him. (The camera floats above the car.)

He takes her to where he lives because she says “yes.”

He doesn’t kid himself about how ridiculous this is, and how dangerous, but he feels he has “earned the right,” and that nothing had been for anything, and that everything that has come before is merely the set-up to an awful, awaiting punch-line that will put an end to it all no matter what he does or does not do.

She slumps down in the car seat on the way to his cabin, either because (the camera is now in the car during this) she is hiding or because it is some weird affectation, like the way teenage girls twirl their hair. He drives her past his old house, with a new SUV in the driveway, and past the familiar storefront landmarks and out to the edge of town to his new place on the edge of a woods where, he does not tell her, a human sacrifice took place in the 18th century.

“Can I stay here a few nights? Do you mind?” she asks, looking around (we are in his cabin now, Haydn’s) at his sparse place like she’s interested in renting it. Before he answers she had tossed her backpack onto the couch and disappeared into the bathroom. It is either sheer confidence or else an act.

The first night he sleeps in his bed and she on the couch.

The second night she sleeps in his bed and he on the couch.

On the day of the fire (flames fill the full screen frame for several seconds) that drives him finally and evermore out of his old life, she wants to talk, but not about anything that seems to matter.

He doesn’t know if she is homeless, or a runaway, or what.

He guesses she’s about 17.

Her face has a savage determination about it, but he can’t tell if it’s from lots of experience or something else. Her eyes are wide-apart bright green. Perhaps people were desperately looking for her, or perhaps they were hoping she would never return. She is quiet about all that with Haydn. He can see how she, with her long bare arms and fierce stare, could become “the object of obsession or disdain.” She is eating an orange at the kitchen counter, digging her fingers into it, wearing a white tank top. She has a tattoo of an oversized drop of blood on her left shoulder. It is a place where you could put your lips.

“Have you ever been to Spain?” she says. (Camera moves, creeping ever so slowly in some unmotivated direction during what follows, as if there’s a third character not on the screen but watching.)

HIM: “No. Have you?”

HER: “Yeah, it’s nice. No one rushes around. The beaches are white.”

HIM: “Beaches? That doesn’t sound so bad.”

HER: “Calamari.”

HIM: “With squeezed lemon juice. And what else?”

HER: “Priests. You can have a drink with them at the cafe. They understand about sin.”

HIM: “I’ll bet they do.”

HER: “But I don’t do confessions.”

HIM: “I understand, my child,” he says and puts his hand on her shoulder in a gesture of mock forgiveness. She smiles and holds his eyes. He just wants (it seems) to touch her tattoo.

HER: “Do you want to know what I saw in one of the churches there? In Spain?”

HIM: “Sure.”

HER: “I’ve never told this to anybody. I shouldn’t tell you… maybe it’s because you’re a total stranger, you know?”

HIM: (I’m sure this line is accurate; it’s underlined twice in red ink) “I don’t believe you but go ahead.”

HER: “It is unbelievable, you’re right. God. You’ll think I’m lying. It’s like something out of a horror movie, except that in a horror movie you don’t know who or what to trust which is the whole point and I already know that I can trust you. It was hard to find you, do you understand?”

HIM: “Not really.”

HER: “It was so fucking hard to find you but then you came up to me in the car just like that and I worried that you’d drive me to a parking garage and pull my jeans down and put your hand or a knife on my throat and rape me but it was something I had rehearsed over and over in my head and I had it figured out what to do.”

HIM: “God.”

(She pushes the plate of orange rinds away.)

HER: “In this old stone church or church-like structure in the country we went to one night, past midnight, when we were drunk. It was outside of Madrid. We had followed the dirt road through a forest. It was (sound cuts out)… anymore. It was so dark. And then this church — or (a foreign-sounding word; ‘templo’?) — appeared, at the end of the road. The door kind of fell off its hinges when we went to open it. Should I really tell you this?”

HIM: “I don’t see why not.”

HER: “I’ve wanted to tell somebody. Might as well be you. At first it was only a feeling, a feeling like (sound cuts out)… but we were drunk, so it’s hard to say. It was pitch black inside. The floor was crooked, tilted. But everything was spinning anyway, so. Why we were even there, I don’t know. It was one of those (another word that makes no sense; ‘jyhiardo’?) things. I was the first one in, and it smelled rotten. Like dead flesh. Like a dead animal.”

HIM: “This is like a campfire story, isn’t it?”

HER: “But it doesn’t have much of an ending.”

HIM: “That’s okay.”

HER: “Well inside, there was this thing. I don’t know. It was (soundtrack garbled) and dark, but you could still see it, standing there, like ten feet tall, by the altar.”

HIM: “What kind of thing?”

HER: “Like a person. But too (sound cuts out)… Standing very still, but looking right at me. At first I thought it was a statue, something religious. Like Mary. But it was moving, swaying.”

HIM: “Swaying?”

HER: “It could have been. I think it was. My head was spinning.”

HIM: “What did you do?”

HER: “Nothing. I couldn’t tell what it was. It was this (sound cuts out) presence, you know? Like God’s eye but not God. Or a statue of God. That’s what I keep thinking now, a statue of God. I slowly backed up and (sound goes) could hear the voices of the others back at the jeep. I heard it start and I thought they were going to (alien-sounding word; ‘gadorigean’?) without me. I ran to them in the dark.”

HIM: “And then what.”

HER: “Nothing else happened. But the (screeching sound; camera vibrates) in the church, it saw me, it recognized me. What if I told you that it’s searching for me?”

HIM: “That would be nice.”

HER: “What would?”

HIM: “To be hunted.”

HER: (film gets grainy here) “What makes you say that?”

HIM: “I’m just kidding.”

HER: “Don’t kid because (sudden droning sound drowns out dialog) and like it saw right through me and knows everything now. Even things that haven’t happened yet.”

HIM: “Sounds like mythology.”

HER: “Well it’s a story, at least. That’s what you (drone sound). But it really happened. It’s a story that’s true. You better watch out. You’re the only one I’ve told it to.” She laughs.

This seems to Haydn (the screen goes blank or black here) like some sort of threat or promise, or maybe even a little bit like an invitation. She touches his hand gently when she says it. Why she does this he can’t fathom; what she wants from him he does not know. He lets her keep her hand on his for a few moments, before withdrawing it and standing up. Whatever it is that she wants he does not have to give, although her cryptic talk makes sense to him in a strange way. As he listens to her, he thinks that maybe she reminds him of his wife or daughter. But she doesn’t. She is just some girl, some person. She smiles, and there is something beneath her smile, something that Haydn thinks he understands.

Then everything changes again so quickly. (Like the accident?) Late into the night he awakes on the couch to the smell of what he first thinks is burning popcorn. (Only became clear during third viewing.) In the semi-light he stands up and pulls on his pants and sweatshirt, his eyes watering, coughing, and for a moment, inexplicably, he thinks he needs to save his daughter. (Not conveyed directly on screen but somehow this is the feeling we get as the audience, the feeling of Haydn’s thoughts.) Then he remembers and calls for the girl, as if he had always known her, but there are flames coming from the kitchen that stand between where he is and the bedroom. The heat pushes him back, and out of the cabin, and he finds his way in the dark to the front door, and then down the steps, (the camera moves with remarkable grace during this sequence) across the street, and to his car, and he doesn’t look back, and for a moment, in his alarmed grogginess, he believes that Hell itself is coming for him in the flames. He gets in his car and drives off, passing the screaming fire truck coming the other way.

What will they find back there?

Her body, charred in his bed?

Or perhaps not, perhaps she was bad, and had started the fire herself, had waited until he was asleep on the couch, had tiptoed around and looked at his face one last time. It’s strange to be driving without direction or purpose, but he was. Clutching the steering wheel, he drives for hours into the night down through the northern Michigan openness toward Detroit, which looms 200 miles in the future like an abandoned set from a dystopian science fiction film. (This is conveyed in a non-representational way, not from images in the film but from the soundtrack, a song that’s playing while Haydn’s driving.) Every time he drives through Detroit it looks and feels worse than the time before. It’s “an experiment in suicide.” At 1 a.m. he pulls off into a welcome center and sleeps on the leaned-back seat.

He starts up again at about 4 a.m. About an hour later, he can see the dawn creeping up in his rearview mirror, illuminating the flat, scrubby fields. It’s June; “why isn’t anything growing in them?” It doesn’t matter.

The truth is, Haydn could travel like this forever (this part’s voiced over) through the unpoliced towns that dot the Midwest, the freedom of its unkempt highways, its unexplored woods, its abandoned barns, its empty buildings from another era of physical labor. It’s as if the real world has been abandoned to him alone. There is no war. There are no Towers. There is nothing virtual. He moves across the landscape unnoticed. Despite everything that has happened he is Godlike in his assuredness. He ambles vacantly through the vacant city and it’s as if he’s watching himself in a movie (conveyed through something that approximates a split screen; a screen-within-a screen or layered on top of the screen) that’s supposed to be frightening but that comes across as absurd, absurd in the old existential sense where the blasted, blank landscapes are there for a reason, a real fucking reason. He finds himself at The Fist, oh yes, Mr. Joe Lewis, the 8,000 pound fist that knocked out the Nazi puppet boxer Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium on a hot day in 1938 in front of J. Edgar Hoover and Clark Gable, and the same fist that would be extended to an open hand, the open hand of a man who would befriend Schmeling in later years.

In his car, driving out of the ruined city, the rain pounds his windshield in the night. Buildings and bridges disappear behind him, fleeing into the distance of his rearview mirror. Lightning fills the passageways of abandoned buildings and the underpasses of great highways. (And yet I recall this being depicted as lightning flashes coming from within the car itself.) On a sharp curve on I-94 he passes a night-time road construction crew, illuminated in the lightning like some three-dimensional painting, their yellow hats, their orange vests meant to protect them from swerving cars. They’re carving out the rib-caged underside of an overpass. He drives further south out of Detroit with its savage history written everywhere, the car radio playing a crackly version of a new White Stripes song that already sounds ages old.

He takes Telegraph Road laid out like the barrel of a gun through the suburbs past Dearborn and eventually into the dark countryside past Adrian and into the little town of Monroe, with its sad middle-of-the-night flashing red stop lights, the rain coming down in heaves like something from an over-budgeted movie.

Haydn slows at an intersection as a shadow speeds across the road, then stops. A bony dog stands at the side of the road in the pale edges of his headlights and Haydn reaches over and behind him and opens the door and waves a half-eaten candy bar beneath the dome light. In the backseat, the animal holds the candy between its paws and chews at it silently.

He drives on out of Monroe south into the unfamiliar Michigan countryside, his window open to the sound of crickets in the fields.

Farther south still (the film goes silent for several minutes beginning here) to the Ohio border. At the Red Roof Inn at midnight, he pays in cash and carries the lame dog bundled in his coat up the dimly lit, cracked cement stairs, to room 218.

Everything looks fake, like props.

The bed.

The TV.

The walls.

He kicks at the tiny table to make sure it’s not painted cardboard.

He puts the dog on the bed, turns on the lights, and shuts the door.

In the shower, he rubs the little odorless white bar over his face and in his hair.

