“‘That part’s important. Put more there,’ she’ll say.
“‘What part?’
“‘About how to use it. The weapon. In case we forget and someone else has to.’
“As absurd as it is—for who is ever going to want to hear about this or any other incident with the helicopter?—I’ll tell her I will and then keep playing the part about the violent kick of the catapult, and how it shook the roof, and how the third cinder block leapt out of the throwing tin, and how after the block crashed through the pilot’s window the helicopter just slowed down and spiraled around slowly and fell. It had happened so many times before that we didn’t even run to the edge and look over it like we did the first dozen times we shot something out of the sky. Jesus, how many helicopters could there be? We had brought down at least 40 or 50. Then one night John said to me—he was smoking like he always did at night—the reason there are so many is because it’s the same one.
“I’ll feel the screen contracting and expanding, like a breathing lung. I’ll shift from me to a character playing me to a character who’s playing someone who’s playing me and then back to me again.
“I’ll ask John B. what he means, though I had thought it myself before. That’s why the helicopter always looked the same, and why it returned to the same spot and hung there like an emblem and waited to be taken again and again out of the sky.
“‘Have you ever noticed how it always comes at the same time of day, from the same direction, and how we always hit it on the third try? I’m just asking.’
“‘I guess you’re right,’ I’ll say, pretending that I had never thought of this before. We don’t know where the helicopters are from, or if they are friendly or not, but when they come too close we shoot them down just to be safe. These are real weapons. They kick back hard when you fire to remind you of what you’re fucking with.
“Some of us believe that the real fighting has been over for a long time, and that this is just what’s left. None of us has actually seen, as far as I can tell, anything organized enough to be called a war, or a documentary about a war, and we have never been attacked in a serious way. So that’s not war, is it? We think there must have been a war, or at least some kind of terrible fighting, and that we are what’s left, and that there are probably other people like us scattered around the land. But we’ve never been instructed to actually go out and kill, or pretend to kill, anyone.
“If we could escape the city maybe we could find out. But every time we try to get out we are shot with bullets or blanks, either by those trying to keep us in or trying to keep us out. We don’t know.
“Katy will get up, flick her burned-down cigarette out the window, and tell me it sounds too much like a journal or a memoir, too much like the private experiences of an uninterested and maybe coerced observer. She’ll ask me don’t I want to be a writer? Don’t I want to be a sound man? She tells me to put more detail in, more about the weather, the smells, the bug bites, the bats, the black smoke that rises continually on the horizon like some forever burning underground oil field, more about the secret romances, the way this building seems haunted, the bodies we found buried beneath the floor of the boiler room, Stu’s suicide last month. She has more suggestions, but all I can notice are the silver rings on her fingers, the shape of her hips beneath her fatigues. She is someone I could hold, on screen or off.
“And then Stu’s last words will come back to me, what he said the day before he hung himself. ‘The only way to get out of here is to kill someone.’ And what he said was just the boldest, bravest statement of what we were all thinking, because maybe we all had this one shared memory, this one fact. But the secret beneath that truth involved a sacrifice that no one was brave enough to try yet. And yet this one question was slowly forming in all our minds: by killing another, could you escape unmolested out of the city? But why did we think this? Was it part of the documentary, if that’s what this is? A sort of twist that’s so unreasonable that it actually makes sense. At night I’ll lie in my bunk and work out the formula, which in the dark is perfectly logical. In exchange for escape, you need to kill someone. How or why this is so doesn’t matter to me; it’s just a brute fact that rises up in my head and won’t go away.
“When Stu hung himself we all knew why. It was because he was so good. Too good. It was because Stu, he would rather kill himself than someone else. He’s listed special in the credits for this fact alone. Your name will be there too, but for a different reason,” Laing says, looking at me there in that Wisconsin motel room with the sort of intensity that destroys the distinction between love and hate. “And your daughter’s name. And the names of the missing children.
“The truth is, my memory is better than anyone knows. It seemed the right thing to do, to lie about it, when they first brought me here. After all, I didn’t know them, and how could I believe what they told me? During the interrogation, as they poked me gently through the cage with sticks (method acting crossing over into something else) I knew they wouldn’t kill me, and I could have told them the truth: that I remembered. Not enough to mean anything, but enough to be sure that there was something before this place. Just images and sounds: A girl’s hand in mine. A lightning storm in the summer. The phone ringing in the middle of the night. Human ashes. Men and women falling from the Towers. The house with the old woman down the dusty road near where I grew up. A friendly dog that suddenly turned on me and seized my ankle at a picnic. The flapping of a kite stuck in a tree at that same picnic, a scene from a movie bathed in blue light with a Well-Dressed Man. I remembered these things, and others, but I haven’t told anyone about them. I keep two sets of tapes, one that I play for Katy to prove to her that I am keeping details so that we can have a collective memory, and one that I keep hidden that describes what I really do remember.
“And then the day will come, the last day that things will hold together. It’s our turn to patrol today, and John comes in, ready to go.
“‘Your turn to carry this,’ he’ll say, tossing me the duffel bag with yellow flags. The tops of his hands and arms will be shiny and hairless, scarred from some burning that he can’t remember.
