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.
The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing Page 7