In the foggy mirror he looks upon his own blank face, even and smoothed out in the steam, except for his hair, which is shockingly black, like crows’ feathers.

And the scar above his left eye.

On the bed the dog whimpers and licks a bloody, mutilated paw. Its nails are long, like it had been unnaturally caged and recently set free. (It’s a strange moment in the film, tone wise, with all the blood, almost exploitation-like.) Haydn sits down beside the animal and with his knife trims them back, holding each paw, one-by-one, firmly. Perhaps the dog understands because it offers no resistance. It lies on its side blinking at the ceiling. It laps up the water Haydn brings it in the frail plastic-wrapped cup from the bathroom. It sleeps beside him in the bed, twitching and fretting all night.

He lies back on the bed and looks up at the freshly painted ceiling, and falls asleep.

That night (this part is projected in soft-focus color) on the motel room ceiling above Haydn’s sleeping body he dreams of Something coiled black in the trunk of his car, and of the girl’s warning after she told him the story of the thing in the church, and of opening the trunk with the turn of a key, and of the Something spiraling out of the trunk like a reverse tornado.

The next morning, the dog lets Haydn carry him out to his car and put him in the backseat. He drives out to the main street with its Dairy Queen and Pizza Hut and Tire Shop and every building that has been distractedly built, past Fetter’s Iron Works and Meijer and Dough Boys and the pharmacies and banks and oil changers, past the brown brick bank with the time and the temperature that can’t be right unless you live on Mars and the small tilted farmhouse wedged between the insurance office and the church, past the lurking hospital, square like a bunker with its startling antennas on the roof and its thin crease-like windows. He drives out to the edge of development where the new marriages and hopeless marriages flee, some age-old memory trace of butchery buried in the signs for the brand new Indian-named subdivisions, Shawnee Trace and Tecumseh Point and Arrowhead Park.

Then the houses and businesses fall away and the road south opens up with no distractions. Haydn drives further and further still until it’s dark, a blanket of numbness (the screen seems oily at this point) covering his mind.

Everything at the truck stop off I-75 is covered with a delicate sheen of grease.

He is somewhere near Ashland, Kentucky.

The food comes in fried heaps, delivered by a “somnambulist waitress with wild red hair and a torn dress.”

Perhaps she isn’t the waitress, after all, Haydn thinks afterward.

The coffee sets his ears ringing, and he has to strain to hear his own thoughts.

Two tables over (this is shown in a strange Polaroid-type film; the images look smeared like wet paint) a young boy about 11 or 12 with a pierced eyebrow pokes at his food sullenly, a secret signal to his parents that he will soon be leaving their world, that even this — this innocent stopover on the way to somewhere else — is the end of something. The boy is bored with his own boredom. His clothes are brown and baggy; he’s loaded with the “symbology of discontent.” With his bare hands and thumbs Haydn could mold the boy’s high-cheek-boned, feminine face into the face of his own child’s, his daughter, lost now but visible in traces in the body of every child.

With shaking hands Haydn fishes out his money and spills it on the cashier’s counter.

One coin spins and spins beyond reason until he stops it with his hand. Out of his wallet slips a small piece of paper with a phone number written on it. He turns it over in his hands, and knows without knowing that the girl must have slipped it in there. Perhaps her cell phone number. Why? He imagines her doing it (we actually see her doing it so it’s hard to know whether Haydn’s imagining it or not) in the dark, as he slept. He folds it in two and returns it to his wallet. In the car the dog is awake, watching Haydn approach through the foggy window. Haydn starts the car and drives off, pulling onto the highway with all the banal order that such an act requires, gripping the steering wheel in his hands with strangulation strength.

As the gray strip of highway gathers retreating speed behind him, he looks more than once in his rearview mirror, certain that someone is following him. Not the police. There is something bigger in store for him than that. Whatever it is, it’s getting closer. Something to end it all. Everything that was happening was tending toward this final moment.

(Parts of what happens next are voiced over, others depicted through exposition.) That night, in southern Kentucky, Haydn pulls off the highway and takes a sorry road to the James Motel just outside of Kensington. The dog sleeps beside him in the bed.

He feeds the dog and checks its feet, which are healing quickly. He flicks on the TV but all that comes up is the blue on-screen menu, which he can’t get to work. He goes to the window and closes the drapes, and then turns on the lamps on the desk and the bedside table.

When he’s in the bathroom, someone pounds on the door. The dog jumps down from the bed and stands there barking. (We’re seeing this now from an impossible overhead point of view, as if the camera’s affixed to the ceiling.) Haydn comes partially out of the bathroom and stands in the doorway, waiting. The dog quiets down, and then there is pounding again, louder, almost alarming, and the dog goes back to barking, its body shaking. It throws its head from side to side as it barks. Haydn doesn’t move. After the pounding stops, he goes to the door and looks out the peephole, but it’s fogged and he can see nothing.

Haydn sits down on the bed and the dog jumps up next to him. He rubs the dog’s head, and wonders if it might have been the cop at the door. Or maybe the cleaning woman, but she would have let herself in. He calls the front desk and puts another night on his card. He gets Chinese that day and night, and then the next, delivered by a woman in a yellow waitress outfit with a tattoo of a red triangle on both of her forearms and it slowly occurs to him that he will not be leaving any time soon. He has enough money to stay here for a long, long time. (On third viewing I saw clearly that Haydn’s actions were creating a network of action that I myself would follow.) Before he knows it, five or six days have gone by, and he hasn’t even opened the curtains or looked outside. He doesn’t answer the door when the knocking comes again, nor does he answer the phone when it rings. If someone wants to get him, they would have to fucking come and get him, because for all he cares the world outside has disappeared, and as long as he has food and money to pay for this room he’s content not to leave, ever. He ceases to look at himself in the mirror, but sometimes catches sideways glances that reveal his growing beard, his scraggly hair, his wrinkled clothes.

At night he sometimes wonders about the boy in the diner, which makes him think about his daughter, and her long graceful body in the coffin, and the way she covered her mouth when she laughed, and about how the dog is healing, and about the girl he had maybe left in the fire.

He remembers her number in his wallet.

He regrets not touching her tattoo.

He wonders if she’s okay.

Sitting on the edge of his bed, he dials the number.

It rings and rings.

He hangs up and does it again.

This time, she answers.

HER: “Hello?”

HIM: “I wanted to see if you were okay.”

HER: (Long pause. The sound of the humming phone line) “Me? You’re the one who’s got to be careful. Why did…”

Before she can finish, another voice interrupts them on the phone, and at that moment the dog, startled by something at the door, jumps off the bed, tangling its foot in the phone cord, pulling the whole thing down and disconnecting the call. Haydn puts the phone to his ear, but it’s dead.

The lamp on the bed stand suddenly seems too bright, like 200- or 300-watt bright. He reaches over and turns off the light. The dog barks wildly at the door, showing more life than Haydn can imagine, the hair on its back standing up.

He knows that he will never call her again, and that he shouldn’t have even tried, and that it’s time to let the dog go. He leans over and puts the phone back on the table, gets out of bed, and walks across the room to open the door. Haydn, in his Detroit Tigers shirt, lets the dog out. It’s easy to let it go.

Haydn stands in the doorway and looks out into the black night, trying to see something, anything, even a light. Yet there is nothing but blackness. The air must feel sweet in his lungs. His car has got to be out there somewhere in the parking lot that he cannot see. In fact it is so quiet, so still, that looking into the blank night, Haydn can almost imagine that the world itself had disappeared, or has never existed.

What happened to you, she had said.

He wants to answer her now, but it’s too late.

As he steps away from his room, what he has come to fear and secretly hope for is finally and actually there before him in its darkness, darker even than the gathered night.

CHAPTER 3

The Insurgent (a film treatment, 1968)

Gutman (2001)

IT’S LATE, AND LAING STANDS UP FROM THE TABLE and stretches his arms above his head, grasping a wrist.

“Have I disappointed you?” he asks.

“Whatever they bind, shall be bound,” I say.

“And so would you have me broken by sorrow?”

“It’s not just word games, you know. What is it that you want?”

“You’re the one who came to find me,” Laing says.

“Ego te absolvo.”

“For what?”

“You tell me, Roberto. That’s your role.”

“Complete and utter destruction.”

“Of what?”

“Of them,” Laing says.

“Them? The films, or…”

“It’s a funny thing that you’ve come all the way out here to ask me to talk about these films. If this was a movie it would be the point where I begin to let you know that I know why you’re really here.”

“Then I’m afraid I’m the one who’s disappointed you. I’m only here for the films. You and the films.”

“Me and the films and…?”

“Are you asking because you know or you think you know?”

It’s hard to explain how or why, but this whole exchange feels rehearsed, though that’s not really the right word. Uncanny? That’s getting closer. Reconstructed? Closer still. Close enough. That’s also when I notice a HAVE YOU SEEN ME flyer, on the floor by the throne-chair with the VHS tapes, for one of the missing children, a girl with yellow pigtails and a pink turtleneck. A school picture. Last seen wearing… If you have any information…

*

The problem with The Insurgent, as Laing told me before handing it over to me, was that it had been deemed too philosophical, too abstract by the studio heads, the money men, at Paramount. It would have been Antonioni’s second American film, after Zabriskie Point (1970). In fact, he wrote the treatment (probably with others, though only his name appears on the document) during the initial months of shooting Zabriskie Point in Los Angeles in 1968, during an era when he spoke frequently and ominously about the fact that we, as human beings, must become reconciled to nature, and that this reconciliation would necessarily involve great violence. Antonioni had found it difficult to adapt to life in California, and, he said in several interviews given during that time, admired the anarchic spirit of the counter-culture while loathing the hippies’ need for gurus and mystics. All this while wearing a heavily starched white shirt and black tie, smoking imported cigarettes and using the phrase “the Southern Strategy” years before it entered the lexicon.

The treatment for The Insurgent is typed on thick cream paper. I reproduce it here, as Laing gave it to me, without alteration:

THE INSURGENT

By A.A., ’68

Evie has been assigned to repair (to poison, but she doesn’t know this yet) the well, in an obscure area of the State. The notice came, like it always did, in the curiously old-fashioned form of a note in a sealed envelope beneath her apartment door. It was there in the morning, a simple folded slip of paper in the envelope with the coordinates, a time-line, an all-zones passport, a contact number, the familiar list of instructions, and a credit card. If this sounds mysterious and romantic, the stuff of spy novels, then consider that Evie was a mere field engineer, a repairer of structures, a tuner of sounds, part laborer, part designer, part theorist.

The theorist part, that’s what would get her into trouble at the end.

She understands that the job will take her to the furthest edges of the State, where the well hardly seems to matter. She checks the coordinates again and spreads out the map on the floor, tracing in blue pencil a line from where she is now to the place she’s going. Not quite as far as she thought, but still a week’s journey, at least.

She goes back to the envelope, and only then notices that there are two passports, not one. The first one has her name and photo. The second contains an unfamiliar face and photo, someone whose name is Farris. She looks at the instructions again, typed on a white index card. The instructions are the same as always, with the exception of a new directive, typed at the bottom of the card in a font that appeared to be from a different typewriter than the rest. It reads: Join with Farris at mile 9 and continue to destination together.

