Amnesiascope

by Steve Erickson

  There are so many beautiful people in L.A. that no one becomes famous just for being beautiful. L.A. is the city where, if it’s to mean anything, mere beauty must transcend itself. Ten years ago I met a photographer who told me a startling story. It was about a young woman he knew who had just arrived in Los Angeles from South America; not long after, he began taking pictures of her, which he distributed to various agencies and magazines. Because the young woman was very beautiful, the pictures were well received. But the woman began to come unraveled by the sight of her own face, first in the photos, then in the mirror; she wound up institutionalized in a mental hospital near Ojai, where the photographer was still visiting her weekly. She had literally been driven crazy by her beauty, which had so little resonance in her South American village, and so much in Los Angeles. The streets of L.A. abound with women and men who are clearly mad from their beauty. They’re clearly mad from the burden of becoming the face of our dreams, and from their compulsion to carry this burden. They invest everything in this mission that money can buy and technology can achieve, until they’re plastic from top to bottom, bone and cartilage and fat carved away to make way for more plastic—until there isn’t any more plastic left. When the plastic is gone, the doctors fill them up with whatever’s handy. Open up any one of these beautiful people that you see on the street, any one of these people whose life is an audition, and inside you’ll find anything you could want or need for modern existence: lighter fluid, dish soap, cognac snifters, bookends, collapsible umbrellas, matching monogrammed bath towels, dog biscuits, remote control, margarita mix, the Sunday comics, the collected recordings of Bessie Smith. Almost everyone in L.A. positively glows with the bric-a-brac and spare parts of the millennium. In the city where there is no time, the most transient of gifts—beauty—strives to be endless, added to or subtracted from not by time but at will. One invents one’s beauty as one invents one’s name or destiny or dream; and a thousand exchanges transpire between the dreamers: I will be the face of your dream, if you will be the dream to which I can give a face.

  Beauty no longer drives the stake through my heart it did once. I’ve become inoculated to beauty; I got a good dose of it, and came out of the fever still alive. The Hotel Hamblin that has Jean Harlow’s name scrawled in the sidewalk in front teems with beauties. They lurk in the hallway shadows hunting for a dream to which they can attach themselves: some are sweet and some are neurotic, some are nervous and some are melancholy; some are frivolous, most seem intelligent, a few may even be deep. They eye me warily at certain times, hopefully at others, perhaps because I’m one of the few men in the hotel who doesn’t appear to be a homosexual, and perhaps because they sense the inoculation and recoil from it. I don’t know whether to feel badly for these dream-forsaken women or terrified of them, afraid that if I so much as meet their ravenous gaze, I’ll find them in the morning sleeping at the foot of my door, their nails wedged into the wood.

  At any rate I don’t really think the women in the Hamblin are much interested in me. What they’re interested in, from what I can tell, is their pound of flesh, and that flesh, I’m happy to say, is not mine. Unhappily for him, it’s Abdul’s. Since he lost his job as the manager of the building, there’s nothing to protect him from the wrath of women who got sick of him showing up in their apartments in the middle of the night in his smoking jacket with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. Now they want him out of the hotel altogether, and maybe in jail at that, for breaking into their apartments and going through their underwear when they weren’t there, or greeting them in the shower when they were. Abdul denies all of it. One day he pulls me aside in the hall and asks if we can talk; in a shaken voice, with a face full of hurt, he recounts the rumors about him. “Can you believe this terrible shit?” he says, outraged. In the meantime he’s moved out of the palatial penthouse on the first floor and in with the girl from Indiana—the one whose apartment he graced with a new hardwood floor. Following a minimum of dallying and a maximum of dalliance, she is now pregnant. “You see,” he smirks when confiding the news, “even the sour fruit has a sweet bite,” or some fucking idiotic Arab proverb, meaning I suppose that the sour fruit is the situation with the Hamblin in general and the sweet bite is the one he gets on what are now his very own hardwood floors. The mother-to-be is inscrutable; it’s hard to know what she thinks of all this, maybe because she doesn’t know herself. But as all the drama swirls around, her eyes take on the strange haunted look of a woman for whom everything depends on believing the best, even as thirty women are circulating a petition that charges the worst. Soon enough the petition comes my way. “No,” I tell Dory, who presents it for my signature.

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s not the manager anymore, and kicking him out of the building is just vindictive.”

  “The man has been harassing every woman here for the last two years,” Dory answers angrily. “There are women who felt compelled to move out of the hotel because of him—because in a sense he drove them out.”

  “That may be,” I answer. “It’s also true they had other reasons for moving. I know, because I talked to some of them. They didn’t like the rent or they didn’t like the problems with the plumbing or the elevator or they were leaving L.A. like everyone else. So maybe he drove them out and maybe he didn’t.”

  “It doesn’t bother you that he was breaking into women’s apartments?”

