In the first scene of Vanishing Point, the white Dodge Challenger—Challenger could easily be the character’s first name; come to think of it, the father’s—hurtles down the highway at top speed, such that man and car simultaneously embody Renaissance and Futurist ideals. The final scene repeats this to the death. The consciousness of an evaporating country.
The final collision could also be interpreted as the purest, simplest form of propaganda. During the years prior to the film’s premiere, numerous complaints were filed regarding faulty car-manufacturing at the Ford and General Motors plants in Detroit, including the most popular and exclusive models. Sales dropped by 93%. The fact that an expert driver like Kowalski crashes of his own volition into earthly bulldozers shifts blame from the industry, engulfed by confrontations with unions and popular movements, to the client—creating, in the process, the fantasy of heroism that outlives anyone who dies at the wheel.
I’d check the crash reports if I were you. When this-guy tells the whole story to the neighbor, who is buying a cup of coffee at the deli on the corner of their block, she tells him that the screenplay was written by Guillermo Cabrera Infante. There can’t be too many cars like that one. Can there? This-guy, who doesn’t know exactly who she’s talking about, mumbles something about the screenplay. The neighbor, not taking this-guy—strapped, fetishistic, calculating—very seriously, smiling slightly in her third-floor apartment, the attic of a house with a mattress on the floor, hands him a copy of Tres Tristes Tigres and tells him that the screenplay is archived at a nearby university.
And what you write is suddenly real. The ink-stain-on-the-face-neighbor closes her fingerless gloves around another steaming cup of coffee and glances up, sheathed in a black wool hat, at the thirty-fourth floor of the building on Mercer Street. The thing is that writing can never be automatic enough, because the writer always has to come back, pick up the pen, get hold of a body to print things onto the surface. She looks at him steadily. So I can’t have been the one who said that in your dream. Pero qué sucede if you don’t have a body when you come back, she says to this-guy who was a family man in last night’s dream.
The full-bag-of-books-neighbor is standing on Mercer St. before her writing day at the library. Ana Mendieta left her country in a fish tank. She was put there when she was twelve years old. From the other side, she saw her father, the one who kept the guns, the one who went to jail, saying goodbye to her. She kissed the Miami ground when she got off the plane, as she’d seen a pope do before 1959. She turned from a messiah into a child in a refugee camp, a house in Iowa, an orphanage. From family to family, her strong Cuban accent was perceived as a mark of inferiority. She used her body as a transformative entity. So, too, the language she shared with her mother and her mama. Her body left landmarks in galleries, in pits she dug in fields, in museums in Britain, Rome, Berlin. On city streets, in the voices of New York, in photographs, in tracts of land outside Havana, was a silhouette of Ana Mendieta’s body. A silhouette was left when she fell from the thirty-fourth floor, naked, as in her performances. ¿Un cuerpo que escribe su futuro? There’s always an unlaid stone in the ground.
The back-pain-neighbor sneezes and covers the viscous liquid that her nose expels. She stays in position, tissue at her face, as if counting the seconds it took Mendieta to hit the ground. Lo que debe haber sido. This-guy knows she’s murmuring in her most intimate language, the one she speaks deepest inside herself. It sounds to this-guy like a lament for who knows what. Walking, taking little sips from her coffee, the neighbor tells him that she’s looking for work. This-guy—he of the raised eyebrow—doesn’t understand what this has to do with the Cuban artist’s suicide. What happens in the model city isn’t a real job, right, Dad? Sometimes people who catch sight of him on the street think he does something feminine, like keep a diary. When they part ways, he sees it’s snowing and realizes he never asked her where the jobs she’s looking for are located.
