Amnesiascope: A Novel (12 page)

By the fourth day of the auditions I realized I had to try and find the real Jasper. I didn’t have the courage to tell Viv there was a real Jasper, because she would want to know how I could have let her slip away in the first place and also about the labia ring business, which didn’t sound like the kind of thing someone just confesses in a bar. For several nights at the Feverish I waited for her to show up. I asked various people if they had seen her, and wasn’t entirely surprised that no one had the slightest idea who I was talking about. The waitress who had served us our wine that night didn’t remember, no matter how much I harassed her, nor did the bartender, no matter how much I badgered him, as though she was my hallucination, as much an illusion as Justine—the ragged doll muse who enticed me into her room high at the top of the tower of inspiration and then slammed the door, took the key, and folded the stairs up in a suitcase when she reached the bottom.

The final night before the shoot, as I was about to give up on Jasper and leave, I was distracted by a conversation behind me. People at nearby booths were talking about this and that, and there was nothing about this one conversation in particular, about the talkers or the tone or volume of their conversation, to necessarily draw my attention … but when my ears caught a familiar reference I couldn’t place at first, I had to listen several minutes before I realized the movie they were talking about was
The Death of Marat
. I turned to peer over my shoulder, thinking maybe it was someone from the newspaper. But it was a man and woman I had never seen before, and they looked back at me as if to say, What’s your problem? The more they talked and the more I listened, the more it sounded—Well, the more it sounded like they weren’t talking about the review I had written, but a real movie. The more I listened, the more it sounded as if … well, they were talking about the movie as if they had seen it. They were talking about scenes I never mentioned in the review—scenes, in other words, that never existed in my imagination, let alone on a screen. “The use of lighting in the monastery sequence was extraordinary,” the guy said. Monastery sequence? I thought to myself, truly alarmed, until finally I lurched to my feet from the table, almost tipping it over; people at other tables looked up. “I guess the whole damned city’s in on the joke!” was all I could sputter at them. “Jerk,” I heard the waitress behind me murmur as I left. “Asshole,” confirmed the bartender.

I’m not exactly sure how, since I tried to be circumspect about it, but soon it seemed the whole newspaper had heard about my new vocation as a writer of pornographic movies. The Cabal in particular was fascinated. Ventura read my tarot and drew huge life lessons from the event. Struggling to remain non-judgmental, he never directly addressed the question of whether it represented a major turning point, or just my final fall from whatever state of grace one could consider my life to have occupied. …

There wasn’t going to be anything glamorous about the filming of
White Whisper
. Given its length and a budget that was almost visible to the naked eye, it would have to be shot in one night, with every scene afforded no more than one or two takes, maybe three if we thought we could push it. The actresses had only a few hours of rehearsal in Viv’s loft, with me reading Jasper’s lines, since it wasn’t until the last possible minute that we finally reconciled ourselves to casting Catwoman, who had the personality of a cat if not the labia ring. The day before the shoot, Viv, Veroneek and I frantically scoured the city scouting locations in abandoned factories and dingy alleys, casing rundown rooms that were distinguished mostly by the tell-tale signs, on rumpled beds and stained floors, of other productions that clearly had been even less elegant than ours. I admit that as each place smelled worse than the other of piss and semen, it gave me some pause about the whole project. I admit that for a moment or two I felt downright disreputable, just the way the New Paragons would have wanted me to. We finally decided to go with one of the Glow Lofts that appear after sundown in the industrial district east of Downtown, a white windowless cavern like the inside of a huge egg, with curved corners and cubbyholes lining the perimeter that could instantly be converted into dressing rooms, rehearsal spaces, an office and kitchen. Its preeminent virtue, however, was that it didn’t smell.

