Amnesiascope: A Novel (17 page)

Now I try to answer more regularly, though there’s no way to keep up with the stream of cards that keep coming. I got forty last month; in the last twenty-four hours I’ve received nineteen. She’s literally writing them faster than I can read them, and I’m running out of space to put them. The drawers of my desk are crammed, the closet is full, I’m boxing them up and renting storage bins. I’m shipping them off to far lands because L.A. can’t hold all of them. On the front of the cards are pictures of cats, elephants, trains, boats built in the shape of guitars, punk riots in London, a river that cuts through a valley like sulfur, a woman in a black dress clutching her child watching a ship on the ocean in the distance, a man on fire plummeting to earth, two apparently naked bodies folded into each other beneath a bed sheet, and a gallery of familiar icons, Billie Holiday, Tom Mix, Marcel Duchamp, Miles Davis, Cab Calloway, Greta Garbo, Albert Einstein, Bob Marley. “How do you define culture?” she asked early on. “Appealing to the intellect is always a selective process, isn’t it?” Lately, however, the tone has changed. “I’m twenty-five, long-legged, large-breasted, golden-haired, green-eyed,” she taunts. “I’ve got a Ph.D. in American literature, I act and model part-time. I’m a photographer and filmmaker and I’ve got my pilot’s license and fly cross-country solo. I’ve never been married, hence never divorced, never had either a child or an abortion, never been engaged. I’ve never made love. I’m a virgin two times.”

I’ve gotten the order of K’s cards hopelessly mixed up. I warned K that our correspondence is bound to be one-sided; nonetheless she has seduced me somehow, even as the continually arriving cards raise certain questions in my mind. Is she obsessed? Is she insane? Is she homicidal? Will she appear any moment at my door? Nonetheless from the distance of Virginia she has found the secret passage into the secret room of my life. My life’s secret room has been empty for some time, like my life’s literary room. From time to time I pass through the public room, but over the last several years, since the Quake and the backfires and meeting Viv, I’ve lived almost wholly in the private room, with communications issued from wherever it is I write the movie reviews. Since the secret room has been empty my life has been much calmer, but it’s also true I’ve come to miss it; and I’ve come to realize that it’s only when I’m either in the secret room, or when the secret room is completely empty not only of myself but guests, that I’m entirely in the present. Now I think that maybe I hear sounds coming from the secret room. I wonder if they’re K’s. I wonder if K has invaded the secret room and that unsettles me, not only because I have no idea what she’s really like—I’m skeptical of the leggy, large-breasted, green-eyed description—but because I have no idea what password she used to get in, among all the words scribbled in tiny writing on the back of countless postcards. She’s becoming a figment of my imagination, like
The Death of Marat
, and as a result of her invasion I’ve been thrown a step back into the future. Our correspondence, one-sided or not, has both the utter innocence and profound danger of secret life.

What I find both irresistible and frightening about my correspondence with K is that, inside my secret room, she is the secret, not me. Though I’ve come to feel I can trust her, I still can’t be entirely certain in the dark what weapons she might hold or whether the glint in her eye is desire or murder. So I push her away with one hand and pull her to me with another, as I’ve done with so many women; in the secret room I want to have my way with K as she’s tied and bound. I want to walk away from her after I’m finished until whenever I’m ready to come back, and not have to think about her in between, because if I did my conscience would be tormented, and long ago I became so tired of all the things and people, significant and trivial, that torment my conscience. I am aware, of course, that I created the secret room in the first place so I could pretend its forbidden activities happen not in the real world but rather a dream that has four walls. And I personally know of secrets, not mine but those held by others, that are beyond the pale even as fantasies, secrets that cannot be absolved no matter how large or small is the room of the psyche in which these fantasies find life, no matter how dark the room is or how light. Compared to such secrets my correspondence with K, who I have never met and am not likely to ever meet, is barely worth being a secret at all, for which I may or may not be held accountable any more than the world can hold me accountable for the desires of my dreams. Only moral totalitarianism refuses to make the distinction between a secret that announces the death of the soul—watching a snuff film, for instance, or the defilement of children—and the secret of a one-sided correspondence that does nothing more than suggest an illicit affair of the mind. Still, I’m stirred by my contemplation of just where moral rationalization ends and real damnation begins, I’m stirred by how even the imagination is not entirely guiltless. I’m stirred by consideration of just how many layers really lie between the blackest secret and the most harmless, and just how thin they are, and by the membrane between the impulse that only lurks and the impulse that is realized. I can only bring myself to ponder, without ever actually pursuing the answer, whether I would really pursue my darkest impulses if I was sure I could get away with it, or whether my conscience would still know itself, even if the defining lines of civilization were so scrambled as to allow the unallowable. …