The street is lit by burgeonings of snow. It falls from the trees. It falls from the rooftops. It falls, like this-guy’s gaze on the third floor. The notebook-neighbor now has a suitcase she takes out for a walk several times that month. He doesn’t see her for days. The frigid mattress, the solitary nights—they intersect with the stripped tree branches tossed by wind like a falling, falling angel. At night, looking out the window from the corner of his eye, his drowsy eye, this-guy—mute, blank—confuses the snow with people walking down the middle of the road. Bodies are unrecognizable under coats, parkas, hats, boots, gloves, balaclavas. The snow illuminates the street, casting shadows where there used to be none. They file along after the last big snowfall as if on a movie set, orderly, one a night, while this-guy shovels snow around three in the morning without a single light on. One night he sees a big man with a child in his arms. They’re wearing the same garments, like they’re the same person on different planes. The next night he sees two people walking side by side, a man and a woman. Every so often the woman slips, moving awkwardly in a way he recognizes at once. Roberta. Holding the hand of another man whose face he doesn’t see. He doesn’t stop, just tells her it’s unwise to walk across the layer of snow that sifts between them. When he wakes, he sees that the storm has passed and the snow has heaped up on cars, in the streets. The night allows him to make out a single silhouette, a slight body dragging along a suitcase. He of the shovel-in-hand hurries to help, but he hears a car engine behind him, a shuddering accelerator. When he turns around, this-guy, blinded by the light, wakes up.
This-guy—ricocheting about his life—opens the door. He’s suddenly met with the smell of spring. He’s handed a package addressed to a woman who lives in the house next door, but he doesn’t recognize the name. It’s heavy and he doesn’t know what to do with it. He looks skyward and decides it isn’t yet time to plant flowers, or is it?, but give this-guy any excuse to spend time outside, in the fresh air, without waiting for Roberta to call. This-guy, snuffling, cleans his flowerpot stand and Gary’s from the second floor. The inky-fingered neighbor leans against the gate and speaks in Spanish with the neighbor from #1433. This-guy—he of the sidelong glance—thinks they’re talking about him and he becomes that-guy, he of the clumsy body. The coffee-cup neighbor waves at him and gestures toward the street, her lips pursed like a duck beak. It’s the car that belongs to the new people who recently moved in next to the husky-voiced neighbor—duplex doors, thin walls. They’re getting out of a Mercedes 300 Coupe that’s the same color as his, sort of a creamy coffee color, and certainly the same model year as the car that belongs to the guy looking for his father. They keep it in perfect condition and without the ridiculous rear that distinguishes his own. Hi there. The Spanish-speaking women have fallen silent. Pretty weird, huh, Dad? Two nearly identical cars have ended up end-to-end right in front of the neighbor’s house. We got you covered.
Do you know them? The voice emerges from the unsteady body climbing the stairs. They look out from the neighbor’s attic window. The dissertation-neighbor opens the three windows that the sunlight and a faint heat come through. She hasn’t let go of the plastic flowerpot holder. Weird, isn’t it? This-guy’s voice—dirt-stained—comes out of him from somewhere else, because he knows that the image will slip into his dreams tonight. I don’t know them. Right, Dad? How many cars like that one came in through the eastern border in ’79? They sift in the soil a little at a time, carefully settling the wildflower seeds in place. This-guy knows that the red-pencil-neighbor could do this by herself, but he already spends so many hours of the day writing alone that this-guy—he who assesses with a clinical eye—sees the jumbled books as a symbol of the mental chaos that inhabits his room, like hers. Unemployment starts to strain through the cracks of the model city.
From the armchair where he observes this undertaking and listens to the morbid bolero, he reaches out a hand through the living room until he can touch the neighbor’s bare thigh. He hesitates for a moment when he sees his own fingernails caked with dirt and grime, bu
t those things only matter in dreams, right, Dad? As his hand finds its way, he imagines an entire life with her, the book-discarded-on-the-windowsill-neighbor: this-guy waking in a bed like her bed, this-guy leaving a house like hers in the morning, looking out a window like hers, walking down the stairs in another house, almost hers, kissing the naked air from below as if the above were his. A hand on his shoulder shakes him awake. This jolt, this earth. Hoarsely, she introduces him to the people standing before him. So forever out of place—the place of the unemployed, he seems to hear his father say—that he feels he should go.
