The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing

  “Have you ever been to Spain?” she says. (Camera moves, creeping ever so slowly in some unmotivated direction during what follows, as if there’s a third character not on the screen but watching.)

  HIM: “No. Have you?”

  HER: “Yeah, it’s nice. No one rushes around. The beaches are white.”

  HIM: “Beaches? That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  HER: “Calamari.”

  HIM: “With squeezed lemon juice. And what else?”

  HER: “Priests. You can have a drink with them at the cafe. They understand about sin.”

  HIM: “I’ll bet they do.”

  HER: “But I don’t do confessions.”

  HIM: “I understand, my child,” he says and puts his hand on her shoulder in a gesture of mock forgiveness. She smiles and holds his eyes. He just wants (it seems) to touch her tattoo.

  HER: “Do you want to know what I saw in one of the churches there? In Spain?”

  HIM: “Sure.”

  HER: “I’ve never told this to anybody. I shouldn’t tell you… maybe it’s because you’re a total stranger, you know?”

  HIM: (I’m sure this line is accurate; it’s underlined twice in red ink) “I don’t believe you but go ahead.”

  HER: “It is unbelievable, you’re right. God. You’ll think I’m lying. It’s like something out of a horror movie, except that in a horror movie you don’t know who or what to trust which is the whole point and I already know that I can trust you. It was hard to find you, do you understand?”

  HIM: “Not really.”

  HER: “It was so fucking hard to find you but then you came up to me in the car just like that and I worried that you’d drive me to a parking garage and pull my jeans down and put your hand or a knife on my throat and rape me but it was something I had rehearsed over and over in my head and I had it figured out what to do.”

  HIM: “God.”

  (She pushes the plate of orange rinds away.)

  HER: “In this old stone church or church-like structure in the country we went to one night, past midnight, when we were drunk. It was outside of Madrid. We had followed the dirt road through a forest. It was (sound cuts out)… anymore. It was so dark. And then this church—or (a foreign-sounding word; ‘templo’?)—appeared, at the end of the road. The door kind of fell off its hinges when we went to open it. Should I really tell you this?”

  HIM: “I don’t see why not.”

  HER: “I’ve wanted to tell somebody. Might as well be you. At first it was only a feeling, a feeling like (sound cuts out)… but we were drunk, so it’s hard to say. It was pitch black inside. The floor was crooked, tilted. But everything was spinning anyway, so. Why we were even there, I don’t know. It was one of those (another word that makes no sense; ‘jyhiardo’?) things. I was the first one in, and it smelled rotten. Like dead flesh. Like a dead animal.”

  HIM: “This is like a campfire story, isn’t it?”

  HER: “But it doesn’t have much of an ending.”

  HIM: “That’s okay.”

  HER: “Well inside, there was this thing. I don’t know. It was (soundtrack garbled) and dark, but you could still see it, standing there, like ten feet tall, by the altar.”

  HIM: “What kind of thing?”

  HER: “Like a person. But too (sound cuts out)… Standing very still, but looking right at me. At first I thought it was a statue, something religious. Like Mary. But it was moving, swaying.”

  HIM: “Swaying?”

  HER: “It could have been. I think it was. My head was spinning.”

  HIM: “What did you do?”

  HER: “Nothing. I couldn’t tell what it was. It was this (sound cuts out) presence, you know? Like God’s eye but not God. Or a statue of God. That’s what I keep thinking now, a statue of God. I slowly backed up and (sound goes) could hear the voices of the others back at the jeep. I heard it start and I thought they were going to (alien-sounding word; ‘gadorigean’?) without me. I ran to them in the dark.”

  HIM: “And then what.”

  HER: “Nothing else happened. But the (screeching sound; camera vibrates) in the church, it saw me, it recognized me. What if I told you that it’s searching for me?”

  HIM: “That would be nice.”

  HER: “What would?”

  HIM: “To be hunted.”

  HER: (film gets grainy here) “What makes you say that?”

  HIM: “I’m just kidding.”

