Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

by Sleights of Hand- The Deception Issue (retail) (epub)

  SEPTEMBER 30, 1989

  “In other news this morning, an act of vandalism has police puzzled. This sign along the Morgan Highway, which until yesterday read:

  Welcome to Scranton: The Electric City

  Embracing Our People, Our Traditions, and Our Future

  has been altered, as these images show, by the addition ofwhat appear to be block-letter graffiti tiles, changing it to ‘FALLING TOWERS Welcome to JERUSALEM ATHENS ALEXANDRIA VIENNA LONDON Scranton: The Electric City UNREAL Embracing Our People, THESE FRAGMENTS I HAVE SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS, Our Traditions, THE CHAIR SHE SAT IN LIKE A BURNISHED THRONE and Our Future SHANTIH SHANTIH SHANTIH.’

  “Although the intended message is unclear, the act has recalled the so-called ‘Waste Land’ graffiti vandalism of a couple years ago. The name became popular after references in several prominent instances of graffiti were connected to J. Alfred Prufrock’s poem ‘The Waste Land.’ Scranton police are not amused but bemused, and without any suspects.

  “This is Hegda Toryeakevic for Channel Four, Scranton. Back to you, Ron.”

  Off air again, and back at the studio, helping Bill Drindley wrap mike cables, Hegda suffered what had become the routine sensation of coming down, as if from a high, all her chemical levels dropping, her heart slowing, her intestines relaxing, her muscles all heavy, her body feeling weighted, empty, wasted, and unpretty. It wasn’t as if the feeling of being on-air was truly comparable to being high, it wasn’t enjoyable, really; it was just that being on-air intensified various aspects of her very being, brought to bear things that lay deep inside and were otherwise largely uncertain. On-air, she became a fierce tree of electricity, crackling, filled with light and radiating outward, everything she was clicking into place, her imagined self and her real combined into a terrible harmony. But off air, the two selves were severed again. Bill Drindley, for instance, was continually trying to look down Hegda’s blouse, eyeing her chest as though secretively, and indeed the woman he was now seeing—the outer Hegda—was someone who inspired this type of ogling often. But the inner Hegda, the conscious woman hidden inside now that the camera’s eye was off her, felt empty, ugly, and alone. This Hegda still believed herself to be separate from whatever she looked like on the outside. In Makeup, as she sat in the glare of the vanity’s lights and elevated in her plastic salon-style chair, she realized indeed that her transformation out of adolescence had resulted in the emergence not of an ugly-duckling-turned-swan or butterfly-from-caterpillar, but of an Other, not the appearance of her true self, but instead her appearance had arrived now as something outside her, as something, someone, else. She did not watch her spots on the news, never consulted with producers or editors on which shots to use, how much of a segment; she knew that the woman she was when the camera was on her was not the woman she was when not being looked at. Watching herself in the mirror now, as the makeup guy Stefan smoothed her blush with fast brushstrokes, she felt painted, inauthentic, a palimpsest. She had that Dorian Gray effect, where as her exterior became ever more legitimately beautiful, her ability to see it became mired and gray and murky; as the subterraneans became visible in the daylight sun, her ability to see them in the mirror diminished, such that she saw the worst of herself, saw not what was objectively there, but indeed what was subjectively mirrored.

  She was most comfortable therefore when she was standing posed and poised, her eyes looking not at another person or at a mirror but instead at the dead, blank eye of the camera—usually on Kyle Mann’s or Bill Drindley’s shoulder—knowing that this was what was real: the disconnection, the performance, the loss entirely of the internal, thinking self. Facing the camera, she became beautiful, nothing else. She had no doubts, no thoughts about who she was or about anything really. Instead, she performed or read lines, affected the appropriate look on her face, inflected the appropriate tone to her voice, and whoever Hegda really felt herself to be inside gained exactly what she’d always wanted, became what she’d always wished she could be, at the cost of oblivion, at the loss of her own existence, disappearing (this true, original Hegda) inside the mask she’d created.