That night, Evie has a terrible dream. In it, she stands before a vast oil painting in what might have been a museum, a painting that’s so large that she can’t stand far enough away to take it all in. The room is cold and quiet, except for a noise that seems to come from the painting itself, from a small human figure lost in the orange and red oils, and the figure requires that she stand very close to the painting to see it, so close that she can smell the linseed oil, and on the horizon of what appears to be a vast desert is the human figure, on a horse, and the noise it emits from the painting is faint, like the buzzing of a bee, and she becomes dizzy and loses the horizon line and her perspective and in that instant realizes that the voice she heard in the painting is that of her lost sister Kate, crying out to her from the depths of the painting, not even from a photograph, which represented something real at least, but from a painting, so that she was abstract, nothing more than a brushstroke on a canvas, and yet a moving brushstroke, moving slowly across the painting from left to right, as if the artist was not yet finished, waiting for Evie to put her ear to the painting to hear her sister’s scream, her mouth spewing red paint.

*

The walk to mile 9 is familiar. Through the outskirts of the largely abandoned village, down into the valley, due west, until the remnants of the old city come into view, its cracked cobblestones, the toppled First Presbyterian church spire still dangling from the structure, its upside down cross like some alien warning symbol, the granite-faced library with its smashed-in windows, and then, in the distance to the east, across the river that divided the city, the smoke from the camp settlements.

What had happened here?

The same thing that had happened everywhere.

*

At 9 mile there’s a man, leaning against a splintering telephone pole, a russet duffel bag at his feet. His shoes are large and black. His hair is crow-black too, greased back like an old-time punk crooner, thinks Evie. An unsteady smile crosses his face as Evie approaches.

He extends his hand, his palm up. For a moment, Evie doesn’t know what to do. Instinctively, she reaches her hand out, too, and they shake, firmly. How long had it been since Evie had done such a simple, fundamental thing as shake another’s hand?

The sky above them has changed slowly from blue to purple, casting everything in a weirdly menacing violet light. The clouds appear distended, stretching low to the ground as if they carried something heavier than moisture. Without another word, they begin their journey, heading east along the city perimeter, skirting the motorway with its now-meaningless signs. As always when Evie’s mind begins to wander her thoughts find their way back to her sister Kate, who had gone missing over a decade ago, just out of university, and the letters she had received from her that she had begun to suspect weren’t really from her at all. Kate. Her shocking red hair. Her barrettes. Her missing left pinky from the accident. Her fierce, troublesome skepticism about the State.

Soon, Evie and Farris develop a rhythm to their walk, and over the course of that first day a set of unspoken rules takes shape: no small talk; walk not side-by-side but one in front of the other, switching positions when it seems right; eyes and ears open for whatever lays ahead. The most remarkable feature of the landscape is its relentless sameness, and if they hadn’t been paying close attention it might seem to Evie and Farris that they had passed the same locations several times, as if walking in a circle.

“I’ve never worked with anyone before,” says Farris, near the end of the first day.

“That’s okay. Who gave you the assignment? Who told you to wait for me at 9 mile?”

“Likely the same ones who told you to find me there,” says Farris.

“What did they say about me?”

“That your name was Evie, and that you would be coming. And that I was to trust you.”

Trust? Who could trust anyone anymore? Did Evie consider herself trustworthy? Or, put another way, did Evie trust Farris? At this point it didn’t matter; trust didn’t enter into the equation of what they were doing. Neither of them depended on each other yet. Each could complete the journey without the help of the other, although at the end everything could change.

They sleep that night beside the locks of an old canal, its stones carved with revolutionary slogans and the names of lovers. As she sometimes does before falling asleep, Evie makes a list in her mind of the things she can be certain of as a way, she supposes, to confirm that her sense of reality is not suspect. Her sister Kate; she is certain of her. And the man beside her, Farris; of him Evie is certain. The fact of the grass beneath her blanket, and the sound of the water in the canal, and the night insects she hears in the nearby trees, and the blank black sky without even a star, and the beating of her heart.

Of these things Evie is certain. This gives her comfort enough to fall asleep. In the morning, she will wake up, inexplicably, on the other side of the canal.

This is not a post-apocalyptic film, a film of what happens after the end of the world. The theorist in Evie understands this, about the story she’s in, understands that the end of the world is really a reactionary fantasy, the dream of thin-blooded tyrants, spun into popular narrative by writers and artists and movie makers. The landscape around her — the broken roads and disfigured buildings and polluted rivers — is not some dystopian fantasy of the slate-wiped-clean, but something far more dangerous: things as they are. The present is always the present, even when it seems like the future. There is no “post-” to what was happening to Evie.

As she lies there beside the canal, the light just beginning to come up on the horizon, she tries to work through yet again just why they had paired her up with Farris. And why, of all things, send them on a voyage to the outer remnants of the State to repair a well that was unnecessary, and had been for as long as anyone could remember? In school Evie had been taught by radical theorists that the well was, in the words of the philosopher D., an event, not a structure, an event that took the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling. But she understood that the meaning of the well from a theorist’s point of view was just that: theory. She was a practical woman, and during those years of reading and puzzling over the most obscure, esoteric of texts, she made sure to keep grounded in the reality of this world — even as she read books and essays that dismantled that very reality — by chopping wood. She had lived for a time in a small rented house at the edge of a forest that bounded a field, and had taken to dragging fallen limbs out of the forest and hand-cutting and chopping them until her body trembled from exhaustion. As a way, she supposed, of connecting her back to the things her readings in theory were destroying.

But the well. No matter how it was theorized, it remained. And now she’s been summoned to repair it, the very structure identified by her teachers as the most visible outcropping of the ideological state apparatus. An event, not a structure. Something to be destroyed. And here she is, on her way to make it even stronger.

*

“This way, or that?” asks Farris.

They’ve reached yet another rusted, burnt-out patch of flattened meadow where the footpath forked in two directions, one easterly, one west.

“You pick.” She can’t be the one to decide. She doesn’t think it matters much which path they take.

“This way, then,” says Farris, and they head east, Evie walking behind, observing Farris’s slight limp. She also notices the scar on the back of Farris’s neck, a patch of almost shiny skin in the shape, as far as Evie can tell, of a five-pointed star.

An hour later, they arrive back at the same spot.

“Well, now what?” asks Farris, taking a swig from his canteen and passing it over to Evie. Something like a grasshopper but larger jumps across the space between them. For a moment Evie thinks it’s a bird but then just as quickly dismisses the thought. Birds don’t jump like that.

“West, then,” Farris says, wiping his mouth.

*

But west is no better. They pass several, then more, then more, people on the path, heading in the opposite direction, sacks of grain or something on their backs, babies strapped to their fronts like shrunken prisoners of war.

*

That night, lying in the dark, Evie cradles the small transistor radio to her ear, slowly rotating the tiny plastic dial through the Gaussian noise. The entire spectrum of the dial: nothing. Until at last, this, as if some terrible new philosophy was being communicated in a secret broadcast that Evie was not meant to hear.

Then, as if in response to the noise, she feels something on the back of her left hand, like the gentle movement of a moth turning in circles. When she’s sure Farris is asleep she holds the back of her hand up to the firelight and sees it there, the oil painting from her dream, in miniature, her sister Kate lost now but coming up for air in this painting, alive in oranges and reds on the back of her hand, tingling; and tilted just the right way against the jumping, shadowed light from the flames she could spot her, linseeded and moving in the painting and if she dared (which she did) to put the back of her hand to her ear she could hear her, the small bee-like voice, and in that moment Evie felt that she was in a loop, and that she had returned again not to a place but to a memory, the same memory, of her sister the night before she disappeared, purple barrettes in place, secret eye shadow, shorter-haired than before, focused, intensely focused, the car pulled over, the promise she made her make about keeping that drawer in her dresser locked, and the way she could tell in the car dome-light that something was wrong, and how it all changed with the sudden rain that forced them to roll up the car windows fast, the old hand-crank kind, and the pelting of the rain on the roof, and the steam rising off the hood, and then how it stopped suddenly and Evie had to kick open the door (she laughed) because the moisture made it stick, them coming around to the trunk area of the car, in the night, Kate calling her “brother” and Evie calling her “sister” as if they were the first to decipher the stupid codes of their time, the trunks of trees in the headlights of the car coming up from the earth, no record of them except in tree rings fossilized in museums or textbooks.

And no record of Kate after that night.

*

The well. What about the well? It was a question posed by Evie to Farris, as a sort of test.

“Farris,” she says, as they make their way the next day across a plain, “what’s your plan concerning the well?”

“To help you repair it.” He’s walking in front of Evie, leading the way. The sky has brightened, and the sun’s making the earth beneath their feet, it seems to Evie, somehow softer.

“What makes you think I’m going to repair it?”

With this, Farris stops and turns to her. A look — an almost threatening look, or worse, demonic — crosses his face and then just as quickly vanishes. He smiles, fingers a cigarette from his pocket, lights it (in a procedural sort of way) takes a drag, and offers it to Evie. To be friendly Evie obliges and passes it back.

“You know,” says Farris, “they warned me you might say that.”

“Warned? They?”

In the near distance, an animal of some sort, black and low, crosses the plain. It makes a noise, a muted howl. It stops, and then moves again, and then stops. Evie feels the paint moving again on the back of her left hand, and she glances down to see it swirling slowly, counterclockwise, in purples and browns, like a bruise. The animal is closer now and they can see the black, shiny hair standing up on its back, thick like wire. It makes another sound, and Evie pictures the noise as red horizontal sound bars reaching low across the ground towards her and she understands or thinks she understands that if she can get close enough to the animal or whatever it is to hear the sound up close it would be significant and have meaning.

They push, step by step, deeper into the State and the animal shadows them for a while and then disappears. The plain gives way to patchy, untended fields that slope gently down into a valley. They pass people dressed in yellow tending an apple orchard and a building with a spire looming behind them topped off with something carved out of metal, a slashing symbol unknown to either Evie or Farris. They continue on, warming in the afternoon sun, sometimes Evie leading, sometimes Farris. They walk in silence mostly, their strides in sync for minutes at a time.

Until the drones come, appearing in the form of something resembling hawks, complete with feathers, soaring high and screechless. Evie has a memory — as faint as the undercoating of paint — of throwing pebbles at large birds like that. Not quite: her handing Kate small stones and she hauling off and whipping them at the sky not to hit them but to make them dive as if at insects. They had gotten the idea from watching bats at dusk above the open field drop and rise in sharp, impossible rhythms. Just trying to pick one out and follow it was enough to set your eyes in a sort of waking REM.

There are two of them, then three, against the gray afternoon sky. Those slow, looping circles in the air that were so familiar.

“Are they ours?” Farris asks, still watching the sky.

Evie, standing behind him, considers, yet again, the star-shaped symbol scarred onto the back of Farris’s neck. To their east is an enormous grasslands, stretching to the far horizon. To their west is much the same, with pale mountains rising in the distance. They stand upon something like a farm-to-market road, dipping and rising ahead of them and then curving off into the unseeable distance.