  HER: “Don’t kid because (sudden droning sound drowns out dialog) and like it saw right through me and knows everything now. Even things that haven’t happened yet.”

  HIM: “Sounds like mythology.”

  HER: “Well it’s a story, at least. That’s what you (drone sound). But it really happened. It’s a story that’s true. You better watch out. You’re the only one I’ve told it to.” She laughs.

  This seems to Haydn (the screen goes blank or black here) like some sort of threat or promise, or maybe even a little bit like an invitation. She touches his hand gently when she says it. Why she does this he can’t fathom; what she wants from him he does not know. He lets her keep her hand on his for a few moments, before withdrawing it and standing up. Whatever it is that she wants he does not have to give, although her cryptic talk makes sense to him in a strange way. As he listens to her, he thinks that maybe she reminds him of his wife or daughter. But she doesn’t. She is just some girl, some person. She smiles, and there is something beneath her smile, something that Haydn thinks he understands.

  Then everything changes again so quickly. (Like the accident?) Late into the night he awakes on the couch to the smell of what he first thinks is burning popcorn. (Only became clear during third viewing.) In the semi-light he stands up and pulls on his pants and sweatshirt, his eyes watering, coughing, and for a moment, inexplicably, he thinks he needs to save his daughter. (Not conveyed directly on screen but somehow this is the feeling we get as the audience, the feeling of Haydn’s thoughts.) Then he remembers and calls for the girl, as if he had always known her, but there are flames coming from the kitchen that stand between where he is and the bedroom. The heat pushes him back, and out of the cabin, and he finds his way in the dark to the front door, and then down the steps, (the camera moves with remarkable grace during this sequence) across the street, and to his car, and he doesn’t look back, and for a moment, in his alarmed grogginess, he believes that Hell itself is coming for him in the flames. He gets in his car and drives off, passing the screaming fire truck coming the other way.

  What will they find back there?

  Her body, charred in his bed?

  Or perhaps not, perhaps she was bad, and had started the fire herself, had waited until he was asleep on the couch, had tiptoed around and looked at his face one last time. It’s strange to be driving without direction or purpose, but he was. Clutching the steering wheel, he drives for hours into the night down through the northern Michigan openness toward Detroit, which looms 200 miles in the future like an abandoned set from a dystopian science fiction film. (This is conveyed in a non-representational way, not from images in the film but from the soundtrack, a song that’s playing while Haydn’s driving.) Every time he drives through Detroit it looks and feels worse than the time before. It’s “an experiment in suicide.” At 1 a.m. he pulls off into a welcome center and sleeps on the leaned-back seat.

  He starts up again at about 4 a.m. About an hour later, he can see the dawn creeping up in his rearview mirror, illuminating the flat, scrubby fields. It’s June; “why isn’t anything growing in them?” It doesn’t matter.

  The truth is, Haydn could travel like this forever (this part’s voiced over) through the unpoliced towns that dot the Midwest, the freedom of its unkempt highways, its unexplored woods, its abandoned barns, its empty buildings from another era of physical labor. It’s as if the real world has been abandoned to him alone. There is no war. There are no Towers. There is nothing virtual. He moves across the landscape unnoticed. Despite everything that has happened
he is Godlike in his assuredness. He ambles vacantly through the vacant city and it’s as if he’s watching himself in a movie (conveyed through something that approximates a split screen; a screen-within-a screen or layered on top of the screen) that’s supposed to be frightening but that comes across as absurd, absurd in the old existential sense where the blasted, blank landscapes are there for a reason, a real fucking reason. He finds himself at The Fist, oh yes, Mr. Joe Lewis, the 8,000 pound fist that knocked out the Nazi puppet boxer Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium on a hot day in 1938 in front of J. Edgar Hoover and Clark Gable, and the same fist that would be extended to an open hand, the open hand of a man who would befriend Schmeling in later years.