  “It bothers me if it’s true. But I don’t know for myself that it is true. I never heard it firsthand from anyone who knew for a fact that he had been in her apartment, other than a feeling she had about it. I also don’t know that it’s not true. To be honest, it wouldn’t surprise me if it were.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “Has he ever come into your apartment?”

  “No.”

  “So.”

  “So what are you saying? Because he didn’t come into my apartment and accost me when I was coming out of the shower, I shouldn’t do anything?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Let the women he did it to make the accusation. Let them get him thrown out of the hotel or worse. Until then he’s just another tenant living with his pregnant girlfriend on his hardwood floors.”

  “You men all stick together,” Dory viciously concludes.

  “Someday someone will say something unpleasant about you. If it’s a rumor, I’ll be on your side. If it’s a fact, you’ll be on your own.”

  “Oh thank you Abraham Fucking Lincoln,” she sneers, stomping off. “What a bunch of sanctimonious crap,” Viv agrees with Dory, expressing that dead-on sureness of hers I can only envy: “He’s guilty and you know it.” Soon I have the same problem from the other side; Abdul comes around wondering if there’s any time we can “get together and talk.” I hedge and dodge; I can hear this conversation coming a mile away. He’ll want me as some kind of character witness for him, in whatever forum this is going to be thrashed out: “Abdul, the smooth Palestinian, breaking into women’s apartments?” with the proper tone of astonishment and indignation. So now I keep my eyes constantly peeled—for the women, for Abdul. Soon I’m hiding out from everyone, the women and Abdul and the fact-checkers at the newspaper who would confront my fraudulent movie reviews, the zombie America that stalks my streets. Only in the windows of my suite thirty feet up do I put myself on complete display to the world; and Carl still phones with bulletins, and warnings: “For God’s sake, get out of there.”

  My Cinema of Hysteria grows. I’ve cleared my shelves of everything else, with the sweep of my arm. All the “masterpieces,” all the “landmarks,” all the films good for one’s edification, tossed them out and replaced them with nothing but my deeply hysterical movies. The Big Combo, Phantom Lady, Humoresque, Leave Her to Heaven, Autumn Leaves, Duel in the Sun, The Curse of the Cat People, Land of the Pharaohs, Some Came Running, Written on the Wind, Kitten With a Whip, When Worlds Collide. I run them on the monitor all the time twenty-four hours a da
y, with the sound off, even when I’m not here.

  For a while, amid Carl’s warnings and the pleas of auditioners, I heard other voices. I heard them everywhere, in bars and cafes and theaters, in the aisles of bookshops and the checkout lines of grocery stores and up and down the street, people talking about my movie, and I don’t mean the one I made with Viv. Everywhere I went I heard it until I thought I was going to go nuts, endless discussions of spectacular tracking shots and the revolutionary triptych effects and the exciting montage and what a wonderful performance Adolphe Sarre had gotten from the lead actress, the “fabulous” lighting and the “authentic” costumes and the “stunning” set design, blah blah blah. It was bad enough everyone was a film critic now; worse that they were critiquing a film entirely written, directed, acted, photographed and produced in my head.

  I’m sure everyone thought it was pretty damned funny. I’m sure it was all quite amusing to everyone. Every once in a while, sitting in a theater listening to a conversation about The Death of Marat in the row behind me, I was tempted to turn in my seat and confront the matter head-on. I was tempted to say, to whomever was prattling on about it at the moment, “You really thought the costumes were that good? The editing’s a little slack in the middle, wouldn’t you say?” And if they tried to argue with me I would yell back, “Yeah, well, I’m the guy who made up the movie in the first place! So don’t give me a lot of crap about costumes!” One night I was about to do just that when the woman who was discussing the film with her boyfriend or husband or whoever said, “Did you read that piece about it in the newspaper? I thought the reviewer really missed the point.” I was so dumbfounded all I could do was sink into my seat: I had missed the point of a movie I invented. After that the voices just got louder; I woke to them in the morning as though they were in the next room, having a party. …

  Tonight Network Vs. is showing White Whisper. As it happens Viv is on the set of another shoot, and I choose not to watch the movie without her. I go to sleep with the movie on the airwaves, floating above me in the skies of Los Angeles. It snags on my dream and catches in a dream-loop, playing over and over just beyond my windows, where I sit hovering in the sky naked on a model’s platform as Amy paints away and asks if I’m the good guy or if I’m the bad guy. Just as I’m about to answer, and before I know for sure what my answer is, the dream begins all over again.

  Lately I’ve been getting letters from a woman in Virginia who I’ll call K. Actually it is one letter, written on the backs of postcards, all of them numbered and sent one by one though, given the vagaries of the postal system in L.A. or what’s left of it, I receive the cards in random order. Number five arrives before number three, followed by thirteen, nine, seven, twenty-one. For some reason there are no even-numbered cards, just odd ones. As K writes these cards each breaks off mid-sentence, which is completed on the next card that begins mid-sentence. She’s writing because she’s read a couple of my books, one several times, each time from the point of view, she explains, of a friend or acquaintance to whom she recommended the book but who didn’t have the time or inclination to take her recommendation. When I first began receiving these cards I answered with my usual perfunctory response, thanking her for her comments; but then I became almost inexplicably intrigued by her questions, about art, life, love, sex, what food I like to eat, what movies I like to watch, my favorite color.