“The one on the left is, maybe,” Evie says. It’s meant as a joke; the drones are in continual motion, continually exchanging places in the sky. There is no left or right drone. It’s a test, of sorts, to see if Farris will smile.

He doesn’t.

*

After two hours of walking at a good clip without stopping, everything looks the same. Which is to say, everything looks just slightly different, somehow. Repetition and difference. Wasn’t that how one of the theorists Evie studied under characterized our present age? Was it repetition with difference, or and difference? Also: Empty time. In the dry air of that classroom in the cool basement library Evie had fallen in love with the translated words of philosopher D., even though later that semester, drunk at the Brickhouse on a cold winter night, she would learn from the philosophy students that no one in philosophy considered D. a real philosopher. What is he then? Evie asked. An aphorist, they said, made into a philosopher by English departments.

*

That night, as Farris and Evie sleep near the side of the road beneath one of the shapeless thorn apple trees that had begun to appear, Evie listens as Farris talks in his sleep. Some of the words are familiar:

State…

Instructions…

Firestorm…

Jinxed…

While others seem to be two words put together into something familiar:

Out-push…

Day-gold-by…

Open-waste…

And yet others are alien to Evie:

Cuitlaxcolli…

*

In the morning they keep walking. The State stretches on and on, encompassing its own useless, undulating fields. Day after day, toward the chaos and catastrophe of the well. Evie’s repair kit with its small metal objects wrapped individually in oiled cloths weighs heavily on her back in a small leather knapsack. On the third day the grass fields change to barren, dusty land, and then back to grass.

The lack of objects on the horizon intrigues and then spooks Evie, who recalls the plane of immanence from her useless theory-training, the horizontal moment of thought and all that. She understands that in order to repair the well she will have to destroy it. That was prerequisite for the emergence of any new System. She will need to get to the root of the infection. In this phase of the State’s long collapse, to be an engineer, as she is, means to be a destroyer, not a designer, of objects. But in order to destroy them properly one has to know how they were built in the first place.

On the fifth day, they arrive at a quarry, the first sign that they are nearing the well. Evie knows that some sections have been quarried hundreds of kilometers from where it was built, so the well might still be days ahead. The bitter smell of limestone fills the air and Evie can’t help thinking of the smell of blood from the cut-throated animal. Large ruts in the earth indicating the direction the limestone had been transported run due north, towards the well. Looking down into the quarry she sees that at the bottom, perched on a large rock in the middle of a pool of turquoise water, there are several of the drones they had seen in the sky earlier. Again, Evie thinks of Kate and her pebble throwing, and of how, on the night before she disappeared, home from university for the summer, her hair shorter than Evie had ever seen it before, they had gone to the zoo, and how in the enormous walk-in aviary, so full of sound, she first suggested that some of the birds weren’t real at all.

*

The quarry a few hours behind them, Evie and Farris rest at the side of the road.

“We should have taken a trophy,” says Farris, “from the animal.”

“Why?”

“As a reminder. Maybe a tusk.”

“There were no tusks.”

“I should have said ‘the.’ There was only one tusk. Someone or something else must have taken the other.”

This was the most Farris has said since the beginning of the journey.

“Or the tail,” Farris continues. “Tusk or tail.”

“What tail? There wasn’t any tail.”

Farris gives Evie a look that tells her to stop or to be careful, but Evie keeps talking.

“We looked at the same animal, Farris, dead on the road. There were no tusks. There was no tail.”

“Perhaps you failed to see them because of the blood.”

“I saw what you saw. The same thing.”

“Well. We should have taken a trophy,” says Farris, and they are back where they began.

*

Before nightfall they pass another larger quarry. The landscape is more rugged now, with outcroppings of mossy rocks and scattered pine trees. By the light of the campfire, Evie studies the back of her left hand, looking for movement in the design. Her thoughts drift ahead to the well, not as a structure but as an event, an event that the State wants her to contain, as if meaning could ever be anything other than deferred, and in this deferral not nothingness but the revelation of absolute absence. A structurally unreadable sign, that’s what the well had become, and yet she was to engineer its repair, as if a breach that great could be repaired. The question was: why has the State sent her on a mission to repair a well that, they must know, is beyond repair?

During the night, beneath the stars, the sky full of silent drones, more than she could possibly imagine, Evie dreams of letters, and then those letters in the shape of a word: Cuitlaxcolli.

The next day, under the bright hot sun, they arrive at a false well, prior to the well itself. Quarried and built around the same time as the original well, this one’s purposes remained obscure. Its stone rim rises impressively from the landscape: its clean limestone lines that make an enormous circle, its sheer whiteness in the sun, the way it seems somehow to divide nature from itself.

As they approach, the well wall looms higher than it appears possible, as if it has grown as they have come nearer. At least ten meters high and stretching enormous distances as it curves around to meet itself again. On the other side of the curving wall, presumably, the well itself, as deep as the imagination would allow. As they enter its cool shadow it appears that it has emerged out of the earth rather than being built upon it. A flock of drones passes silently overhead, their shadows racing across the plain toward Evie and Farris and then disappearing into the well wall’s shadow.

After half a day’s westerly walk parallel to the false well, they reach the end and head north again, the well receding in the distance. Soon, the plain gives way to outcroppings of trees and they stop at a good-sized lake where they gather water, catch fish, and rest. And then north again into a vast pine forest that holds the cool air and seems untouched by the will of the State. For most of the time Evie walks in front and on the straight parts Farris follows in sync, step for step, so that it sounds to Evie as if she is walking alone. In these long stretches she wonders what the differences are, really, between the false well and the real well they are headed toward. At certain points the forest is so thick with trees that she feels it difficult to generate any thought at all, and so she walks without thinking, her legs mechanically carrying her forward. Without knowing how it happened her hands have become sticky with pine sap.

They reverse positions: now Evie follows Farris. The forest stretches on and on as if only to create the very conditions of its own existence. Evie imagines for a while that the forest is the well. As a child she had heard that the well had been stuffed with bodies of the State’s enemies, so that it was really a graveyard. A mass grave. And other stories that it wasn’t built by the State at all, but by the kingdom or whatever it was that the State had conquered hundreds of years ago. And others yet that it wasn’t a well even but something natural, something of nature itself. The well appeared and disappeared from history books. Often it was spoken of, and then suddenly it was not. It appeared on stamps and then those stamps were confiscated, along with the envelopes they were affixed to. A story made the rounds that those without limbs had had them forcibly removed to eradicate the symbols of the well that had been tattooed upon them. Then just as suddenly the well was heralded on all the State’s banners. The well became a natural resource and then, the next week, a toxic waste site. A documentary about the well’s early existence was shown on television and the following night the same documentary was re-advertised as a feature film masquerading as a documentary.

It’s safe to say that people of Evie’s generation were raised to have a schizophrenic relationship with the well, at once desiring and detesting it, acknowledging its existence and then disavowing it, and on and on. As darkness seeps into the pine forest Evie thinks about this, and then suddenly realizes that Farris is gone. Evie stops, calls out his name. It’s the first time she has spoken all day and the sound of her own voice startles her.

“Farris,” she calls out, and the name just hangs there in the air for a moment and then disappears, along with Farris himself.

Suddenly Evie feels stupid standing alone in the forest. So she keeps walking, alone, until it’s too dark to continue.

And then she makes her camp for the night.

*

As she sleeps in the dark, Evie cannot have known that the black sky has filled with silent drones so completely autonomous that even to their ground controllers their purpose is obscure, or that the forest ferns produce haploid spores that travel impossible distances, or that her lost sister Kate is sleeping also on some other patch of the earth, or that she has not yet even arrived at the deepest part of the forest, or that the animals that have followed her and Farris earlier are still nearby and that they aren’t animals at all but, like the drones, machines in the guise of animals, created by the State for the simple reason that they could be created and once created set loose to explore, as if the State, having already discovered and mapped itself, created these things to experience itself anew, not through the eyes of humans but machines, and not to collect information but to forget information so that it could be discovered again as if for the first time, or that one theory of the well — being debated at this very moment by functionaries of the State — was that the well existed only insofar as it receded from view, a perpetually vanishing vanishing point, and that Evie’s useless, carefully tended tools are already antiques aged beyond use and that she has been on this journey for a very, very long time, not days but months. Or years.

*

In the morning she continues, without Farris, passing through the thickest part of the forest and then out into an expanse of grasslands that give way to a village whose flags bear woven symbols that Evie has not seen before. Three men with wooden rifles spot her on the outskirts and follow her casually as she takes the road that skirts the town. They don’t threaten her. She imagines that, if she had wanted to, they would allow her to enter the village.

It’s not that she misses Farris — what is there to miss? — but rather that she misses the idea of Farris’s presence, as quiet and unobtrusive and even menacing as it was. As Evie leaves the village, the road straightens out and after a few miles takes her by another lime quarry, larger than the previous one, an impossibly sharp-angled cube subtracted from the earth, a pool of bright, glass-flat turquoise water at the bottom. She stands at the edge, peering in, and knows that the well is not far off, and that the stone from this quarry had been used to build it. Three very large birds circle silently in the sky above her, and she senses she’s being watched in a way she hasn’t felt before.

If it’s true that the drones have evolved somehow as self-sustaining machines detached from the State itself, then why did the State allow them to exist? What data could they possibly be gathering and transmitting, and to whom or what? Evie suddenly feels the urge to shoot one down, to watch it with the eyes of an insurgent spiral into the turquoise water far below. Better yet to have it fall at her feet so that she could, with her bare hands, determine once and for all what it was made of, where evolution had taken it. What would it feel like to grab hold of the neck of one of those things and squeeze until the lights or cameras or whatever its eyes were made of went out? Did it store the data it collected or just transmit it raw and unfiltered to the nearest antenna tower? Could it fly alone or did it need the others (they always appeared in flocks) to navigate?

That night, Evie sleeps near the edge of the quarry not hoping to sleepwalk over the edge into the pit but not hoping not to either as the night sky fills again with drones flocking and scattering in silence and shitting whatever it is that machines shit, the exhaust not of animals but of engines, engines of thought and malice now detached from their makers and flying amok in the sky above the land of the State upon which Evie sleeps, swooping down close to her in the night, dragging their birdlike feet across the top of the tall prairie grass, their machine thoughts unformed and digitally rigid but beginning to expand beyond the binary into something sentient in an animal sort of way.

Evie sleeps. The earth spins. The State expands and contracts in the night like a breathing creature. And the well arranges itself in anticipation of her arrival.

In the pale morning light, Evie has a beautiful thought, not a memory exactly, but a thought built on a memory, of Kate, showing her the chipped and scarred teak box where she kept her cigarettes lined up neatly like the dead wrapped tightly in white muslin, her fingertips nicotine-stained or else just faintly yellow in the sunlight, the thought beautiful not because it was beautiful but simply because it refused to turn itself into a narrative as so many of her thoughts did, and that was the power of Kate before she disappeared and, to her great surprise and happiness, even now after she was gone: her absolute refusal to become a part of anyone’s story. Kate had managed to detour almost any conversation into what Evie, in the months before Kate disappeared, would think of as a sort of metaphysical swampland, where first you agreed to this, and then to that, and then also conceded x, y, and z, and before you knew it you were laughing with her about the absurdity of, say, believing that the sun exists.