There is a little blonde hooker I see now and then on Sunset Boulevard. She is always there at dusk in Zed Time, on the corner across from the Chateau Marmont: I call her the Princess of Coins, from the American Tarot. She glistens conspicuously. Get close enough to her and she’s younger than you thought; the girls on this stretch of the Strip are always either younger or older than you thought, if you ever get that close. At any rate she’s young enough to still be on the street, before the law of desire either places her in some guy’s penthouse or renders her old, or kills her: she glistens too conspicuously to remain on the street for long. I look for her whenever I drive by this way. I have no serious thought of employing her, but since she’s more appealing than most of the hookers I’ve seen, and since she stands not four blocks from where I live, I find myself wondering what it would be like to buy her and take her home. I can still remember years ago walking down a street in Amsterdam past all the women in the windows, one in particular sitting in her window in black hair and a soft white turtleneck sweater, smiling and saying nothing, knowing I wanted her but had neither the money nor the nerve, and knowing as well that years later I would vividly remember the missed opportunity. But the Princess of Coins, years later on Sunset Strip across from the Chateau Marmont in Zed Time, is too young and unwise to smile like that. Hers are the young smiles that vanish instantly in my rearview mirror when I pass her by. …

I was at Viv’s one evening and had what I thought was a dream. The sun was going down and I was about to leave, because Viv was expecting some friends over in an hour or so for a Night of Women; but I went up to the overhanging platform and lay down on her bed, and I must have drifted off. I don’t remember being so particularly tired. At some point I woke, or I dreamed that I woke, and the women had arrived and were down below the loft, talking; I wasn’t conscious enough to make out what they were saying. I don’t know if they were indifferent to my being up there or had just forgotten it. But slipping in and out of sleep, I woke again to the flickering of candlelight on the ceiling above me, and turning over I peered over the edge of the bed at all the women below me who, eight or ten of them, were naked. Some of them I recognized. I was pretty sure I saw Veroneek and Lydia and even Amy Brown, along with several of the artists who had been at the ball. They weren’t saying much, just whispering among themselves while they shaved each other. Little bowls of soapy water sat between the legs of the four or five women being shaved by the other four or five who very intently dipped the tiny razors into the water and continued until the work was finished. There was nothing especially precious or ritualistic about it; rather the bare, glistening women seemed to be mapping, between the lines of a commonly held secret, their own country that was inviolate to any man, whether or not they knew or cared that he might be up in bed on the platform above them watching. I was lulled by the sight and silence of it; and I can’t remember if I just turned away and closed my eyes or kept watching, but I could see emerge through the pubic hair as it was shaved away the tattoos that had been hidden underneath, the Nine of Bridges and the Ace of Rifles, the Six of Stars and the Five of Coins. In the juxtaposition of their bodies I read my fortune—a foggy destiny and newly revealed crossroads, where the name of the bridge before me was written on a sign in an amalgam, and right before waking I almost deciphered the letters long enough to make it out. Later when I woke the women were gone. I went downstairs in the dark and turned on the light, and there was no sign of razors or bowls of soapy water, but looking closely at the floor I ran my finger through the small silky hairs that had slipped by the women’s effort to remove all traces of what they had done.

Not long after our night with Jasper, Viv showed me her plans for a new sculpture. She calls it the Memoryscope. It is to be twenty feet long, cylindrical like a telescope and made of steel, and will stand perched in the sky. Lining the inside along the bottom will be a mirrored strip that runs from one end to the other, so that when the sun rises to a certain point, the telescope will flash a blinding light. In this light, Viv explains, one will see the memory he or she has most forgotten. Once she has finished this telescope shell determine the coordinates of its aim, wherever that might be—the Rockies, Chicago, Nova Scotia—and build there another telescope, aimed back at Los Angeles. Obviously it is an impressive, ambitious plan; Viv has spoken to Jasper about erecting it in the moat of fire that surrounds Jaspers house, or maybe the junkyard beyond, within view of one of the garrets. I sense this is Viv’s gift to Jasper, to revive Jasper from what she perceives to be the deluded despair of her memories even as it would revive Viv herself from her own doldrums after the Artists Ball and the filming of
White Whisper
, not to mention a growing ambivalence about the direction of her life, the sense that some thing is slipping through the cracks. …