“‘How do you know you were burned, John? Maybe they were always like that.’
“‘These scars,’ he’ll say, pointing to his shiny skin, ‘are from fire. You’re not born like that.’
“This is pure reality now. Our lines are written as we speak them.
“I’ll open the bag and count the flags. We’ll take the east stairs down, past the endless undecipherable graffiti in its faded yellow and blue and brown foreignness, and step out into the warm sunlight. To our right is the library, and beyond that the iron gate that leads out and into the city.
“We are going to see if the flags that we placed last week are still there. They usually aren’t. Usually, they have been replaced with red ones, and because of this, and also because the helicopters that come sometimes drop red leaflets with foreign words printed on them, we have come to associate red with dangerous strangers. We will find a spot about a mile away from campus—as far as it is known to be safe to go—and put the flags, stick first, into the ground of some vacant lot or grassy area or yard of an abandoned house. We will come back one week later to see if they have been taken or rearranged. We call this peace talks. We call this negotiation.
“In fact, we are going there now, to the house they said was mine, to the backyard beneath the giant maple tree with the rope swing where last week we planted ten yellow flags in a straight line in the weedy yard that stretches in a narrow swath between the back of the house and the garage with its sagging roof.
“There are no indications of other creatures—human or otherwise—as we make our way down the crumbling highway, in parts overgrown with weeds and dry grass. The enormous street lights could be but can’t be movie lights. We’ll carry our guns in our hands, cocked, because we are supposed to, because last year Valerie and her partner Leonard went out on one such patrol and didn’t
come back and were found, their faces smashed-in with rocks.
“We’ll follow the highway and walk up the sloping exit ramp whose green sign we cannot read. There will be, in fact, nothing we can read. Not the signs. Not the newspapers in the grocery stores. Not the labels on food. Not the books in the library. We feel that we ought to be able to read these things, that they are, or were, part of our world, that because we can talk with each other in a language that we all know, we should be able to decipher the written symbols around us. But none of us can. They are just hash marks, severe lines in black against white, a secret code of a lost civilization.
“John is one of those who believes it is our own language that we have forgotten, that along with forgetting about our past we have also forgotten how to read.
“‘But we can still talk, John,’ I’ll say, the sun beating down on us like some big-budget movie production lamp. ‘We haven’t forgotten how to talk.’
“‘That’s because we learned that first. It was more deeply embedded in who we are. Like our basic personalities. These aren’t things you forget.’
“The rest of us, on the other hand, think that it’s the world that changed, not us. That the language around us doesn’t mean anything because it never did—it’s not our language—and that if we saw our language, we would recognize it. We’ve tried to write, but it’s just scribble; we know how to make the sounds with our mouths, but not with our hands. It should be easy to do. It should be easy to take what we say and put it on paper, but we don’t know how.
“‘Is this the place?’ John will say. We’ll be in front of the house spray painted with an enormous snake that’s eating its tail. The chimney has been pulled down, like all the other chimneys on all the other houses, but this time they have left the rope amidst the bricks, like a collapsed lasso. It’s rare to find the ropes, and John coils it up and puts it in his bag.
“The spray paint on the bricks, it looks wet, and when I touch it the tips of my fingers turn red. I’ll hold my hand up to John to warn him and we quickly turn to leave. But it is too late. Touching the red paint was the wrong thing to do, and the very first shot goes through John’s neck and he leaps in the air and falls to the ground, twisted on his back like an S. So much blood is already out of him, pooling at my feet like someone else’s victory. I’ll run for the street and keep waiting for the shot. Impossibly, I worry about hurting my face or breaking my nose when I fall. I worry about not being able to stop myself from falling down the wrong way, and scuffing my elbows or breaking my wrist. But there is no shot, and after only a few minutes I am exhausted but keep running at the ramp that takes me back onto the highway.
