Mystery Girl: A Novel

by David Gordon

  “What the fuck?” Nic whispered. “I’ve had enough for one day.”

  “I think that guy’s been following us.”

  “In the truck!” she said and punched my arm. Again. I was going to have bruises. I opened the note. It was neatly typed in English: If you want to know what happened to her follow this man.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “Which ‘her’ does he mean?” Nic asked. “The cousin? Your wife?”

  “Whichever. Do we go or not?”

  She sighed. “I guess we have to. That’s why we’re here.” She turned to the waiting stranger. “Vámonos,” she said.

  He led us around the corner to an old Ford pickup and gestured for us to climb into the bed. It did indeed look like the one that had been following us. I gave Nic a boost and hauled myself up, barely settling on a wooden crate before we jolted into action.

  “Look on the bright side,” I said. “If this is a kidnapping, security’s pretty lax.”

  We left the town and began climbing, slowly, up into the hills. Almost instantly we were in darkness. But unlike a sealed bedroom, this was jungle darkness, thick and warm, wrapping you in itself, like the hot breath and soft fur of an animal rubbing against your face and brushing your shoulders. The sky was riddled with stars. We jolted left, climbing higher, and the trees closed over us and there was nothing but the headlights breaking the blackness ahead and the chatter and chirp of the nightlife all around us. The truck turned again, onto a dirt road now, and the lights showed a white retaining wall, then a gate. The stranger punched a code and it swung back. We were on a steep driveway made of cobblestones. In the moonlight, a big white house towered up before us and we stopped. The stranger helped us out. He pointed at the open door. He tipped his hat. And while we stood and dithered, he hopped back in the truck and he left. So we went inside.

  78

  THE MAIN ROOM OF the house was huge, with adobe walls and thick rafters vaulting a high ceiling. There was an open kitchen with a serious stove and copper pots hanging from the crossbeam, as well as a long, thick dining table and couches and sunken armchairs around a fireplace of pig roast proportions. Sliding doors opened to a large patio and a pool. There were many books, in English, Spanish, French, and German. There were all manner of crafty and arty knickknacks around, clay figurines and stone bowls, woven blankets and torturous candelabras. But the most striking thing, aside from the amazing view of jungle, beach, and crashing sea that leapt up as you entered, was the art on the walls: large unframed canvases painted with bright, simplistic forms, whether deliberately primitivist or simply primitive I couldn’t say, all depicting the same woman—Mona, or one possible Mona, anyway—her face, her nude body, in thick strokes against fields of color, sometimes covering the whole canvas in deep paint, sometimes with bald patches shining through. In some pictures the setting was clearly this house. I recognized a large leather chair and the bougainvillea pouring over the white patio wall. In others, she seemed to be involved in some mythological or ritualistic drama, holding a spear or whip or wearing a childish crown and sitting on a throne, holding hands with the devil while nude men groveled at their feet, or else hoisting a torch to awkwardly light a bonfire, while witches and demons pranced.

  At one end, the main room connected to a large bedroom where the unmade bed and scattered clothes suggested very recent occupancy, but the garments, a pair of jeans, a denim shirt, and some boots, were all men’s. At the other end was a studio where it seemed as though the portraits had been made. There were a great many tubes and jars and vats of paint, heaps of smeared rags, stained and battered brushes in coffee cans, overflowing ashtrays, a dish still caked with fried egg, and nearly finished on one wall, a very large mural perhaps six feet long. Here the model, or muse of the house, seemed to be copulating with a minotaur, a figure who combined the horned and bearded head of a bull and the torso and arms of a wooly man, with cleft hooves, a tail, and a rather bullish endowment as well. The actual penetration was the mural’s central focus, the genitals cartoonishly enlarged, blown up junior-high-bathroom-style, a ball-and-shaft combo entering a narrow, slitted eye.

  Nic peered dubiously at this final piece in the exhibit. “Wow,” she pronounced, and then, in that odd, slightly autistic way she had, asked: “Would you say this painting is a good painting? I mean, would you hang it on your wall? What about a Picasso? Why is that better? I mean it’s worth more, obviously, I know that, but why would I hang it up and see it every day while eating breakfast if it’s ugly and doesn’t look like anything?”

  “It does look like something though.” I pointed at the face, a plain oval with black hair in a line down each side, a tiny arrow of a nose, two big eyes, and lips like a candy heart. “It looks like you… or her. These paintings are of Mona, whoever that is. And the scenes remind me of those films I got from Kevin’s.” I touched the figure’s forehead and my finger came away brown. “And this one is still wet.”