Last week I had dinner with Dr. Billy O’Forte, in a little steak joint near the old pier. “You know,” he said of Viv, “she’s better for you than anyone you’ve ever been with,” and once I was too young and stupid for that to have meant anything. But then life passes by and, almost unnoticed to you, the curve in the hill that has always been upward suddenly turns downward, and what and who are good for you means something. Viv is my Queen of Stars. She’s the face of a dream that waits for the flash of sunlight along a strip of mirrors before it explodes into recognition, which may be to say that Viv is not the face of my dream but that my dream is the face of Viv: at any rate she is the face of my reality, which has become a much better thing than my dreams. Part maternal caretaker and part eternal ten-year-old tomboy, part romantic commando and part sexual guerrilla, Viv careens between the extremes of scandal—it’s all one can do to hold her back from jumping on the Cathode Flower stage and taking her clothes off with the strippers, and there was one month she seriously considered a job as a go-go dancer in Tokyo—and a kind of saintliness, giving a bum on the street her last twenty because she has nothing smaller. For the first year, we were together only because we couldn’t stay apart, our bond made not out of dreams but our irresistible fucking; sex bound us when everything else, the past and future in particular, tried to break us down. And then not so long ago came the moment when both the past and the future rushed into the present and all the wounds I inflicted on us and all the promises that had been implied between us presented themselves to be answered for. When amnesia broke, through its gate marched every person I ever hurt, one after another, and I broke down one afternoon in a little diner on La Cienega Boulevard, sobbing into my cheeseburger while the other patrons hastily paid up their tabs and bolted, as though fleeing the spectacle of an epileptic fit. I cried from the diner to the parking lot, I cried from that afternoon to that night, all the way home and into the next day. I cried for Viv, I cried for Sally, I cried for the women I hurt before Viv and after Sally, I cried because my father was dead, I cried because someday my mother would be dead, I cried for my conscience and my faith. I cried for my dreams. I was quite a basket case that day, when amnesia broke and I remembered again; I cried for all my failures, and for that moment’s failure in particular: the failure to transcend memory.

Sally called last night. Viv was over at my place in a foul mood, wondering why none of her film work was bringing her any real money—and if she wasn’t making money, then what was the point, and why wasn’t she doing what she really wanted to do, like building her Memoryscope? In the midst of this serious discussion the telephone rang, I answered, and it was Sally. Of course Viv knew immediately. Later she accused me of “practically cooing,” though I know from the sound in Sally’s voice that to her I seemed as cold as ice; it’s funny that two women can hear exactly the same thing at the same time and hear not entirely different words or meanings, which one might expect, but entirely different heartbeats and temperatures. Sally was more right than Viv. I was colder than I was cooing. We hadn’t spoken since she got married. Typically, she was in town for only one night and calling at the last minute to say that Polly was with her, and wondering if I wanted to have breakfast with the two of them in the morning. I answered that it wasn’t possible. She asked how I was and I answered that I couldn’t talk. She rushed to hang up, either right before or after I began to add, “Let me know if—”

Let me know, I began to say, if you ever come back to L.A. Viv, already in the furious throes of a full moon, was on her way out the door before I stopped her. I knew that later she’d regret going, and that I’d regret letting her go. “She couldn’t care less whether you see Polly,” Viv answered bitterly. Viv thinks the worst of Sally partly because she needs to, because she feels that Sally stole something that was Viv’s before Viv and I ever knew each other existed, and because she believes she’s worthier of it than Sally ever was. As to whether Sally truly cares or not that I see Polly, I don’t know. I believe she does, but it doesn’t matter; what matters is that over the weeks and months and years, I haven’t been able to get Polly out of my mind. I was a father to her even as I was never the father she wanted. I was the one who bathed and fed and read her stories and put her to bed when her father was off strumming his guitar and listening to people tell him he was a genius and basking in little Polly’s distant adoration, and the knowledge that besides being a genius he was the world’s best-loved father. And then one day I disappeared. I cut her off as I cut off her mother, as I cut myself off from the past and from my memories one by one, because I wasn’t brave or strong or big enough to rise or at least sidestep the pain long enough to see a little four-year-old kid for an hour or two now and then. My pain was pretty petty compared to the confusion she must have felt; and it was my choice, after all, because she was four years old after all, so it couldn’t very well have been her choice. Later I told myself I did it because my continued presence in her already confused life could only compound the confusion; and I knew
that
was a lie as soon as I tried to convince myself I believed it.