Glamorama (69 page)

I sit in a revival theater on Boulevard des Italiens. I collapse on a bench in the Place du Parvis. At one point during the day I’m shuffling through Pigalle. At another point I just keep crossing then recrossing the Seine. I wander through Aux Trois Quartiers on Boulevard de la Madeleine until the glimpse I catch of myself in a mirror at a Clinique counter moves me to rush back to the house in the 8th or the 16th.

Inside the house Bentley sits at a computer in the living room, wearing a Gap tank top and headphones from a Walkman. He’s studying an image that keeps flashing itself at different angles across the screen. My throat is aching from all the smoke I inhaled and when I pass a mirror my reflected face is streaked with grime, hair stiff and gray with dust, my eyes yellow. I move slowly up behind Bentley without his noticing.

On the computer screen: the actor who played Sam Ho lies naked on his back in a nondescript wood-paneled bedroom, his legs lifted and spread apart by an average-looking guy, maybe my age or slightly older, also naked, and in profile he’s thrusting between Sam’s legs, fucking him. Bentley keeps tapping keys, scanning the image, zooming in and out. Within a matter of minutes the average-looking guy fucking Sam Ho is given a more defined musculature, larger pectorals, what’s visible of his cock shaft is thickened, the pubic hair lightened. The nondescript bedroom is transformed into the bedroom I stayed at in the house in Hampstead: chic steel beams, the Jennifer Bartlett painting hanging over the bed, the vase filled with giant white tulips, the chrome ashtrays. Sam Ho’s eyes, caught red in the flash, are corrected.

I bring a hand up to my forehead, touching it. This movement causes Bentley to swivel around in his chair, removing the headphones.

“What happened to you?” he asks innocently, but he can’t keep up the facade and starts grinning.

“What are you doing?” I ask, numb, hollowed out.

“I’m glad you’re back,” Bentley says. “Bobby wants me to show you something.”

“What are you doing?” I ask again.

“This is a new program,” Bentley says. “Kai’s Photo Soap for Windows 95. Take a peek.”

Pause. “What does it … do?” I swallow.

“It helps make pictures better,” Bentley says in a baby’s voice.

“How … does it do that?” I ask, shivering.

The sex-scene photo is scanned again and Bentley concentrates on tapping more keys, occasionally referring to pages torn from a booklet and spread out on the table next to the computer. In five minutes my head—in profile—is grafted seamlessly onto the shoulders of the average-looking guy fucking Sam Ho. Bentley zooms out of the image, satisfied.

“A big hard disk”—Bentley glances over at me—“is mandatory. As well as a certain amount of patience.”

At first I’m saying, “That’s cool, that’s … cool,” because Bentley keeps grinning, but a hot wave of nausea rises, subsides, silencing me.

Another key is tapped. The photograph disappears. The screen stays blank. Another two keys are tapped and then a file number is tapped and then a command is tapped.

What now appears is a series of photographs that fill the screen in rapid succession.

Sam Ho and Victor Ward in dozens of positions, straining and naked, a pornographic montage.

Bentley leans back, satisfied, hands behind his head, a movie pose even though no camera is around to capture it.

“Would you like to see another file?” Bentley asks, but it’s really not a question because he’s already tapping keys.

“Let’s see,” he muses. “Which one?”

A flash. A command is tapped. A list appears, each entry with a date and file number.

As Bentley continuously scrolls down the screen it becomes apparent that this list goes on for pages and pages.

Bentley starts tapping keys, landing on new photos. He enhances colors, adjusts tones, sharpens or softens images. Lips are digitally thickened, freckles are removed, an ax is placed in someone’s outstretched hand, a BMW becomes a Jaguar which becomes a Mercedes which becomes a broom which becomes a frog which becomes a mop which becomes a poster of Jenny McCarthy, license plates are altered, more blood is spattered around a crime-scene photo, an uncircumcised penis is suddenly circumcised. Tapping keys, scanning images, Bentley adds motion blur (a shot of “Victor” jogging along the Seine), he’s adding lens flair (in a remote desert in eastern Iran I’m shaking hands with Arabs and wearing sunglasses and pouting, gasoline trucks lined up behind me), he’s adding graininess, he’s erasing people, he’s inventing a new world, seamlessly.