  “But who could have painted it?”

  As if on cue, thunder cracked above our heads, as though we were standing in the hollow of a drum, while outside the window, lightning shattered the horizon, and a torrential downpour began. The lights flickered. The windows shook. The patio was instantly flooded. I remembered Lala, long ago, telling me that during certain months, in the town where she was born, it rained like this every night, as low clouds carried the ocean onto the land, pouring out short, violent storms that dried right up and were forgotten in the next morning’s sun. Perhaps this really was where she was from after all. Another explosion. The lights fluttered again and, as if in a cave painting, the face on the wall seemed to waver, considering us with equipoise while the minotaur ravished her body. Gasping, Nic bolted from the room.

  “Wait. It’s just a storm…” I rushed after her, into the dark living room, as the power came on and the large TV began to glow.

  “Look,” Nic said, pointing. There was a typed note taped to the bottom of the screen. I removed it.

  Welcome Guests, Please make yourselves at home. I’m sorry I couldn’t be here to greet you in person, but I’ve left a disk in the player. Please listen carefully. It is programmed to erase itself after one play. Any attempt to stop or remove it will trigger the self-destruct mechanism. Just like Mission Impossible (the TV show and not that insipid film).

  I looked over at Nic. “What do you think of this?”

  She shrugged at the remote lying on the coffee table. “Press it,” she said.

  I pressed play. We saw a man standing in what was clearly this room. He had a cowboy hat and a beard.

  “That guy looks familiar,” I said. The man smiled wordlessly, and removed his hat to reveal a bandana. Long black hair tumbled out. “Holy shit!” I said. “That’s the biker who was following me in LA.”

  “What biker?” she asked, but I didn’t have time to answer, because now the man removed the bandanna and the hair with it, revealing another head of hair, also long but entirely gray. Next he peeled off the lower beard, leaving a walrus mustache. Nic clutched my wrist.

  “That’s the guy who drove us up here. The Mexican hombre!”

  He peeled off the mustache, revealing a clean-shaven and handsome if rather haggard face. He smiled and lit up a short black cigar.

  “Hello,” he said in perfect, clipped, vaguely British English that still carried a flat Germanic tone. “My name is Zed Naught.”

  79

  GREETINGS FROM BEYOND the grave and welcome, I suppose, to purgatory. After all, isn’t this where rich old white people go to spend eternity? I know it feels like forever for me. Really, the toughest part about hiding in Mexico ten years isn’t the corrupt officials, who are actually quite helpful and reasonably priced on the whole, but the need to blend in with so many dead-boring and generally horrible old Americans, Germans, Brits, and Aussies. What a bunch. Broiling in the sun, satellite dish on the roof endlessly running football and commercials for beloved cookies and toilet paper from the homeland,
while they drink themselves into oblivion. Have I become one? I can only hope that if I do I have the courage to blow my head off for real this time. I’ve often thought that it was a mistake not to kill myself then, when I had the chance. My existence ever since has been a kind of descent into hell, as if I were in Dante’s suicide garden, transformed into a twisted and monstrous tree, rooted here among the vegetative tourists and slowly burning away in the heat. But somehow I felt I no longer had the right to end it myself. I was in a sense, already dead. This was the afterlife and dead people have no way out, except, I suppose, resurrection, and so I carried on like a zombie, eating, sleeping, talking, walking, and of course making art, which I can’t help continuing, like a compulsion. I could not really make films. I had no money or resources, could not use my name or draw any public attention to my work. So I painted, sculpted, drew. I am terrible at all these things. My sculptures fell apart, the stone shattered under my clumsy chisel, and the clay collapsed because I used too much water. All are probably part of an adobe pig hut now. My paintings are ridiculous, abominations. An insult to real art. But like a stupid child drawing on the wall, I couldn’t help myself. As long as I persisted, and I say “persist” not “live,” as I was dead already, I had to go on making art. I have no desire for these works to last. You would be doing me a favor if you destroy them, if you simply torch this whole place, this exhibition of my wretchedness, when you leave.