  Now I try to answer more regularly, though there’s no way to keep up with the stream of cards that keep coming. I got forty last month; in the last twenty-four hours I’ve received nineteen. She’s literally writing them faster than I can read them, and I’m running out of space to put them. The drawers of my desk are crammed, the closet is full, I’m boxing them up and renting storage bins. I’m shipping them off to far lands because L.A. can’t hold all of them. On the front of the cards are pictures of cats, elephants, trains, boats built in the shape of guitars, punk riots in London, a river that cuts through a valley like sulfur, a woman in a black dress clutching her child watching a ship on the ocean in the distance, a man on fire plummeting to earth, two apparently naked bodies folded into each other beneath a bed sheet, and a gallery of familiar icons, Billie Holiday, Tom Mix, Marcel Duchamp, Miles Davis, Cab Calloway, Greta Garbo, Albert Einstein, Bob Marley. “How do you define culture?” she asked early on. “Appealing to the intellect is always a selective process, isn’t it?” Lately, however, the tone has changed. “I’m twenty-five, long-legged, large-breasted, golden-haired, green-eyed,” she taunts. “I’ve got a Ph.D. in American literature, I act and model part-time. I’m a photographer and filmmaker and I’ve got my pilot’s license and fly cross-country solo. I’ve never been married, hence never divorced, never had either a child or an abortion, never been engaged. I’ve never made love. I’m a virgin two times.”

  I’ve gotten the order of K’s cards hopelessly mixed up. I warned K that our correspondence is bound to be one-sided; nonetheless she has seduced me somehow, even as the continually arriving cards raise certain questions in my mind. Is she obsessed? Is she insane? Is she homicidal? Will she appear any moment at my door? Nonetheless from the distance of Virginia she has found the secret passage into the secret room of my life. My life’s secret room has been empty for some time, like my life’s literary room. From time to time I pass through the public room, but over the last several years, since the Quake and the backfires and meeting Viv, I’ve lived almost wholly in the private room, with communications issued from wherever it is I write the movie reviews. Since the secret room has been empty my life has been much calmer, but it’s also true I’ve come to miss it; and I’ve come to realize that it’s only when I’m either in the secret room, or when the secret room is completely empty not only of myself but guests, that I’m entirely in the present. Now I think that maybe I hear sounds coming from the secret room. I wonder if they’re K’s. I wonder if K has invaded the secret room and that unsettles me, not only because I have no idea what she’s really like—I’m skeptical of the leggy, large-breasted, green-eyed description—but because I have no idea what password she used to get in, among all the words scribbled in tiny writing on the back of countless postcards. She’s becoming a figment of my imagination, like The Death of Marat, and as a result of her invasion I’ve been thrown a step back into the future. Our correspondence, one-sided or not, has both the utter innocence and profound danger of secret life.

  What I find both irresistible and frightening about my correspondence with K is that, inside my secret room, she is the secret, not me. Though I’ve come to feel I can trust her, I still can’t be entirely certain in the dark what weapons she might hold or whether the glint in her eye is desire or murder. So I push her away with one hand and pull her to me with another, as I’ve done with so many women; in the secret room I want to have my way with K as she’s tied and bound. I want to walk away from her after I’m finished until whenever I’m ready to come back, and not have to think about her in between, because if I did my conscience would be tormented, and long ago I became so tired of all the things and people, significant and trivial, that torment my conscience. I am aware, of course, that I created the secret room in the first place so I could pretend its forbidden activities happen not in the real world but rather a dream that has four walls. And I personally know of secrets, not mine but those held by others, that are beyond the pale even as fantasies, secrets that cannot be absolved no matter how large or small is the room of the psyche in which these fantasies find life, no matter how dark the room is or how light. Compared to such secrets my correspondence with K, who I have never met and am not likely to ever meet, is barely worth being a secret at all, for which I may or may not be held accountable any more than the world can hold me accountable for the desires of my dreams. Only moral totalitarianism refuses to make the distinction between a secret that announces the death of the soul—watching a snuff film, for instance, or the defilement of children—and the secret of a one-sided correspondence that does nothing more than suggest a
n illicit affair of the mind. Still, I’m stirred by my contemplation of just where moral rationalization ends and real damnation begins, I’m stirred by how even the imagination is not entirely guiltless. I’m stirred by consideration of just how many layers really lie between the blackest secret and the most harmless, and just how thin they are, and by the membrane between the impulse that only lurks and the impulse that is realized. I can only bring myself to ponder, without ever actually pursuing the answer, whether I would really pursue my darkest impulses if I was sure I could get away with it, or whether my conscience would still know itself, even if the defining lines of civilization were so scrambled as to allow the unallowable. …