  In his car, driving out of the ruined city, the rain pounds his windshield in the night. Buildings and bridges disappear behind him, fleeing into the distance of his rearview mirror. Lightning fills the passageways of abandoned buildings and the underpasses of great highways. (And yet I recall this being depicted as lightning flashes coming from within the car itself.) On a sharp curve on I-94 he passes a night-time road construction crew, illuminated in the lightning like some three-dimensional painting, their yellow hats, their orange vests meant to protect them from swerving cars. They’re carving out the rib-caged underside of an overpass. He drives further south out of Detroit with its savage history written everywhere, the car radio playing a crackly version of a new White Stripes song that already sounds ages old.

  He takes Telegraph Road laid out like the barrel of a gun through the suburbs past Dearborn and eventually into the dark countryside past Adrian and into the little town of Monroe, with its sad middle-of-the-night flashing red stop lights, the rain coming down in heaves like something from an over-budgeted movie.

  Haydn slows at an intersection as a shadow speeds across the road, then stops. A bony dog stands at the side of the road in the pale edges of his headlights and Haydn reaches over and behind him and opens the door and waves a half-eaten candy bar beneath the dome light. In the backseat, the animal holds the candy between its paws and chews at it silently.

  He drives on out of Monroe south into the unfamiliar Michigan countryside, his window open to the sound of crickets in the fields.

  Farther south still (the film goes silent for several minutes beginning here) to the Ohio border. At the Red Roof Inn at midnight, he pays in cash and carries the lame dog bundled in his coat up the dimly lit, cracked cement stairs, to room 218.

  Everything looks fake, like props.

  The bed.

  The TV.

  The walls.

  He kicks at the tiny table to make sure it’s not painted cardboard.

  He puts the dog on the bed, turns on the lights, and shuts the door.

  In the shower, he rubs the little odorless white bar over his face and in his hair.

  In the foggy mirror he looks upon his own blank face, even and smoothed out in the steam, except for his hair, which is shockingly black, like crows’ feathers.

  And the scar above his left eye.

  On the bed the dog whimpers and licks a bloody, mutilated paw. Its nails are long, like it had been unnaturally caged and recently set free. (It’s a strange moment in the film, tone wise, with all the blood, almost exploitation-like.) Haydn sits down beside the animal and with his knife trims them back, holding each paw, one-by-one, firmly. Perhaps the dog understands because it offers no resistance. It lies on its side blinking at the ceiling. It laps up the water Haydn brings it in the frail plastic-wrapped cup from the bathroom. It sleeps beside him in the bed, twitching and fretting all night.

  He lies back on the bed and looks up at the freshly painted ceiling, and falls asleep.

  That night (this part is projected in soft-focus color) on the motel room ceiling above Haydn’s sleeping body he dreams of Something coiled black in the trunk of his car, and of the girl’s warning after she told him the story of the thing in the church, and of opening the trunk with the turn of a key, and of the Something spiraling out of the trunk like a reverse tornado.

  The next morning, the dog lets Haydn carry him out to his car and put him in the backseat. He drives out to the main street with its Dairy Queen and Pizza Hut and Tire Shop and every building that has been distractedly built, past Fetter’s Iron Works and Meijer and Dough Boys and the pharmacies and banks and oil changers, past the brown brick bank with the time and the temperature that can’t be right unless you live on Mars and the small tilted farmhouse wedged between the insurance office and the church, past the lurking hospital, square like a bunker with its startling antennas on the roof and its thin crease-like windows. He drives out to the edge of development where the new marriages and hopeless marriages flee, some age-old memory trace of butchery buried in the signs for the brand new Indian-named subdivisions, Shawnee Trace and Tecumseh Point and Arrowhead Park.

  Then the houses and businesses fall away and the road south opens up with no distractions. Haydn drives further and further still until it’s dark, a blanket of numbness (the screen seems oily at this point) covering his mind.

  Everything at the truck stop off I-75 is covered with a delicate sheen of grease.

  He is somewhere near Ashland, Kentucky.

  The food comes in fried heaps, delivered by a “somnambulist waitress with wild red hair and a torn dress.”