If this were one of those horror movies where the demon or spirit was always off screen then Kate would remain — as she is now — out of sight and off the page. Not that she’s demonic and not that Evie’s thoughts tend, of late, to be spectral, or that gathering herself to sleep less than one statute mile away from the well doesn’t make her miss Kate even more, because what would she say about this whole mess Evie was in other than to divert it to some other level, deeper or higher, what did it matter as long as it was diverted in the endless way that flocks of tree swallows move in assembling and disassembling pixels across the sky. Kate’s cigarettes, the closest she ever came to real rebellion, the way she shut her eyes when Evie lit one for her, leaning in close to her, some secret sisterly information shared between them of the sort that would take years to decode. The way she lit her cigarette off hers, Evie before she became Evie, and before the missed call that would result in Kate’s disappearance from the known places of this world.

A dead world. Of course they had both fantasized about it, though not in a post-apocalyptic way. Their thoughts, when they ran together as in the moment with the shared cigarettes on the roof of Kate’s flat, conjured a world devoid of the objects that gave rise to artifacts and then to meaning. How to think without thinking, and would a dead planet make such a thing possible? Back then the State had just deployed the first generation of drones-as-birds, and they hadn’t figured out how to land them in trees yet, and the whole thing was comical, really, to watch them try to perch on a branch only to end up tangled and dying there, depowered, until one of the freelance retrieval units came to bag them and return them at the depot. It was Kate who first spoke about how the drones might very well be the first step in the direction of lifelessness. The denaturing of nature, its living creatures replaced one by one by dead things, like Evie’s crablike ribcage and its preposterous sternum self-coding in symmetrical offshoots.

In the meantime of Evie’s memory Kate flicked her smoked-down cig off the roof and leaned back and sighed and Evie reached over (and this was years ago and miles of unstrung human thought away from where Evie was now, near the real well) and picked up her fallen blue barrette which she held in the palm of her hand for her like a live, trembling cricket, the smallness of its heart beating against her skin. She closed the cigarette box then opened it again and they commenced with the same cig-lighting ritual and she banished the thought that between the moments of the closing and opening of the box the cigarettes they had just smoked replaced themselves (as if through magic) and if Kate noticed this too she didn’t let on in the least but simply let Evie light hers off of her own precisely as she had minutes earlier and that’s when Kate asked her again, this time in a way she could understand, about a dead world, something along the lines of are we on a dead world with living things or a living world with dead things? and then laughed as if to withdraw her question before Evie could take it seriously, which was her way, Kate’s.

In a sense the question answered itself when a lone drone drifted across the sky, apparently having broken away from the flock and she lifted her hand to wave at the bird, which back then they built with enormous twenty-meter wing spans that modeled her own wobbling thought and unfastened gravity so as to rise and fall on the updrafted heat from the earth. The drone’s slow shadow dragged across the city streets below as real as the shadow of a bird not stuffed with wires, but actual bird-blood and wire-thin bones that, dried out, seem as fragile as straw of the sort that no cigarette box or bone box could preserve any more than anarchist thoughts disguised as blood-red oil-dripped paintings in some Soho art gallery could stay on walls in frames gazed upon by doomed children lost deeper and deeper in their longings and volcanic breaking of tens and twenties as the family that shouldn’t have turned off I-90 but stayed on the interstate built and abandoned and rebuilt by the State’s most prolific technicians. Evie feels the massively parallel signature sequencing that sparks between them, the 10 feet of DNA coiled into a microscopic nucleus, sister and sister not uterine or agnate but full, the ragged sentimentality of nostalgia for the future (because in the future all bonds are severed) tugging at her in an unforgiving, psychopathic way, as if the State and its fucking black drones could ever see into Kate’s heart or the synapse flashes that inspired her fragile hand to touch her heart or hold a cigarette to her lips or close her eyes to black out the stupid life-affirming symbols of her era that came now faster and faster in clichéd binaries of ones and zeroes strung out like the video-game junkies from her middle-school years, blinking their way awkwardly into the reality of the real world, this world, not some other double-screened once removed from the finger touch of riverbank mud or the suicide of a skyscraper diver, his thoughts splattered across sidewalks and plate glass storefront windows, and if Evie shuddered to think that Kate might take this sort of leap first, without her, understanding that the drones accumulated into the textures and fabrics of reality, the DNA coils that linked enemy States so that every war was really brother versus brother and sister versus sister well, then at least one of them had gone first into the void.

And in the pale morning light Evie (now back in the present) abandoned by Farris and walled-in by thoughts of wells and the family she would never raise or those gardens out back in the 7 o’clock sun she would never tend, guiding her son’s or daughter’s uncalloused hands into the to-be-seeded furrows and yet deeper-welled furrows of the mind to protect them from the soft-thought walkabouts of the State itself, schooled now in a sort of Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam self-understanding, Evie’s thoughts still fleeing back back back to Kate on the roof despite her best efforts to press forward, her cigarettes and the way the wooden matches that lit them kept striking and unstriking in her mind, her guillotine eyelids and the minimalist precision of her thoughts like notes or silence, the timed silence of 4’33’’ as if the Commonwealth of Nations number signs could legislate the counting-down-till-death beats of her heart, or how, when the immense drones glided too close overhead you could hear something whirring in them, you wondered whether they could hear the whirring inside you.

How Evie’s thoughts tend to collapse in on each other as she nears the well so that it amounts to an act of violent psychological excavation to bring them to the surface pure and clean and uninfected. And that very same Evie up on two legs making her way across a grasslands spotted with oak trees, the false well fading behind her and the landscape now dotted with lime quarries large and small and some unfinished as if the levied stone was not pure enough. Shaking out grains of sand from her hair from where she slept and them scattering and the sound of thunder as they fall to the ground. Thought, and the thought of thought, pulling itself apart at the seams. And reaching the well at last. A long line of limestone cubes set one after the other, hardly a well at all, cubes about as large as small automobiles. A mockery of a well, devoid of any sort of clear intention. Long dry grasses growing between and around the stones that encircle the supposed deepness of the well itself, the stones demarcating nothing from nothing, the natural world as banal on this side as on that. Hardly worth dividing. Evie collapsing and then recovering beneath the unevenness of her thoughts splitting into splinters and then rearranging into wholes, swirling into Kate, the complete and utter breakdown of object relations, the stones themselves separated and unattached, the well there on the other side deep and black and as endless as

The well.

Welling in or out a dead world.

And she, Evie, going to destroy it all.

When I arrive the next morning at the motel Laing’s not there. The room door is unlocked. There is a box fan that I don’t remember seeing before set up on the table going full speed. And reams of papers loosely stacked in a dozen or so piles on the bed, each one with a stone or asphalt chunk to keep them from being blown around. I’m relieved he’s not there. Beside the fan there’s a micro-recorder that I hadn’t noticed when I first came in. I switch off the fan, sit down, and press play:

“The film is heavily voiced over,” Laing’s voice says. “The narrator appears to be making a prolonged confession. A confession that is by turns sorrowful and defensive.

“Like Chris Marker’s La Jetée the film consists of optically printed photographs, as well as some motion footage. Often these are accompanied not just by the voiceover but by a sort of droning, ambient music, very spare and harsh and oddly beautiful. The film was sent to me in 1991 in a package marked GUTMAN. Inside, sandwiched crudely between two torn pieces of cardboard, each, in turn, marked with a black X, was the 16 mm sound film which I watched once and destroyed.”

What follows next seems impossible, but not really if you think upon all the impossible things that happen every day. It’s an audio recording Laing made of the film, with his periodic comments describing the images on the screen. Laing describes each image as it appears, and then simply records the audio, which is voiceover narration by a person we never see.

“The first image is an industrial landscape, in oversaturated color,” Laing’s voice says. “A sandstorm or something even more toxic looms on the far horizon. It’s a still image, although there’s the feeling of movement somehow, as if the image were quietly breathing.” This — like the rest of the images — is followed, presumably, by a simple audio recording of the film’s voiceover during the duration of this image. (For the sake of clarity, or some semblance of clarity, I’ll put the voiceover that Laing recorded directly from the film in italics, and I’ll put Laing’s description of each film segment that precedes each voiceover in quotation marks.)

It’s true that I worked for them during the second purge. It’s not my intention to excuse what I’ve done, though God knows my crimes, if crimes is even the proper word, are far less grievous than those committed by others, the ones now called patriots. As for those maimed by our activities, they will have to speak, if they are still capable of speaking, for themselves. I’m responsible for my actions, and my actions alone. I’ve been promised immunity. But from what? And by whom? I don’t even know who my captors are, only that they have instructed me to commit to writing a true and faithful account of my role in the second purge.

“The second still image is black and white. It appears to be the interior of a large room with a window that looks out onto the sandstorm.”

I suppose I should start with the Gutman case. Upon first glance, the file seemed typical, Gutman having taken certain actions which, in the eyes of the Messiah Detectives, deemed him suspect and unreliable. I was to follow him, trace his communications, and take all due and proper precautionary action should I deem him about to divulge information that would force the agency to reveal, in the process of recovering that information, its existence. For it was true that at this point the agency was still a shadow operation, whose power derived not from visible action but rather from, as they claimed in white paper after white paper, strategic abstinence.

Like I said, there was, upon first reading, nothing atypical about the Gutman file. As customary, it was delivered beneath my door during the night. As usual, stamped in blue ink with a time code indicating precisely when it should be opened. A little heftier than previous envelopes, perhaps, which only whetted my curiosity, even as I felt a noose tightening around my neck, invisible, its rope threading out through my window, down the street, into the sewers, and up again through the vents into the offices of the Messiah Detective Agency where, tied to a heavy iron handle emerging from the floor (much like I imagine an old train switch lever might look) it awaits the yank that will snap my neck.

But all this is speculation. About the rope, the noose. The facts are much less melodramatic. I opened the file at the time indicated by the time code, and began to read. As usual, I jotted down the major points on my notepad and mapped out, roughly, my plan of action. The file was sparsely written, in the minimalist corporate style fashionable during that time. I put the file back in the envelope, poured myself a drink, flipped through the sports pages of the local newspaper, and went to bed. It was only later, sometime deep into the night after being awoken by a sharp noise that seemed to come from within the apartment itself, that I realized what it was that bothered me about the file.

“The third image is a moving image. Color. An open field in the sunlight. A shadow — or the shadow-like figure of a person — emerges in the distance and gradually spreads over the field. Consuming.”

The second purge, unlike the first, was less joyous. The public hangings and beheadings were glorious the first time through, accompanied as they were by the high rhetoric and the music. They were spectacles that meant something, confirming a certain iron-fisted tendency of thought that had crept into the minds of even the most liberation-minded of our thinkers. And yet, clearly, the first purge had not done its duty. Five years of gagging violence had still not rooted out the primal attachment to wrong ideas. The second purge would need to purge the purgers, and that’s where it began. All the architects and heroes of the initial purge — Maria, Sergio, Tomás, Annabel, Toni, and the others — were of course disposed of first, their bruised faces the last image-memory any of us have of them. I remember (and even disclosing this is a risk, but I am already doomed) walking along the riverbank with Sergio several days before he disappeared, sharing a cigarette, when, in passing, he mentioned a name to me, which I at first thought (mistakenly) to be the title of a book: Gutman. I remember that the cherry trees were in bloom, so it must have been spring, even though we tightened our collars against a cold wind.