Misfortune stops inside the car. This-guy—stranger to himself—presses on the gas as he starts to hear the neighbor’s throaty voice on the phone, and this body starts to miss her nearness. At some point the things they’re writing about bump into each other. 1896: they interrupt each other. The same year of the first film screenings in the whole world, the same year when the first horseless carriage embarks down the street. No, 1920, sometime around then. Not long before, the Ford automobile plant had settled in on the outskirts of Santiago. Sales weren’t good. The U.S. ambassador, seated in the cold, neoclassical office he’d decorated baroquely, lest he forget where he came from, met with some local businessmen to foment the projection of American films. The public, the people, sensed something that made them grit their teeth. Now bearing sums of money allocated for trips to the city-that-never-sleeps, the businessmen left, slightly drunk, to find the car that would take them from the park to the ministry. Availing himself of the recently installed telephone lines, the ambassador informed some city, some office, and some ear full of hair gel that the deciding thumb had shifted upward. In the ensuing years, American films flooded theaters, their elegant halls newly fumigated to get rid of the fleas—a plague of them had inundated the southern city that very year. Soon, the very same people who had gone to work that morning at the Ford plant would buy cocktails at the movie theater bar, dressed in the same short-hemmed suits as the actors moving around onscreen. They’d drive cars like the high-heels-and-slitskirt car and clog traffic along the alamedas. The twenty-first century: the advent of horror.
This-guy—disoriented, slightly aroused by the brush of the hoarse voice—decides not to hear the final comment, as he’s learned by now to identify certain minor provocations from the pencil-and-empty-wallet neighbor. He looks for a parking spot and decides to stop waiting for Roberta.
Misfortune accelerates inside the car. This-guy works to keep her on the line. Henry Ford was the only American to garner a favorable mention in Mein Kampf. It would seem that the dictator’s admiration for the businessman earned him Nazi Germany’s highest honors: a prize measured in money, parties, women, a gold plaque, and a role overseeing the provision of the productive model through which Hitler would practice his genocide.
There’s a silence on the line, as if a wall had suddenly gone up between this-guy and the fountain-pen-neighbor. He hesitates in the street.
When he rings the bell, he doesn’t yet know that he’s attending a goodbye party. This-guy—adamantine, cruel—has visualized a full, intimate evening. By then, he feels the lack of nothing more acutely than the presence of the inky-fingered neighbor. When he goes up, however, lots of people are there. He loses count before greeting anyone. Alcohol stalks him. How many are there, Dad? Suddenly the room empties out and leaves only five, who sit down to eat. The flowers they’d planted together have blossomed. The red spreads through the house and into the neighbor’s springy dress. This-guy—he of the unstormy desire—notes that she’s cut her hair, painted her nails, and seems happier than ever before. She clearly has, too, a close relationship with every one of the other three men who face him at the table, speaking English with heavy and occasionally incomprehensible accents. The first seems curiously at home there: her kisses hound him. The second exudes an excessive familiarity with the neighbor, a rapport possible only with someone you live with. The third has a tactile relationship with the neighbor: their fingers are tenderly laced together. He addresses this-guy—he of the closed mouth, he who looks inward—and asks about his work. He imagines, through his father’s eyes, what he might say: a population graphic illustrating the growth of Detroit, twenty-five times its size in under twenty years, photographs of the Ford Co. assembly line, the city’s majestically abandoned buildings. The trouble began just a few years after the boom. In the 1930s, the crisis prompted mass lay-offs and plummeting salaries forced immigrants and citizens to see their lives from a new perspective. This abandonment, this road. The industry recovered by manufacturing tanks and war vehicles. Malcolm X was among the hundreds, thousands, working in the factories. Union leaders were crushed, beaten, spit at, burned, and fired. In the late ’50s, Detroit’s population dropped by 25%. The downtown area, which had once represented the long-dreamed empire, was desolate. Around it were hundreds of unemployed people, poor people, beggars. Motor City, Murder City.
He could explain so many other things, too. Right, Dad? 1971, the job at Chrysler; 1973, the oil crisis; 1979, debt; 1982, a letter of dismissal; 1984, an empty garage. Instead of that, with the coffee-smell wafting in from the kitchen, the radio thrums “Motor City is Burning.”
Birdsong invades his room through the open window. A bird has perched on a cable within his field of vision. He watches it warble. It has an extraordinary vocal range, imitating, with notable precision, the calls of the thrush, the robin, the hen harrier, and several others whose names he doesn’t know. He wonders whether the bird sings with a particular intention, or if it’s rehearsing, or if it’s maybe enjoying the very act of imitation, using the patios between the houses and buildings as a sounding board.