  SEPTEMBER 12, 1989

  President George H. W. Bush: “And behind all of the senseless violence, the needless tragedy, what haunts me is the question: Why?”

  SEPTEMBER 11, 1984

  The smoke curling across in front of G.P. is literally blue. Blue tinged. The word diaphanous came into his mind, and as his head swiveled a little on its mount, the word was again gone.

  “That’s not enough,” Dr. Death was saying. “The purpose, though, always has to be understanding. It has to be higher level, it has to be a seeking. Otherwise you might as well live in cardboard on the streets and ask assholes for change. That’s all you’ve got.”

  Dr. Death was a man of indeterminate age, maybe fortyish, but his skin had that leathery look of being outside a lot, as in what has to be an unhealthy amount, such that he could have been twenty or sixty, though G.P. did know or understand him, Dr. D, to be older than he himself was. Rumor had it that once Dr. Death had been an actual doctor, or rather a doctoral student, had been in med school. Whatever medical training he had had, G.P. knew for a certainty that he always had the absolute best weed in Scranton, hands down. Not just weed that was good, impressive, get-you-high weed like that, but weed that was life altering, life preserving, perhaps, weed that was clinically strong and scientifically rich in its effects. You couldn’t so much smoke it as endure it.

  This is how you remember it, anyway. Real effects are always physical.

  Dr. Death had adopted the moniker a couple years before Kevorkian made it household, something he’d come up with while on who knows what, something he felt was fittingly shamanistic, as that was the type of doctor he intended in the honorific (he’d barely finished high school, lived with his mom—and her boyfriend, Steve—well past thirty), given that his whole vibe was making electronic music in his mom’s basement and loosening his mental tether and exploring the farthest frontiers of consciousness.

  He kept a gun in the basement, G.P. had noted, since he handled a lot of merchandise and “had to be careful” but, G.P. was aware, Dr. D tended to be pretty shamanistically untethered on whatever he was selling and promoting and thus maybe not the most trustworthy decision maker, in terms of when the gun might get used. The gun—the one G.P.’d seen; there was a sawed-off single-action pump in the closet dangling from a leather strap off a hanger—was a laser-sighted .44, which Dr. D would periodically handle, and in one particularly transcendental moment of a high he’d rubbed it across his temple and even put it briefly in his mouth, declaring afterward he couldn’t die, couldn’t be killed.

  G.P. watched smoke recede from himself, considered what it was about this smoke that was so captivating, considered abstractly how it was we could be captivated, be so in love with and struck by beauty in such simple things, beauty at all—and then what was beauty, and then whether there is something (all in our heads) about how we perceive (bottom line, like just the perceiving mechanism, how we perceive anything) that we call beauty, that feels this way, that we can’t help, that our monkeyish ancestors had some percentage of, used in fashioning mud huts or bone tools or whatever. As quickly, though, this thought stream had itself gone.

  “I mean, any high has to be about separating yourself from the way we see things, the way life is to us, and seeing it new, seeing something different, a different truth.”

  “You know that’s bullshit, though, right?”

  “It’s not bullshit. It’s bullshit to you, since you’re underformed, you’re fetal, sitting
here watching the smoke come out your own mouth like a fucking baby staring at a mobile, a kitten pawing at a dangling bit of string. You’re using it to regress, and in that ignorance find bliss.”

  “No, I just mean, like, in the sixties they were all about pot or acid or whatever, being in this altered state, opening the doors of perception, being something ontologically other, but that was just kind of idealistic nonsense. I mean, what we’ve learned—and let me remind you this is the eighties, we’ve got Bedtime for Bonzo Ron Reagan as walk-of-fame leader of the free world—is that there is no other purpose, there is no beyond, no higher power or altered state or other dimensions or whatever. All that spirituality has been evaporated, has been erased from us. Now it’s just celebrity and what you can get for yourself.”