At this point in the tape and for a short while Laing voices the characters, a voiceover of the voiceover. It’s strange: you can still hear the original voiceover but it’s followed almost immediately, like time-delayed sound or an echo, of Laing repeating (mostly verbatim) the original voice. You can picture Laing watching the 16 mm film in the dark somewhere, holding the recorder close to his mouth, repeating the voiceover in some terribly intimate way, as if he were witnessing some secret ritual that put him in grave danger, for there is an undeniable weariness and even sadness to his voice, as if these were the last words he might ever speak. I’ve italicized Laing’s voiceover of the voiceover.

“‘Gutman, yes,’ I said to Sergio, ‘but it is you for whom I fear. What about you?’

“‘Oh, there’s no hope for me!’ he said brightly, as if saying it might protect him, putting his hand upon my shoulder as he always did to indicate that our conversation had reached a point beyond which it could go no further. I suppose that’s why we had remained friends for so long: we knew when to draw the line, and when not to cross the line, while others drew lines only to cross them.

“I was the one to cut down Sergio’s body, days later, hanging from a cord not much thicker than a shoelace, from a lamppost at the edge of the city park. His trousers were bunched down around his ankles, his hands tied behind his back with his own bandana. There were scuff marks on the rusted lamppost pole where his heels had kicked. Tomás and I carried his body to Maria’s apartment (that smelled of lemons) nearby, and then onto the hospital in the backseat of her car, the air conditioning on full force, him lying there like the flesh that he was.

“Image number four is black and white. It’s a freeze frame. A long, empty hallway in what appears to be a school or hospital. There are gas masks or something scattered on the tiled hallway floor, and a symbol on the wall that I can’t quite make out. Not spray painted like you’d expect but neatly drawn in sharp lines, as if cut into the wall with a razor.

“In the hospital lobby, which stank of formaldehyde and burnt rubber, two men dressed as orderlies grabbed Maria and quickly taped-over her mouth and dragged her away down a fluorescent hallway. Tomás and I fled through the smeared glass doors back out into the parking lot, but as we ran (past the very car that held Sergio’s body) they overtook Tomás, as well, and would have taken me but for his fighting, which delayed them until I disappeared into the darkness, the night offering its own strange sort of bindings, the harsh hospital lights receding in the distance, the cool blank fields smelling of night dirt.

“The next night Toni didn’t answer his phone at first, and then later he did, except it wasn’t him, and I wondered if it’s true like the rumors suggested that a call can be traced so quickly through the heavy wire lines.

“Which is to come back to what gave me pause about the Gutman file: it was, as I noted right away, a little heftier than the others, something I first attributed to the stock of the paper, which felt slightly heavier in my hands.

“In other words, a forgery.

“Image five switches to color. It’s a slow forward-tracking shot down the same hallway from image four, intercut with brief flashes of another location, what appears to be a stadium at night, under bright lights, in the rain.

“As the principal architect of the second purge, Gutman was a despised (if largely unseen except for the fact of his name) man, widely known to be the author of the so-called ‘Gutter Articles,’ slang for not only where the executions took place, but how. Despite the blood that flowed and splashed in the streets as a result of these orders, Gutman, it was suggested, was really more of an idea man than a man of action. He was not associated with the original junta, but was recruited later from university, where prior to the purges his published critiques of how power is rooted primarily in language and subtle but persistent linguistic ‘codes’ earned him wide acclaim among the very intelligentsia his policies would eventually exterminate.

“‘What does it mean for one to be a prophet of his own fate?’ Gutman had asked in one of his rare post-Gutter public appearances, as if seeking the answer for himself. ‘With modernity, we enter the age of the production of ourselves as the Other, do we not? All the endless commentaries about the rights of the Self are thus mere folly.’ This brief clip (he seemed to be speaking at a soccer stadium at night, harshly lit, his glasses speckled with rain, the sound of explosions or thunder cracking through his words) circulated briefly, and then disappeared, and returned as an extended version that was so over-copied and degraded that Gutman’s face (if it even was Gutman at this point) appeared as a cubist, pixilated thing. And then, enigmatically: ‘As for hate speech, all speech is hate speech,’ or something like that, as an explosion so powerful it rocked the camera and interrupted his last few words before the screen went static and then black.

“And so yes: it’s true that beginning sometime during the second purge there was no ‘good’ side anymore, nor ‘bad’ side. All sides were equally bad, with the difference being that the more powerful side exacted a more crippling, terrible form of badness upon the less powerful. As I’ve said, at that point the Messiah Detectives were just becoming what came to be known as the Messiah Detectives; two words that did not yet carry the weight or burden of history. They had no context. It was just another shadowy name, mistaken by the resistance as opposed to the junta and mistaken by the junta as opposed to the resistance.

“In truth, my fate was sealed as soon as I opened the envelope, and saw his name. Whether or not the papers were forged was, I came to realize in the following weeks, immaterial.

“The sixth image is black and white and appears to be the same room from the second image. There’s a feeling that we’ve entered this room from the long hallway. The same image that had been carved on the hallway wall is in the room in the form of metal pipes laid out roughly on the floor in the shape of the symbol.

“The envelope contained an invitation to a small private party where Gutman would be in attendance. Taped to the card was a simple silver ring that I was to wear on my right hand, with instructions to present the invitation card to the doorman with my ringed hand, making sure that my left hand remained gloved and to my side. The ring, apparently, would allow my entry without being searched. I was to seek out Gutman quickly, shoot him dead, allow myself to be swarmed and captured, confess that I, acting as the long arm of the Messiah Detectives, had murdered Gutman for no other reason than to demonstrate that it could be done, and await my rescue by another person, whom the instructions referred to as an ‘inside’ man.

“The plan went… according to plan, as they say. I was ushered into an elegant home, down a long narrow hallway that spilled open to a large ballroom lit by chandeliers that cast everything in a gold hue. On the walls hung enormous red paintings that looked to have been made out of splashed blood. Women in dresses and men in tuxedos drank champagne and marveled at what appeared to be a mummy in a glass box near the middle of the room. One entire wall, floor to ceiling, appeared to be an aquarium, but it turned out to contain no fish but rather a wooden chair with leather straps placed on a short ledge near the top of the tank, just above the water line.

“In the glass, I saw a reflection of Gutman behind me, wearing a red vest as I had been told he would. He too was looking at the tank, at the chair. Without hesitation — before he could speak to me — I took out my gun, turned to him, and shot him twice in the neck. He stepped back, fixed his fox eyes on me, both hands at his own throat, and collapsed in a sputter and gurgle of blood and bone. Within seconds the pistol had been knocked from my hand, skittering like a spin-the-bottle across the wood floor and coming to rest beneath a chair. I was seized by two men, then three, one of whom (wearing black gloves that smelled strongly of chemicals) pulled out a handful of my hair. Another put his palm on my face and pushed my head back with violence. They wrestled me to a small panelled door that I hadn’t noticed before, punched me through it, and then really began to lay into me until I was on my back on the floor. One of them took me by the ankles and dragged me further down the hall and through another doorway into a small room lit by candles.

“‘The chair,’ the one with the gloves said to another.

“‘The chair,’ the other replied.

“Image number seven is a color freeze frame of a packed stadium at night in the rain, and what at first appears to be spectators up on the enormous light poles turns out to be workers of some sort, perhaps repositioning the angle of the lights so they shine more brightly on Gutman.

“My accounting of the Gutman imbroglio now catches up to the present time. I remain in the room with candles, writing this on my knees, the open notebook before me on the floor. For some reason, I feel that I should use my remaining words not to speculate about the meaning of the chair, or my fate in it above the blue aquarium, if that is indeed what awaits me, but rather on Gutman himself, whose life I took. My mind goes back to that degraded video tape of Gutman speaking at the stadium laying out in modernist abstractions his structuralist vision for the total control of our society, and the hints that he gave regarding the coming ‘third purge’ which would be so annihilating that it would usher in a new Enlightenment.

“I struggle to recall the frames in question from that short video and what I remember most — as Gutman spoke with surprising force in the heavy rain — was the bright lights, lights that reminded me of a soccer stadium at night. But even at the time of the original broadcast I felt there was something about those lights, something terribly familiar. Now, in the clarity of forced isolation, I understand that the lights had been added in later, post-filming, and that Gutman had delivered his speech in the rain in complete and utter darkness, as if the absence of light itself prefigured the barren hopelessness of our land. I imagined the rain coming down so heavily as to choke Gutman’s words in his throat, and that his colleagues at the university whom he had betrayed, whose carpeted living rooms he had sat in before it all went bad, trading flirting jokes with the flirting daughters who, were they fortunate, had not been raped before being flayed and murdered in the abandoned gymnasium, and how even then, before the purges, he understood this about himself: that he was the sort of man to betray those closest to him for the chance to be a part of history.

“Image number eight, a moving image. Full color. The interior of the room from earlier. It appears that the sandstorm has entered the room itself. The window is blown open. The curtain blows wildly. Bits of paper and sand swirl and there’s a feeling of vertigo, as if the whole thing had been shot in a room that was falling from a very great height.

“If Gutman had indeed given his speech in the dark (the bright lights added later, perhaps to give the moment the thrust and force of an epochal ‘event’) then how had his face been illuminated, post-production? It seems to me now, as I realize that the Messiah Detectives have betrayed me and that there will be no inside man to rescue me, that somehow everything hinges on this question. For if those who made the videotape were truly able to manufacture light — enough wattage to illuminate the black-hole darkness of Gutman — then what else might they be capable of making, both of this world and not-of this world?

“The ninth image is black and white. A person’s hands bound together with rough rope at the wrists. It appears to be a freeze frame until we see an ant crawling across one of the hands.

“Hours have passed. One of the men who dragged me here — the one who pulled my hair — enters the room and sits in the empty chair across the table. His left eye droops. His hands are large. He seems all undercurrent, and no current. There’s a pull of gravity around him and I’m sure that were he to remain seated for hours eventually the objects in the room would all end up closer to him.

“Perhaps he is, after all, a fellow Messiah Detective, the so-called inside man. He seems to be waiting for me to speak first, but what to say? These thoughts only last a moment, and are quickly replaced with more disturbing ones.

“For I come to suspect — and then at last to understand with certainty — that the man across from me is, in fact, the one whom I was sent to kill. Writing this, as I am, in his very presence, I can hardly bring myself to print his name. There he sits, his hands now clasped together resting on the table as if to signal that he is about to make or has already made a decision.

“Gutman.”

EPILOGUE

The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing

“According to the deed let the measure of doom be fixed in proportion.”

— Old English saying

OUR LAST MEETING. DAYBREAK.