“You can move planets with this,” Bentley says. “You can shape lives. The photograph is only the beginning.”

After a long time passes, I say in a low voice, staring silently at the computer, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but … I think you suck.”

“Were you there or were you not?” Bentley asks. “It all depends on who you ask, and even that really doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Don’t …” But I forget what I was going to say.

“There’s something else you need to see,” Bentley says. “But you should take a shower first. Where have you been? You look like shit. Let me guess. Bar Vendôme?”

In the shower, breathing erratically, I’m flashing over the two files in the giant list containing my name with the most recent dates.

22

After the shower, I’m led downstairs at gunpoint (which Bobby thought was excessive, needless, but not Bruce Rhinebeck) to a room hidden within a room in what I assume is some kind of basement in the house in the 8th or the 16th. This is where the French premier’s son, chained to a chair, is slowly being poisoned. He’s naked, gleaming with sweat, confetti floats on a puddle of blood congealing on the floor beneath him. His chest is almost completely blackened, both nipples are missing, and because of the poison Bruce keeps administering he’s having trouble breathing. Four teeth have been removed and wires are stretching his face apart, some strung through broken lips, causing him to look as if he’s grinning at me. Another wire is inserted into a wound on his stomach, attaching itself to his liver, lashing it with electricity. He keeps fainting, is revived, faints again. He’s fed more poison, then morphine, as Bentley videotapes.

It smells sweet in the room underground and I’m trying to avert my eyes from a torture saw that sits on top of a Louis Vuitton trunk but there’s really nowhere else to focus and music piped into the room comes from one of two radio stations (NOVA or NRJ). Bruce keeps yelling questions at the actor, in French, from a list of 320, all of them printed out in a thick stack of computer paper, many of them repeated in specific patterns, while Bobby stares levelly from a chair out of camera range, his mouth downturned. The French premier’s son is shown photographs, glares wildly at them. He has no idea how to respond.

“Ask him 278 through 291 again,” Bobby mutters at one point. “At first in the same sequence. Then repeat them in C sequence.” He directs Bruce to relax the mouth wires, to administer another dose of morphine.

I’m slouching vacantly against a wall and my leg has fallen asleep because of how long I’ve been stuck in this particular position. Sweat pours down the sides of Bentley’s face as he’s camcording and Bobby’s concerned about camera angles but Bentley assures him Bruce’s head isn’t in the frame. The French premier’s son, momentarily lucid, starts shouting out obscenities. Bobby’s frustration is palpable. Bruce takes a break, wiping his forehead with a Calvin Klein towel, sips a warm, flat Beck’s. Bobby lights a cigarette, motions for Bruce to remove another tooth. Bobby keeps folding his arms, frowning, staring up at the ceiling. “Go back to section four, ask it in B sequence.” Again, nothing happens. The actor doesn’t know anything. He memorized a different script. He’s not delivering the performance that Bobby wants. He was miscast. He was wrong for this part. It’s all over. Bobby instructs Bruce to pour acid on the actor’s hands. Pain floods his face as he gazes at me, crying uselessly, and then his leg is sawed off.

21

The actor playing the French premier’s son realizes it doesn’t matter anymore how life should be—he’s past that point now in the underground room in the house in the 8th or the 16th. He was on the Italian Riviera now, driving a Mercedes convertible, he was at a casino in Monte Carlo, he was in Aspen on a sunny patio dotted with snow, and a girl who had just won the silver medal in the Model Olympics is on her tiptoes, kissing him jealously. He was outside a club in New York called Spy and fleeing into a misty night. He was meeting famous black comedians and stumbling out of limousines. He was on a Ferris wheel, talking into a cell phone, a stupefied date next to him, eavesdropping. He was in his pajamas watching his mother sip a martini, and through a window lightning was flickering and he had just finished printing his initials on a picture of a polar bear he’d drawn for her. He was kicking a soccer ball across a vast green field. He was experiencing his father’s hard stare. He lived in a palace. Blackness, its hue, curves toward him, luminous and dancing. It was all so arbitrary:
promises, pain, desire, glory, acceptance. There was the sound of camera shutters clicking, there was something collapsing toward him, a hooded figure, and as it fell onto him it looked up and he saw the head of a monster with the face of a fly.