  “One thing,” Dr. Death loaded up a cassette tape he’d earlier recorded—he recorded sounds, out in the world, nature sounds, city sounds, whatever he came across—and started it playing alongside a second tape, this one fragments of speech he’d recorded from last night’s CBS news report with Dan Rather, and to these, as he talked, he would periodically add distortion effects from his keyboards—one a straight QWERTY keyboard connected to a self-made computer devoted to producing, the other an eighty-eight-key extended Yamaha—or beats from the drum machine (approximately) he had wired into his sound machine, “is the fact that you’re wrong about all this decade emphasis, we were then, they are now, or whatever, doesn’t matter. Everybody is always trying to define time by taglines: the Roaring Twenties, the Swinging Sixties, whatever materialistic tag you’d give the eighties—”

  “The eighties: Back to the Future.”

  “What?”

  “Get it? Back to the …”

  “The movie?”

  “Well, yeah, but, you know, like back to the, back …”

  “Point is, that’s not important. Time isn’t divisible like that, isn’t fitted into these neat little groupings, like the twenties, the thirties, etc. We use those numbers as labels, numbers we all agree on as fairly representing an average of human experience of time—”

  “No idea what you’re talking about right now.”

  “—but what about changing our experience of time? See? Like, if you dream, everybody agrees dream time is way different from lived, waking time. So why can’t there be other experiences of time that are just as valid as the average we all agree to?”

  “OK.”

  The stuffed deer’s head hanging from the wood paneling of Dr. D’s basement wall loomed with savage, dead eyes, and lashes, which were incongruously girlish and pretty and fey and innocent, yet the dead deer’s unopening mouth was pursed tight beneath its dusty nose. Dr. D layered more noise on top of the CBS/nature mix. Sounded like cars passing on a busy street.

  “But what I’m telling you, there really is such a thing as altered existence, as being able to transport from, like, this type of experience to a literally meaningful other type of experience.”

  “You mean getting high.”

  “Different than that. I mean what you do is smoke, you smoke a bunch of weed, maybe pop a couple caps, and you think that’s all there is. I’m talking about fundamentally rewiring the mainframe, hacking into your mental processor and changing the settings. I’m talking about opening up the selective experience of existence and letting in other possibilities.”

  “Again,” G.P. forced an elliptoid smoke ring out above the littered coffee table into the suddenly dimly lit atmosphere of the basement, watching as the momentary ring held together, rotated slightly, slowly, seemed to come apart, managed to drift whole for some time shortly thereafter, “no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about shit beyond weed, shrooms, acid, whatever. I’m talking about, like, DMT.”

  “DDT?”

  “DMT.”

  “DMV?”

  Dr. Death looked cross-eyed over his mustache at G.P. for a long moment. “I don’t believe you’re that stoned.” He put on a new sound, running water, a guitar tuning. “Oh. Oh shit.”

  “What?” G.P. vaguely recalled something, an idea he’d had some time ago, about politics, about the decay of modern society. About an idea of how he could save it. He looked at the tip of the joint he’d just relit, as one does a dirty fingernail. What was he thinking?

  “I know this, man. I know this sound.” Dr. D replayed the tape, and then again.

  “Well, you taped it, right? I mean.”

  “No, yeah, but what the fuck is that. ‘What can this strange device be? When I touch it, it gives forth a sound. It’s got wires that vibrate and give music. What can this thing be that I’ve found?’ That’s fucking Rush.”

  Oh, shit. G.P. didn’t mind Rush. He liked Rush, actually. But Dr. Death had this unhinged thing with them, like he did with his drugs. This idea that beyond life’s fair veil there was some inebriated truth ringed in smoke and Day-Glo bright, and that Rush was the philosophy of those other seekers who knew this truth and understood its value in the face of daily life’s meaningless musical misdirection. Dr. D started moving quickly around the basement, frantically pawing through stacks of cassette decks and whatever other bits and pieces of his creative endeavors covered his counters. G.P. stood up, did the obligatory “Well, I mean, I guess I should get going,” letting his voice trail off, thinking he’d say he had to go to work but being overcome with guilt since he’d been fired from the Sheetz three weeks ago. Astral sounds were already starting to merge and diverge throughout the still, fog-thick basement air. Standing, G.P. could see an elaborate collection of disorderly spray-paint cans and old cloth, a milk crate filled with shards of plastic, the cans, and a couple of halogen lights with orange extension cords.