In a state of neither wakefulness nor sleep, he assesses the kilometers separating his body from the foot of the bed, which seems to move like an oceanic horizon as he crosses from one shore to the other uncertain one. In response to this thought, the sweat accumulated on his neck, inner thighs, and armpits becomes a sea. He floats and sinks.
He walks the eleven blocks to where he’d parked his car the night before. He opens the door, places his heavy backpack inside, and inspects it twice, making sure everything is as he left it. He starts the engine, revs it hard, and feels a new vibration underfoot, something superimposed over the layer of loose metal. He turns it off and starts it up again, pressing on the accelerator with all his strength. A slight scent of gas seeps into the car, as if the heat from the subsoil were about to transform it into fire. He guides it along, slowly, among the other vehicles seeking out a parking space at that hour, hoping to avoid a fine from the garbage truck. It’s unusual for him to find a spot right in front of his house, right beside the new neighbors’ identical vehicle. They greet him coldly as they settle their sleepy daughter into her seat. Only then does he see two enormous red suitcases and two small ones, each sporting a gaudy luggage tag, on the inky-fingered neighbor’s front steps. The name on the tag is the same as the one on the package he received months ago and kept without knowing exactly who it was for. He’s startled to realize that its owner was his neighbor coming down the stairs. They’d never asked each other’s names. How did they address each other, then? No need, they barely knew each other at all. The neighbor greets him as if for the first time. They shake hands like perfect strangers. He tells her he has a package for her, but the neighbor says it doesn’t matter anymore, that it must be the potting soil. That she doesn’t need it anymore because she’s moving out. She asks him to give her keys to the landlord, who hasn’t gotten back to her. Maybe he’s sleeping on the first floor. She’s moving. Where to?
In the car, on the way to the airport, this-guy—fractured soul, irreparable solitude—talks with the books-in-the-backpack neighbor. Like perfect strangers, estranged from each other, they talk about the nice weather in California, that she’ll be able to speak Spanish there with pretty much anyone, that she’ll probably forget her English altogether. The writer, who looks out at the industrial landscapes of Ridgewood and Jamaica,
tells him she’d learned English and Spanish almost simultaneously at a school where she was taught to think she belonged somewhere else. She now struggles to believe how she felt her lifelong ailments leaving her as soon as she reached this country—how she’d recognized herself, recognized her brother, so much like her, in the passer-by getting off the subway, in the clerk at the Verizon store, in the people leaving buildings on Wall Street, in the bodies drinking whiskey in Bowery bars. In the list of surnames she sang, there were Spanish names, their creole deformations, their Arab heritage, but nothing to indicate any affiliation with the dwellers of Russian, Polish, or Czech neighborhoods she could walk through undetected. But some things can’t be helped. A last name with a diacritical mark. The color of her eyes. A certain intolerance to cold. Impossible to shake off el sur. At the same time, a seed was growing. How could she identify so absolutely with people so quick to kill anyone else? Now she was on a new quest. Al ni aquí ni allá. To be from nowhere other than wherever this notebook and this pencil happened to be. Like the other women who got on a plane.
The hug with which this-guy—he of the achy ear—bids farewell to the unknown woman imprints itself into his body along with a sentence that punctures him persistently as he drives home: if only this obsession with one’s roots actually accomplished anything. The night before, Roberta had finally told him she was coming back, having found the archives full of nothing but empty boxes and folders of discarded papers. Her money was running out, too. Ro-ber-ta: that name was moving away from him, replaced by the body that this-guy—embittered, self-flagellating—has just left and which has become part of his own, although he doesn’t know how or why. The gas pedal falters and stops responding at a red light. The honking will start any moment now. He’s in the middle of Eastern Parkway, in the lane designated for left-hand turns. The car won’t start. It just emits that strange vibration, stronger now, every time he turns the key in the ignition, and the pleasant smell of gasoline fills the air. This-guy, who knows more about his car than anyone, Dad, lifts the orange cone out of the trunk and sets it down about five feet away. The shouts and honks fall silent when he opens the hood. Blue smoke overtakes everything, boiling the battery, boiling the pipes and metal, dissolving the rubber of the tires, melting the inside of the car. This-guy—he of the languid body and the living soul—crosses the street. From the corner of his eye, he sees that the open-doored car is engulfed in flames, and he leaves it behind at last.
Cars on Fire Page 6