But before that, I must tell you this. That on my way to my own motel room the previous night I stopped at the tavern because I wanted to see the waitress, who happened to be standing next to the very table where she had served me a few days earlier, except this time she was not wearing her waitress outfit but a blue skirt and a jean jacket and I wasn’t even sure it was her until she turned around, her hand over her mouth laughing at some joke or story one of her friends had told — friends who were standing around the table with her — and looked at me. So she was the waitress, yes (the one who invoked the waitress in the Destroyer film) but also a woman whose name was Anna, Anna who took my hand when she saw me this time and led me through the tavern (where men smoked cigars and toyed absently or with secret intent with large rings on their fingers) back into a small dark room where several tables had been elaborately prepared with tablecloths and candles and fine china and silver for guests who were yet to arrive. I think she was drunk. Or else just very happy.

“This is where I work,” she said. “This is who I serve.”

But the small room (a room that I recall now as having stone walls and in whose doorway hung a large, heavy sheet of white fabric rather than a traditional door) was empty except for us. She leaned into me and then pushed away and then leaned in again and I wondered if she wanted me to kiss her or if in kissing her any hint of sense or meaning about what was happening would be ruined. Then she said something like, It’s the children who are missing and yet all we can think about is the suffering of those who have lost them, but she said this in a sort of giddy, smiling way, as if she was simply pretending to be drunk and happy so that her words to me in that room would not arouse suspicion and yet I wasn’t here for the missing children but for Laing. When her friends found us in the room (there you are!) and swept her away and back out into the main part of the tavern where I had first seen her I was relieved.

The next day — at daybreak — I met Laing for the last time. I think I brought him the bottle of nice bourbon not so much out of gratitude for telling me about the films he had burned, but rather out of guilt that I knew I wasn’t going to reveal to him anything about the waitress at the tavern even though he had some connection to her — however tenuous and slight and perhaps imaginary — through the character in Destroyer. I understood I had betrayed him, somehow, as unreasonable as that sounds. And yet I was compelled not to mention it because of a strange feeling, a spooky knowledge that in mentioning the waitress and what she said about the children to Laing, I would also be revealing to him the story of my daughter’s immeasurable suffering and death. It makes no sense to say I didn’t trust him with this knowledge about my past, I know. And yet there it is. Something about Laing had sparked a feeling of unease in me, and I felt the need to be protective of my own past, of Emily, as if that was something that he could somehow damage or take away.

Laing has assembled all the familiar, interchangeable objects on the motel room table: the cigarettes, the scarf (neatly folded), the bottle of bourbon, the red cone-like object. The sun is rising with an intensity that reminds you it is a star so large that a million earths could fit inside it. We leave the door open.

“Now let me tell you,” he says, “what happened, or what’s going to happen. It’s a version of what’s going to happen to you too,” he says, “and that’s why, right now, I need to ask for forgiveness, and as dramatic and silly as that sounds, your forgiveness, your absolution, if absolution is even something that can be granted. It’s not simply that in destroying those films I destroyed art for the terrible, beautiful truths it revealed, and to spare others from ever having to look, but rather that I understand that you came all the way to Wisconsin not just to interview me, but to put some final order to what has happened to you, the sort of order you think can be found by paying such intense, painstaking attention to the details of films that speak the same language you do. But it’s more than that, and I can say this to you (you who are too afraid to use your own name in the narrative you are going to create about your interviews with me, so that even now I must refer to you as you rather than by your name), I can say that what it is you have lost — whatever it is — shall not be restored. If I know anything I know that. Like I said, I already know what’s going to happen to me, and some version of that involves you, as well, and if I told you I dreamed it, last night, you must understand that it wasn’t at all dream-like. In fact, it was all too real and for some reason I feel as if I ought to tell you what happens, or what’s going to happen, although in some ways I suppose it’s happened already and you just don’t know it. The beginning of a film already knows its ending, doesn’t it? Do the characters in the first frames understand that it’s already happened, whether they end up in love or trapped burning to death in a car, it doesn’t matter if they glean this or not because those final frames are already printed? The dream I had plays out as if the script was written by Dalton Trumbo in ’48 or ’49, just before he began serving his prison time for contempt of Congress. Blacklisted. One of the Hollywood Ten condemned in the so-called ‘Waldorf Statement’ of 1947 by the studio heads, a statement that included the line ‘we will invite the Hollywood talent guilds to work with us to eliminate any subversives.’ And the dream might as well have been directed by William Wyler over a three-week period during post production on his film Detective Story as an excuse to experiment with a new film stock deliberately manufactured for a brief time without the anti-halation backing that prevents a halo-ing effect that would otherwise occur around bright spots in the film. So there’s a strange, eerie beauty to it, but it’s the sort of beauty that ruins it, too, and so it’s not surprising that Wyler would only have one work print made, perfectionist that he was. That’s what I saw in my dream — the work print — given to me by someone who claimed to be Wyler’s great niece, though she was far too young for that to have been true. So this is what will happen, based on the film I dreamed about last night. And of course when I say ‘I’ I also mean ‘you,’ you who have chosen to come to this motel to ‘interview’ me about films, though by now it’s clear, isn’t it, that that’s not really the reason — or at least not the only reason — you’re here? Is it possible for a film (a film in a dream) to be future tense? I can’t talk about the film-dream in the past tense (even though I dreamed it last night) because what was depicted has not yet happened. So, in the future, they’re going to tell me that the big metal box in the other room is the recording machine. It sits empty, with no one to enter it and run it. Its smooth metal casing is blood-smeared, and its thin sheet metal door is bent off its hinges, hanging cockeyed as if frozen in time. The room that it sits in at the university is bombed out, its charred walls that once held the framed title pages of the first stories as black as night. Looters, they’ll say, have long ago stripped bare the bookshelves. There’s been a campus shooting. The first of many shootings, each one out-doing the last, a blood ritual. The university will become toxic, untouchable not because the violence there is unique but just the opposite: it’s a reminder of who we are, of what we’ve become.

“The Towers will fall, and then this.

“They’ll also say that I was wounded in one of the attacks, and that I forgot who I was, and that I was with them now (or in the future, or in your future) hiding out here in this building (the building in the film-dream), surviving, regrouping, waiting for our chance to move deeper into the city to meet up with the others. What others? We don’t know if they are friend or foe.

“Then I’ll discover that none of them remembers, either. No one knows where they are from, or how long they’ve been here, or who their family is. We are in the building because, so far, it has been safe. They’ll say they are letting me record these things because they want some history, some record, no matter how good or bad. That’s the kind of people they are. They also say that so much is gone now, and that we have to start again, and that since I can’t remember anything (but I can) I’m the best one to keep track of what we are doing and what we are going to see, no matter how terrible. Why do they think it’s going to be terrible?

“I’ll remember how to talk, and how to do the things I need to do to survive. I’ll be able to move across the screen as easy as the rest of them. The attack — or whatever it was — will not have made me stupid or incapable or unreliable. And I am not totally clueless about who I am, or who I was. My wallet has my driver’s license, and it shows my face, and my name, and what we eventually figured out was my address. We match the symbols on the driver’s card to the street signs not far from here and I’ll return to where I supposedly used to live, at the place called 933 Woodward Avenue. They’ll take me there, in the back of the falling-apart pickup truck, speeding through the city as glimpses of people hidden away in half-destroyed buildings take rifle shots at us. I curl up under the damp tarp and cover my head and try to stay in the corner as we tear down the highway. It will be hard to know if this is documentary footage or re-enacted documentary footage or if it’s just the way things will be, mimesis wise.

“The house is (will be; everything “will be”) a white bungalow with carefully kept gardens that had been smashed and there’s a big wide porch covered with debris. All the windows are broken. The front door is gone. Inside, everything’s carefully destroyed, even the carpet looks as if it’s been clawed at by some horrible thing, but upstairs in the bedroom I find some pictures in a dresser drawer of a man who looks like me and a woman who must have been my wife (of course she was) and a boy who must have been my son. We are holding fishing poles in the sun with a blue lake behind us. I take the picture and put it in my wallet and when we get back to the old university I show it to Katy, the leader or director, who asks me if I remember anything about it.

“‘Nothing,’ I’ll say, which is mostly true. Whenever I talk to her, I’ll lie a little bit. Maybe it’s just self-defense.

“I’m in, or will be in, Katy’s office (so will you) the one with the nice view of what’s left of the campus: the crumbled bell tower, the buildings without glass in the windows, the scorched trees. She is someone who I imagine has turned beautiful because of the conflict. She is gaunt but strong, and looks ravaged in a seductive way. I’ll try to picture what she was like before: she was going to get married; she lived on a farm; she believed in God. I have no idea how old she is. Outside, we hear the distant rhythm of helicopter, and some faraway gunfire, like firecrackers might sound on a TV from a different room.

“‘Are you recording all this?’ she’ll say.

“I show her my small recording machine. ‘As much as I can.’

“‘Do you add details later?’

“‘I don’t have enough tapes. Or batteries.’

“‘That’s why you need the bigger machine.’

“But the so-called machine does not work, if it ever did, and without it everything is falling apart. I tried to tell her this once, Katy. I tried to tell her that there’s no evidence that the machine ever worked at all, or that it was even a machine for recording stories. But she is right about one thing, without a record of what happened, it’s hard to know what to do. Among ourselves, at night, in our sleeping bags, we’ll speculate about the war, and the documentary about the war, and if that’s even the right word for it, and about how long it’s been going on, and how many people have died, and whether it involves the entire world or not. There’s really no way to know. Nothing works. We’ll do everything by hand.

“‘Play me something from last week,’ Katy will say. She takes (will take) two cigarettes from a desk drawer and then hesitate a moment and then put one away. Maybe she thinks I don’t smoke. She puts her feet up on the desk — she is wearing black army boots and green fatigues. Where her pant leg is pulled up a little I’ll see a tattoo of a cartoon face on the white flesh of her calf. I play her some sound from the last time, when we decided to use the catapult against a helicopter that came too close. John Barth and I carried it up to the roof, navigating the narrow metal staircases, and placed it between the gray ventilation ducts. We secured it with the harness, and John aimed it while I targeted it on the copter. After three misses we finally hit.

“‘That part’s important. Put more there,’ she’ll say.

“‘What part?’

“‘About how to use it. The weapon. In case we forget and someone else has to.’

“As absurd as it is — for who is ever going to want to hear about this or any other incident with the helicopter? — I’ll tell her I will and then keep playing the part about the violent kick of the catapult, and how it shook the roof, and how the third cinder block leapt out of the throwing tin, and how after the block crashed through the pilot’s window the helicopter just slowed down and spiraled around slowly and fell. It had happened so many times before that we didn’t even run to the edge and look over it like we did the first dozen times we shot something out of the sky. Jesus, how many helicopters could there be? We had brought down at least 40 or 50. Then one night John said to me — he was smoking like he always did at night—the reason there are so many is because it’s the same one.

“I’ll feel the screen contracting and expanding, like a breathing lung. I’ll shift from me to a character playing me to a character who’s playing someone who’s playing me and then back to me again.

“I’ll ask John B. what he means, though I had thought it myself before. That’s why the helicopter always looked the same, and why it returned to the same spot and hung there like an emblem and waited to be taken again and again out of the sky.