  I admit, it was not always quite so bad. The first years of exile were better. In fact it was a golden time for me, a kind of reprieve, a vacation, as Mexico is for all of us, but for me also a vacation from being myself and from the life in Los Angeles, which had become a prison, although I admit a very comfortable one. A pleasure prison with glass walls so you can imagine you are free, as long as you never actually try to step outside. Of course these can be the most difficult prisons from which to escape. And I did not go willingly, not at all, I fled in cowardly abject terror, but I still found, once I had absconded like a worthless scoundrel, a deep sense of relief and freedom. I could breathe. I slept, especially here by the ocean, like I had not slept in decades. The sweet sleep of the newly dead, resting in fresh earth. Not that there is anything original in that. There’s a long tradition of Europeans and Americans coming to Mexico to disappear, into exile or death. Ambrose Bierce was a legend to me. I remember, as a child in my grandfather’s house in Bavaria, he was obsessed with the American West like so many Germans, and we always were reading about the frontier, cowboys and Indians, the desert and the open plains. I remember learning then about Bierce, the writer of spooky tales, heading off to join Pancho Villa and fight for freedom in Mexico, the people’s war for land and freedom, long mustaches, crossed bandoliers, and bare-breasted Indian maidens. He disappeared into the unknown and I longed to follow. Later as an adolescent I read D. H. Lawrence, of his great escape, crawling out of the coal mines, out of the dark, dank asshole of his fatherland, and the smothering, castrating living death of the motherland, running away later to find light and sun and sex in Mexicos old and new. Then Lowry and Greene, the atoners, who came to Mexico to drink and suffer, to confront God face-to-face and be saved or die. Then there are the successes, the lucky exiles who came and stayed and somehow thrived in the native soil. I am thinking now of Buñuel in film. A whole career in the Mexican cinema and even after he returns to Europe to make his final masterpieces, he remains a resident of Mexico to the end. It was his home. And most of all, of course, B. Traven. He stands apart. The mystery of his past. Who was he? An anarchist who escaped from prison? The Kaiser’s illegitimate son? He flees Europe, from who knows what, becomes a seaman, a voyager traveling the world on cargo ships. Then to live among the Indians in the south, to work in the mines beside the peasants, to immortalize their stories in novels, and then at last to become rich, to write The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, to drink with Bogart and marry a great beauty. He really had his cake and ate it too. So of course to me, longing for escape from dreary, rotten Europe, Mexico was like a magic word, like the secret that could release me. It was nonsense of course. By then the beautiful new world was utterly violated, whored out and lobotomized, but as a kid I was too dumb to know it, and who wouldn’t be tempted by even the scent of freedom, of life, when suffocating in a dead museum like Europe? Remember, this was after the war, the fifties, my world was a garbage heap and not only that, an abomination as well. As a child I played among the ruins of a civilization that we all knew was utterly worthless and horrific anyway. The Germans! I grew up knowing that I belonged to a cursed race, humiliated losers who deserved to be destroyed, who brought our destruction raining down upon ourselves, almost as if there were a God, but one who arrived too late to matter.

  So much for my mother’s side of the family, the pretty daughter of once proud Bavarian minor bullshit landowners, cultured Europeans ruined and penniless after the war of course but still stuffed full of sheet music and Goethe, though the piano and books and shelves had all been burned for fuel. Yes, you say, but my dad was English, a soldier, so this means I was half from the winning side too. Half a victor! Some victory. Do you have any idea what England, especially northern backward sodden rotten England was like in the fifties? Unbelievably bleak. A wet dirty nasty country waking up to the fact that their finest hour was over forever, they had given everything to win, to win not by conquering but by suffering, by holding out, and from here on it was all decline and despair. Their greatness had all been a dream, they were a small northern country with awful weather and disgusting food, an island off the coast of Europe, a minor character on the world stage, a sidekick tolerated by America and Russia, the big bullies, as long as it kept its mouth shut. So they clung to old glory and new bitterness, about the supposedly noble empire they once had. But what was glorious or noble about it? What is any empire but the systematic murder, rape, and subjugation of others? Colonies! Who besides nations have colonies? Vermin, pests, diseases. Cancers have colonies. Parasites. Termites. Invading and growing and sucking the life’s blood out of living creatures, living cultures to feed the ancient, swollen, and depraved Queen. And yet, in those ugly brutal freezing schools they sent us to, those perverted teachers with the horrible frightening teeth taught us how these ungrateful wretches, brown, yellow, red, should thank us and kiss our arses for teaching them how to tie a necktie and brew a proper cup of tea.