  Perhaps she isn’t the waitress, after all, Haydn thinks afterward.

  The coffee sets his ears ringing, and he has to strain to hear his own thoughts.

  Two tables over (this is shown in a strange Polaroid-type film; the images look smeared like wet paint) a young boy about 11 or 12 with a pierced eyebrow pokes at his food sullenly, a secret signal to his parents that he will soon be leaving their world, that even this—this innocent stopover on the way to somewhere else—is the end of something. The boy is bored with his own boredom. His clothes are brown and baggy; he’s loaded with the “symbology of discontent.” With his bare hands and thumbs Haydn could mold the boy’s high-cheek-boned, feminine face into the face of his own child’s, his daughter, lost now but visible in traces in the body of every child.

  With shaking hands Haydn fishes out his money and spills it on the cashier’s counter.

  One coin spins and spins beyond reason until he stops it with his hand. Out of his wallet slips a small piece of paper with a phone number written on it. He turns it over in his hands, and knows without knowing that the girl must have slipped it in there. Perhaps her cell phone number. Why? He imagines her doing it (we actually see her doing it so it’s hard to know whether Haydn’s imagining it or not) in the dark, as he slept. He folds it in two and returns it to his wallet. In the car the dog is awake, watching Haydn approach through the foggy window. Haydn starts the car and drives off, pulling onto the highway with all the banal order that such an act requires, gripping the steering wheel in his hands with strangulation strength.

  As the gray strip of highway gathers retreating speed behind him, he looks more than once in his rearview mirror, certain that someone is following him. Not the police. There is something bigger in store for him than that. Whatever it is, it’s getting closer. Something to end it all. Everything that was happening was tending toward this final moment.

  (Parts of what happens next are voiced over, others depicted through exposition.) That night, in southern Kentucky, Haydn pulls off the highway and takes a sorry road to the James Motel just outside of Kensington. The dog sleeps beside him in the bed.

  He feeds the dog and checks its feet, which are healing quickly. He flicks on the TV but all that comes up is the blue on-screen menu, which he can’t get to work. He goes to the window and closes the drapes, and then turns on the lamps on the desk and the bedside table.

  When he’s in the bathroom, someone pounds on the door. The dog jumps down from the bed and stands there barking. (We’re seeing this now from an impossible overhead point of view, as if the camera’s affixed to the ceiling.) Haydn comes partially out of the bathroom and stands in the doorway, waiting.
The dog quiets down, and then there is pounding again, louder, almost alarming, and the dog goes back to barking, its body shaking. It throws its head from side to side as it barks. Haydn doesn’t move. After the pounding stops, he goes to the door and looks out the peephole, but it’s fogged and he can see nothing.

  Haydn sits down on the bed and the dog jumps up next to him. He rubs the dog’s head, and wonders if it might have been the cop at the door. Or maybe the cleaning woman, but she would have let herself in. He calls the front desk and puts another night on his card. He gets Chinese that day and night, and then the next, delivered by a woman in a yellow waitress outfit with a tattoo of a red triangle on both of her forearms and it slowly occurs to him that he will not be leaving any time soon. He has enough money to stay here for a long, long time. (On third viewing I saw clearly that Haydn’s actions were creating a network of action that I myself would follow.) Before he knows it, five or six days have gone by, and he hasn’t even opened the curtains or looked outside. He doesn’t answer the door when the knocking comes again, nor does he answer the phone when it rings. If someone wants to get him, they would have to fucking come and get him, because for all he cares the world outside has disappeared, and as long as he has food and money to pay for this room he’s content not to leave, ever. He ceases to look at himself in the mirror, but sometimes catches sideways glances that reveal his growing beard, his scraggly hair, his wrinkled clothes.

  At night he sometimes wonders about the boy in the diner, which makes him think about his daughter, and her long graceful body in the coffin, and the way she covered her mouth when she laughed, and about how the dog is healing, and about the girl he had maybe left in the fire.

  He remembers her number in his wallet.

  He regrets not touching her tattoo.