On the big night, the minute the sun fell and the loft came into view, Viv’s crew backed the vans up to the loading dock and moved in. Within the hour the dolly tracks were laid and the cameras and lights and booms were up as well as the set—a makeshift artist’s studio with easels and a paint table and a platform where the models posed. The crew was Viv’s usual circle of bohemians and drug addicts. The cameraman was a big burly Texan named Harris and the makeup woman a former “cosmetics technician” from a local fashion magazine; the paintings were supplied by one of Viv’s ex-boyfriends. The producers were Lydia and Niles, a wife-husband team from New York who used to be in the theater. Lydia was intelligent, dedicated and pleasant, and Niles was a putz of the first order. Viv, Veroneek and I were all saddened to learn Lydia had lovingly tattooed Niles’ name on what presumably had been an otherwise perfectly acceptable bottom. Niles expounded on his vast knowledge of everything from art direction to makeup to sound editing, walking around the set in a stupid baseball cap barking meaningless orders into his walkie-talkie and quickly managing to insult Viv’s ex—who only did the paintings in the first place as a favor to Viv—and grope all the women on the set he didn’t happen to be married to, the most prominent of whom was our star. Waiting for our other actresses to show up, Viv decided to shoot the film’s last scene first in which Amy Brown, as the repressed painter who comes to exchange roles with her model, stands naked on the model’s platform; as everyone prepared the shot, a simple zoom-in on Amy glowing in the lights like a trailer-trash Modigliani, Niles was determined to give her his personal supervision. In and out of the scene he darted between takes to “fix” Amy’s hair, constantly brushing a curl from her brow as Lydia grew more and more visibly enraged, Niles’ name blazing away on her ass.

Probably the only reason it didn’t escalate into an out-and-out marital crisis was that Lydia and Viv were currently preoccupied with a bigger problem. Catwoman hadn’t shown up. After several hours trying to track her down Viv finally placed a frantic phone call to the casting agent with the gangrenous hickey on his chest who, just before midnight, lined up another actress. Thirty minutes later Viv came over to say later the new actress had arrived and was looking over the script: “We have a new Jasper,” she announced, an odd look on her face.

“You have an odd look on your face,” I said.

“Well, it’s funny.”

“What’s funny?”

“She really
is
Jasper.”

“What do you mean she really is Jasper?”

“I mean, her name is Jasper.” And sure enough, sitting in a chair in the shadows as though she appeared out of nowhere, the way she appeared out of nowhere the night I met her, was Jasper. She wore a different dress, simpler and looser—an altogether less imposing incarnation, but as cool and slightly ethereal as she was at the Feverish, my script in her hand rather than a glass of wine. Viv introduced us, and Jasper just looked up from the script and said, I like the part about the labia ring.

You don’t happen to have one, do you? Viv laughed.

I’ll surprise you, Jasper laughed. Viv laughed some more. They both laughed together and then, looking at the expression on my face, laughed some more. In no time at all they seemed to be getting along famously, and then Viv returned to the set and I sat with Jasper trying to explain the script. I was explaining the character to her, which is to say the character I stole from her in the first place; I was explaining the things the character said—which is to say the things she originally said. She gave absolutely no indication of realizing any of this. She gave no indication of ever having met me at all. She read the lines like they were completely new to her, like she had never heard them before; she even analyzed and interpreted them as she went along, trying out different inflections. “I don’t like tits,” she said, “I’d rather say breasts.” Given the circumstances, I told her she could say just about whatever she wanted as long as it followed the general drift, and that we were going to have cue cards and someone to prompt her, so there was nothing to worry about. Oh no, she insisted, I’ll learn the lines, I’m a very quick study. Finally I left her alone to go over the script by herself. I was happy to leave her to it. There was something about her now that unnerved me, as though the night I met her she had stepped out of my id but tonight she stepped out of someone else’s. A few minutes later she was in makeup, still poring over her lines, and soon we were ready for her. The minutes passed as everyone waited; in the meantime we were shooting everything else that could be shot—scenes with the other actresses, close-ups of paint brushes, close-ups of canvases with Amy and canvases without Amy, close-ups of thighs that looked like lunar plains and breasts that looked like spheres over deserts. Viv kept going back to the makeup room to check in on Jasper and kept coming back without her. The crew grew mutinous.