  Where was I? Oh, yes. This is why, from the beginning I always longed to come to America, not so much because I was interested, though I was in a way fascinated and I admired some things very much like jazz and the Ramones and the novels of Chandler, but because I knew I had to escape from home or I would die. America might be a nightmare but it was a living nightmare. And the attraction to film was I think for me the same, a way to live a bit, to breathe. The other arts were done. Painting was done. Literature, done. Music, almost done, a few last sounds to make. Theater, almost over, and the one or two good things, Beckett when I was still very young, were really just the acknowledgement of this, the last sigh before finally shutting the fuck up. Sculpture done. Really, really done. Ballet? Done after Balanchine, so now totally done. Modern dance? Well really it doesn’t matter because I can’t dance anyway, I am very clumsy so this is a moot point and not worth discussing. I could not become a dancer. Architecture? Architects are even bigger whores than film directors, who are tremendous, stupendous, gargantuan whores. Well, today all artists are whores of course, whores with no shame even. They used to be thieves, hustlers who took what they needed from the rich by trickery, which took some cleverness at least, but now artists are just silly foolish giggling whores sitting on billionaires’ laps at parties, sucking soft limp stinky hedge fund cock under the table. Thus, I chose film as my medium.

  Not because I had hope for it. I want to make that perfectly clear. I am a fool perhaps in many things I admit, but I am not a total idiot of the sort that would have hope for the art of film. No. I had no hope at all for cinema. None. But it was alive, at leas
t, a new art, perhaps fifty years old when I discovered it, when it entered my life, my history. The other arts were over. Their stories, their journeys, were done. I don’t mean of course that people stopped practicing them. Of course people will always keep making art, writing books, painting. I also don’t mean that no one is making good or even great art or writing good or even great books or dancing good or even great dances too. After all, such people are real artists, born artists and poets and they do what they do because they have to, like a primitive man painting a cave or a prisoner scratching the wall of his cell. They are possessed. They have no choice. The historical predicament cannot stop them. Still, any really intelligent artist must understand his own historical situation, his predicament, and so any really good contemporary artist is in some sense a memorialist, an elegist for his own medium, because he knows he is speaking after the fact, as one who came too late. If he is good, or even great, then this is part of his greatness, the greatness of the one who fights even when the battle is lost, because he is a warrior and such is his fate. That is not me. I am not a great artist. I am not really very talented or all that smart. My films are not even very good. Anyway I don’t watch them. They are not the sort of thing I care to see. I like for example Buster Keaton. I like some silent films from Europe like Caligari. I like Marx Brothers. Bugs Bunny. I like too some more recent films. I like Jackie Chan. John Woo. A Better Tomorrow Part Two I like very much. Part One as well but Part Two is even better. I find some Johnnie To very good. Triad Election is excellent, both parts. Really it is one large work. My point is, I am not so arrogant as to think I am a great genius of cinema or anything else. But I had to do something with my life and I understood that while I was too late in a sense for history, too late to do anything but lay a flower on the history of my culture, my family, my people, I was not exactly too late for the cinema. Cinema itself was maybe too late. This I admit readily. I admit this categorically and in advance. I acknowledge this a priori. I… my cigar seems to be out, one moment. There. As I was saying, we do not doubt or challenge the lateness of the cinema as such, not at all. Only a true moron would do so. Rather I suggest that it is this very awareness of lateness, which is inherent in cinema, inscribed into the very act of watching a film, that accounts for its strange beauty. Its sadness. Its sad, strange, melancholy beauty, which is I believe already there, in the very act of watching a film, any film, it is there in film as such, so I am in no way taking credit for this. It is there in a good film or a bad film. And while one might legitimately surmise that the best filmmakers, the artists of cinema (being aware of their historical predicament, of their lateness) will therefore, by my own definition be aware of this, it does not follow that this knowledge or any other technique or talent creates the feeling I’m speaking of, the sadness, the beautiful melancholic sense of loss. It only means that they know it is happening while the fools do not. It has to do with time, this sadness. This lateness. This loss. With the relationship of film to time, which I believe is unique in the arts. Music of course has a very important relationship to time, but music is said to keep time. We are on the beat, with the beat, behind the beat. So here music is making us aware of time but also moving us through time. Theater and dance I would argue have duration, just as literature has sequence, but these are art’s hopeless attempt to erase time, to destroy time, to defeat time by either making us forget it, as in theater, or in literature and painting by rendering time itself powerless. The uniqueness of film, its special quality, comes from the fact that film does not hide time, nor defeat it, nor does it move us along with it, rather film makes us aware, always, of time passing us by. Film is in this sense the late art form par excellence because everything that appears on film is already the past. Even the present is instantly the past on film. A movie camera or projector is a machine for making time pass or rather for making the passage of time visible. Film is what passes. It renders time visible. Hence we feel this loss, the loss of the present, the sadness of the very moment that is always dying away.