The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (13 page)

Haydn gives himself a couple of weeks (
it seems; time is disjointed through elusive editing that recalls Varda’s French New Wave roots
) and then goes back to work. People had said it was the best thing to do. He assigns his English class
Blood and Guts in High School
by Kathy Acker and is reprimanded at the end of the year, kindly but formally, by the superintendent in his absurdly cold air-conditioned office. Then Haydn slowly and deliberately cuts off all connections to his limited and far-flung family: his wife’s mother, who at age 43, abandoned her family to sell her art on eBay; his older brother (
all this is told in weird short mini-films within the film, like Polaroids come to life
) in San Francisco; his aunt who gave him all those rare books and the Roman coin. Haydn sells his house and moves into a smaller one, and then a while later sells that and moves into a smaller one yet (
shown in a slow montage of dissolves
), a cabin really, that backs up against a five-hundred-acre woods outside of town. Sitting on the back stoop now, in the dark (
we are in real-time present again
) June night two days after summer vacation has started and many, many months after the accident, nursing a beer, he can remember the dumbest of details about them—like how his daughter always skipped stairs
or how his wife said “whew” and tossed her keys on the entry-way table when she came home, no matter where she had been.

On the first day of summer (
big jump here; the film becomes full of color and sun showing all that happens next
) Haydn goes to town for groceries, and as he pulls out of the parking lot, he sees a girl waiting, she says later, for a taxi.

Her red backpack.

Her army fatigues.

Her beautiful face beneath her stringy hair.

She is standing in the sun, by the side of the road, watching him.

She seems to have rings on every finger.

She gets into his car because he leans over and opens the door, unexpectedly.

It’s not something he planned to do.

He drives away with her because she lets him. (
The camera floats above the car
.)

He takes her to where he lives because she says “yes.”

He doesn’t kid himself about how ridiculous this is, and how dangerous, but he feels he has “earned the right,” and that nothing had been for anything, and that everything that has come before is merely the set-up to an awful, awaiting punch-line that will put an end to it all no matter what he does or does not do.

She slumps down in the car seat on the way to his cabin, either because (
the camera is now in the car during this
) she is hiding or because it is some weird affectation, like the way teenage girls twirl their hair. He drives her past his old house, with a new SUV in the driveway, and past the familiar storefront landmarks and out to the edge of town to his new place on the edge of a woods where, he does not tell her, a human sacrifice took place in the 18th century.

“Can I stay here a few nights? Do you mind?” she asks, looking around (
we are in his cabin now, Haydn’s
) at his sparse place like she’s interested in renting it. Before he answers she had tossed
her backpack onto the couch and disappeared into the bathroom. It is either sheer confidence or else an act.

The first night he sleeps in his bed and she on the couch.

The second night she sleeps in his bed and he on the couch.

On the day of the fire (
flames fill the full screen frame for several seconds
) that drives him finally and evermore out of his old life, she wants to talk, but not about anything that seems to matter.

He doesn’t know if she is homeless, or a runaway, or what.

He guesses she’s about 17.

Her face has a savage determination about it, but he can’t tell if it’s from lots of experience or something else. Her eyes are wide-apart bright green. Perhaps people were desperately looking for her, or perhaps they were hoping she would never return. She is quiet about all that with Haydn. He can see how she, with her long bare arms and fierce stare, could become “the object of obsession or disdain.” She is eating an orange at the kitchen counter, digging her fingers into it, wearing a white tank top. She has a tattoo of an oversized drop of blood on her left shoulder. It is a place where you could put your lips.

“Have you ever been to Spain?” she says. (
Camera moves, creeping ever so slowly in some unmotivated direction during what follows, as if there’s a third character not on the screen but watching.)

HIM: “No. Have you?”

HER: “Yeah, it’s nice. No one rushes around. The beaches are white.”

HIM: “Beaches? That doesn’t sound so bad.”

HER: “Calamari.”

HIM: “With squeezed lemon juice. And what else?”

HER: “Priests. You can have a drink with them at the cafe. They understand about sin.”

HIM: “I’ll bet they do.”

HER: “But I don’t do confessions.”

HIM: “I understand, my child,” he says and puts his hand on
her shoulder in a gesture of mock forgiveness. She smiles and holds his eyes. He just wants (
it seems
) to touch her tattoo.

HER: “Do you want to know what I saw in one of the churches there? In Spain?”

HIM: “Sure.”

HER: “I’ve never told this to anybody. I shouldn’t tell you… maybe it’s because you’re a total stranger, you know?”

HIM: (
I’m sure this line is accurate; it’s underlined twice in red ink
) “I don’t believe you but go ahead.”

HER: “It is unbelievable, you’re right. God. You’ll think I’m lying. It’s like something out of a horror movie, except that in a horror movie you don’t know who or what to trust which is the whole point and I already know that I can trust you. It was hard to find you, do you understand?”

HIM: “Not really.”

HER: “It was so fucking hard to find you but then you came up to me in the car just like that and I worried that you’d drive me to a parking garage and pull my jeans down and put your hand or a knife on my throat and rape me but it was something I had rehearsed over and over in my head and I had it figured out what to do.”

HIM: “God.”

(
She pushes the plate of orange rinds away
.)

HER: “In this old stone church or church-like structure in the country we went to one night, past midnight, when we were drunk. It was outside of Madrid. We had followed the dirt road through a forest. It was (
sound cuts out
)… anymore. It was so dark. And then this church—or (
a foreign-sounding word; ‘templo’?
)—appeared, at the end of the road. The door kind of fell off its hinges when we went to open it. Should I really tell you this?”

HIM: “I don’t see why not.”

HER: “I’ve wanted to tell somebody. Might as well be you. At first it was only a feeling, a feeling like (
sound cuts out
)… but
we were drunk, so it’s hard to say. It was pitch black inside. The floor was crooked, tilted. But everything was spinning anyway, so. Why we were even there, I don’t know. It was one of those (
another word that makes no sense; ‘jyhiardo’?
) things. I was the first one in, and it smelled rotten. Like dead flesh. Like a dead animal.”

HIM: “This is like a campfire story, isn’t it?”

HER: “But it doesn’t have much of an ending.”

HIM: “That’s okay.”

HER: “Well inside, there was this thing. I don’t know. It was (
soundtrack garbled
) and dark, but you could still see it, standing there, like ten feet tall, by the altar.”

HIM: “What kind of thing?”

HER: “Like a person. But too (
sound cuts out
)… Standing very still, but looking right at me. At first I thought it was a statue, something religious. Like Mary. But it was moving, swaying.”

HIM: “Swaying?”

HER: “It could have been. I think it was. My head was spinning.”

HIM: “What did you do?”

HER: “Nothing. I couldn’t tell what it was. It was this (
sound cuts out
) presence, you know? Like God’s eye but not God. Or a statue of God. That’s what I keep thinking now, a statue of God. I slowly backed up and (
sound goes
) could hear the voices of the others back at the jeep. I heard it start and I thought they were going to (
alien-sounding word; ‘gadorigean’?
) without me. I ran to them in the dark.”

HIM: “And then what.”

HER: “Nothing else happened. But the (
screeching sound; camera vibrates
) in the church, it saw me, it recognized me. What if I told you that it’s searching for me?”

HIM: “That would be nice.”

HER: “What would?”

HIM: “To be hunted.”

HER: (
film gets grainy here
) “What makes you say that?”

HIM: “I’m just kidding.”

HER: “Don’t kid because (
sudden droning sound drowns out dialog
) and like it saw right through me and knows everything now. Even things that haven’t happened yet.”

HIM: “Sounds like mythology.”

HER: “Well it’s a story, at least. That’s what you (
drone sound
). But it really happened. It’s a story that’s true. You better watch out. You’re the only one I’ve told it to.” She laughs.

This seems to Haydn (
the screen goes blank or black here)
like some sort of threat or promise, or maybe even a little bit like an invitation. She touches his hand gently when she says it. Why she does this he can’t fathom; what she wants from him he does not know. He lets her keep her hand on his for a few moments, before withdrawing it and standing up. Whatever it is that she wants he does not have to give, although her cryptic talk makes sense to him in a strange way. As he listens to her, he thinks that maybe she reminds him of his wife or daughter. But she doesn’t. She is just some girl, some person. She smiles, and there is something beneath her smile, something that Haydn thinks he understands.

Then everything changes again so quickly. (
Like the accident?
) Late into the night he awakes on the couch to the smell of what he first thinks is burning popcorn. (
Only became clear during third viewing.
) In the semi-light he stands up and pulls on his pants and sweatshirt, his eyes watering, coughing, and for a moment, inexplicably, he thinks he needs to save his daughter. (
Not conveyed directly on screen but somehow this is the feeling we get as the audience, the feeling of Haydn’s thoughts.
) Then he remembers and calls for the girl, as if he had always known her, but there are flames coming from the kitchen that stand between where he is and the bedroom. The heat pushes him back, and out of the cabin, and he finds his way in the dark to the front door, and then down the steps, (
the camera moves with remarkable grace during this sequence
) across the street, and to his car, and he doesn’t look back, and
for a moment, in his alarmed grogginess, he believes that Hell itself is coming for him in the flames. He gets in his car and drives off, passing the screaming fire truck coming the other way.

What will they find back there?

Her body, charred in his bed?

Or perhaps not, perhaps she was bad, and had started the fire herself, had waited until he was asleep on the couch, had tiptoed around and looked at his face one last time. It’s strange to be driving without direction or purpose, but he was. Clutching the steering wheel, he drives for hours into the night down through the northern Michigan openness toward Detroit, which looms 200 miles in the future like an abandoned set from a dystopian science fiction film. (
This is conveyed in a non-representational way, not from images in the film but from the soundtrack, a song that’s playing while Haydn’s driving.
) Every time he drives through Detroit it looks and feels worse than the time before. It’s “an experiment in suicide.” At 1 a.m. he pulls off into a welcome center and sleeps on the leaned-back seat.

He starts up again at about 4 a.m. About an hour later, he can see the dawn creeping up in his rearview mirror, illuminating the flat, scrubby fields. It’s June; “why isn’t anything growing in them?” It doesn’t matter.

The truth is, Haydn could travel like this forever (
this part’s voiced over
) through the unpoliced towns that dot the Midwest, the freedom of its unkempt highways, its unexplored woods, its abandoned barns, its empty buildings from another era of physical labor. It’s as if the real world has been abandoned to him alone. There is no war. There are no Towers. There is nothing virtual. He moves across the landscape unnoticed. Despite everything that has happened he is Godlike in his assuredness. He ambles vacantly through the vacant city and it’s as if he’s watching himself in a movie (
conveyed through something that approximates a split screen; a screen-within-a screen or layered on top
of the screen
) that’s supposed to be frightening but that comes across as absurd, absurd in the old existential sense where the blasted, blank landscapes are there for a reason, a real fucking reason. He finds himself at The Fist, oh yes, Mr. Joe Lewis, the 8,000 pound fist that knocked out the Nazi puppet boxer Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium on a hot day in 1938 in front of J. Edgar Hoover and Clark Gable, and the same fist that would be extended to an open hand, the open hand of a man who would befriend Schmeling in later years.