“Not exactly.”
“Hookers in motion? Soft porn?”
He frowns, but in thoughtfulness, not irritation. It is maddeningly difficult to ruffle him. “It’s something new I’m trying, hard to describe.” He searches for words and disappears into the enterprise itself, cuddling the little cup of tea in both hands, sipping, breathing the jasmine steam. “A sort of photographic decomposition,” he says carefully. “The declensions of an image. Not sure if it’ll go anywhere, but New York seems interested. I’m still working on it. The subject matter keeps changing.”
The desire to touch the frail wrists that cradle the cup frightens Lucy.
“So who’s this?” she asks brusquely, flicking one finger at the boy on the workbench. The boy is wearing a Grammar uniform, he is a blow-up from one of the high school photographs, but across the surface of his body the jigsaw outline of a puzzle has been inked, black lines, interlocking tabs and slots. Some of the pieces have been removed by scissors, so that the boy has a hole where his face should be, another at the left thigh, another at the blazer pocket skimming straight through school badge and prefect’s crest, another shearing off part of one hand. The missing puzzle pieces have been stuffed into the boy’s other hand which is cupped and held up for show in a way that seems slightly frantic, slightly comic, as though, heroic school prefect that he is, he hangs grimly onto the shreds of a desiccating self. See, not a single piece lost or unaccounted for! Aren’t I a good little boy? he seems to say. In the original group photograph, Lucy suspects, this hand held a football, or a cricket bat perhaps. “Who is he?”
Charlie looks at the puzzle-piece boy as though the question has long baffled him, as though the question is the meaning of the photograph.
“Is it you?” Lucy prods.
“Sometimes.”
“And other times?”
“Another boy.”
“What happened to him?”
“Oh, he’s very much in one piece. A pillar of the community. A judge, as a matter of fact.”
“Don’t tell me,” Lucy says, rolling her eyes. “I’m on intimate terms with a couple of judges.”
“Yes,” Charlie says. “I know.”
Lucy bridles. “Jesus,” she says annoyed. “Talk about Big Brother. Next thing, we’ll need permission slips, I suppose. Have the johns sign the visitors’ book as they pass through the restaurant on their way upstairs.” She hisses and makes claws and lunges at him.
Very quietly, but swiftly, he reaches up and takes hold of her wrists. They stand braced against each other, deadlocked. Seconds pass.
“Fuck,” Lucy says in a nervous whisper. She feels a hunger for Gabriel so acute, she can scarcely breathe. “Oh fuck.”
Charlie leans in against her and kisses one of her wrists.
“Oh fuck,” Lucy says, and pulls away. She wrenches free of his grasp. “I’m going.”
At the apartment door, she turns back. He has not followed her, and the emptiness of the living room seems immense. She cannot bear it. “Who are they?” she calls out, to fill the emptiness.
He does not answer.
When she goes back to the workroom, he is sitting huddled on the floor beside the bench, rocking himself, his arms folded across his chest. He holds his sides as though he is in terrible pain, as though his ribs are bruised and flayed, as though he is stopping up the bloody openings from which the two Catherines have been ripped.
“Who are they?”
“They are part of me,” he says.
“Fuck,” she says wearily, ridiculously and violently jealous (but of what, exactly?) hardly able to stomach her own idiocy Gabriel is certainly not part of me, she tells herself Nobody is part of me and they never will be.
“I’m off,” she says savagely. “I’m working. Can’t stand around talking all day.” At the door she calls: “And keep your bloody hands to yourself. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s touchers.”
5
Yes, where the road crosses Cedar Creek, you must make a sharp turn, and follow the unpaved detour until it ends, and then you must leave your car and enter the dark wood on foot and keep going until the straight way is lost.
When I said that I came to myself in that dark rainforest, I meant it literally I blacked out. Shock hit me in a cinema full of strangers, once in London and then a second time in Sydney, in dark rooms full of those projections of moving light where Charlie regularly cobbled together time past and time still to come.
I remember once in Charlie’s apartment commenting on a large blow-up of a hooker, done not in black and white but in sepia, so that the girl looked as tawny as one of the great cats. Stripes of shadow fell across her. In standard bodysuit (long sleeves, backless, cut high over thighs and buttocks) and fishnet pantyhose, she had her hands in front of her face like rapacious claws. The image was elongated, not quite human. The mouth was distorted in a feral hiss, the bedposts were like bars of a cage.
“God,” I said, awed. “Is that Cat?”
“No.”
“Who is it?”
“I call it Wildcat.”
“It’s horrible.” Because of the way he looked at me, I said uneasily: “It’s not me, is it?”
“It’s Wildcat,” he said. “It is itself.”
That was the maddening sort of non-response Charlie hid behind when you tried to pin him down. Catherine and I expect to bump into him again in New York shortly, and when I see him I’ll insist on a proper answer. Would it shock me? The johns thought I was unshockable. Quite frankly, from that day on the railway platform in Brisbane until I lost my way in the dark, I myself thought I couldn’t be shocked. (I myself. What a riddle that is. Where, in the grab bag of costumes and masks, does the self hide out?) Insatiable, invulnerable, beyond the reach of dismay, that was what I thought. That was in the time of the Second Innocence, before Charlie, before I got tangled up in Gabriel’s riddle, before I stumbled into the way Charlie saw things. Sees things. Saw. He’s thrown it all away now, he’s stuffed the past in a bag and dumped it somewhere and shot through to New York again. He left his camera in the workroom where someone else lives, his photographs are in boxes under Sheba’s bed, he’s through with all that, he doesn’t care to see like that anymore, but he used to juggle coincidence, he used to shuffle incongruities and hold them up to the light and show that their contours matched.
This was part of his black magic. This was part of his uncanny power. Second sight, intuition, precognition, I don’t know what to call it. He himself would have had an artist’s explanation, which would have been self-deprecating and a little flippant, almost offhand, but would have hinted at bemusement too, as though he found his own magic puzzling. People are always telling me they see themselves in my work, he would shrug. People I know nothing about, people I’ve never even met, insist I’ve got their lives in my lens.
Must be my negative perspective, he’d joke. Or my overdeveloped angle of view.
At any rate, Charlie’s Inferno is part of the body of work which has now made him a cult figure in New York, and even, belatedly, in the Australian art world as well, in certain enclaves of the avant garde. Chang is a byword in some quarters. (This was after the hidden ideogram signatures were discovered on photographs, and reassessments were made. Looking through a different glass, the critics solemnly pronounced that the Chang eye was not at all a common expatriate eye, nor was it just one more migrant eye or ethnic eye. Not at all. The Chang eye sees us in its own authentically foreign light, the critics said. The Chang eye has visited and dwelt among us and has seen what it has seen. The Chang eye has integrity. The Chang eye makes us all seem wilfully blind. The Chang eye is valid in a unique and remarkable way.)
Particularly since its disappearance, the Chang eye’s validity has grown.
(Bull’s eye! Charlie would laugh. Chang-eyed and shanghaied, I’ve got them both ways.
The Chang eye sees a congregation of vapours, he would say, a jostle of hot-air balloons.)
&nb
sp; Making an effort to be suitably detached, I will say only that the particular short feature to which I refer — I once held it in my hand in videotape form — is an early example of a Chang-eye technique to which the critics, as critics will, have attached a label. “Mutational collage” is what they call it.
In the undersized overheated cinema (London or Sydney? Both, it seems to me now), some pompous doctoral candidate from Film Studies explains this to us. Of the five postmodern film-makers whose work we are privileged to experience in this festival, he says, blah blah blah …
And then it is running.
There is no soundtrack at first, and the blurred arrangement of black and grey is deliberate, I have no doubt. Oh Charlie, how typical. You and bloody Gabriel: riddles, games, puzzles, conundrums, the world as Rubik’s cube.
Charlie’s face, a finger to his lips, appears hazily on screen. Be patient, his finger says. Wait.
“Now,” his voice murmurs, and my body lurches and spins.
“Note how the shifting pattern of blackness is transgressed,” he says. (His voice is eerily disembodied, an off-stage whisper, distorted, fed through synthesisers, but it is Charlie’s voice. It is unmistakably Charlie’s voice. It reaches me from outside of time, it echoes, it causes vertigo and pain.) “Note,” he says, “how a thin line of light reaches down from the top of the screen like Gods bony finger.”