“‘Have you ever noticed how it always comes at the same time of day, from the same direction, and how we always hit it on the third try? I’m just asking.’

“‘I guess you’re right,’ I’ll say, pretending that I had never thought of this before. We don’t know where the helicopters are from, or if they are friendly or not, but when they come too close we shoot them down just to be safe. These are real weapons. They kick back hard when you fire to remind you of what you’re fucking with.

“Some of us believe that the real fighting has been over for a long time, and that this is just what’s left. None of us has actually seen, as far as I can tell, anything organized enough to be called a war, or a documentary about a war, and we have never been attacked in a serious way. So that’s not war, is it? We think there must have been a war, or at least some kind of terrible fighting, and that we are what’s left, and that there are probably other people like us scattered around the land. But we’ve never been instructed to actually go out and kill, or pretend to kill, anyone.

“If we could escape the city maybe we could find out. But every time we try to get out we are shot with bullets or blanks, either by those trying to keep us in or trying to keep us out. We don’t know.

“Katy will get up, flick her burned-down cigarette out the window, and tell me it sounds too much like a journal or a memoir, too much like the private experiences of an uninterested and maybe coerced observer. She’ll ask me don’t I want to be a writer? Don’t I want to be a sound man? She tells me to put more detail in, more about the weather, the smells, the bug bites, the bats, the black smoke that rises continually on the horizon like some forever burning underground oil field, more about the secret romances, the way this building seems haunted, the bodies we found buried beneath the floor of the boiler room, Stu’s suicide last month. She has more suggestions, but all I can notice are the silver rings on her fingers, the shape of her hips beneath her fatigues. She is someone I could hold, on screen or off.

“And then Stu’s last words will come back to me, what he said the day before he hung himself. ‘The only way to get out of here is to kill someone.’ And what he said was just the boldest, bravest statement of what we were all thinking, because maybe we all had this one shared memory, this one fact. But the secret beneath that truth involved a sacrifice that no one was brave enough to try yet. And yet this one question was slowly forming in all our minds: by killing another, could you escape unmolested out of the city? But why did we think this? Was it part of the documentary, if that’s what this is? A sort of twist that’s so unreasonable that it actually makes sense. At night I’ll lie in my bunk and work out the formula, which in the dark is perfectly logical. In exchange for escape, you need to kill someone. How or why this is so doesn’t matter to me; it’s just a brute fact that rises up in my head and won’t go away.

“When Stu hung himself we all knew why. It was because he was so good. Too good. It was because Stu, he would rather kill himself than someone else. He’s listed special in the credits for this fact alone. Your name will be there too, but for a different reason,” Laing says, looking at me there in that Wisconsin motel room with the sort of intensity that destroys the distinction between love and hate. “And your daughter’s name. And the names of the missing children.

“The truth is, my memory is better than anyone knows. It seemed the right thing to do, to lie about it, when they first brought me here. After all, I didn’t know them, and how could I believe what they told me? During the interrogation, as they poked me gently through the cage with sticks (method acting crossing over into something else) I knew they wouldn’t kill me, and I could have told them the truth: that I remembered. Not enough to mean anything, but enough to be sure that there was something before this place. Just images and sounds: A girl’s hand in mine. A lightning storm in the summer. The phone ringing in the middle of the night. Human ashes. Men and women falling from the Towers. The house with the old woman down the dusty road near where I grew up. A friendly dog that suddenly turned on me and seized my ankle at a picnic. The flapping of a kite stuck in a tree at that same picnic, a scene from a movie bathed in blue light with a Well-Dressed Man. I remembered these things, and others, but I haven’t told anyone about them. I keep two sets of tapes, one that I play for Katy to prove to her that I am keeping details so that we can have a collective memory, and one that I keep hidden that describes what I really do remember.

“And then the day will come, the last day that things will hold together. It’s our turn to patrol today, and John comes in, ready to go.

“‘Your turn to carry this,’ he’ll say, tossing me the duffel bag with yellow flags. The tops of his hands and arms will be shiny and hairless, scarred from some burning that he can’t remember.

“‘How do you know you were burned, John? Maybe they were always like that.’

“‘These scars,’ he’ll say, pointing to his shiny skin, ‘are from fire. You’re not born like that.’

“This is pure reality now. Our lines are written as we speak them.

“I’ll open the bag and count the flags. We’ll take the east stairs down, past the endless undecipherable graffiti in its faded yellow and blue and brown foreignness, and step out into the warm sunlight. To our right is the library, and beyond that the iron gate that leads out and into the city.

“We are going to see if the flags that we placed last week are still there. They usually aren’t. Usually, they have been replaced with red ones, and because of this, and also because the helicopters that come sometimes drop red leaflets with foreign words printed on them, we have come to associate red with dangerous strangers. We will find a spot about a mile away from campus — as far as it is known to be safe to go — and put the flags, stick first, into the ground of some vacant lot or grassy area or yard of an abandoned house. We will come back one week later to see if they have been taken or rearranged. We call this peace talks. We call this negotiation.

“In fact, we are going there now, to the house they said was mine, to the backyard beneath the giant maple tree with the rope swing where last week we planted ten yellow flags in a straight line in the weedy yard that stretches in a narrow swath between the back of the house and the garage with its sagging roof.

“There are no indications of other creatures — human or otherwise — as we make our way down the crumbling highway, in parts overgrown with weeds and dry grass. The enormous street lights could be but can’t be movie lights. We’ll carry our guns in our hands, cocked, because we are supposed to, because last year Valerie and her partner Leonard went out on one such patrol and didn’t come back and were found, their faces smashed-in with rocks.

“We’ll follow the highway and walk up the sloping exit ramp whose green sign we cannot read. There will be, in fact, nothing we can read. Not the signs. Not the newspapers in the grocery stores. Not the labels on food. Not the books in the library. We feel that we ought to be able to read these things, that they are, or were, part of our world, that because we can talk with each other in a language that we all know, we should be able to decipher the written symbols around us. But none of us can. They are just hash marks, severe lines in black against white, a secret code of a lost civilization.

“John is one of those who believes it is our own language that we have forgotten, that along with forgetting about our past we have also forgotten how to read.

“‘But we can still talk, John,’ I’ll say, the sun beating down on us like some big-budget movie production lamp. ‘We haven’t forgotten how to talk.’

“‘That’s because we learned that first. It was more deeply embedded in who we are. Like our basic personalities. These aren’t things you forget.’

“The rest of us, on the other hand, think that it’s the world that changed, not us. That the language around us doesn’t mean anything because it never did — it’s not our language — and that if we saw our language, we would recognize it. We’ve tried to write, but it’s just scribble; we know how to make the sounds with our mouths, but not with our hands. It should be easy to do. It should be easy to take what we say and put it on paper, but we don’t know how.

“‘Is this the place?’ John will say. We’ll be in front of the house spray painted with an enormous snake that’s eating its tail. The chimney has been pulled down, like all the other chimneys on all the other houses, but this time they have left the rope amidst the bricks, like a collapsed lasso. It’s rare to find the ropes, and John coils it up and puts it in his bag.

“The spray paint on the bricks, it looks wet, and when I touch it the tips of my fingers turn red. I’ll hold my hand up to John to warn him and we quickly turn to leave. But it is too late. Touching the red paint was the wrong thing to do, and the very first shot goes through John’s neck and he leaps in the air and falls to the ground, twisted on his back like an S. So much blood is already out of him, pooling at my feet like someone else’s victory. I’ll run for the street and keep waiting for the shot. Impossibly, I worry about hurting my face or breaking my nose when I fall. I worry about not being able to stop myself from falling down the wrong way, and scuffing my elbows or breaking my wrist. But there is no shot, and after only a few minutes I am exhausted but keep running at the ramp that takes me back onto the highway.

“I’ll ditch my gun and my duffel bag. I’ll throw off my jacket. Every channel in my head is opening up full, screaming. I am running for only one thing now. For Katy. I want to touch her tattoo. I want to make her not sad. I want to make the tapes better, and so full of mystery that she will smile at me, and offer me one of her cigarettes, and the orange sun will finally creak through, and there will be the green of trees, of willows even, and the touch of her fingers to mine as she cups the match between us…” and here Laing ends as everything must end and of the missing children they have not been found as far as I know, even all these years after my interlude with Laing in Wisconsin. Of that last meeting I can say that there was a tension in the air and for the first time I felt the old fear return, the sort of fear that passes away with childhood, creeping up my spine and looking back on it now I attribute it to Laing. My version of what happened at our last meeting — and I say happened because something did happen and I say version because everything is a version of itself — is that Laing thought he had let me in on a secret and that just before I was to depart he feared I might not keep it and so thought about threatening or hurting me, or worse. In other words the fear I felt was based on the real possibility that Laing might do to me what he had done to the films and as I’m writing this I recall a detail that seemed so obvious, so utterly obvious, that I hadn’t even considered it: the collapsed metal barrel in the scrubby field adjacent to the motel. I’m ashamed of the wild ideas that fill my head. The barrel (that smelled of rust), the destroyed films, the missing children, that’s all speculation, so remote from the banality of Laing, so fantastical. No, it’s not the barrel that haunts me, or what might have been burned in it, or the HAVE YOU SEEN ME? flyer I found in Laing’s room. Not even the death of Emily. What haunts me is that I was successful. One cannot absolve oneself, of course. It takes another. Absolution — the absolution of moral sins — must be granted by another and I remember driving away from that place and having the strange feeling that it was all a set and that it was being torn down or deconstructed the moment I left, the workers coming out with their sweaty faces from their hiding places, the hidden mics removed from the back of the throne chair and Laing himself undergoing a procedure right there on the motel room bed to extricate his face from the mask which had been sewn across it and screaming for something far stronger than bourbon and yet… of course I knew that nothing of the sort was happening. Laing and I had entered each other’s lives for three brief days, and yet during that time something — someone — had been resurrected, I was sure of it and I floored it, I can tell you, I put the pedal to the metal in that crappy van while the magic still held and tear-assed it back to Pennsylvania knowing beyond reason that those three days in hell (spent with a spirit in prison, as if Laing could be called anything but that) had opened up something new and brief and astonishing and that Emily would be sitting there in the sunlight at the kitchen table waiting for me with a sly smile as if to say: Father, you are in it now, you are really in it now.

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If you would like to receive, in the mail, a short, typed, personal note from the archives of Roberto Acestes Laing, as well as a strip of 16 mm film frames from his obscure cinema collection, simply scissor out the form below and mail it directly to:

Nicholas Rombes

5589 Villa France Avenue

Ann Arbor, MI 48103

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement to the editors of The Rumpus, Necessary Fiction, and Fiddleblack, for publishing excerpts, often in much different form than they appear here.

The writing of this novel was greatly assisted by support from the University of Detroit Mercy.

Thank you to Andrea Monheim, Lisa Rombes-Smith, Julia Kristeva, Denise Stull, Wendy and Steve Kern, Eric Obenauf, Eliza Jane Wood-Obenauf, Robert Pollard, Sandy Williams, Carlos Wieder, and Andrzej Żuławski.

For Niko and Maddy.

For Lisa.

Content

Nicholas Rombes
The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

EPILOGUE

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS