The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (10 page)

“But the film doesn’t have to end this way. Why should it? It could end, instead, in the very instant it began: the precise moment of the film frame. There is no before. There is no after. There is just the forever now of this frozen moment, full of possibilities, when their eyes are always-already on the verge of meeting.”

Laing glances around the motel room as if to check for some secret thing he had left hidden in plain sight, or as if to confirm the presence of someone else in the room, a third person unseen to me. He smiles or pretends to smile. It’s at this point in the story that I think I should make something clear: I’m not exactly certain that the person who returned to the motel room with the grocery bag
was
, in fact, R. Laing. Listen, of course it was him. I don’t mean I doubt it was him literally, in the sense that Christ is “Christ” or Satan is “Satan.” Something had changed, that’s all I’m trying to say. At the time I had no such suspicions that it wasn’t him, or at least not outright suspicions, rather something more like very thin spider-webbed doubts spread so delicately out upon my thoughts that I couldn’t collect it all into a single idea. It was only later, in preparing this manuscript in fact, that these doubts began to take shape into something more fixed and permanent. And even now, like I’ve said, of course I
know
it was the same Laing as before, just as the resurrected Christ is the same as the pre-crucified Christ, or Satan is the same as the rebellious angel that became Satan. It’s just that when I think about it now, looking back, I have the feeling that it wasn’t him, or at least not the same him. But it’s just a feeling and nothing more.

And yet, his descriptions of the films changed somehow, linguistically, in ways that I’m only now beginning to sort out. For I’ve come to see, in retrospect, that there was a void at the heart of the films that Laing destroyed, and that through his
descriptions of those films he was attempting to fill, somehow, that void, as if talking about the films might fill in the meaning that they themselves lacked. I also came to understand that Laing didn’t think of the destroyed films as “lost treasures” at all, but instead as something more dangerous, as expressions of pure nothingness. A nothingness that goes beyond nihilism, beyond philosophy, a sort of absence that’s so seductive and so powerful that to look upon it is to corrupt a part of your soul. At my darkest, most irrational moments I fear that this is what happened to Emily, that she came across not “a something” but “a nothing” so powerful in its absence that it emptied her out and destroyed her. And that somehow it only happened because she was my daughter. Sounds like simple guilt, I know, the sort of guilt any parent who’s lost a child might feel. Guilt at not being able to… intervene.

But like I said, Laing acted as if there were a third person there with us, sometimes even catching himself, it seemed, from searching the room, with his eyes of course, as if the person or presence or whatever appeared and disappeared and reappeared. In any case, it seemed Laing was trying to keep track of movement in the room. In the brown paper bag was Chinese for both of us and another bottle of bourbon, the same obscure brand from earlier with the charcoal drawing of the slaughtered lamb on the label. He asked me what I thought of the Gutman movie, and I told him I thought it was strange that he remembered so clearly the voiceover.

“That was from notes. Not from memory,” he says.

“Notes you took while you watched the movie?”

“I typed them up afterward.”

“Because?”

“I figured you, or someone like you, would eventually come. With questions. And here you are.”

“I’m not a lawyer or a detective, if that’s what you’re saying.”

“That’s not what I’m saying at all. I know who you are. I know
that Edison sent you. Of course, it doesn’t matter. Because, like I said, here you are.”

“I’d heard about you before Edison.
Aspen
.”

“The experimental journal that came in a box,” he says.

“I mean the film. The ski movie.”

“That’s what it was named after, the journal.
Aspen
. The 1966 issue that came with an article by Martin Luray on downhill skiing, and an essay on cinema by Lionel Trilling where he says something like,
maybe cinema will be able to step in and do what literature is no longer able to do: tell the truth about life
.”

“Is that what you think. That films can do that?”

“If they did—tell the truth about life—who would want to watch them? They’d have to be destroyed, because who can look at truth and survive, or at least survive all in one piece? Mentally. It’d be like looking directly at the sun, or reading a curse whose words would choke you to death, so yes, to answer the question I’m surprised you haven’t asked yet, I, a lover of cinema, destroyed the films—in nothing more than a shitty little garbage can, which is funny considering the can had no idea that its insides were being burned and scalded by the likes of Lynch and Antonioni and Deren and Jodorowsky—destroyed them back behind the library of that land-grant university surrounded by the Amish and cow pastures. I’d watched them, all right, and seen something in them that should never be seen, and I’m not talking about a real-life killing on camera or a dangerous, evil idea convincingly expressed by an otherwise sympathetic character or anything like that. What I mean is that there was something there,
in between
the frames, something that wasn’t quite an image and wasn’t quite a sound. It was both and neither of those things at the same time. In other words, an impossibility, an impossibility that, because it expressed or represented a new way of being, had to be destroyed. An extreme, undiluted truth, that’s what I’m talking about.”

“I know what you mean,” I tell him.

“How could you?”

It’s hard to say why I open my wallet and remove the small scratched picture of Emily. In the ten years since her death I’d shown it to only one other person. I place it on the table and slide it over to Laing. She is eight years old, in a tree, the shadows of leaves on her face and arms, waving to me, smiling, probably laughing. What are the circumstances of the image? I have no idea, no memory of when it was taken or by whom, although I’ve always imagined I’m the one who took it, and that in her look is a secret message to me, a message that suggests she knows what’s going to happen to her. But how could she have known? As Laing looks down at the picture I think about the missing children, the ones in the news, and that Laing’s reasons for destroying the films only made sense if you believed there was such a thing, as he had called it, as
undiluted truth
because in fact, well let’s face it, we’re luckless when it comes to truth because there’s just no way to grasp it without polluting it or mucking it up with ourselves, as if the observer effect didn’t only apply just in physics, but in metaphysics as well because, sure, you can coax it out, the truth, but the moment it shows or reveals itself to you it’s changed in response to being detected, and maybe that’s what Laing meant, after all, that somehow, against all reason, the films in question had actually managed to capture the truth
unaltered
by perception and
that’s
why they had to be destroyed, but how does that account for someone like Emily, who at eight years old in that picture was on the verge and did not know of or even imagine an abyss of unknowing, and yes it’s dramatic to say it that way but it’s my daughter we’re talking about and that gives me some room and if there’s anyone to blame (not for Emily’s death of course, not that) it’s Laing, who took it upon himself to destroy beautiful things, those films, those films whose fleeting traces of beauty can now only be conjured in words, as if words could approximate the images and edits and cuts anymore than my words can make Emily—with her in-turned left foot and
slight lisp and yellow plastic butterfly barrettes that held back her unwashed hair—anymore than my words can make her real for you like she was for me, the sweet and bitter smell of my daughter as she came running up to me after once becoming lost and separated in the woods and clinging to me like a tick, we joked later, as if she wanted to burrow back into me or as if she understood that the day was coming soon when she would no longer be able to leap upon my back like that the way daughters do who love their fathers, a sort of undestroyable love, so fierce and primal and frontier-like that nothing prepares you for it because when it’s depicted on the screen or in books it’s either too sentimental or too cynical and if I had come to hate Laing it was for that one simple fact: that he had destroyed films that actually captured this mystery, not just the mystery of the love between a father and daughter but the mystery of what that might become if left free to flower.

Laing studies the picture of Emily while I study his face. But actually—and I can’t be sure of this—he’s not looking at my daughter’s picture at all, but rather at the cone object on the table right beside her in the picture, and the first thought that comes into my mind when I notice this is that Laing can’t bear to look at the photograph for the same reasons he couldn’t bear to keep the films he destroyed. Or else the picture of my daughter reminds him of the other children.

*

That evening, during an intense windstorm that seems to lift the motel itself off the ground and set it down somewhere else, Laing tells me about A. in one unbroken monologue. At the time I didn’t understand what A. had to do with anything but looking back on it now—when it seems all I do is look back—I see that without A. none of the rest of what he told me made sense. I’d first read about A. in
flying signifiers
, where she was described in an uncharacteristically clichéd—almost mocking—way as a cinema theory groupie who had experienced a revelation of doom after
watching the Isis/Cleopatra character make her secret signals in the mouth of the desert cave in Kenneth Anger’s
Lucifer Rising
.

“What I didn’t tell you earlier was that A. was the person who, back in 1978, had stayed to watch
The Blood Order
. She was just a girl—eight or nine—and I assumed she was the kid sister of one of the older grad students who had come to watch the Lynch shorts. She was sitting on a folding chair the way kids sometimes do with one foot tucked under her. I remember that. And also: at some point during
The Blood Order
the film cut out and the room went black for just a few minutes and that’s when she must have brushed by me in the dark because I felt something against my leg and there was the momentary smell also of perfume or candy. Our paths crossed again, in a fatal sort of way, around ten years later during a time when, in Pennsylvania, I was playing two roles at once, as both a librarian in the rare books room, and the other as a part-time graduate student.

“There were two separate but related incidents involving A. It was during the summer of a blazing heat wave. I remember this because the green leaves of the campus trees—even the strong and old trees lining the broad walkways through the middle of campus—these leaves had curled inward, taking the shape of little green tubes, like cigarettes with nothing inside them. They would survive, I knew, and unfurl again miraculously when it cooled, and it reminded me of A., in her apartment with the blankets over the windows to keep the sun out, and how that might not have been an act of retreat or depression, but rather survival, as she waited (she, with her page-boy hair and small knees) for the pressing evil to pass. Also: in her apartment was a white sheet that she had hung across the doorway into what I suspect was a narrow hallway.

“That was the first adventure with A. It’s hard for me to talk about the second one because that was a very dangerous time (as it is for you, now) a time when I felt that hot cauldron beneath my feet. We—all of us enduring the mental excitement of a
university falling apart under the weight of bad ideas—had been reading Jonathan Edwards’ 1741 sermon
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
for a seminar on the religious experience in America, where Edwards’ words became super-charged, colliding like spooked atomic particles against our postmodern skepticism. Secretly, Edwards’ sermon frightened me. There were so many traps in his writing, and the easiest solution was laughter, but that was temporary. ‘It is no security to wicked men for one moment, that there are no
visible means of death at hand
,’ he wrote. ‘The unseen, unthought-of ways and means of persons going suddenly out of the world are innumerable and inconceivable. Unconverted men walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering, and there are innumerable places in this covering so weak that they will not bear their weight, and these places are not seen. The arrows of death fly unseen at noon-day.’

“‘Now it’s dark,’ Frank says in
Blue Velvet
, murmuring to himself, a moment of what psychologists call insight: he knows that something is wrong with him, and that he’s going into the dark place, which make his actions even more terrifying. In another era, I would have suspected that A. might be an informer. A. invited me inside. I leaned my bike against a tree and, book in hand, followed her. Already at this point I could feel the undertow of Lynch’s movies tugging at me. Back then I knew nothing of split edits and so had no framework for understanding what was about to happen in A.’s apartment. She threw a blanket over the books on the lawn, and we went inside. Blankets—not unlike the one she had just tossed over the books outside—hung over the windows in place of drapes. It was dark. The furniture—a few ladder-back chairs, a white wicker loveseat with no cushions, a round table piled with newspapers and magazines, a floor lamp—was pushed back against the walls. The room, for lack of a better word, was enigmatic. The pall of danger hung over it, and the ceiling itself was so obscured in darkness that it seemed as if there was nothing above us except black, empty space. A.
didn’t (thankfully) invite me to sit down. She didn’t invite me to do anything. In fact, for several minutes she was so still, so silent that she seemed to have disappeared completely, and there I was standing alone in this strange dark apartment that felt like some sort of pressure chamber, as if the blankets on the walls were not covering windows but tightly sealed portals into the outside world, which I yearned for suddenly now, the world of grass and wind and bees and the warm summer sun.