(Charlie, I plead. Charlie!
Am I sobbing?
I will him to step out from his screen.)
But he falls silent.
There is no voice now, only electronic music, and I note how radiance leaks out into the image until I can distinguish rocks and water and trees, the soft murk of Cedar Creek Falls. I note how colour bleeds into the black and white. The lens catches the braided water where it twists into a whorl around two boulders. I am looking into the eye of the whirlpool, two seconds, five, ten, the effect is hypnotic. Freeze. The water goes suddenly still. It moves again. Now, as though swaying or drunk, I seem to lose my footing and perspective, painlessly, languidly, and I seem to slide down the outside of the whorl and see the translucent funnel in profile.
(How did you do that, Charlie? At what dangerous angle, on slippery rock, did you and your camera lie to get that shot? What magnification was used? Did you get drenched? Did you slide on the moss?)
The image goes still again: portrait of a waterspout, an impossible aqueous ballerina en pointe.
(Very clever, Charlie, though you’re making me lose my sense of balance. Which you always did, damn it. You always did.)
Vertigo drains out of me, colour is drained from the image.
Then, as subtly as a spill of ink disperses itself in clear oil, the cone of water is smudging at the edges, growing fur, putting forth angular roughness. It is no longer water, but something else. What? It looks vaguely medieval, or more ancient, like a diagram from a book on the plumbing of Roman bathhouses. Text appears at the bottom of the screen: Sandro Botticelli’s drawing of Dante’s Inferno.
I am hanging in space, watching the funnel of hell entire, and it begins to spin like a top, faster faster, so that I grab the arms of my chair to stave off giddiness. Mercifully the dervish-thing slows down, it stops again, I have the sensation of flying toward the vortex, the zoom takes me closer, and where before the corded water of Cedar Creek Falls made its screw turns, now I see the spiral ledges of something like an open-cut mine. It is a black-and-white image, swarming with ants, no, with people, I am swooping down into the slope which is spinning again, I feel nausea, streaks of colour are spinning past me like spittle, I clutch blindly at armchair supports, I stabilise things, I slow down, I am now in the eighth circle of hell.
Get off here, Lucy, Charlie whispers. (He speaks silently now; privately; for my ears alone.) Get off where the two gowned figures stand, one in scarlet and one in purple. Yes, you have your bearings now, he smiles, you recognise this famous landscape of paint and charcoal on white vellum. It is Sandro Botticelli, yes, from the drawings housed in the Berlin and the Vatican museums, the ones in a book on my shelves, the tourist’s illustrated guide to Dante’s hell.
(You remember you commented, Lucy? You remember you thought of Botticelli?
I remember, Charlie. Do you remember what I said when I picked up your videotape? Beckett and Monty Python, I said. I wasn’t so far out, was I?
Pay attention, Lucy. Two gentlemen are waiting for you.)
Here, then, are Dante and Virgil. Beneath their frail rock bridge, boiling excrement bubbles, froths, cords itself, piss-curls, shit-swirls, slips, slops, turd-twirls, putresces, a foul slippery flush of cosmic diarrhoea; and here the Flatterers (recyclers of sewage, panderers to Presidents and Prime Ministers and Supreme Commanders, flaunters of the Queen’s Birthday honours) here they cavort in acrobatic, scatological pain.
Now the camera distances itself, backing away from the stench, so that the striations and rocky niches and rock ladders, the whole diabolic honeycomb, can again be seen entire. Colours stream down the funnel and are sucked out like water running down a plughole (the flushing of hell?). Mutations again; something subtle is going on, too minute to decode. Is that still Dante’s and Botticelli’s hell or an open-cut mine?
(Everything reminded you of the quarry, didn’t it, Charlie? It was a Venus flytrap, it sucked you down.
Wait, Lucy Wait.)
Wait. Wait. I move slowly closer, riding the eye of the camera like a gull on a slipstream of air. The scene in my gull’s eye is steady, motionless, its colours gone: the same pits and ledges and rock pockets, the same ladders busy with tormented souls, but it is no longer Botticelli. It is the same pit all right, and yet it is also another, a black-and-white photograph that looks familiar.