  What had his idea been? Something to do with the DMV? With DDT? To show them there was something worth believing in. I have come too soon. They have done it themselves, but they do not know it yet. The lie that inspires the truth. Where was he reading that? Had he read that?

  (Much later in life, almost twenty years later, a variation of this idea would return to him, the idea of using deceit to forcibly free the common man, the hoi polloi, from his technological enslavement, his unknowing trap in the perfectly constructed hall of mirrors of social media, the Internet, online shopping—a world of consumer convenience that took away even the most basic human qualities, even the roughest, dimmest conception of virtue and arête. That was after more or less a decade’s development as a hacker, first learning simple hacks in MS-DOS and BASIC, coding simple schemes that at the time seemed challenging, meaningful, and potentially revolutionary in scope. Bank codes, credit-card numbers, the primitive intranet of the local nuclear-power plant (the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station), which garnered some attention, despite the fact that he got nothing from the hack, really, nothing of interest anyway, but an article ran in a couple of papers, and they traced the hack to his parents’ basement, where he’d more or less moved at that time, working his endless all-night hacks, stoned and wired on Mountain Dew and Pepsi (for the brief period of its existence, he fell totally in love with Crystal Pepsi, and had a short supply he’d stockpiled as rumor spread that Mr. Z’s Food Mart was down to its last cases, and the product was being literally removed from shelves all over the country, dusty unsellable cans and bottles, which stockpile he extended far past usability, as even he understood, leaving the last twenty-ounce bottle on his desk next to his constantly evolving desktop computer (an aggregate of parts assembled with a true geek’s zeal but little patience or grace: The computer was all loose wires and scattered panels) for what became years, until he ultimately d
ecided to part with it, and sold it for an almost unimaginable amount (given that it was now probably near lethal) on eBay), and playing the then new computerized version of Civilization (circa 1991), which he’d been excited to see and was one of the first buyers of in the Scranton area, despite the relatively quick realization that it was a letdown compared to the original board version, because (among other defects) of the much written-about problem of “phalanx versus tank”: Since the computer-strategy game started players in 4000 BC and allowed progression through time such that there could be ancient versus modern nations, veteran status ended up allowing ancient spearmen to defeat battleships, tanks, aircraft, etc., which was mathematically possible but obviously wildly improbable, to the point of illustrating painfully how this was a game and distinctly separate from reality, which is exactly what the gameplayer never much wants to be reminded of; plus, this version of Civ was “turn based,” which limited what a player has, versus the “real-time” style of play,which includes the ability to create additional levels of play and facets and features, etc., during gameplay, which really is just to say one of the two biggest drawbacks for G.P. was the fact that he sat stoned and wired in his basement developing his nation, taking little real pleasure from attacking tanks with spearmen and critiquing the game’s coding, all alone, where the board version had been a shared endeavor, the technologically advanced one was a socially isolating fantasyland, one that didn’t map onto reality the way a real game really should; viz., the game is on one level about the rules of the game as stated, the literal level (a game of Civilization), but at the same time the game is really being played interpersonally and socially, where the rules govern the interactions but the players flesh out the competition and the development of play based on their real-world personalities and psychologies. Despite the role-playing, Dungeons & Dragons didn’t take with G.P. as it was not, like Civ, real; even the bridge the more extreme made into the real world (never ceasing to perform their D&D roles) was just realized fantasy (dwarves and orcs and whatnot), not fantasized reality. And, anyway, they traced the hack to him and that was pretty serious and there were some threats that ultimately got reduced as the failure to properly understand exactly what he’d done helped keep him somewhat safe, and it wasn’t until years after that nuclear-plant hack that he would be caught for anything seen as substantially criminal, in a legal sense, or actually terroristic.)