“I’ll ditch my gun and my duffel bag. I’ll throw off my jacket. Every channel in my head is opening up full, screaming. I am running for only one thing now. For Katy. I want to touch her tattoo. I want to make her not sad. I want to make the tapes better, and so full of mystery that she will smile at me, and offer me one of her cigarettes, and the orange sun will finally creak through, and there will be the green of trees, of willows even, and the touch of her fingers to mine as she cups the match between us…” and here Laing ends as everything must end and of the missing children they have not been found as far as I know, even all these years after my interlude with Laing in Wisconsin. Of that last meeting I can say that there was a tension in the air and for the first time I felt the old fear return, the sort of fear that passes away with childhood, creeping up my spine and looking back on it now I attribute it to Laing. My version of what happened at our last meeting—and I say happened because something did happen and I say version because everything is a version of itself—is that Laing thought he had let me in on a secret and that just before I was to depart he feared I might not keep it and so thought about threatening or hurting me, or worse. In other words the fear I felt was based on the real possibility that Laing might do to me what he had done to the films and as I’m writing this I recall a detail that seemed so obvious, so utterly obvious, that I hadn’t even considered it: the collapsed metal barrel in the scrubby field adjacent to the motel. I’m ashamed of the wild ideas that fill my head. The barrel (that smelled of rust), the destroyed films, the missing children, that’s all speculation, so remote from the banality of Laing, so fantastical. No, it’s not the barrel that haunts me, or what might have been burned in it, or the HAVE YOU SEEN ME? flyer I found in Laing’s room. Not even the death of Emily. What haunts me is that I was successful. One cannot absolve oneself, of course. It takes another. Absolution—the absolution of moral sins—must be granted by another and I remember driving away from that place and having the strange feeling that it was all a set and that it was being torn down or deconstructed the moment I left, the workers coming out with their sweaty faces from their hiding places, the hidden mics removed from the back of the throne chair and Laing himself undergoing a procedure right there on the motel room bed to extricate his face from the mask which had been sewn across it and screaming for something far stronger than bourbon and yet… of course I knew that nothing of the sort was happening. Laing and I had entered each other’s lives for three brief days, and yet during that time something—someone—had been resurrected, I was sure of it and I floored it, I can tell you, I put the pedal to the metal in that crappy van while the magic still held and tear-assed it back to Pennsylvania knowing beyond reason that those three days in hell (spent with a spirit in prison, as if Laing could be called anything but that) had opened up something new and brief and astonishing and that Emily would be sitting there in the sunlight at the kitchen table waiting for me with a sly smile as if to say: Father, you are in it now, you are really in it now.
READ YOUR WAY TO ADVENTURE
And share the joys and frustrations, triumphs and defeats of other cinephiles.
If you would like to receive, in the mail, a short, typed, personal note from the archives of Roberto Acestes Laing, as well as a strip of 16 mm film frames from his obscure cinema collection, simply scissor out the form below and mail it directly to:
Nicholas Rombes
5589 Villa France Avenue
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
Please allow 2-4 weeks for delivery by mail.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement to the editors of The Rumpus, Necessary Fiction, and Fiddleblack, for publishing excerpts, often in much different form than they appear here.
The writing of this novel was greatly assisted by support from the University of Detroit Mercy.
Thank you to Andrea Monheim, Lisa Rombes-Smith, Julia Kristeva, Denise Stull, Wendy and Steve Kern, Eric Obenauf, Eliza Jane Wood-Obenauf, Robert Pollard, Sandy Williams, Carlos Wieder, and Andrzej Żuławski.
For Niko and Maddy.
For Lisa.
Also by Two Dollar Radio
CRYSTAL EATERS
A NOVEL BY SHANE JONES
“A powerful narrative that touches on the value of every human life, with a lyrical voice and layers of imagery and epiphany.” —BuzzFeed
“[Jones is] something of a millennial Richard Brautigan.” —Nylon
A QUESTIONABLE SHAPE
A NOVEL BY BENNETT SIMS
“[A Questionable Shape] is more than just a novel. It is literature. It is life.” —The Millions
“Presents the yang to the yin of Whitehead’s Zone One, with chess games, a dinner invitation, and even a romantic excursion.”
—The Daily Beast
MADE TO BREAK
A NOVEL BY D. FOY
“With influences that range from Jack Kerouac to Tom Waits and a prose that possesses a fast, strange, perennially changing rhythm that’s somewhat akin to some of John Coltrane’s wildest compositions.” —HTML Giant
RADIO IRIS
A NOVEL BY ANNE-MARIE KINNEY
“Kinney is a Southern California Camus.” —Los Angeles Magazine
“[Radio Iris] has a dramatic otherworldly payoff that is unexpected and triumphant.” —New York Times Book Review
, Editors’ Choice
THE ORANGE EATS CREEPS
A NOVEL BY GRACE KRILANOVICH
National Book Foundation 2010 ‘5 Under 35’ Selection.
NPR Best Books of 2010.
The Believer Book Award Finalist.
“Krilanovich’s work will make you believe that new ways of storytelling are still emerging from the margins.” —NPR
ANCIENT OCEANS OF CENTRAL KENTUCKY
A NOVEL BY DAVID CONNERLEY NAHM
“Wonderful… Remarkable… it’s impossible to stop reading until you’ve gone through each beautiful line, a beauty that infuses the whole novel, even in its darkest moments.” —NPR
HOW TO GET INTO THE TWIN PALMS
A NOVEL BY KAROLINA WACLAWIAK
“One of my favorite books this year.” —The Rumpus
“Waclawiak’s novel reinvents the immigration story.”
—New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
THE CAVE MAN
A NOVEL BY XIAODA XIAO
WOSU (NPR member station) Favorite Book of 2009.
“As a parable of modern China, [The Cave Man] is chilling.”
—Boston Globe
THE PEOPLE WHO WATCHED HER PASS BY
A NOVEL BY SCOTT BRADFIELD
“Challenging [and] original… A billowy adventure of a book. In a book that supplies few answers, Bradfield’s lavish eloquence is the presiding constant.” —New York Times Book Review
“Brave and unforgettable. Scott Bradfield creates a country for the reader to wander through, holding Sal’s hand, assuming goodness.”
The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing Page 15