(Do you recognise it, Lucy? Charlie whispers.
Is it the quarry?
Not yet, he says.)
Text flickers across the base of the screen:
Since a peasant found the first nuggets there in 1980, a mountain has been reduced to a hollow 600 feet deep and half a mile wide. It has yielded 42 tons of gold. Bars, brothels and stores have sprung up nearby; 100,000 people now live alongside the pit. Photographer Sebastiao Salgado captured this image of the Serra Pelada goldmine in northern Brazil, where fortune-seekers have moved a mountain on their backs.
(New York Times Magazine, June 7, 1987)
(Okay, I say. The photograph on the wall in your living room. Yes, he says, you remember it now. You remember that you thought of Dante, and I’m willing to bet you thought of various other landscapes of nightmare too, of the desolate craters made by desert storms, of mines and quarries and clearcuts and man-made hells. You were idly riffling through an old magazine in your upstairs room, and there it was again: the traffic up and down the ladders of hell, the fanatic eyes. You closed the magazine quickly. Remember that, Lucy?)
The camera moves slowly across the screes and pocked walls of the pit, pausing here and there so that first one tormented face then another fills the screen in stark black and white. At the point when I cannot bear those maddened dilated eyes a second longer, the pit recedes, a languidly falling ball. I am somewhere high and suspended, uninvolved, a remote high-tech bomber pilot, a spectator, a newscaster in the first circle.
This respite is brief. But when I descend the scarp of the pit again, something has changed, something I can’t quite pinpoint, a change so slight that at first only a sense of mild disorientation assails me. How shall I explain it? It’s the kind of malaise you feel on returning to a home that has been burgled. No vandalism, nothing spectacular, but your eye snags on a hook near the back door that should have a coat on it. Odd, you think, pausing. But then you shrug; probably you hung the coat in your bedroom. A drawer in the kitchen is slightly open. You close it, frowning a little. A tiny splinter of unease scratches one corner of your mind, but it’s nothing, probably nothing, certainly nothing of consequence. When you see your lover’s running shoes and his pillowcase on the living room sofa, you are annoyed (How
many times have I asked that man …?) but you are also puzzled. Pillowcase? Why the pillowcase? Then you notice the space where the television set should be. And then it hits you.
In the same gradual way, looking at the black-and-white still, I come to realise I am no longer looking at the Serra Pelada mine in Brazil, but at the granite cut that surrounds the railway station of Newtown in inner Sydney I am, at last, in the quarry It is difficult to ascertain just when this photograph would have been taken, but clearly it was some time after the squatters moved in, after the buildings were burned out and the digging began, after the construction of the warren of tunnels that turned Newtown and Redfern into something resembling the Pueblo cliff dwellings of New Mexico. Probably the photograph was taken at about the very time the newspapers began to speak of the quarry. Just as I recognise one of the places where Old Fury used to scavenge for food, colour surfs in like a fast king tide, relentless, a splash of all the harsh bright sunstruck colours of Sydney.
(So, Charlie, what’s this? The Big Dipper tour of the quarry? Visceral involvement for the audience? You want to induce actual nausea?)
I am in the pit, at the heart of a fisheye lens, and I feel dizzy because of the languid curving zoom, as though the lens and I are swinging at the end of a rope. I am on a ladder that will not keep still, I am going to fall. Other bodies on other ladders are falling with me, this is unbearable, I close my eyes.
(Stop it, I cry silently. Stop it, Charlie.
Be patient, Lucy. Wait. I haven’t told you anything yet.)
Alone in the dark, sheepish, I remind myself that I am, after all, not on a ladder but very comfortably settled in a chair. There are people around me. Charlie himself is in New York. I open my eyes.
How long has the screen been spinning like this, a giddy blur? Am I still on the ladder? I hold tightly to the arms of my chair, my ladder. When the image comes to rest, the whole scene has been turned on its side, and from this perspective, the ladder looks like a railway line with someone lying prostrate on the tracks, other figures bending over it, watching. No faces can be seen. The figures are cowled and stooped, the mood is stark but also mysterious: these hooded forms are keepers of a horrible secret.
The Last Magician Page 6