Jasper finally appeared. She glided onto the set like she did into the Feverish. She moved as though not walking through the real world but through the corridors of her imagination, where she might pick up one of its artifacts, casually admire it and then, bored, toss it over her shoulder. She didn’t so much drop her robe as let it slide off her, ascending naked to the model’s platform; she took off everything but the cat ring on her finger. The crew, men and women alike, were stunned by the sight of her. She was impossibly lush; you could practically hear last night’s semen still sloshing around in her. I had two reactions to her. The first was that I wanted to fuck her, because not to fuck her would be to insult God and slander the divine order of things, and the second was I wanted to get the fuck away from her, because it was about to become clear, as I suspected from the first, that she was absolutely crazy, the Abyss Walking like a Woman, madness so generic it practically had a bar code on it.

We had written all of her lines on cue cards, and script assistants were at the ready to prompt her. We began filming. She got through the first line of her monologue—the one I had transcribed practically word for word from that night at the Feverish, about picking up the guy at the art gallery and tying him to his bed—and then forgot the second line. The script assistant prompted her but she refused to take the cue, asking instead that we begin again. Viv called cut, we took a break. After a couple of minutes Viv called action again and we started from the top; Jasper once again got through the first line and once again forgot the second, and once again refused to take the cue. Once again Viv called cut. When Viv again called action, Jasper now forgot her first line; the cue card was waving in front of her face but she refused to read it; Viv called cut, we took a break, Viv called action, Jasper began: “I was at a gallery the other night, thinking I might. …” She shook her head. Now Viv told Harris the camera man to just keep rolling. Jasper started again. “The other night, at this gallery, I was there and—” Over and over she started and stopped, the camera constantly rolling: “At this gallery the other … at this … I was at this gallery where I thought. … I—” Suddenly she dissolved into sobs. It’s all right, it’s all right, Viv assured her, and Jasper nodded Yes, yes, OK, and she took it from the top and actually got several lines into her speech before she lost the train of thought, at which point she collapsed naked on the platform like a woman having a fit, before suddenly leaping back to her feet: “OK, OK, OK! I’m all right, really, I can do it,” and beginning again at the top, camera still rolling, she once more got several lines in before everything fell apart.

By now Harris the Texan and the rest of the crew just wanted to rip the film out of the camera, tie a noose and toss it over the highest rafter. Every breakdown pushed them closer to vigilante justice. Viv was cool beyond belief. People were screaming at her and she was making fifty decisions a minute while always keeping her eye on the big task at hand, with the calm authority of someone so comfortably in charge she never had to raise her voice or make a demonstration of her power. Now I heard her voice in my ear. It was a soothing voice; she was smiling a little too broadly, beaming a little too brightly. In the monitor behind her I could see Jasper pulling on her robe and lighting a cigarette. “What?” I said uneasily.

“Well. …” I didn’t know why but I already had this feeling Viv was about to say something very peculiar. “I think we’ve gotten as much out of Jasper as we’re going to get. We almost have enough to intercut with scenes of Amy. But we still don’t have Amy’s scenes with Jasper. …”

“Shoot Amy’s scenes in close-up,” I suggested helpfully. “Someone else can read Jasper’s lines off camera.”

“Exactly.” Her calm was as terrifying as it was awe-inspiring.

Suddenly I saw the light. “Forget it.”

“You haven’t even heard what I’m going to say.”

“Forget it.”

“You haven’t even—!” Furiously, she spun on her heels and began to stomp away.

“All right,” I succumbed, “tell me. …”

“Never mind.”

“Tell me.” This was Viv’s genius; I was now begging her to tell me this idea I knew I wasn’t going to like.

“All you need to do is read with her,” Viv said, fists on her hips.

“Why can’t someone else?”

“Fine. We’ll get someone else.”

“You could do it.”

“Fine. I’ll do it. I don’t have anything else to do right now, except direct a movie.”

“Veroneek can do it.”

“Fine, Veroneek can do it. I just thought maybe
you
would do it, that you would
want
to do it, because you wrote these lines and you understand them. I thought you would be able to see how much better it is for Amy to act with someone who knows how to read the lines and what they mean.”